Our brains respond to corporations as if they are people

Do corporations, like people, have moral rights and responsibilities?

The US Supreme Court has recently made a number of rulings that suggest it sees corporations as having similar rights and responsibilities to individual human beings, such as that they have the right to free speech, and can be exempt from laws that contradict their owner’s religious beliefs. Can a new neuroimaging study help us determine whether the Court’s approach is justified?

Forty participants viewed written vignettes while their brains were scanned, each describing a pro-social, anti-social or neutral action committed either by a person or a corporation. An example of an anti-social vignette was a freelance gardener or a gardening company deciding to charge an invalid falsely, for work they didn’t carry out.

When David Eagleman, and his colleagues Mark Plitt and Ricky Savjani, directly compared the corporation and person conditions they found no significant differences in brain activity. Moreover, compared to a neutral baseline (descriptions of objects not performing a social action), there were a number of common areas of activation in response to individual people or corporations, with Eagleman’s team particularly interested in an area of the medial prefrontal cortex previously implicated in predicting mental states and discriminating emotion. They argue this is significant because past studies have shown deactivations in this area when manipulations present human beings as dehumanised, so you might expect to find a difference in this area when viewing a non-human target - but this was not the case for corporations.

After viewing each vignette, participants were also asked to make an evaluation of how they were feeling - a rating of intensity of a menu of feelings including "admiration" or "indignation" - and this data did point to a difference: humans behaving pro-socially were met with stronger approval than were corporations, and misbehaving corporations made participants angrier.

This sense that corporations are judged more harshly is consistent with a finding from the imaging data that the superior temporal gyrus, an area that responded differently for positive versus negative actions, responded in the "negative" way for corporation’s neutral actions. Previous work has also suggested that we take unethical corporate behaviour as a strong predictor of future behaviour but we are more lenient when it comes to people, as to err is human.

Can we gain any legal insight from these findings? They could be seen as an endorsement of the extension of rights to corporations. On the other hand, we could argue that our brains are simply doing their best to model the active intrusions of corporations into our lives, by treating them more like people than inanimate objects. But this wouldn’t make this an acceptable situation; in fact, low tolerance for corporate actions could suggest that we resent the people-like status that corporations already have. Ultimately, as a question of how society ought to be, science can provide insights, but not answers.

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Plitt, M., Savjani, R., & Eagleman, D. (2014). Are corporations people too? The neural correlates of moral judgments about companies and individuals Social Neuroscience, 10 (2), 113-125 DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2014.978026

--further reading--
Investigating the personality of companies

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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The trouble with tDCS? Electrical brain stimulation may not work after all

By guest blogger Neuroskeptic

A widely-used brain stimulation technique may be less effective than previously believed.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) is an increasingly popular neuroscience tool. tDCS involves attaching electrodes to the scalp, through which a weak electrical current flows. The idea is that this current modulates the activity of the brain tissue underneath the electrode - safely and painlessly.

Outside of the neuroscience lab, tDCS is also used by hobbyists looking to boost their own brain power and a number of consumer stimulation devices are now being sold. The technique regularly makes the news, under headlines such as “Zapping your brain could help you lose weight”.

However, according to Australian neuroscientists Jared Horvath, Jason Forte and Olivia Carter, a single session of tDCS may have no detectable effect on cognitive function in most people. In a new paper published in the journal Brain Stimulation, Horvath and colleagues reviewed the published evidence on tDCS. They performed a meta-analysis of the data on how tDCS influences cognitive functions such as memory, language, and mental arithmetic.

For example, in experiments investigating language function, neuroscientists generally place the active tDCS electrode over the left frontal lobe of the volunteers. This ensures that the electrode is near to Broca’s area, a part of the brain known to be involved in language production. Then, the current is switched on and the volunteer is asked to do a linguistic task such as verbal fluency, in which the goal is to think of as many words beginning with a certain letter (say “p”) as possible within one minute. The performance of the volunteers given tDCS is compared to the performance of people given “sham” tDCS, in which the electrodes are attached but no current is applied.

Horvath et al. found that overall, there was no statistically significant difference between active and sham tDCS on any of the cognitive tasks that they examined. They say that:

Of the 59 analyses undertaken, tDCS was not found to generate a significant effect on any. Taken together, the evidence does not support the assertion that a single-session of tDCS has a reliable effect on cognitive tasks in healthy adult populations.

That seems pretty clear-cut. However, Horvath et al. acknowledge that their analysis did not include any of the studies that have been conducted on individuals with brain diseases or on the elderly, and they note that tDCS might be more effective in such cases.

What’s more, Horvath et al.’s meta-analysis didn’t utilize all of the studies on healthy people. The authors decided to only include results that had at least one published independent replication attempt. In other words, they only included studies that had measured the effects of tDCS on a given cognitive task, if more than one different research group had published papers using that technique. Even if one team of scientists had published several studies all showing that tDCS does influence some aspect of cognition, those results weren’t included unless at least one other team of researchers had published tDCS results using that same task. One hundred and seventy-six articles were excluded as a result.

Horvath et al. explain their decision not to consider those studies by saying that:

We chose to exclude measures that have only been replicated by a single research group to ensure all data included in and conclusions generated by this review accurately reflect the effects of tDCS itself, rather than any unique device, protocol, or condition utilized in a single lab.

However, this is a slightly unusual restriction to use on a meta-analysis. It might be interesting to see whether including these additional studies would have changed the results.

This is the second time Horvath, Forte and Carter have published a sceptical meta-analysis of tDCS. In November last year they reviewed studies on the neurophysiological effects of tDCS and concluded that tDCS has virtually no measurable effects on brain function. So Horvath et al. seem to have comprehensively shown that tDCS essentially has no impact in healthy people, either on a biological or on a cognitive level.

However, I spoke to Dr Nick Davis, Lecturer in Psychology at Swansea University who has published several papers about tDCS. Davis says that:

This is a really useful review, as it helps us to think about the way we talk about the effects of tDCS.

However I believe that the way the analysis was conducted may have obscured some of the very real effects of tDCS. The authors have made a judgement about which studies can be pooled together and which studies cannot be pooled. One always has to make these kinds of decisions and I am not sure I would have made the same decisions given the same choices.

tDCS is still a developing technology. I think that with more principled methods of targeting the current flow to the desired brain area, we will see tDCS become one of the standard tools of cognitive neuroscience, just as EEG and fMRI have become.

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Horvath, J., Forte, J., & Carter, O. (2015). Quantitative Review Finds No Evidence of Cognitive Effects in Healthy Populations from Single-Session Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) Brain Stimulation DOI: 10.1016/j.brs.2015.01.400

Post written for the BPS Research Digest by Neuroskeptic, a British neuroscientist who blogs for Discover Magazine.

--further reading--
It's shocking - How the press are hyping the benefits of electrical brain stimulation
Read this before zapping your brain
Bloggers behind the blogs: Neuroskeptic

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People are quicker to dismiss evidence from psychology than neuroscience

Imagine a politician from your party is in trouble for alleged misdemeanours. He's been assessed by an expert who says he likely has early-stage Alzheimer's. If this diagnosis is correct, your politician will have to resign, and he'll be replaced by a candidate from an opposing party.

This was the scenario presented to participants in a new study by Geoffrey Munro and Cynthia Munro. A vital twist was that half of the 106 student participants read a version of the story in which the dementia expert based his diagnosis on detailed cognitive tests; the other half read a version in which he used a structural MRI brain scan. All other story details were matched, such as the expert's years of experience in the field, and the detail provided for the different techniques he used.

Overall, the students found the MRI evidence more convincing than the cognitive tests. For example, 69.8 per cent of those given the MRI scenario said the evidence the politician had Alzheimer's was strong and convincing, whereas only 39.6 per cent of students given the cognitive tests scenario said the same. MRI data was also seen to be more objective, valid and reliable. Focusing on just those students in both conditions who showed scepticism, over 15 per cent who read the cognitive tests scenario mentioned the unreliability of the evidence; none of the students given the MRI scenario cited this reason.

In reality, a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's will always be made with cognitive tests, with brain scans used to rule out other explanations for any observed test impairments. The researchers said their results are indicative of naive faith in the trustworthiness of brain imaging data. "When one contrasts the very detailed manuals accompanying cognitive tests to the absences of formalised operational criteria to guide the clinical interpretation of structural brain MRI in diagnosing disease, the perception that brain MRI is somehow immune to problems of reliability becomes even more perplexing," they said.

What about the students with a very strong political identity for whom the diagnostic evidence was therefore particularly unwelcome? The researchers found that the gap between the perception of MRI and cognitive testing was largest for this group. This is because, when the students were highly motivated to disbelieve the diagnosis of Alzheimer's, those told about the cognitive tests were very dismissive, but those told about the MRI scans showed similar levels of trust to their less partisan peers. The authors said this suggests we are more willing to discount unwelcome psychological evidence than we are to discount brain-based evidence.

These new results add to past findings showing people's bias for neuroscience and other "hard" sciences and against psychology. For example, medical students think their psychology lectures are "soft and fluffy"; students think psychology is less important than the other natural sciences; children rate psychological questions as easier than chemistry or biology questions; and expert testimony supporting an insanity defence is seen as less convincing when delivered by a psychologist than a psychiatrist. Another line of research suggests people are particularly influenced by images of brain scans, although recent attempts have failed to replicate this finding.

The researchers called for their work to be extended into other contexts, and for the allure of neuroscience to be probed more deeply. "The need for the general public to accurately evaluate the scientific methods used by psychologists is especially relevant to real-world situations," they said, "in which strongly held values, beliefs, or identification with specific groups renders people particularly likely to discount psychological evidence."

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Munro, G., & Munro, C. (2014). “Soft” Versus “Hard” Psychological Science: Biased Evaluations of Scientific Evidence That Threatens or Supports a Strongly Held Political Identity Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 36 (6), 533-543 DOI: 10.1080/01973533.2014.960080

--further reading--
When our beliefs are threatened by facts, we turn to unfalsifiable justifications

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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