Sense of agency and responsibility: integrating legal and neurocognitive accounts

这个跨学科的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行动责任的概念。法律的体系通常认为个人负有责任，因为他们可以控制自己的行为：他们是有意识的、理性的行为人，“本来可以不这样做”。快速扩展的科学知识提出了一种不同的观点，即个人的行为是神经生物学大脑过程的结果，这些过程是机械的，并且在很大程度上独立于意识经验。最近的专家共识确定，法律的和神经科学的责任观之间的紧张关系是科学知识和更广泛的人类文化之间的一个重要的当前辩论。需要进行跨学科研究，包括新的数据，以确定法律的责任观和科学的责任观之间的异同。本项目作为一个研究灯塔，弥合这一跨学科的差距。它通过强调心理学重要性的法律的研究和解决法律的责任的具体方面的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，该项目首先确定英国刑法在其责任学说中引用主观经验和其他心理学概念的方式。我们将回顾代理人的意图与责任相关的关键案例，因为间接意图，自动症/精神错乱或失去控制。对于每一个案例，我们将写平行的法律的分析，和心理/神经科学的评论，强调最近的科学知识如何可能通知法律的讨论。由此产生的出版物将呈现法律的和科学的看待人类行为的方式之间的相似点和紧张点。它也将为法律和神经科学的进一步研究提出富有成果的领域。第二，该项目将包括一系列的5个行为实验。实验的目的是量化的代理人的感觉，使用一个既定的隐式测量的基础上人类的时间感知：较强的代理和责任感导致一个动作和其结果之间的感知间隔较短。使用这个方法，我们将进行3个简单的实验来研究代理人对行动结果价值的理解如何改变行动体验。简而言之，对好结果和坏结果的能动感有何不同？发展实验范式来研究这一点将澄清法律的假设，即行为的意图是以了解“行为的性质和性质”为基础的。这些实验的结果将与自动症，精神错乱和间接意图有关。另外两项研究将调查极端消极的情况如何影响责任感，旨在提供一个实验比较法律的“失控”的辩护。我们将评估当代理人的行动用于终止由受控热痛刺激器产生的持续和疼痛感觉时，我们的实验测量如何改变代理感。总之，实验旨在提供系统和相关的数据，为未来的研究和讨论神经科学/心理学和法律之间的重要联系提供信息。最后，在项目结束时，我们将组织一个专家研讨会，汇集法律/神经科学领域的国际专家。这是一个重点，以展示我们的成果，交流跨学科的观点，并考虑未来的研究议程，在科学和文化的这一基本课题。

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.