Free Will: A Dangerous Idea?

The British Journal of Social Psychology has published a fiery rebuke to psychologists who argue that belief in free will makes people more ethical.

Recent much-publicized studies have claimed that scepticism about free will makes people behave less morally. "Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness" as the title of one of hese papers puts it.

In his article (free pdf), British 'independent researcher' James B. Miles says that these experiments are flawed, because they didn't distinguish between determinism (lack of free choice) and fatalism (lack of the ability to change events).

More fundamentally, though, Miles says that free will is used to justify things, such as punishment and poverty, that would otherwise be seen as scandalous -

Western law recognizes that the penal system is so harmful to the existing life and future opportunities of persons that to convict requires evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet libertarians provide no objective evidence whatsoever for the existence of free will, and therefore no apparent justification for the mass poverty and brutal punishments that belief in libertarian free will often brings with it. The leading legal theorist Stephen J. Morse freely admits that harsh prison conditions and execution are only morally tolerable where the presumption of free choice exists...

...In June 2009, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published research showing that up to 83% of Britons think that ‘virtually everyone’ remains in poverty in Britain not as the result of social
misfortune or biological handicap but through choice (Bamfield & Horton, 2009, p. 23; 69% of those surveyed agreed with the statement and an additional 14% were unsure but did not disagree.) Because of their belief in the fairness of ‘deserved inequalities’, such respondents were discovered to have become almost completely unconcerned with the idea of promoting greater equality while at the same time asserting that Britain was a beacon of fairness that offered opportunities for all...

...Free will may just be the primary excuse many use to legitimize a contempt for the poor that would exist independent of their professed belief in free will, but free will assertion nonetheless provides the ethical fig leaf for such contempt that would be far harder to rationalize (and therefore tolerate) without the myth of free will.

This is a polemical piece (remarkably so, for an academic journal), and clearly this is only one side of the story, but it's hard to deny that he has a point: there's a dark side to the belief in free will. If you doubt free will, and yet praise the myth of it, as some scientists seem to be doing, you need to accept that you're condemning some people (prisoners, most obviously) to suffer as a result "through no fault of their own".

Personally, I think the great majority of people do believe in free will and always will - the arguments against it have been around for millenia, they're as convincing as they'll ever be, and they haven't convinced most people, however irrational that might make most people. So I think the debate over belief in free will is academic; it's not going away.

 Miles JB (2011). 'Irresponsible and a Disservice': The integrity of social psychology turns on the free will dilemma. The British journal of social psychology / the British Psychological Society PMID: 22074173

Do Brain Scans Sway Juries?

Does seeing a criminal's brain affect jury decisions?

Edith Greene and Brian Cahill ask this question in a new study which put volunteers in the position of jurors in a murder trial. The 'defendant' was guilty, but the question was: should they get life in prison, or death?

It turned out that seeing brain scans didn't have much of an effect - but it's not clear how far the results would generalize.

208 mock-jurors were randomly assigned to get different kinds of mitigationinformation about the accused. Sometimes, all they were told was that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression and a substance misuse disorder. Others were also given neuropsychological test scores showing that he did poorly on various tests of reasoning and cognition. Finally, some were shown brain scans on top of all that, scans which were described as showing left frontal lobe damage.

All these materials were based on a real 2007 court case.

What happened? When the defendent was said to have been assessed as probably "dangerous" in future, people who were only told his diagnosis of schizophrenia usually sent him to the chair. But when they were given his psychological test scores - showing that he suffered from cognitive impairments - they were far more lenient. Seeing the neuroimages had no effect on top of that.

If the guy was described as posing a low risk of future violence, the verdicts were lenient, no matter what else they were told about him. In the real case, by the way, he got life.

This suggests that brain scans don't exert a seductive allure on jury decisions, at least not over-and-above psych test scores. But I'm not sure how representative the results are. The 'jurors' were all psychology undergrads. Most were Hispanic (63%) females (67%). Are psychology students especially resistant to the allure of brain scans - and/or especially vulnerable to the allure of psychological test scores? No-one knows, but it's surely plausible.

On some level, neuroimaging evidence clearly can influence people's decisions, like any other evidence; lawyers wouldn't bother presenting it otherwise. The question is how much of an impact it has, but that is surely going to depend on the details of the case as well as the juror's background; I'm not sure how much a study like this one, focussing on one example, will be able to tell us.


Greene E, and Cahill BS (2011). Effects of Neuroimaging Evidence on Mock Juror Decision Making. Behavioral Sciences and the Law PMID: 22213023

Do You Have Free Will?

I mean you, specifically.

I'm not asking whether people have free will. I think they do - except you. You're the one person on earth who doesn't have it.

If you disagree - how would you convince me that you do have it?

Alternatively, if you're one of the people who doesn't believe in free will - I agree with you, people don't have it... except me. I'm special.

-

This might seem like one of those thought experiments that only philosophers could care about, but it's of more everyday importance than the general question of 'whether we have free will'. That's an interesting debate, but really it doesn't change anything. If we have it, we always have, and if we don't, we never will. Either way, here we are, and we'd better get on with our lives.

On the other hand, the question of whether an individual has free will has real consequences. It can even be a matter of life or death. It comes up in court cases. Lawyers and psychiatrists don't use the words "free will", they'll talk about responsibility or capacity or sound minds, but what they mean, in essence, is what the rest of us mean by the term free will.

In some of these cases, free will is what you want - if, say, psychiatrists want to confine you to a hospital, and you say you don't want to be there. Other times it's the reverse - if you've committed a crime, and your defense is that some kind of mental or neurological illness made you do it, then you're arguing that you don't have it (or didn't, at the crucial moment.)

But while lots of people have opinions on the abstract "Free Will" question, I don't think many people pay attention to the issue of their own free will or lack of it - until they end up in court. We just assume that if everyone else has it, so do we, and vice versa.

Yet how can we be so sure? Everyone accepts that people differ in regards to how much free will they have. Wwhen people say "I believe people have free will", they don't really mean all people - they surely make an exception for babies, people in a coma, people having a seizure, and probably children, people with dementia, people with severe mental illness... Likewise, people who don't believe in free will recognize that there's a difference between a normal adult and one of those people.

But where do we draw the line, and how do you know which side you're on? This seems to me the most important questions to be asking about free will.

Potential Personal Genomics

A while ago I wrote about how new findings in genetics could herald a new kind of "eugenics", based not around selective breeding to ensure that "bad" genes aren't passed on, but rather based on using fetal genetic testing to choose which variants enter the gene pool in the first place.

I said-

In the near future, we might be able to routinely sequence the genome of any unborn child shortly after conception

But I didn't realize that this may be really very near indeed. Two recent reports have shown that it's possible to sequence fetal DNA from a maternal blood sample. In one case it was used to diagnose a 35 week fetus with a genetic deletion on chromosome 12 seemingly associated with autism, developmental delay and shortness.

In this case it was inherited from the father (which is why they decided to test for it), but this approach could equally be used to screen for the de novo mutations that account for much disease, as I discussed in the last post.

This is big. Currently, the main way to get fetal DNA is through amniocentesis, i.e. inserting a needle into the womb. It's a substantial and not entirely safe medical procedure. A blood sample would be an order of magnitude cheaper and safer, but most of all it would be something you could do at home.

No longer would you need to go to a hospital and discuss everything with a doctor. You could take some blood, send it off anonymously to a sequencing company, and get the results in an email. It would take it out of the hands of professionals and open up a space for individual choice.

The cost of whole-genome sequencing has been falling exponentially and many think it will fall below the $1000 mark within a few years. Combine that with fetal DNA testing and we might see moderately well-off parents able to sequence fetal DNA within the next decade.


When this happens I think the personal genomics industry will suddenly become extremely "hot". At the moment you can sequence your own DNA for a few thousand $ if you want. The results may be interesting but they're of little obvious use. Whatever your genes are, you're stuck with them.

But as soon as we're talking about potential human genomes, it'll kick things up a notch. Media interest and political controversy is sure to follow. Personally I think it'll the debate will begin in earnest when we start seeing selective abortions on the basis of genes for "normal" variants rather than "disease" genes.

It's one thing to not want a child with blindness, or a high risk of leukaemia. But as a society I don't think we're ready for not wanting a child because they're predicted to be a B student rather than an A student, or brunette rather than blonde. At some point soon, though, we'll have to decide what we think about that.

Peters D, Chu T, Yatsenko SA, Hendrix N, Hogge WA, Surti U, Bunce K, Dunkel M, Shaw P & Rajkovic A (2011). Noninvasive prenatal diagnosis of a fetal microdeletion syndrome. The New England journal of medicine, 365 (19), 1847-8 PMID: 22070496

Srebniak M, Boter M, Oudesluijs G, Joosten M, Govaerts L, Van Opstal D, & Galjaard RJ (2011). Application of SNP array for rapid prenatal diagnosis: implementation, genetic counselling and diagnostic flow. European journal of human genetics : EJHG, 19 (12), 1230-7 PMID: 21694736

To Catch A Predator... With A Brain Scanner?

With the help of an MRI scanner and some child pornography, a new study claims to be able to tell whether someone is a paedophile: Assessment of Pedophilia Using Hemodynamic Brain Response to Sexual Stimuli.

It was an fMRI study of 24 self-identified paedophiles (recruited through a clinic offering anonymous treatment) and 32 male controls. Everyone was shown a series of images of naked men, women, boys and girls. The neural response to child vs. adult images was the main outcome measure.

Respect to the authors for getting that past the ethics committee.

The blob-o-grams above show that the paedophile's brains reacted differently to the control brains, when shown images of naked children, which is not surprising because the brain is what makes you a paedophile (and everything else.)

However, what's more interesting is that by comparing each individual's brain activity to the average activity of the paedophile group and the control group, it was possible to diagnose people as paedophiles or not with high accuracy (90+%).

Plotting the "typical paedophile"-ness of the neural response to girls vs women and boys vs men, the paedophiles (triangles) form a clear cluster. There were also some differences between homosexual and heterosexuals in both groups.

The statistics seem kosher: they used leave-one-out cross-validation to avoid the error of double dipping.

What's not clear is whether this was measuring sexual attraction as such. All it's measuring is how much each person's activity correlated with the paedophile group average. Maybe it's picking up on the shame paedophiles feel over being reminded of what they've done. Maybe the controls were just averting their eyes when the child porn came on.

However, you could say that if you're just interested in the practical business of catching paedophiles, that's academic. More concerning is the question of whether it would be possible to fool the technique. A recent study showed that it's easy to fool a brain scan designed to detect lying.

But let's suppose it does work out. Would that be a good thing? What is "a paedophile", anyway? Is it someone's who's attracted to children, or someone who acts on that attraction?

For example, there are people who are caught with child porn, and who admit they downloaded it, but who deny being attracted to children. The Who shredder Pete Townsend and comedian Chris Langham being two British examples. Both admit downloading illegal images, but say it was for 'research purposes'.

Now it might be possible, using fMRI, to find out if they're telling the truth. Let's suppose it was doable.

So what? Downloading child pornography is a crime - whatever your motivation. Being attracted to children is legal, in itself. So from a legal perspective it should make no difference at all in cases like this.

Of course, we don't in fact go around seeing things from a purely legal perspective. We care whether someone is attracted to children or not. But should we care? Is that fair? You don't choose your sexual orientation. What you choose is whether to break the law by commiting the crime.

There are surely people out there - no-one knows how many - who are attracted the children, and never act on it. Do we want to be able to "catch" them?

Edit: The original version of this post linked to the wrong paper, an older paper by the same authors. This has been fixed now.

Ponseti, J., Granert, O., Jansen, O., Wolff, S., Beier, K., Neutze, J., Deuschl, G., Mehdorn, H., Siebner, H., & Bosinski, H. (2011). Assessment of Pedophilia Using Hemodynamic Brain Response to Sexual Stimuli Archives of General Psychiatry DOI: 10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.130

New Mutations - New Eugenics?

True or false: you inherit your genes from your parents.





Mostly true, but not quite. In theory, you do indeed get half of your DNA from your mother and half from your father; but in practice, there's sometimes a third parent as well, random chance. Genes don't always get transmitted as they should: mutations occur.



As a result, it's not true that "genetic" always implies "inherited". A disease, for example, could be entirely genetic, and almost never inherited. Down's syndrome is the textbook example, but it's something of a special case and until recently, it was widely assumed that most disease risk genes were inherited.



Yet recent evidence suggests that many cases of neurological and psychiatric disorders are caused by uninherited, de novo mutation events. Here are two papers from the last few weeks about schizophrenia(1,2) - but the story looks similar for autism, intellectual disabilities, some forms of epilepsy, ADHD, and others. Indeed they're often the same mutations.



Biologically, a given mutation is what it is, whether it's de novo or inherited. But on a social and a psychological level, I think there are crucial differences, and in particular I think that if it turns out that de novo mutations are important in disease, we're going to see attempts to take these variants out of circulation - far more so than in the case of the very same genes, were they inherited.



The old eugenics movement was based on the idea that if we stop people with bad genes from breeding - by sterilization, voluntary or otherwise, say - we'll be able to eliminate diseases and other undesirable traits. This idea is now generally regarded as extremely unethical, but many of its opponents have shared with the eugenicists the belief that it could work.



But if de novo mutations are what cause the majority of disease, then this approach would be pointless. Sterilizing certain people, or encouraging the healthy ones to have more children, would never be able to eliminate the 'bad genes' because new ones are being created every generation, pretty much at random.



So the de novo paradigm ought to be welcomed by opponents of eugenics. It wasn't just morally wrong - it was biologically misguided too.



But hang on. This is the 21st century. We have in vitro fertilization (IVF), and you can analyze the genes of an IVF embryo before you decide to make it into a child. In the near future, we might be able to routinely sequence the genome of any unborn child shortly after conception.



From there, it would be a small step to allowing parents to decide not to have children with de novo mutations.



This would be, in its effects, a form of eugenics - in the sense that it would produce the effect that the old eugenicists wanted. No more 'bad' genes, or not nearly as many. Opinions will differ as to whether it's morally different. But I would have said that politically, it's a lot more likely to happen.



I can't see forced sterilization returning any time soon. But if you were expecting a baby and you knew that it was not just carrying your and your partner's DNA, but had also suffered a mutation - might you not want to avoid that?



Psychologically, it matters that it did not inherit the gene. It would be a big step to decide that your child should not inherit one of your own genes. Of course, some genes are obviously harmful, like one that raises the risk of cancer, but think about the grey areas - a gene for social anxiety, mild autistic symptoms, obesity, a personality trait.



You might well feel that carrying that gene is what makes you, you; and so it would be natural for your child to have it. You might decide that if it was good enough for you (and all your ancestors), it's good enough for your children. You might well resent the very idea that it's a 'bad' gene at all, as an attack on your own self-worth.



But none of that applies if it's a de novo mutation. Indeed, quite the opposite - all those same considerations would probably lead you to want your children to carry as close as possible to a carbon copy of your DNA, with no random changes. It was good enough for you.



My point is that I think there will be much more support for the idea of genetic screening against de novo mutations than against inherited genes. More people will want it, it will be more socially acceptable, and more widely used. I'm not saying this would be a good or a bad thing, just making a prediction. In the future, diseases and traits that are primarily caused by de novo mutations will increasingly selected against.