Should We be Held Responsible for our Brains?

While Brad has briefly touched on this subject in his post, there seems to be a lot more involved in the debate about psychology and law. In class the question was: should a person be held legally responsible for their implicit thoughts of discrimination even if the direct or circumstantial evidence did not support the claim? In a discrimination case, it is difficult to know exactly what distinguishes the facts of the case from the thoughts, emotions or assumptions of the parties involved. Because of this, psychology seems to play an integral role in determining the outcomes of cases, not just in employment, but in criminal cases as well. It takes a logical and critically thinking jury and judge to decide what evidence is true and what parties are credible or trustworthy. All of these metal processes are surely very related to psychology and our ability to effectively categorize, process and retrieve important information.

In class we spoke about the confirmation bias, its relation to stereotypes and information processing. We touched on how a person who has a racial stereotype against Hispanics, like in Krieger’s article, may attribute any negative action by a Hispanic person to that person’s disposition, or personality, thus confirming their stereotype and causing them to pay specific attention to that action. That same biased person might attribute any positive action by a Hispanic person to the situation, seeing it as a rare or unique occurrence, and soon forgetting about it. These mental processes are often done implicitly and without thought. So, the question remains, can we hold people legally responsible for these unconscious thoughts?
What if the crime was more seriously than discrimination? What if the crime was murder?

Recall the IAT tests about black stereotypes and guns, (Kyle mentioned that he took the test and associated black faces with guns). In another class I read an article where a group of all white policemen repeatedly shot and killed a black man they thought to be holding a gun. It turns out the gun was a wallet, the black man was unarmed and the officers were found innocent. The article then continued with an implicit association test that showed subjects frequently mistook everyday objects as guns when they were first shown a picture of a black man’s face as opposed to a white man’s face.

Ultimately, why did the officers go free? Because the jury found that they had reason to believe, in that situation, that the black man had a gun. Now what if the jury and judge held the same implicit stereotypes against blacks as the officers might have held? Did they sympathize with the officers because they would have also believed the black man to have a gun? Did the jury use their implicit attitudes to confirm parts of their racial stereotypes and ignore other valuable information in the case?

After all of that, I still do not have an answer to the question but I believe that these implicit thoughts should at least be taken into account and the juries and judges should be made aware of the defendant’s, as well as their own, implicit attitudes, letting the subsequent verdict decide responsibility.