Risky Teens and the maternal gaze

Christian Jarrett at the British Psychological Society's Research Digest blog reports that kids take fewer risk when mum's watching:

João Moreira and his colleagues scanned the brains of 23 15-year-olds (9 girls) while they played a risk-based game that involved going through a set of 26 traffic lights as quickly as possible and deciding at each set whether to accelerate or brake as the lights turned amber. Accelerating saved time usually, but also carried the risk of a crash which would lead to a greater delay than braking. The teens played the game twice: once in the presence of their mother who was located in the scan control room, and the other time in the presence of an unfamiliar female professor who was described as an expert in adolescent driving behaviour (some played the game with mum present first, others with the stranger present first).

There was a tendency for the teens to take fewer risks when their mum was present, as compared with the professor, but this difference didn’t reach statistical significance. However, at a neural level there were statistically significant differences between the conditions: when mum was present, the teens’ brains showed more reward-related brain activity after making safe decisions and less reward-related brain activity after making risky decisions. Mum’s supervision seemed to make caution a more pleasurable approach, at least at a neural level.

Why?

The researchers interpreted their findings as suggesting there is something unique about the influence of a parent (or a mother, at least) on the way a teenager’s brain processes risk, which could have practical implications. For example risk-prevention educational programmes for teenagers, which often struggle to make a difference, might be more likely to be effective if parents are directly involved.

I have a simpler explanation. If Mum sees that the kids are driving like hoons in a simulation even when she's watching, she won't give them the car keys next time they ask. Because the kids know that whatever happens in the game affects Mum's behaviour out-of-game, fun risk-taking is less rewarding. It isn't that Mum being there makes them different people or that they're better learning how to behave, it's just fear of out-of-game sanction.

Or at least that'd be my prior on it, if I were inclined to draw any conclusion whatsoever from a study scanning the brains of 9 teenage girls.

The addictive choice

Maybe the Becker-Murphy rational-addition model isn't so unrealistic after all.

Becker and Murphy's model shows that even rational, forward-looking, fully informed individuals can choose to consume addictive substances, knowing and accepting that it will result in addiction. It isn't meant to describe each and every addict, but if we can show that addiction can be consistent with rational choice, we cannot presume that all addicts are irrational. Further a lot of the subsequent empirical work finds results consistent with rational addiction. After a price change, the rational addiction model predicts larger long-term than short-term consumption changes; this prediction has been confirmed in the literature. It's a sharp contrast to some policy work around addiction that assumes agency away.

Sally Satel at The Atlantic surveys recent work by Carl Hart:

...Carl Hart, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, who has been showing that cocaine and methamphetamine addicts have a lot in common with Powell. When Hart’s subjects are given a good enough reason to refuse drugs—in this case, cash—they do so too.

The basic experiment goes like this. Hart recruits addicts who have no interest in quitting but who are willing to stay in a hospital research ward for two weeks for testing. Each day, Hart offers them a sample dose of either crack cocaine or methamphetamine, depending upon the drug they use regularly. Later in the day, they are given a choice between the same amount of drugs, a voucher for $5 of store merchandise, or $5 cash. They collect their reward when they’re discharged two weeks later.

More often than not, subjects choose the $5 voucher or cash over the drug, except that, when offered a higher dose, they go for the drug. But when Hart ups the value of the reward to $20, addicts chose the money every time.

In his new book, High Price—A Neuroscientist’s Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society, Hart reports that he was surprised by his findings. Wasn’t addiction a dopamine-driven compulsion “that ’hijacked’ the brain and took control of the will?” he asks. As a graduate student Hart was taught that. It's understood that recovered addicts eschew substances for fear that even a small amount could set off an irresistible craving for more. 

Satel also describes the array of self-control mechanisms available to help addicts avoid consumption urges when it's important to avoid consuming.

Yet there’s room for deliberate action in the form of “self-binding,” a practice by which addicts can erect obstacles between themselves and their drugs. Examples include avoiding people, places, or things associated with drug use; directly depositing paychecks or tearing up ATM cards to keep ready (drug) cash out of one’s pockets; or avoiding boredom, a common source of vulnerability to drug use.

Her discussion here reminded me of Jon Elster's older work on the topic.

Drinkers' utility

Folks measuring the social costs of alcohol are often pretty happy to assume that heavy drinkers get no utility from drinking; that lets them count private costs as socially relevant. For example, BERL wrote:


"We assume that it is irrational to drink alcohol to a harmful level and that harmful alcohol use has zero private benefit."

And now we see neurological evidence that the problem might rather be that heavy drinkers get too much enjoyment from alcohol:

Dr Jennifer Mitchell of the University of California San Francisco, who led the study, said: "This is something that we've speculated about for 30 years, based on animal studies, but haven't observed in humans until now.

"It provides the first direct evidence of how alcohol makes people feel good."

Researchers conducted positron emission tomography (PET) scans on the brains of 13 heavy drinkers and 12 non-drinkers immediately after they drank alcohol. Their findings, published in the Science Translational Medicine journal, showed that alcohol caused endorphins to be released in the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex brain regions.

In all of the volunteers, larger quantities of endorphins released in the nucleus accumbens were linked to increased feelings of pleasure.

Increased levels of endorphins released in the orbitofrontal cortex were linked to a more pronounced feeling of intoxication in people who were heavy drinkers, but not in non drinkers, the study showed.

Dr Mitchell said: "This indicates that the brains of heavy or problem drinkers are changed in a way that makes them more likely to find alcohol pleasant, and may be a clue to how problem drinking develops in the first place.

"That greater feeling of reward might cause them to drink too much."

I'm happy to grant that heavy drinkers may experience costs in excess of benefits on the later units of consumption. But to assume away the existence of benefits runs contrary to common sense, and to the brain scan machines.

It's sciency!

Start by constructing good and bad explanations for psychological phenomena, with the latter just being circular restatements of the phenomenon. See how well a control test pool can distinguish good from bad explanations. Add irrelevant neuroscience jargon to both explanations without altering the form of either explanation. Surprise! Adding the sciency flavour makes it harder to distinguish good from bad explanations.

Our most important finding concerns the effect that explanatorily irrelevant neuroscience information has on subject’s judgments of the explanations. For novices and students, the addition of such neuroscience information encouraged them to judge the explanations more favorably, particularly the bad explanations. That is, extraneous neuroscience information makes explanations look more satisfying than they actually are, or at least more satisfying than they otherwise would be judged to be. The students in the cognitive neuroscience class showed no benefit of training, demonstrating that only a semester’s worth of instruction is not enough to dispel the effect of neuroscience information on judgments of explanations. Many people thus systematically misunderstand the role that neuroscience should and should not play in psychological explanations, revealing that logically irrelevant neuroscience information can be seductive—it can have much more of an impact on participants’ judgments than it ought to.
...
Regardless of the breadth of our effect or the mechanism by which it occurs, the mere fact that irrelevant information can interfere with people’s judgments of explanations has implications for how neuroscience information in particular, and scientific information in general, is viewed and used outside of the laboratory. Neuroscience research has the potential to change our views of personal responsibility, legal regulation, education, and even the nature of the self (Farah, 2005; Bloom, 2004b). To take a recent example, some legal scholars have suggested that neuroimaging technology could be used in jury selection, to ensure that jurors are free of bias, or in questioning suspects, to ensure that they are not lying (Rosen, 2007). Given the results reported here, such evidence presented in a courtroom, a classroom, or a political debate, regardless of the scientific status or relevance of this evidence, could strongly sway opinion, beyond what the evidence can support (see Feigenson, 2006). We have shown that people seem all too ready to accept explanations that allude to neuroscience, even if they are not accurate reflections of the scientific data, and even if they would otherwise be seen as far less satisfying. Because it is unlikely that the popularity of neuroscience findings in the public sphere will wane any time soon, we see in the current results more reasons for caution when applying neuroscientific findings to social issues. Even if expert practitioners can easily distinguish good neuroscience explanations from bad, they must not assume that those outside the discipline will be as discriminating.

There's a reason that folks try to make their prescriptions look more sciency.

Ignatieff on evil

Michael Ignatieff's essay on political evil reminds me of a great article by Lskvayan. Here's Ignatieff:

So, Wolfe’s first lesson is a very old one, but worth repeating. There is method in apparent madness. The world is not divided between a sane world of deliberative politics and an insane world of apocalyptic violence. It is all politics, all the way down. To call a terrorist attack “senseless” is merely to admit that you have not understood its purpose.

Lskvayan provided a nice rational choice story for Stalin's Great Terror. Stalin couldn't tell which of his workers were shirking and which were working. But instituting random draw exile to Siberian death camps with reduced probability of being sent to Siberia for turning in a shirker turns the workers into the monitors and helps solve the principal-agent problem that otherwise obtains. From Lskvayan's abstract:

There is no agreement about the reasons for Stalin's Great Terror of 1937–1939. This paper argues that the problem faced by Stalin was similar to the standard principal–agent problem: the country was run as one enormous firm with Stalin as the only residual claimant. The monetary incentive structure was inadequate and the threat of mass shirking by the agents was real. A simple model of a principal with two agents is developed to address the problem. Assuming that the agents can observe and can reveal each other's shirking, it is shown that, under some assumptions, an equilibrium exists with the following strategy profiles: unless someone's shirking is revealed, the principal is committed to randomly punishing one of the agents with positive probability; an individual agent never shirks and always reveals a co-worker's shirking. A case study of the period is used to check the plausibility of this hypothesis.

The very real output costs of exterminating a lot of workers in Siberia was a second-best solution to the very real output costs of Stalin's slaves' shirking. Other solutions aren't great either; it's the existence of such principal-agent problems and imperfections in Stalin's monitoring ability that provided the space within which small amounts of freedom could exist.

Meanwhile, some neuroscientists say evil doesn't exist.

From the department of irrelevant prescriptions

Before the results came in, Brown told me to keep my expectations low. The sex regions might stay dark. She told me, "I actually think men in your situation" — meaning married with young kids — "should be encouraged to go to the Internet and look at pornography, because it brings novelty into the home. When you look at [porn], you're going to have some hormonal flooding. Which is needed in the 'captivity' situation."

My limited unscientific surveys of men in that situation suggests that such prescriptions may have no effect on the extensive margin.

The recommendation comes from Helen Fisher, Prof of Anthropology at Rutgers who specializes in the neurochemistry of love.

Fisher put A.J. Jacobs, author of the Esquire piece linked, into an MRI machine to see how much he loves his wife. They mapped his brain while he looked at pictures of his wife compared to pictures of Angelina Jolie. Noted Fisher:

When I told friends and family I was trying to scientifically assess my love for Julie, they all had the same response: "No good can come of this."

Lots of fun pop neuroscience in the article.

Cryonics

Kerry Howley's piece in the New York Times Magazine is lovely.

Robin Hanson wants to be cryogenically preserved on death; his wife, Peggy, works in a hospice helping folks deal with death and is no fan of cryogenics.

Among cryonicists, Peggy’s reaction might be referred to as an instance of the “hostile-wife phenomenon,” as discussed in a 2008 paper by Aschwin de Wolf, Chana de Wolf and Mike Federowicz.“From its inception in 1964,” they write, “cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.” The opposition of romantic partners, Aschwin told me last year, is something that “everyone” involved in cryonics knows about but that he and Chana, his wife, find difficult to understand. To someone who believes that low-temperature preservation offers a legitimate chance at extending life, obstructionism can seem as willfully cruel as withholding medical treatment. Even if you don’t want to join your husband in storage, ask believers, what is to be lost by respecting a man’s wishes with regard to the treatment of his own remains? Would-be cryonicists forced to give it all up, the de Wolfs and Federowicz write, “face certain death.”

I'm not opposed to cryonics, but I've not signed up. It's a form of Pascal's wager that offers far better odds than heaven, but still odds that seem vanishingly slim. I'd put non-trivial odds on a future mapping of a frozen brain being sufficient to generate whole brain simulation, but lower odds that the frozen brain can be revived. As Alcor puts it:

Cryonics is not a belief that the dead can be revived. Cryonics is a belief that no one is really dead until the information content of the brain is lost, and that low temperatures can prevent this loss.

And while I place positive value on there being some simulated version of me existing a couple of centuries from now, I still probably irrationally place undue weight on that it's this instance of this consciousness that wakes up rather than a copy. If cryonics were available at low cost, I'd sign up. But it isn't exactly cheap. Then again, lots of medical treatments are far more expensive. As Howley notes:

Robin’s expertise extends to the economics of health care, a domain in which enormous amounts of money are spent on experimental procedures with only a small chance of extending life. Like many cryonicists, he says he thinks of bodily preservation as experimental end-of-life medical care, and it is within a medical context that he typically introduces the subject of cryonics to his health economics class at George Mason. His students rarely accept this framing. “We spend most of the semester talking about how people are obsessed with taking any small chance at living longer,” Robin says. “And then when we get to cryonics, it’s: Well, who needs to live longer? What’s the point of living anyway? Why can’t we solve global hunger?”

In other words, while his wife says that medical technology has an unfortunate stranglehold on the way we die, Robin longs to claim the mantle of medical science for his attempt to avoid death altogether. But here he doesn’t expect to succeed, and as with most societal attitudes that contradict his intuitions, he’s got a theory as to why. “Cryonics,” Robin says, “has the problem of looking like you’re buying a one-way ticket to a foreign land.” To spend a family fortune in the quest to defeat cancer is not taken, in the American context, to be an act of selfishness. But to plan to be rocketed into the future — a future your family either has no interest in seeing, or believes we’ll never see anyway — is to begin to plot a life in which your current relationships have little meaning. Those who seek immortality are plotting an act of leaving, an act, as Robin puts it, “of betrayal and abandonment.”

None of this forms a binding constraint in our house. It's rather that, given low odds of successful recovery from cryonics, paying off the mortgage gets higher priority.

If I'm ever able to get over my irrationalities about prioritizing this instance of me over potential alternatives, I suppose I'd have to upweight cryonics.

For folks excessively interested in this sort of thing, check this mindbending piece of science fiction philosophy by Daniel Dennett.

And Robin comments on the article here.

Biology isn't destiny, but it affects your saving throws

James Fallon, UC Irvine neuroscientist, found he had the genetic predisposition for violent behaviour combined with ominous PET scan results:

Fallon says nobody in his family has real problems with those behaviors. But he wanted to be sure. Conveniently, he had everything he needed: Previously, he had persuaded 10 of his close relatives to submit to a PET brain scan and give a blood sample as part of a project to see whether his family had a risk for developing Alzheimer's disease.

After learning his violent family history, he examined the images and compared them with the brains of psychopaths. His wife's scan was normal. His mother: normal. His siblings: normal. His children: normal.

"And I took a look at my own PET scan and saw something disturbing that I did not talk about," he says.

What he didn't want to reveal was that his orbital cortex looks inactive.

"If you look at the PET scan, I look just like one of those killers."

...

Fallon calls up another slide on his computer. It has a list of family members' names, and next to them, the results of the genotyping. Everyone in his family has the low-aggression variant of the MAO-A gene, except for one person.

"You see that? I'm 100 percent. I have the pattern, the risky pattern," he says, then pauses. "In a sense, I'm a born killer."

...

Jim Fallon says he had a terrific childhood; he was doted on by his parents and had loving relationships with his brothers and sisters and entire extended family. Significantly, he says this journey through his brain has changed the way he thinks about nature and nurture. He once believed that genes and brain function could determine everything about us. But now he thinks his childhood may have made all the difference.

"We'll never know, but the way these patterns are looking in general population, had I been abused, we might not be sitting here today," he says.

As for the psychopaths he studies, Fallon feels some compassion for these people who, he says, got "a bad roll of the dice."

Discover comments here; Geeks are Sexy here.

I tend to think of these sorts of things in D&D terms. Fallon made his saving throw against a bad childhood, which meant he had a helpful adjustment to his save versus MAO-A, which he also made. Had he failed that throw, he would have had a strong penalty on willpower checks. If you know you have the propensity, you get an extra "self awareness" check that lets you evaluate whether your course of action really makes sense.

It will be interesting to see how this work plays out in court decisions over the next few decades. We can reasonably model folks with particular gene variants as having higher costs of avoiding illegal behaviour: their supply of illegal behaviour is more inelastic. So it will be more costly to deter them from engaging in any particular act. Recall Friedman's argument in Law's Order:

Net damage = damage to victim - gain to criminal.

For the marginal offence, the one that will be deterred if we raise the punishment just a little more,

Gain to criminal = expected punishment

hence

Net damage = damage to victim - expected punishment.

For the optimal punishment,

Cost of deterring one more offense = Net damage = damage to victim - expected punishment.

Rearranging gives us

Expected punishment = damage to victim - cost of deterring one more offense,

or, in the more compact notation of mathematics,

(P) = D - MC

Suppose we have two groups of individuals sorted by genes: the first whose supply of criminal activity is relatively elastic, the second whose supply is relatively inelastic (warrior gene or other predispositions). A fixed penalty across both groups won't be efficient: it's cheap to deter the former and very expensive to deter the latter and so we'll be overpunishing some of the latter and underpunishing some of the former relative to an efficiency norm. If penalty schedules varied by genotype, we'd have harsher penalties for folks without the genetic predisposition to crime as their supply of criminal activity is elastic and lighter penalties for folks with the genetic predisposition. Yes, it takes a stronger penalty to deter the inelastic; but, because it's more expensive to deter folks with the higher crime genotype, we should spend less on deterring them, not more.

This of course leaves to one side the potential benefits of incapacitation, which could tilt things towards longer punishments for folks whose genetic predisposition makes it likely that they'd re-offend.

But, I rather expect that the political debate will be framed more around (US) liberals arguing for treatment programmes rather than jail for folks with genetic predispositions to crime (regardless of any evidence of effectiveness) and (US) conservatives arguing for harsher punishments for criminal monsters (regardless of whether the incapacitation benefits outweigh the higher deterrence costs).

Check also parts two and three of the NPR series. Part 3 suggests juries are finding the genetic evidence to be exculpatory rather than incriminating: murder turns to manslaughter.

I Love Robot 1-X!

David Eagleman's lecture on neuroscience and law is fascinating. But I can't help but thinking about Bender's upgrade to be compatible with Robot 1-X.



About a half-hour in, he starts talking about neuro-based aversion techniques to train folks to dislike smoking, or to improve criminals' impulse control problems. I favour this kind of thing where it's a voluntary self-constraint mechanism. But it's not hard to imagine a healthist line that drug users shouldn't be put in prison but should rather be forced to undergo brain modification. I'm somewhat comforted by Eagleman's noting that none of these techniques work on people who don't want to change. But only somewhat.