Excerpted from a early draft of The Moviegoer’s Guide to the Future; inspired by the movie Minority Report.
In March 2017, the British newspaper The Guardian ran a web-story with the headline “Brain scans can spot criminals, scientists say”.[1] Unlike in Minority Report, the scanning was carried out using a hefty functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine rather than genetically altered precogs. But the story seemed to suggest that scientists were getting closer to spotting criminal intent before a crime had been committed, using sophisticated real-time brain imaging.
In this case, the headline vastly overstepped the mark. The original research used fMRI to see if brain activity could be used to distinguish between knowingly criminal behavior, or merely reckless behavior.[2] It did this by setting up a somewhat complex situation where volunteers were asked to take a case containing something valuable through a security checkpoint, while undergoing a brain scan. But to make things more interesting (and scientifically useful), their actions and choices came with financial rewards and benefits.
Each participant was first given $6000 in “play money”. They were then presented with between one and five suitcases, with just one of them containing the thing of value. If they decided not to carry anything through the checkpoint, they lost $1,500. If they decided to carry a suitcase, it cost them $500. And if they dithered about it, they were docked $2,500.
Having selected a suitcase, if they chose the one with the valuable stuff inside and they weren’t searched by security, they got an additional $2,500 — jackpot! But if they were searched and found to be carrying, they were fined $3,500; leaving them with a measly $2,000. On the other hand, if they weren’t carrying, they suffered no penalties; irrespective of whether they were searched or not.
The point of this rather elaborate setup was that there were financial gains (at least with the fake money being used) involved with the choices made, and the implication that carrying a suitcase stashed with valuable goods was dangerous (you could be fined if discovered carrying), but financially lucrative if you got away with it.
To mix things up further, some participants only had the choice of carrying the loaded case (thus possibly getting $8,000) or declining to take part in such a dodgy deal, and walking away with a mere $2,000. The participants who took a chance here were knowingly participating in questionable behavior. For the rest of the participants, it was a lottery whether they picked the loaded suitcase or not, meaning that their actions were more reckless, and less intentional.
By studying both behavior and brain activity together, the researchers were able to predict what state the participants were in simply by their actions — whether they were intentionally setting out to engage in behavior that maybe wasn’t legitimate because of the potential payoff, or whether they were just feeling reckless.
The long and short of this was that the study suggested brain activity could be used to indicate criminal intent, and this of course is what threw headline writers into a click-bait frenzy. But the research was far from conclusive. In fact, the authors explicitly stated that “it would be absurd to suggest, in light of our results, that the task of assessing the mental state of a defendant could or should, even in principle, be reduced to the classification of brain data”. They also pointed out that, even if these results could be used to predict the mental state of a person while committing a crime, they’d have to be inside a fMRI scanner at the time, which would be tricky.
Despite the impracticality of using this research to assess the mental state of people during the act of committing a crime, media stories around the study tapped into a deep-seated fascination with predicting criminal tendencies or intent – much as Veris Prime’s Truth Index does. Of course, there’s always been a tendency amongst humans it seems to be suspicious of people who are different, and who stand out from the crowd. Part evolved survival instinct, this tendency is associated with some of our worst collective behaviors as a species. And at times we’ve not only segregated, persecuted and murdered people whose only crime is that they don’t appear to fit in — we’ve used science to rationalize and justify our actions.
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In the 17th century, the “science” of phrenology was all the rage. Phrenology was an attempt to predict someone’s character and behavior by the shape of their skull. Yet as understanding of how the brain works developed, it became increasingly discredited. To be generous, some researchers and practitioners of phrenology may have been genuinely interested in whether there were physiological explanations for beneficial or destructive behavior that could be used to improve society. Yet phrenology was ultimately a way to wrap up human biases and prejudices in scientific sounding terms. Sadly, it opened the way to assuming that physiognomic traits which appeared common to people who were assumed to be of “poor character”, were also predictive of their behavior — a classic case of correlation erroneously being confused with causation.
The ideas coming out of phrenology were picked up by the nineteenth century criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Lombroso was convinced that physical traits such as jaw size, slope of your forehead, and size of your ears, were associated with criminal tendencies. His theory was that these and other traits were throwbacks to earlier evolutionary ancestors, whom he assumed were savages, and that they indicated an innate tendency toward criminal behavior.
Again, it’s easy to see how attractive these ideas might have been to some, as they suggested criminals could be identified and dealt with before doing anything wrong. With hindsight, it’s easy to see how misguided and malevolent they were, but at the time, many people bought into them. It would be nice to think that this way of thinking about criminal tendencies was a short and salutary aberration in humanity’s history. Sadly, it paved the way to even more destructive forms of pseudoscience-based discrimination, including eugenics.
In the 1900’s, scientific racism and other forms of pseudoscience-based discrimination shifted toward the idea that the quality or “worth” of a person is based on their genetic heritage. The “science” of eugenics — and sadly this is something that many scientists at the time supported — suggested that my genetic heritage and yours determines everything about us, including our moral character and our social acceptability. It was a deeply flawed idea that nevertheless came with the same seductive idea that, if we know what makes people “bad”, we can get rid of them before they cause a problem. What is heartbreaking is that these ideas coming out of academics and scientists gained political momentum, and ultimately became part of the justification for the murder of six million Jews, and many more besides, in the Holocaust.
These days, I’d like to think we’re more enlightened, and that we don’t fall prey so easily to using scientific trickery to justify how we treat others. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
In 2011, three researchers published a paper suggesting you can tell a criminal from someone who isn’t (and presumably by inference, someone who is likely to engage in criminal activities), by what they look like.[3] In the study, 36 students in a psychology class (33 women and 3 men) were shown mugshots of 32 Caucasian males. They were told that some were criminals, and they were asked to assess — from the photos alone — whether each person had committed a crime; whether they’d committed a violent crime; if it was a violent crime, whether it was rape or assault; and if it was non-violent, whether it was arson or a drug offense.
Within the limitations of the study, the participants were more likely to correctly identify criminals than incorrectly identify them from the photos. Not surprisingly this led to a slew of headlines along the lines of “Criminals Look Different From Noncriminals” (this one from a blog post on Psychology Today[4]). But despite this, the study was flawed. It’s not clear what biases may have been introduced for instance by having the photos evaluated by a mainly female group of psychology students, or only having photos of white males. Or even whether there was something associated with how the photos were presented and the questions asked that increased the likelihood of the results that were obtained.
The results did seem to indicate that, overall, the students were successful in identifying photos of convicted criminals in this particular context. But how do we know that the same results would have been obtained in a different study, using different methods? Statistical analysis is usually used to indicate whether seemingly-important results from a study are likely to be repeatable. But there’s growing concern that the way statistical analysis is used is leading to too much confidence being placed in weak data.[5] Recently, a group of statisticians proposed a more rigorous standard of testing data.[6] If their criteria had been applied here, the study would have been judged inconclusive.
However, there is a larger issue at stake with this and similar studies, and this is the ethics of carrying out and publicizing the results of research like this in the first place. Here, the very appropriateness of asking if we can predict criminal behavior brings us back to the earlier study on intent versus reckless behavior, and to the underlying premise in Minority Report.
The assumption that someone’s behavioral tendencies can be predicted from no more than what they look like, or how their brain functions, is a slippery slope. It assumes — dangerously so — that behavior is governed by genetic heritage and upbringing. But it also opens the door to a safer-than-sorry attitude to law and order that considers it is better to restrain someone who might demonstrate socially undesirable behavior, rather than presuming them innocent until proven guilty. It’s an attitude that takes us down a path where we assume that other people do not have agency over their destiny.
Just take a minute to think about this. There is an implicit assumption here that how we behave can be separated out into “good” and “bad”, and that there is consensus on what constitutes these. But this is a deeply flawed assumption.
What the behavioral research above is actually looking at is someone’s tendency to break or bend agreed-on rules of socially acceptable conduct, as these are codified in law. These laws are not an absolute indicator of good or bad behavior. Rather, they are result of how we operate collectively as a social species. In technical terms, they establish normative expectations of behavior, which simply means that most people comply with them; irrespective of whether they have moral or ethical value. For instance, in most cultures it’s accepted that killing someone should be punished; unless it’s in the context of a legally sanctioned war, or during an execution (although many societies would still consider this morally reprehensible). This is a deeply embedded norm, and most people would consider it a good guide of appropriate behavior. The same cannot be said of norms surrounding homosexual acts though, which were illegal in the United Kingdom until 1967, and are still illegal in some countries around the world. Or norms surrounding LGBTQ rights, or even women’s rights.
When social norms are embedded within criminal law, it may be possible to use physical features or other means to identify “criminals” or those likely to be involved in “criminal” behavior. But are we as a society really prepared to take pre-emptive action against people who we arbitrarily label as “bad”? I sincerely hope not. And here we get to the crux of the ethical challenge around predicting criminal intent. Even if we can predict tendencies from images alone — and I am highly skeptical that we can gain anything of value here that isn’t heavily influenced by researcher bias and social norms — should we? Is it really appropriate to be asking if we can predict, simply from how someone looks, whether they are likely to behave in a way that we think is appropriate or not? And is it ethical to generate data that could be used to discriminate against people based on their appearance?
Using facial features to predict tendencies puts us way down the slippery slope toward discriminating against people because they are different to us. Thankfully, this is an idea that many would dismiss as inappropriate these days. But worryingly, our interest in relating brain activity to behavioral traits — the high-tech version of “looks like a criminal” — puts us on the same slippery slope.
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[1] Brain scans can spot criminals, scientists say. The Guardian. Published online March 13 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/mar/13/brain-scans-can-spot-criminals-scientists-say
[2] The original research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, under the title “Predicting the knowledge–recklessness distinction in the human brain”. http://www.pnas.org/content/114/12/3222
[3] The research was published in 2011 by Jeffrey Valla, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, volume 5, issue 1, pages 66-91, under the title “The accuracy of inferences about criminality based on facial appearance”. http://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2011-14970-005.html
[4] Criminals Look Different From Noncriminals. Satoshi Kanazawa, at Psychology Today. Posted March 13 2011. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201103/criminals-look-different-noncriminals
[5] See for instance Richard Harris’ book Rigor Mortis: How sloppy science creates worthless cures, crushes hope, and wastes billions. Published in 2017 by Basic Books.
[6] Daniel J. Benjamin and 71 co-authors challenged scientists to rethink how they define statistical significance in research, in their paper “Redefine statistical significance”, published in September 2017 in the journal Nature Human Behavior. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0189-z
Photo credit: Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash