Did your brain make you do it?

Recent story from the NYT by John Monterosso and Barry Schwartz, July 27, 2012: "Did your brain make you do it?" about the concept of responsiblity. Basic stance is here:

it’s worth stressing an important point: as a general matter, it is always true that our brains "made us do it." Each of our behaviors is always associated with a brain state. If we view every new scientific finding about brain involvement in human behavior as a sign that the behavior was not under the individual’s control, the very notion of responsibility will be threatened. So it is imperative that we think clearly about when brain science frees someone from blame — and when it doesn’t.

The authors describe an experiment they carried out to gauge people's sense of causality under different scenarios.

In our experiment, we asked participants to consider various situations involving an individual who behaved in ways that caused harm, including committing acts of violence. We included information about the protagonist that might help make sense of the action in question: in some cases, that information was about a history of psychologically horrific events that the individual had experienced (e.g., suffering abuse as a child), and in some cases it was about biological characteristics or anomalies in the individual's brain (e.g., an imbalance in neurotransmitters). In the different situations, we also varied how strong the connection was between those factors and the behavior (e.g., whether most people who are abused as a child act violently, or only a few).

They found that people seemed to either blame biological causes (i.e. brain injury) or psychological causes (i.e. intentions), a way of thinking they term "naive dualism". Rather than either/or, they point toward a more probabilistic model.

A better question is "how strong was the relation between the cause (whatever it happened to be) and the effect?" If, hypothetically, only 1 percent of people with a brain malfunction (or a history of being abused) commit violence, ordinary considerations about blame would still seem relevant. But if 99 percent of them do, you might start to wonder how responsible they really are.