Sense of agency and responsibility: integrating legal and neurocognitive accounts

代理感和责任感：整合法律和神经认知账户

• 批准号: AH/L015145/1
• 负责人: Patrick Haggard
• 金额: $ 21.98万
• 依托单位: University College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2014 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FL015145%2F1
• 关键词: Sense; agency; responsibility; integrating; legal

This interdisciplinary project compares the concepts of responsibility for action in criminal law, and in psychology/neuroscience. All known human societies have some concept of individual responsibility for action. Legal systems generally view individuals as responsible because they have control over their actions: they are conscious, rational agents who 'could have done otherwise'. Rapidly-expanding scientific knowledge suggests a different view, in which an individual's actions are the result of neurobiological brain processes that are mechanistic, and largely independent of conscious experience. Recent expert consensus identified the tension between legal and neuroscientific views of responsibility as an important current debate between scientific knowledge and wider human culture. Interdisciplinary research, including new data, is required to identify the similarities and differences between legal and scientific views of responsibility. The present project acts as a research beacon, bridging this interdisciplinary gap. It does so by legal research that highlights the importance of psychology, and by experimental psychology research that addresses the possible mechanistic neurobiological bases of specific aspects of legal responsibility.First, the project begins by identifying the ways in which English criminal law makes reference to subjective experience and other psychological concepts in its doctrine of responsibility. We will review key cases in which an agent's intention is relevant to responsibility, because of oblique intention, automatism/insanity, or loss of control. For each case, we will write parallel legal analyses, and psychological/neuroscientific commentary, highlighting how recent scientific knowledge might inform the legal discussion. The resulting publication(s) will present the points of similarity and tension between legal and scientific ways of viewing human action. It will also suggest fruitful areas for further research in both law and neuroscience.Second, the project will include a series of 5 behavioural experiments. The experiments aim at quantifying the human sense of agency, using an established implicit measure based on human time perception: stronger agency and sense of responsibility leads to a shorter perceived interval between an action and its outcome. Using this measure, we will perform 3 simple experiments to investigate how agents' understanding of the value of an action outcome changes the experience of acting. Put simply, how does the sense of agency over good outcomes differ from that over bad outcomes? Developing experimental paradigms to study this would clarify the legal assumption that the intention to act is based on knowing the "nature and quality of the act". The results of these experiments will be relevant to automatism, insanity and oblique intention. A further two studies will investigate how extreme negative circumstances affect the sense of responsibility, aiming to provide an experimental comparison to legal "loss of control" defences. We will assess how our experimental measures of sense of agency are altered when the agent's action serves to terminate a persistent and painful sensation, produced by a controlled heat-pain stimulator. Taken together, the experiments aim to provide systematic and pertinent data to inform future research and discussion of the important links between neuroscience/psychology and law.Finally, at the end of the project we will organise an expert workshop bringing together international experts in the law/neuroscience field. This serves as a focus to present our results, to exchange interdisciplinary perspectives, and to consider future research agendas for this fundamental topic in science and culture.

这一跨学科项目比较了刑法和心理学/神经科学中的行为责任概念。所有已知的人类社会都有一些个人对行动的责任的概念。法律制度通常认为个人是负责任的，因为他们可以控制自己的行为：他们是有意识的、理性的代理人，如果不是这样的话，他们可能会这样做。快速发展的科学知识提出了一种不同的观点，认为个人的行为是神经生物学大脑过程的结果，这些过程是机械性的，在很大程度上独立于意识经验。最近的专家一致认为，法律和神经科学的责任观之间的紧张关系是目前科学知识和更广泛的人类文化之间的一场重要辩论。需要进行跨学科研究，包括新的数据，以确定法律责任观和科学责任观之间的异同。本项目起到了研究灯塔的作用，弥合了这一跨学科差距。它通过强调心理学重要性的法律研究和解决法律责任特定方面可能的机械神经生物学基础的实验心理学研究来做到这一点。首先，该项目首先确定了英国刑法在其责任原则中参考主观经验和其他心理概念的方式。我们将审查特工的意图与责任相关的关键案例，因为间接意图、自动/精神错乱或失去控制。对于每个案例，我们将撰写平行的法律分析和心理学/神经科学评论，强调最近的科学知识如何为法律讨论提供信息。由此产生的出版物(S)将提出法律和科学方法看待人类行为之间的共同点和紧张点。它还将提出在法律和神经科学方面进一步研究的富有成效的领域。第二，该项目将包括一系列5个行为实验。这些实验旨在量化人类的代理感，使用一种建立在人类时间感知基础上的内隐测量：更强的代理和责任感会导致一项行动与其结果之间的感知间隔更短。使用这一措施，我们将进行3个简单的实验，以调查代理人对行动结果的价值的理解如何改变行动的体验。简而言之，对好结果的代理意识与对坏结果的代理意识有何不同？开发研究这一问题的实验范例将澄清这样一种法律假设，即行为的意图是以了解“行为的性质和质量”为基础的。这些实验的结果将与无意识、精神错乱和间接意图相关。另外两项研究将调查极端负面情况是如何影响责任感的，旨在提供与法律上的“失控”防御的实验比较。我们将评估当代理人的行动用于终止由受控的热痛刺激器产生的持续和痛苦的感觉时，我们的代理感觉的实验测量是如何改变的。综上所述，这些实验旨在提供系统和相关的数据，为未来神经科学/心理学与法律之间的重要联系的研究和讨论提供信息。最后，在项目结束时，我们将组织一个专家工作坊，汇集法律/神经科学领域的国际专家。这是展示我们的成果、交流跨学科观点和考虑未来这一科学和文化基本主题的研究议程的重点。

项目成果

Sensorimotor organization of a sustained involuntary movement.

• DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00185
• 发表时间: 2015
• 期刊: Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience
• 影响因子: 3
• 作者: De Havas J;Ghosh A;Gomi H;Haggard P
• 通讯作者: Haggard P