Friday, December 12, 2014

The Evolutionary Basis Behind Reprimanding a Criminal

By Shannon O'Sullivan
Intuition: that indescribable gut sensation that makes itself hard to ignore, yet provides little to no reasoning as to why one should listen to what its demands. What exactly is intuition--which no matter how irrational it may seem—still factors into everyday decision making? In Intuitively Detecting What is Hidden within a Visual Mask: Familiar-novel Discrimination and Threat Detection for Unidentified Stimuli by Anne M. Cleary, Anthony J. Ryals, and Jason S. Nomi, the researchers hypothesize that intuition is an adaptive memory process reflecting our ancestors’ need for snap decision-making in life-or-death situations. According to their theory, intuition uses previous knowledge to drive decisions without actually consciously accessing that knowledge. The ability for intuition to allow for such fast decisions with little circumstantial knowledge supports the theory its evolutionary-based origins, for the few seconds it could save in time spent decision-making could save an animal’s life.
                In Intuitively Detecting What is Hidden within a Visual Mask: Familiar-novel Discrimination and Threat Detection for Unidentified Stimuli, the researchers attempted to create a laboratory version of intuition through recognition without identification (RWI): a phenomenon in which participants in a laboratory setting can identify previously studied stimuli as more familiar than not-previously studied stimuli. While prior studies had shown the connection between existing knowledge and intuition using RWI, the researchers in this study strived to create RWIs with more realistic discrimination tests by having participants determine the previously known from the novel stimuli, rather than determining previously studied from not previously studied stimuli. For every experiment, the researchers obscured all the images used with a filter mask in order to make the pictures consciously unidentifiable. In their first experiment, the researchers had participants discriminate between famous and not famous faces; in the second experiment, the researchers replaced famous and not famous people with famous and not famous scenes; finally, the third experiment had participants discriminate between threatening images and nonthreatening images, with the consideration of whether threatening stimuli were animate (living) or inanimate (nonliving) taken into account.
The reason that whether the threatening stimuli given the higher familiarity ratings was animate and inanimate is important stimuli because of recent research indicating that animate threats required less perceptual information to detect, as opposed to inanimate threats. Also, recent research has indicated that animate objects are easier to remember than inanimate objects. The importance in these difference between animate and inanimate threats lies in the evolutionary-based need for increased awareness of living threats over nonliving threats, such as predators. If the third experiment resulted in more recognitions without identifications (RWIs) of animate threats as opposed to inanimate threats, the results would support the researcher’s hypothesis on the evolutionary basis of intuition.
The results indicated that even without conscious identification, famous pictures (both of people and scenes) received higher familiarity ratings than unfamiliar pictures. In addition, pictures of animate threats also received higher familiarity ratings, as opposed to both inanimate threats and animate non-threats. The latter finding is the study’s most substantial evidence to support the researcher’s theory of an adaptive memory process behind intuition, due to the evolutionary-based need to maintain a greater awareness of living threats rather than nonliving threats.
The implications found in Intuitively Detecting What is Hidden within a Visual Mask: Familiar-novel Discrimination and Threat Detection for Unidentified Stimuli regarding the expansion of RWI results to more realistic situations can help future research determine the process of intuitive decision-making in real-world contexts. For example, the third experiment—in which animate threats received more familiarity ratings than inanimate threats or animate non-threats-- may help explain the conclusions drawn by another study on intuition: Fight Fire With Fire: The Effect of Perceived Anger on Punitive Intuitions by Carolyn Côté-Lussier. In this study, Côté-Lussier hypothesized that perceiving anger in others leads to faster, harsher punishments for crimes based off of punitive intuitions. The study consisted of participants rapidly deciding whether or not to give a prison sentence to a convicted criminal based off of criminal’s mug shot. The results indicated that the perception of a criminal’s anger predicted a rapid and harsh punitive punishment for the criminal, with high levels of anger even negating the strong biases for Black criminals to receive harsher punishments than non-Black criminals.
In a sense, the judicial system is a highly developed manifestation of the way humans and other predators have taken care of threats since the beginning. In both methods of defense against a threat, punishments for infractions are made to fit the crime; the bigger the threat, the greater the likelihood of a harsher punishment in order to ensure the continued safety of an individual or society. As an animal sees a cheetah as a greater threat than a tomcat, individuals such as the participants in Fight Fire With Fire: The Effect of Perceived Anger on Punitive Intuitions see criminals with angry expressions as a greater threat than criminals with sad expressions, and hence in need of a harsher punishment.
The harsh punitive intuition participants used upon the perceivably angry criminals over the non-angry criminals supports Cleary, Ryals, and Nomi’s hypothesis that intuition reflects an evolutionary memory process that allows us to make rapid decisions with scarce information for the means of survival. Possible explanations given for why perceivably angry criminals received rapid harsh punitive responses comes from “mirror neurons”, which are neuronal substrates that hypothetically allow us to learn through imitation of others; when looking at the role of “mirror neurons” through an evolutionary survival standpoint, it seems that through identifying anger in others by imitating them, one can conclude through our own experiences feeling anger that when another person feels angry, defensive action becomes necessary.
Through recognizing how the basis of intuitive punitive decision-making may result from underlying evolutionary survival techniques to recognize living threats, it becomes easier to understand why nature may overcome reasoning when making emotional decisions. While the underlying mechanism of intuition still plays a beneficial role in human decision making, it can also hinder progress towards rational, justified thought processes. If a criminal is already on trial for a crime, determining his or her punishment no longer necessitates intuitive judgment because the criminal is no longer an immediate threat to society. Hence, the results both Intuitively Detecting What is Hidden within a Visual Mask: Familiar-novel Discrimination and Threat Detection for Unidentified Stimuli and Fight Fire With Fire: The Effect of Perceived Anger on Punitive Intuitions remain not only interesting, but also give awareness to precautions we as a society must take in order to prevent evolutionary biases from conflicting with what our human rationale has to offer the world.

References
Cleary, A. M., Ryals, A. J., & Nomi, J. S., (2013). Intuitively detecting what is hidden within a visual mask:
               familiar-novel discrimination and threat detection for unidentified stimuli. Memory Cognition
               41, 989-999. DOI: 10.3758/s13421-013-0319-4
Côté-Lussier, C., (2013). Fight fire with fire: the effect of perceived anger on punitive intuitions. Emotion,

               13(6), 999-1003. DOI: 10.1037/a0034308

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