Free Will and Personal Responsibility

The issue about free will is not so much whether we have any, but whether we exercise the free will we do have. Philosopher Immanuel Kant argues that we are essentially free and fail to live up to the promise of such freedom if we allow biology and external forces to rule us. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, despite all the flaws of his irreligious and political beliefs, had it right in his existentialist arguments that humans do not have a fixed nature handed out from biology. Humans make their own nature out of the freedom to do so in the environment in which they exist. Humans are regarded, in existential philosophy, as independently acting and responsible conscious beings.  Each individual brain is uniquely constructed from life experience, and much of that is self-constructed by willful choices. Science does not hold that the conscious mind is independent of genetics or environmental programming. But each mind is an independent being, acting in the world as a distinct entity, not as some Borg-like unit in a collective.

In terms of religion, Christianity is uniquely individualistic and demands personal responsibility and accountability. It is no accident that many of those who think free will is illusory are also atheists. Kierkegaard railed against growing collectivism, including that of organized religion. His emphasis was on the responsibility of individuals to be true to Christian ideals.

The conscious mind that believes in its power to choose also must believe that it can exert some control over the automatic purposes of its unconscious mind. No doubt, conscious mind has its own automatic purposes, which likewise are subject to veto or modification via free will. Such minds believe they can train and discipline their minds, bending them to freely willed purposes. Such minds say to themselves, “I can quit smoking.” “I can make myself learn how to be an engineer.” I will make this marriage work.” “I will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do.” And so on.

Now it is true that all of us commonly surrender our decision-making autonomy to our baser instincts and compulsions. Much of our behavior is unthinking, knee-jerk responsiveness. Our capacity for free will is limited to our willingness to claim and exert it.

People who believe that humans have no free will are hard-pressed to explain why no one is responsible for their choices and actions. What is it that compels foolish or deviant behavior? Are we compelled to believe in God or to be an atheist? What compels us to accept one moral code over any other? Are we compelled to become a certain kind of person, with no option to “improve” in any self-determined way? Are we compelled in our choices of learning experiences? If so, what or who does the compelling? Are we inevitable victims of genetics and experience or even a robotic unconscious mind?

It seems to me that current debates about determinism and free will tend to obscure the important matters of our humanness. The door to understanding what is really going on is slammed shut by assertions that value choices and the decisions that flow from them cannot be free because they are caused by neural circuit impulse patterns. Free will debates distract us from a proper framing of the issues about human choices and personal responsibility.

While it is true that brain circuitry is programmed by genetics and experience, conscious mind makes choices about who to interact with and what experiences to value, promote, and allow. Conscious mind can insist that some lessons of experience need to be remembered and valued while others are not. In short, the mind gets to help shape what it becomes.

The free-will issue is more than an arcane scholarly argument. Positions become politicized. In a robotocist world, people are more likely to be victims and less able to change maladaptive attitudes and behaviors. Thus, society and government must help people do what they cannot do for themselves. Robotocists don’t seem to ask this question: is our decision to help fellow robotocists likewise a robotocist choice?

If we can’t make conscious choices, then there is not much we can do to improve ourselves or our plight in life. Or even if there are things that can be done to change us and our situations, the approach will surely have to be different if we can’t initiate the change by force of our free will. Without free will, the government or schools or some other outside force must program our unconscious. That, of course, is a driving force behind moves to increase the size and power of government.

If there is no "I" in charge, then there is no reason to demand or expect personal responsibility. All manner of bad brains and bad behavior can be excused. If we believe there is no free will, how can we justify our criminal justice system? If people cannot make choices freely, and if all their decisions emanate from unconscious processes, how can we hold them responsible for unacceptable morals or behavior? All crime should be tolerated or at least excused, because the criminal could not help it. The human robot committed the crime. This would mean that we should reform the criminal justice system so that no criminal would be jailed or punished. If criminals can’t stop themselves from bad acts, it is inhumane to punish criminals or even terrorists. Indeed, the only justification for locking anybody up for misdeeds would be to protect society from further crime or terrorism. Capital punishment has to be banned, as indeed it is in many parts of the world. In the minds of some, criminals are victims.

To believe in the absence of free will creates an intolerable social nihilism. Many defense lawyers increasingly use neuroscience inappropriately to convince jurors that the defendant was not responsible for the evil deeds. They even have a name for this kind of defense: “diminished capacity.” Indeed, to them the whole notion of evil might seem inappropriate. Lawyers are adept at stressing mitigating circumstances where criminal behavior was caused, they say, by a terrible upbringing, poverty, social discrimination, or brain injury. To be sure, most murderers have been found to have a standard profile that includes childhood abuse and some kind of neurological or psychiatric disorder. But many non-murderers have a similar profile. How can lack of free will explain such difference? The reality is that most people have brains that can learn social norms and choose socially appropriate behavior. Ignoring those norms is a choice.

A most disturbing book, written by Laurence Tancredi,^[1] uncritically accepts the notion that free-will is an illusion. He argues that human morals are “hard-wired,” with the “wiring” created by genetics and molded by uncontrollable forces in life experiences. Tancredi, is a lawyer and practicing psychiatrist. Not surprisingly, the poster boy for his arguments was a psychopathic serial killer, Ricky Green, who was abused as a child and had relatives with serious mental problems. Thus, Tancredi stresses that bad genes and bad treatment as a child made Green become a “biologically driven” murderer. Yet, in recounting the case history, it became clear that Green was not insane. He was fully aware of his childhood past, and was fully aware of, even remorseful over, his murders. He was also aware that his out-of-control episodes were triggered by the combination of sex and alcohol. So, it was clear, even to Green, that his crimes could have been prevented by avoiding alcohol. He apparently was not an alcoholic who had no control over drinking. Even if we give the benefit of doubt to the conclusion that Green could not control himself, it is a stretch to argue that the uncontrollability of psychopaths applies to everybody else. One would have to argue that normal people are only normal because they got good genes and had a childhood in which their mental health was not damaged. Virtue would be an illusion.

Interestingly, Tancredi acknowledges the brain is changeable if skilled therapists provide structured rehabilitation for dysfunctional thinking. But the general tenor of his argument is that the individual is powerless to produce such changes. It has to come from others. Because dysfunctional people are victims who seemingly can’t help themselves, it is the duty of psychiatrists and government to mold the brains of people so they overcome bad genes and whatever bad experiences life has thrust upon them. People, robots that they supposedly are, do not have the power to nurture their brain. Thus, government must create a cultural and educational environment in which humans are molded to conform to some pre-defined state of normality.  Does this remind you of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?

Also not considered by Tancredi and his crowd, is that dysfunctional people might have become that way through their own freely determined bad choices along their life’s journey. Those bad choices may have even sculpted maladaptive changes in their brain function. Arguing that the brain is modifiable by experience is a two-edged sword. While one edge slashes the idea that a person can’t change his brain, the other edge slashes the idea that people can’t be changed by the influence of others or by their own conscious decisions.

A major function of consciousness, as I have argued, is to program the brain, which inevitably causes lasting changes in its structure and functions. If consciousness provides capability for freely chosen intentions, choices, and decisions, then people are responsible for how those powers are deployed.

Tancredi acknowledges that many people have bad genes and very traumatic childhoods, yet overcome it. Sexually abused children do not necessarily become sexual predators as adults and may, in fact, become crusaders to protect children from abuse. But they don’t get any credit for a freely chosen decision to live a wholesome and helpful life. Their virtue is attributed to necessity, not to anything they voluntarily chose to do. How then do we account for the effect of schools and religious teachings? Do we conclude that it is the inner robot that decides which ideas and beliefs to accept and which to reject? If so, why do some brains accept the teachings and others reject them?

It is true that brain scans, for example, can sometimes predict that certain people will commit crimes or other antisocial behaviors. But nobody seems to consider the alternative to a “bad brain” cause of misbehavior: namely, that what people freely choose to do changes the brain in ways that make more likely that similar behavior will be repeated. People who voluntarily indulge mind-altering experiences, such as unsavory friends, drugs, or destructive ideologies and lifestyles, have nobody else to blame for those choices.

The evidence for brain plasticity, for good or bad, is overwhelming. Yet, this evidence tends to get ignored when excuses are sought for inappropriate behavior. It is true, of course, that children usually have little control over their circumstance and rising above it is surely hard, but they still have a human capacity to overcome as adults. Many millions have done just that. To deny that people have such capacity is dehumanizing.

Bad brains can surely cause bad behavior. But it is equally true that bad behavior can cause bad brains. What you choose to experience, think, and do sculpts brain function and anatomy to shape what you will become.

We are what we repeatedly do.

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit —Aristotle

The corollary is, in my view:

I will become what I repeatedly do.

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[1] Tancredi, L. 2005. Harwired Behavior.  What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality. Cambridge U. Press, N.Y., N.Y.

Getting Out of a Rut

Why is it so hard to change behavior, or attitudes, or personality? I’ll tell you why. These things are habits. Habits are well learned and they persist from mindlessness.

Our behavior, attitudes, and personality are predisposed by genetics but also ingrained by repeating and reinforcing them over long periods. Thus, the older you get the more inflexible you get. But I see teenagers stuck in ruts too, and they are less likely to have the fronto-parietal cortex executive control to impose changes on themselves.

Regardless of age, being in a rut comes from learning to the point of creating a habit. Habits are really hard to change. Wendy Wood, in her review of the recent book, The Power of Habit, points out that contextual cues trigger habitual behavior. In other words, when you are in a rut, you have mindlessly outsourced your brain’s executive control to these cues. You run on auto-pilot. It is easier to respond to such cues reflexively than think about it and do something else.

Cures for reforming habits require attention to the triggering cues as the core of self-control strategies. When an unwanted response is activated from memory, it needs to be inhibited. Bad habits, unlike responses to temptations, are controlled most effectively through spontaneous introspective awareness and executive control (“Why am I doing this?”…“I don’t want to be doing this”… “don’t do it”… “am I backsliding?”) Vigilant self-awareness and monitoring apparently do not change the strength of the habit memory but are effective because they enhance executive control processes. Wood suggests that the most promising way to break a habit is to “disrupting habit cues so that the old response is not brought to mind and new habits can be learned.”

Some examples of cue awareness and disruption include:

1.    If you over-eat, use smaller plates or put smaller helpings on the plate.

2.    If you can’t focus and your mind wanders, notice distractions for what they are. Practice meditation.

3.    If you are hyper-critical or argumentative, recognize the instant you disagree.

4.    If you are lazy, be aware of your environment when you aren’t doing anything.

5.    If you are boastful, notice the situation that makes you want to boast.

If you want to get out of a rut, another important aid is to substitute a new and more desirable habit. I learned this years ago when I tried to quit smoking. I succeeded many times—in other words, I failed to really quit. Only when I decided to take up jogging and forced myself to do it persistently, was I able to substitute the positive reinforcement of nicotine with the positive reinforcement of the endorphins that are released during jogging.

To substitute a better habit, you must pick something that is likewise reinforcing and repeat it enough for it to become a habit. It also helps to simultaneously remove the cues that trigger the old bad habit. For example, when I finally quit smoking, I made myself go jog when I had a strong urge to smoke. Even though I had an urge to smoke many times a day yet only jogged once daily, this single substitution act seemed sufficiently helpful.

Some examples of habit substitution include:

1.    If you eat more meat than you want, find tasty vegetarian menus.

2.    If you gossip, restrict all gossip to praise talk.

3.    If you procrastinate, create a habit of doing the hard things first.

4.    If you whine, make yourself provide positive interpretations.

5.    If you associate with people who are dragging you down, spend more time with new associates who can lift you up.

Finally, we have to stop making excuses. Our usual attempts to blame things on “bad genes,” are misleading. In recent years, scientists have discovered that most of our DNA does not have a coding function. They used to call it “junk” DNA, presumably just carried along as useless sludge in the stream of evolution. Now they discover that “junk DNA” actually controls the expression of the coding genes. New discoveries in the field of “epigenetics” are showing that what we think and do influence if and when many of our coding genes are expressed.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. (2008) Blame Game. How to Win It. Bryan, Tx: Benecton Press.

Quinn, J. M., Pascoe, A., Wood, Wendy, and Neal, D. T. (2010) Can’t control yourself? Monitor those bad habits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 36(4); 499-511 doi: 10.1177/0146167209360665

Wood, Wendy (2013) On ruts and getting out of them. Science. 336: 980-981

Just Do It

If you can do it, should do it, and want to do it, what are you waiting for? Many things in life that we excuse or misplace blame for are not created by what we do but by what we fail to do. Maybe we just procrastinate and just don’t get around to action. Or maybe it’s just a thought, something that we think would be nice to do, but we just aren’t serious about it.

What keeps us from action? Can, should, and want ought to be pretty compelling. I was recently asked by a group of editors to write a chapter on the “Neurobiology of Agency,” for a scholarly book. Don’t worry. I won’t burden you here with what I am writing for the book chapter. But that task has caused me to reflect on agency from the perspective of  the everyday issues of what we do and fail to do.

Some possible answers come from my own experience. One excuse is that we just can’t seem to find the time. That won’t wash. Whatever we do in life, we have found or made time for. Final choices are matters of priority, and sometimes we don’t prioritize well.

Fear is an obvious cause. There are many kinds of fear that cause inaction. There is:

•        Fear of failure.
•        Fear of being different or out-of-step.
•        Fear of rejection.
•        Even fear of success.  

Fear of failure arises from self-doubt. We may think we don’t know enough, don’t have enough time or energy, or lack ability, resources, and help. The cure for such fear is to learn what is needed, make the time, pump ourselves up emotionally so we will have the energy, hone our relevant skill set, and hustle for resources and help. These things can be demanding. It is no wonder there are so many things we can, should, and want to do but don’t do.

All our life, beginning with school, we are conditioned to consider failure as a bad thing. But failure is often a good, even necessary, thing. The ratio between failures and successes for any given person is rather stable. Thus, if you want more successes, you need to make more failures. Even the corporate world recognizes this principle, and the most innovative companies practice it. Jeff Dyer, in his book The Innovator’s DNA, says the key to business success is to “fail often, fail fast, fail cheap.” It’s o.k. to fail, as long as you learn from it. Our mantra should be: “Keep tweaking until it works.” This is exactly how Edison invented the light bulb. Most other inventors and creative people in general have operated with the same mantra.

Fear of being different leads to social pathology. It can cause people to join groups, causes, and lifestyles that are not be good for them or even harmful. The corollary is that bad social commitments make it harder to experience better alternatives. Not everyone can be a leader, who by definition is different from the crowd. But all of us are better off when we are our own person, march to our own drummer, become “captain of our own soul.”

Fear of being different often arises from personal insecurity and lack of confidence. These are crippling emotions and one’s life can never be fully actualized until they are overcome. This comes to the matter of self-esteem. One thing many people don’t realize is that self-esteem has two quite distinct components: self-worth and self-confidence. Self-worth is given (by being valued and loved by others, by God). Self-confidence cannot be given−it has to be earned. People who lack the confidence to “put themselves on the line” deny themselves opportunities to enjoy the fruits of success. Their life becomes a vicious cycle that begins with lack of confidence, lack of agency, lack of success, and increased justification not to be confident.

If we are different, the in-crowd may reject us. Rejection is certainly depressing. Nobody in his right mind wants to be depressed. But no life can be fulfilling when it is lived to satisfy the opinions others may have of us. We need to be true to ourselves, to trust in our values and standards. If who we are is not worthy of such trust, we can certainly fix that. This dictum lies at the heart of Socrates’ great admonition: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Fear of success is often learned by watching how others have failed to adjust to success. Witness the entertainment celebrities who end up committing suicide. Most of us probably know personally some people who have become conceited, aloof, condescending, arrogant, or otherwise unlikable as a result of their success. We don’t want that to happen to us. When we surrender to our fear of success, we affirm our lack of trust in ourselves. Do we really need to reinforce such lack of self-trust?

So, when life offers you the chance to do something you can, should, and want to do, just DO IT!

More on the matter of excuses and blame can be found in Dr. Klemm’s book, Blame Game. How To Win It, available at Amazon and bookstores.

Victims or Just Damn Lucky?

The nature versus nurture argument has been around since at least ancient Egyptian times. Both our genetic inheritance and what we experience shape the development of self, according to the deceptively thorough book by psychologist and science author, Robert Ornstein. I say deceptive, because Ornstein provides no recognition, much less discussion, that we humans can choose many of the experiences that determine what we become. Moreover, at the time of his book’s publishing, the scientific world did not know that even the nature side of the argument was historically flawed. Geneticists are now learning that our choices of experiences regulate how our genetic endowment is expressed.

Ornstein argues persuasively, but with little objective evidence, that for any key dimension of person-hood or behavior, everybody operates around an immutable set point. He fails to recognize that a person can change the set point. Though it is not easy, people can change their set point dramatically: witness the reformed addict, the religious convert, or the ner-do-well who becomes a tycoon.

Ornstein’s thinking blind spot is typical of the age we live in. People who struggle with life are regarded as victims, while people who achieve are just damn lucky. From this perspective, people shoulder no blame or guilt for being dysfunctional nor credit for being successful.

The bias against personal accountability is enshrined in the current notion among scientists and social scholars that even when people make choices, they do not choose freely. What we choose to do is driven by unconscious drives arising from biology or the programming imposed by life experience. People are biological robots. I argue against this view in my recent book, Atoms of Mind.

The biological robot bias is revealed in a recent research report in a premier science journal. The authors conducted economic game experiments to explain what causes people in conditions of scarcity to make poor decisions. The reality behind this study is that people in poverty generally do make bad choices that perpetuate their poverty. They play the lottery, borrow too much, are unwilling to pay for preventive health services or education,  or save for specific future needs, and may even fail to enroll in government assistance programs. The usual explanation is that such maladaptive behavior is caused by the circumstances of poverty, such as poor health, lack of education, and the like.

The authors, from the School of Business at the University of Chicago, tested the idea that it is scarcity itself that drives poor choices. Their experiments were based on giving varying spending “rich” or “poor” allowances for experimental subjects to allocate in common TV game-show formats such as Wheel of Fortune or video games.  The allowances were distributed as “paychecks” across multiple rounds of the games. Games were structured so that players could sometimes borrow against future earnings or save for future rounds. In one experiment, participants were allocated a certain number of guesses in word puzzles (84 for the poor; 280 for the rich), The poor engaged more deeply in the game and borrowed more. Subsequent cognitive tests showed they were more mentally fatigued despite spending less time in the game. Another experiment used a video game in which participants had a fixed number of shots from a slingshot (30 for poor, 150 for rich). The poor spent more time aiming each shot and borrowed more when the game allowed it (actually the rich never accumulated a debt).

The results were interpreted to show that scarcity produces a focusing effect. The poor pay more attention to the options and become more mentally exhausted. Scarcity clearly promoted borrowing, which proved to be counter-productive. The poor did not adjust their borrowing as they accumulated debt, but as their budgets shrunk, they gradually increased borrowing relative to their remaining budget. The poor were more likely to neglect the opportunities of future rounds and borrow away from them. The poor performed better when they could not borrow.

In sum, scarcity changed behavior for the worse. The poor were more intensely engaged in the games but the focus on some issues came at the expense of neglecting others, such as ignoring the real cost of borrowing.

Thus, the researchers implicitly concluded that the poor in the real world are victims of their state of scarcity. Scarcity drives the poor to make unwise choices that keep them trapped in poverty. The possibility that the poor have the power to change their behavior was never considered. The authors conclude that the poor cannot change their poor choices.

The solution advocated is wise government policy that manipulates the poor in ways that limit the opportunity to make bad choices. For example, policy should aim at reducing the number of decisions the poor have to make by simplifying their economic choices, enrolling them in savings programs by default, making it more difficult to borrow, advertising to get them to sign up for relief programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and the like. The nanny state needs not only to provide for the poor, but also to intercede so the poor are not allowed to make so many bad choices.

Of course, we have known of government solutions to poverty for a long time. There is Marxism, which says take from the rich to give to the poor and its near-relative, Socialism, which re-distribute wealth and make everybody equally poor by not allowing anybody to get rich from ownership of business. There is Fascism, in which dictators decide which companies can prosper and limit the number of rich to those who are lackeys of the government. There is U.S. “state-ism” which employs some measure of all the others, but in less draconian ways.

Regardless of which government “isms” exist, we seem to live in a world in which personal responsibility no longer matters. It isn’t expected, and we don’t get much of it as a result. If you are poor, it is not your fault, but the fault of your genes or bad luck or exploitation by the rich. Only government can save us from ourselves. But who saves us from government?

Who wants to be saved from government? Around the world, and now in the U.S., more people want more government, not less. Government can protect us from ourselves. We no longer shoulder the burden of being “masters of our fate, Captains of our destiny.” The corollary is that we may have less opportunity to benefit from being our own Captain.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. 2010. Atoms of Mind. New York: Springer Publishing.

Ornstein, Robert. 1995. The Roots of the Self. New York: Harper Collins.

Shah, A. K., Mullainathan, S., and Shafir, E. 2012. Some consequences of having too little. Science. 338: 682-685.

Gene Research Shows the Truth of Proverbs 23:7

“Don’t blame me. I got my meanness from your side of the family.” …
“I got my stubbornness from Uncle Joe.” … 
“I can’t help it; that’s just the way I am.”

Blaming your genes can make a handy excuse. It is also highly misleading. A decade-long international research collaboration involving 442 scientists in 32 worldwide institutions now makes obsolete the original scientific views about DNA and genes. This research initiative, called ENCODE, was initiated and largely funded by the Genome Research Institute of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Just this week, some 30 groundbreaking publications have appeared in premier journals such as Nature and Science.

This accumulated mountain of data unequivocally demonstrates that most of our genes do not code for RNA that translates into proteins used by the body. True, the ENCODE project confirmed that there are about 21,000 traditional protein-coding genes, but they constitute only about 3% of the human genome. Until now, all the other DNA was thought to be “junk DNA,” presumably left over from ancient ancestors with no function in today’s evolved species.

ENCODE scientists have discovered that about 80% of the human genome does have function, but that DNA transcribes RNA as end  products that regulate the expression of protein-coding genes. When a protein-coding gene is expressed, its double helix strands of DNA become unzipped to expose the coding nucleotides so they can translate the code into the RNA that will then translate the code into the various proteins used by the body. Most of the DNA previously thought to be “junk” has now been revealed to regulate gene expression by way of enhancing or suppressing gene expression or shielding protein-coding DNA.

Over 18,000 species of regulatory RNA have been described. Clusters of regulatory genes are found throughout the chromosomes, and they very often regulate non-adjacent genes, often working with other regulatory genes as a team.

These new findings cause some scientists to assert a need to redefine what a gene is. The basic unit of heredity, they say, is not DNA, but rather its RNA transcripts. Why is this new view important? Production of regulatory RNA is governed by the environment, not your biological inheritance. These “epigenetic” influences include things like what you eat, your bodily activities, what you think, and the feedback from how you behave. For example, a muscle body builder, through intense exercise, causes expression of genes to make extraordinary muscle mass. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger before, during, and after his body building career. He had the same protein coding genes all along, but their expression changed by what he chose to do.

What this says is that you can control the expression of your genes by the choices you make and by what you think and do. Most of us are born with a genome that can generate a happy and productive life. Whether that happens or not depends on how our choices and actions affect gene expression.

So, next time you are tempted to blame your genes for a bad outcome, consider what role you played in the expression of those genes. Science is showing the truth of Proverbs  (chapter 23 verse 7),

“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

Source:

Pennizi, Elizabeth (2012). ENCODE project write eulogy for junk DNA. Science. 337: 1159-1161.

Learning to Make Bad Choices

Every day, people make choices among options they may have never experienced. Yet, they can make such choices rapidly, even confidently—yet unwisely. Whether good or bad, the choices are likely to be biased from past learning conditions,

Research is now clarifying how biased choices are made. All choices, biased or not, are influenced by the values we place on alternative choice options. If a past choice led to a good outcome, people are biased to make that choice again because a positive value has been attached to it.

If in a current situation where there is no past relevant experience, we can still make a choice easily. To do that, we must be able to assign positive value to the choice made. But how can that be done in the absence of past experience? It now appears from recent experiments that such decisions can guided by past memory associations.

Memories certainly modulate value assignment and thus decision-making. In one recent study, brain-scan imaging of humans has revealed that giving people monetary rewards activates a pre-established network of memories that spread the positive value of reward to non-rewarded items stored in memory. This creates a bias for later decisions to choose non-rewarded items.

As an aside, the study revealed that a key structure involved in memory formation, the hippocampus, predicts choice bias. It appears that activity in the hippocampus, as revealed in brain scans, helps to spread the reward value among memories of items that had never been rewarded, and thus bias future choices for these non-rewarded items.

The rationale for the study began with the authors’ realization of how the hippocampus helps to form memories. It encodes relationships between items and events to form a remembered association. Later, when an item is recalled, the hippocampus can automatically reactive the neural representation of the associated item. Here then might be a way that the hippocampus could re-allocate reward value when a past situation is recalled.

The choice task had three stages. First, the subjects had to learn association between paired items. They were shown a series of pairs of images, first one and then the other. Next was a reward phase, in which half of the second stimuli were rewarded with money. Thus, subjects  unconsciously learned a response to value those stimuli that were directly rewarded.  The researchers expected that the non-rewarded member of the pair might pick up some value by virtue of being associated with the rewarded member of the pair. If so, a bias might have been created for these non-rewarded items in future choice situations. Indeed, that is what they found in a later test in which only the first member of each pair was presented and subjects were asked to pick the preferred items. If no transfer of value had occurred in the prior learning, the choices would have been evenly divided. But that is not what was found. Subjects more often than chance preferred the stimuli that had previously been paired with a rewarded second stimulus.

Why is this important to the issue of blame? This issue was never considered by the authors. But to extrapolate from the experiment, we could conclude that sometimes we may blame a bad choice on the wrong cause. The real cause may have been our own bias for making a bad choice, in which we had erroneously assigned value on the basis of some past associations with experiences that were rewarded. That bias may have been created by some past experiences in which we had inappropriately assigned a high value to certain choice options that did not deserve such value.

So, for example, we might have had a past experience in which a good thing happened at the same time as other events which had no learned value or even negative value. But the value of the good thing spreads to bias attitudes toward the other events. In the future, in a different circumstance, we might unwisely choose the previously low-value option.

Here is a common example. Suppose we have a dear friend who we have found to offer a valuable relationship. We meet the dear friend’s associates, who may be unseemly characters that would make poor choices for us to value as friends. Yet, the value we attached to the dear friend spills over to the others and makes us less likely to be critical of them. Thus, we might start running with a bad crowd of people that get us into trouble. When we get into trouble, we likely will place the blame in the wrong place, without realizing it all started with the bias created in us by the value we had placed in our dear friend.

You can probably conjure your own examples. This whole process of learned bias can affect every aspect of our life. It is important for us to be more aware of our biases and the true value of our choice options.

Source:

Wimmer, G. E. and Shohamy, D. (2012). Preference by association: how memory mechanisms in the hippocampus bias decisions. Science. 338: 270-273.