3 Cool Studies on Predicting Behavior & 5 Causes for Concern Scientific foreknowledge of people s criminal behavior A new, bad

reality? I love Tom Cruise movies, or at least most Tom Cruise movies. They usually inclu de people doing crazy things at high speeds with fireballs and loud explosions a t the end. Some of his spectacles are more thought provoking than others, and on e of his more intellectually provocative, but still visually dazzling, is Minori ty Report. In this acclaimed 2002 movie by Steven Spielberg, Cruise stars as the head of a P reCrime unit, which fights evildoing by arresting people before they actually com mit a crime. The justifications for the arrests are images generated by three gi fted humans, the pre-cogs, who have perfectly predicted the times, places, and oth er details of crimes in the past. The end result is the virtual elimination of c rime in 2054. (The plot twist is that Cruise s character himself gets accused by t he pre-cogs of murder, and the character s fight for his freedom leads to the obli gatory high-speed and fiery mayhem). Science Imitates Art? Tell me which of these three cool studies reminds you of Minority Report. Study 1: Psychologist Nathan Spreng and fellow researchers described fictitious individuals with either agreeable or extroverted characteristics to a group of s ubjects then asked the subjects, while scanning their brains, to imagine how eac h individual would behave in certain situations. The researchers found they coul d accurately infer which fictitious individual a subject was imagining based onl y on activity in the subject s medial prefrontal cortex. Study 2: Psychiatrist Drew Barzman and his research team collected saliva sample s from 7- to 9-year-old boys shortly after they were admitted to a hospital for psychiatric care. Their goal was to identify which children were most likely to be aggressive and violent, a pervasive problem for psychiatric health care provi ders. Their results showed that the severity and frequency of the boys aggression was associated with their levels of the hormones testosterone, DHEA, and cortis ol. Study 3: Neuroscientist Eyal Aharoni and colleagues conducted brain scans of 96 male prisoners immediately before their release from prison. They found the pris oners with low ACC activity during a quick-decision task were rearrested for all crimes at a rate 2.6 times greater than those with high activity in the same re gion and rearrested for non-violent crimes at a rate 4.3 times greater than thei r high-activity counterparts. Wow! But Proceed with Caution? I don t know about you, but they all remind me in one way or another of Minority R eport. But is scientific foreknowledge of people s bad behavior a good thing? Used properly, it can be. For instance, the authors of Study 2 (saliva tests) say su ch knowledge could help doctors put together more effective medical treatment pl ans for violence-prone patients. But here are five reasons, two scientific and t hree social, to be careful with this science. Reason 1: Sometimes these studies don t follow the classic scientific model, which dictates that researchers should use theory to make predictions (hypotheses) th ey later test by collecting data that either confirm their predictions or not. T his process reduces false positives that result from random associations occurri ng only in a specific set of data and nowhere else. Neuroimaging studies, for in stance, sometimes reverse the process by searching first through the vast data c ollected by brain scans for activity patterns in brain regions, which they then use to create an explanation (theory) that is scientifically suspect because of its convenience and likely higher levels of unreliability. Reason 2: The biomarker (e.g., hormone or brain region) under study may not repr esent the scientific explanation of a behavior a researcher thinks it represents . For example, the researchers in my post Why Politics Makes Your Head Hurt go out of their way, correctly, to say that although they believe the brain region ass ociated with liberals relates to social and self-awareness and the region associ ated with conservatives relates to the body s fear-based fight-or-flight system, t he regions could be related to something completely different such as reward or

emotion processing. Reason 3: The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees individuals a righ t to free speech that is extended to a right to free thought. A person is free t o say, and think, whatever s/he likes, but the right is not absolute. We all rem ember from high school civics class US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holm es famous claim that a person cannot yell fire in a crowded movie theater. People s f ree speech rights are also limited, for example, by prohibitions against the pos session of child pornography and the use of fighting words. That is, you can say w hat you want as long as it doesn t immediately endanger the safety of people aroun d you. Is it a far stretch, then, to say someone s brain activity indicates they a re a danger to the people around them and, therefore, they must be limited or in capacitated to protect those people? Reason 4: Just like racial profiling, neuro- or hormonal profiling lacks the power, at this point, to separate the good guys from the bad guys. While many of the te rrorist events we hear about in the news are instigated by Muslims, clearly an i nfinitesimally small proportion of Muslims are terrorists. Likewise, just becaus e an individual has a certain biological profile does not mean that s/he will be have in the ways associated with that profile. Is it a far stretch, then, to say that some people in today s violent world may be willing to give up their or othe rs' privacy of thought in exchange for greater protection from criminals by the government? Reason 5: Our criminal system is based on intent. In essence, to be guilty of a crime you have to intend to commit that crime (my apologies to my lawyer friends , who I m sure cringe at my lay interpretation of one of their core principles). C an a person who is born with an underdeveloped frontal lobe or deformed amygdala , both of which have been associated with extreme antisocial behavior, possess t he free will necessary to intend to commit a crime? If the answer is no, is it a f ar stretch, then, that we start down a slippery slope to a society in which no one has responsibility for their bad behavior? I Have Foreknowledge Regardless of the concerns, these studies are extremely interesting. And what I can predict is we re going to see more studies like them as the technology used to conduct them continues to advance. The results will be controversial, and the e nsuing debates will be almost as much fun to watch as a good Tom Cruise movie almo st. Is the seemingly impossible future science of Minority Report a worry for today? I hope you ll leave a comment and let me know what you think. - - - - - - If you enjoyed this post, please share it by email or on Facebook or Twitter. Fo llow me on Twitter @GreggRMurray or like me on Facebook to see other interesting r esearch. For more information on the research discussed above Aharoni et al. 2013. Neuroprediction of future rearrest. Proceedings of the Nation al Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.