Paper on Mental Illness and Moral Responsibility

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Hey Everybody,

Felipe De Brigard, Dave Ripley, and I have been running some studies on people's moral responsibility judgments for the mentally and neurologically impaired. We have found that our subjects have no problem holding the mentally and neurologically impaired responsible for their actions. Surprisingly, our subjects judged the neurologically impaired to be just as responsible for their actions (sometimes even more so) as the psychologically impaired. Our studies lead us to believe that Greene and Cohen (2004) might have overstated their case when they claimed that the law will need to make some theoretical revisions to account for the impending discoveries of neuroscience. We've had this paper kicking around for a bit and we could really use any comments you have to offer. Please check it out and tell us what you think.

Cheers,

Eric Mandelbaum

Comments

[Adam]

Nice paper, guys. Very interesting experiments and results.
One reason that you might not have seen a difference between the neurological and psychological attributions of responsibility could be that neither condition is made sufficiently salient to the reader. In all of the vignettes, the diagnosis is presented in a short, one-line sentence near the end. I wonder if making the psychological or neurological illness more salient (i.e., giving a less-brief description of how the neurological or psychological illness functions, or putting the diagnosis at the beginning of the vignette) might elicit a more significant difference. It looks like making the causal efficacy of the illness more salient, in your second experiment, seems to lower responsibility scores (significantly?); I suspect that making the two processes and their differences more salient might also impact responsibility judgments.
I also wonder if making the question explicitly about moral responsibility (as opposed to responsibility _simpliciter_) might elicit differences in judgments. There are all sorts of responsibilities that might be at work in people's minds (moral, legal, causal, social, professional...), and not all of them are moral in nature. Is there any particular reason that you didn't include 'moral' in your survey question? ...or use 'blameworthy'/'deserves blame' locutions?

[Tamler Sommers]

I agree, nice paper. I want to echo Adam's second point, especially since a similar social psych. study gets very different results and they incorporate the word 'blame' and connect the acts to the appropriat punishment.

Monterosso et al (2005)(http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a784402380~db=all~order=page)

find that people are MUCH more likely to exonerate the agent when the explanation is physiological (excess of some hormone in the brain) rather than experiential (poor upbringing). In fact, they find that this variable matters more than the uniformity variable. In other words, even if only 25% of people who have the physiological condition perform the violent act, they are held more blameworthy than someone who has the kind of the upbringing that leads 90% of the people who have it to perform the violent act.

That result seems in line with Greene and Cohen's view. What do you think accounts for the difference?

[Bryce Huebner]

Eric, Dave, and Felipe,

I dig the paper! But here are some initial reactions:

I too would like to echo one of Adam's claims, but I'll take the first one: the worry about salience. There is, to put it bluntly, a big difference between knowing that a person has one of these disorders and really understanding what it means to have one of these disorders.

To begin with, the use of made up disorders (and no, I'm not just singling out the dig against me...) with only a brief description leaves the scenarios pretty unbelievable and pretty unpersuasive. That is, although you claim that this disorder leads the person to behave thus and so, it's not at all clear to me that i should believe that this is the case. I take it that the view advanced by Greene and Cohen is that as we come to understand the various ways in which behaviors are caused by lower level neurological structures, structures that aren't obviously under endogenous control, we're going to have a really hard time continuing to hold people responsible for those behaviors.

The tendency to look for rationalizing explanations that can be used to treat people as reasonable actors seems to be fairly pervasive in our moral reasoning; and likely in our interpretation of action, and causation, and a whole host of other phenomena. Perhaps folk-psychology takes people to be responsible for their actions, rather than fully determined by their neurophysiology, as a matter of rather primitive mentalizing. Sure, you might be able to shift the way that a person thinks about action by engaging high-level deliberative structures that can override this immediate intuitive judgment; but, it's not clear to me that you've got the cases that you need to do this.

The sort of intuitive dualism that Paul Bloom finds in folk psychology, and the sort of folk-teleology that Deborah Keleman finds, seem to fund a view of the mind that *at least initially* detaches it in important ways from psychological and neurological structures. When we are asked to interpret the behavior of a person from the standpoint of folk-psychology, we look for things that make that action *rationally interpretable* even if it's not rational. Sure, you might be able to get people to pay attention to the internal and external structures that determine their behavior; but, that's going to take the force of lots of empirical data, and lots of philosophical argument--at least for the majority of people.

thoughts?

"seem to fund a view of the mind that *at least initially* detaches it in important ways from psychological and neurological"

"neurological" I can understand there, but I can't understand what it would be to have a view of the mind that is disjoint from the "psychological".

[Bryce Huebner]

Sorry for the unclarity there. Folk-psychology is obviously *not* disjoint from the psychological.

What I was trying to say was this. Talk of psychological disorders sits uncomfortably at a level of description that doesn't quite map onto folk-psychological theorizing. Many people really don't seem to understand what it is to have a psychological disorder. To put that another way, many people don't understand what it would mean to feel like something that you were currently doing was not under your control. My thought, here, was that the sort of folk indeterminism and folk incompatibilism

(see Hagop Sarkissian's recent post over at The Splintered Mind: http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2008/05/academic-philosophers-are-fairly.html)

that would be an upshot of intuitive dualism would be likely to preclude a robust understanding of mental illness as a cause of action.

I hope this helps.

[Bryce Huebner]

sorry about the link there, too...

it's at

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/

and the title is crossing cultures in free will

[Dave Ripley]

Thanks for all the responses so far!

The difference in phrasing between "responsible" and "morally responsible" doesn't seem to make a difference on its own; we reran these studies switching the wording, and the results didn't seem to shift. This might be because participants were thinking about moral responsibility anyway, or it might be because they just ignored the word "moral" when we added it.

I hadn't seen the Monterosso et al. paper; thanks for the link! It'll take some digestion, but at a first pass, I'd at least point to the following dissimilarity: they compared physiological causes to experiential causes without mentioning disorders. While their physiological condition may have been something like our neurological condition, I don't think their experiential condition was much like our psychological condition.

Where we give our characters made-up psychological disorders, they give their characters horrible childhoods. But horrible childhoods do fit neatly into folk psychology in a way that I'm inclined to agree with Bryce that psychological illnesses don't. (By "fit neatly", I don't mean that folk psychology at all makes accurate predictions about what horrible childhoods lead to; I mean that folk-psychological categories aren't challenged by the existence of horrible childhoods.)

To Adam's first point: I think it's absolutely right. We've run a pilot study that makes it much clearer what's involved in psychological/neurological causation, and the difference doesn't look significant, but a pilot is only a pilot, and only further research will answer the question with any degree of oomph.

re: future juries:

We've got a practice of holding people responsible, supported in part by beliefs about where their actions come from. But it's likely supported on other fronts as well: our anger at those who do things we don't like, our beliefs about who should be punished, our beliefs about who should be separated from society.

If future neuroscience chips away at folk beliefs about the origin of actions, that's only a small piece of the puzzle; to the extent that the other pieces are doing the stabilizing, practices may not need to change much.

So an important question moving forward: how much of our responsibility-practices depends on what? What are the factors and their relative importance? I think there's some evidence here that beliefs about actions' origins aren't doing all the work, but really stepping up and making vivid the pathologies in question could help answer the question in more detail.

[Lisa Lederer]

Eric, Dave, and Felipe,

A thought-provoking paper!

Since I just started my graduate studies in "cognitive rehabilitation" following neurological insult (which, interestingly enough, relies on a completely different set of assumptions from clinical psychology!) I am very interested in folk beliefs about the distinction between "neurological" and "psychological" impairment. Dave points out that our beliefs about responsibility are supported by our beliefs about who should be punished (which I take to mean: who we feel anger towards). In fact, current events suggest that the former beliefs are shifting at this very moment, maybe due to a shift in the latter. So I wonder if the differences between the results of the studies mentioned above are, at least partly, simply due to when and where those studies took place.

To explain, just last week, the US House of Representatives passed a bill requiring health insurance companies to provide equal coverage for "mental" and "physical" conditions (see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/washington/06health.html
The bill prohibits insurance companies from setting different annual monetary or treatment limits on treatment for the two types of conditions (though admittedly, they are free to define "mental"). This means, the NY Times implies, that insurance would have to pay as much for treatment, including medication and psychotherapy, for a "psychological" condition (e.g. depression) as for treatment for a "neurological" condition (e.g. stroke). The passage of this Bill (which will, admittedly, probably become less radical before it passes both houses) suggests that the folks in congress consider psychological illness as "biological," and extrinsic to the person, as neurological illness.

Even more interestingly, the NY Times speculates that one cause for the shift is that ". . . the stigma of mental illness has faded as people see members of the armed forces returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental disorders." In other words, it is possible that the folk no longer hold people responsible for the negative acts associated with mental, or psychological, illnesses because some people who are committing such acts, it seems, cannot possibly deserve punishment -- they are US soldiers! The factor of "who to punish" thus seems hugely important in determining our responsibility-practices.

[Felipe De Brigard]

Lisa:
Thanks very much for your comment. I think it is really hard to figure out which circumstances may affect people's views on which disorders sound more "organic" than others. It is, however, and interesting question. Once upon a time (philosopher's say), people use to think that epilepsy was caused by demonic possession, in which case the person was heavily responsible for being an epileptic. Nowadays epilepsy is seen--as far as I know--as a condition upon which you have very little control and, thus, a condition for which you aren't responsible. Would something like that happen with other diseases, as our knowledge about the brain progresses? Maybe, but such knowledge does not seem to be the main variable here. Other elements may factor in.
On the other hand, it may be possible that the folk distinguish between being responsible and being blameworthy, and between being responsible and deserving punishment. Teasing apart whether there is a distinction between the folk's judgments of blameworthiness and responsibility vis-à-vis neural and psychological diseases is the next step in our research.
Once again, thanks for your comment.
Felipe