The role of neurological and psychological explanations in legal judgments of psychopathic wrongdoers

Although brain imaging has recently taken center stage in criminal legal proceedings, little is known about how neuroscience information differentially affects people’s judgments about criminal behavior. In two studies of community participants (N = 1161), we examined how mock jurors sentence a fictional psychopathic defendant when presented with neurological or psychological research of equal or ambiguous scientific validity. Across two studies, we (a) found that including images of the brain did not alter mock jurors’ sentencing judgments, (b) reported two striking non-replications of previous findings that mock jurors recommend less severe punishments to defendants when a neuroscientific explanations are proffered, and (c) found that participants rated a psychopathic individual as more likely to benefit from treatment and less dangerous when a neurological explanation for his deficits was provided. Overall, these results suggest that neuroscience information provided by psychiatrists in hypothetical criminal situations may not broadly transform mock jurors’ intuitions about a psychopathic defendant’s sentence, but they provide novel evidence that brain-based information may influence people’s judgments about treatability and dangerousness.