How has neuroscience affected lay understandings of personhood? A review of the evidence - O’Connor & Joffe - 2013 - Article

The article deals with the increasing prominence of neuroscience and how this affects our society and people's self-concepts. Several empirical studies are reviewed in order to examine this rather broad phenomenon.

What is this article about?

The article deals with the increasing prominence of neuroscience and how this affects our society and people's self-concepts. Several empirical studies are reviewed in order to examine this rather broad phenomenon.

New brain scan technologies have led to increasing implications of neuroscience in different social fields such as law, marketing, public policy, education, parenting, and economics. How society will deal with this recently acquired pieces of knowledge has become a concern of social scientists.

The deficit model evaluates the accuracy of public understandings of neuroscience, since whether a conception is scientifically true or false is often irrelevant for the effect on the layperson's thinking. Rather, the meaning that people infer from neuroscientific ideas to their personal and social life is what matters. It would be interesting to study in which ways neuroscience impacts folk psychology since it guides people’s behavior, how they perceive their environment, and how they interact with others. According to O`Connor and Joffe, some researchers claim that recent developments in neuroscience have led to revolutionary changes in the ways with which society is understood. It is supposed to alter the dynamic between personal identity, responsibility and free will.

A valid counter-argument can be found in the well-established social representation theory. This theory states that people tend to look for scientific findings that validate their already existent values, identities and beliefs. Thus, new scientific information proposed by neuroscience can either challenge and change present understandings as well as assimilate and strengthen established concepts. This article aims to determine where the truth can be found.

What are crucial terms in neuroscience?

First, we will look how conscious people are about neuroscience, and thus how prominent it has become. Indeed, we can observe a sharp increase in media coverage between 2000 and 2010. Main topics of neuroscience related news are neuro-realism, neuro-essentialism and neuro-policy.

Neuro-realism describes how people use neuroscientific information to let phenomena appear to be objective or real. Neuro-essentialism refers to the idea that the brain and its properties are the essence of a person. Neuro-policy describes how brain research can be deployed in order to support political agendas.

A reasonable explanation for the rising media coverage is the rhetorical force neuroscientific findings imply. It helps to make claims seem more credible. Brain images, which are pictured three-dimensional, are especially convincing.

How does neuroscience relate to self-concept?

A second question that comes to mind when thinking about neuroscience is whether it fosters people to view their self-concepts as more strongly rooted in biology rather than in their experiences and environments. Materialist theories of the person argue that the mind is physical matter. Dualist theories see the mind and body as being separated, the mind consisting of non-physical plane. Terms as “neurochemical self”, “cerebral subject” and “brain hood” in the sociological literature suggests that neuroscientific findings may have led to a stronger endorsement of a materialist view. Nevertheless, studies have revealed that behavior is mainly regarded as built by an interaction of relationships with parents, teachers and society, at least for the general population.

Research with clinical populations has shown there to be high endorsement of neuroscience into the self-concept. This can be explained in several ways. First it allows for objectification of the disorder, making qualitative information quantitative. Furthermore, it is regarded as a neutral tool to legitimize peoples experience and it makes a disorder easier to understand for healthy populations. Foremost, it helps to sustain a positive self-identity which actually led to the “neurodiversity movement”. This movement emphasizes disorders as being simply an alternative of biological expression.

These diverse research findings of the salience of neuroscientific ways to view the self in clinical and non-clinical populations suggest that the “neurochemical self” might be endorsed by certain events such as diagnosis and medication. Thus, people who are confronted with their bodies biological components as well as their impact might more often view themselves in relation to these biological components. Another idea is the multi-dimensionality of disorder meanings. This concept endorses the split of the self-concept in two distinct elements, namely one that is based on the brain, and one that is completely separated from the brain.

What are the main differences between determinism and free will?

Given the idea that who we are and how we behave is controlled by our biological set-up, the question is to what extent are we free agents? To what extent can we be held responsible for our actions when the development of certain brain areas have led us for instance to cheat on our spouse, kill our neighbor or hit our child? This philosophical battle between determinism and free will is on the rise, but now with integrations of neuroscientific ideas. Apparently, the newly discovered connections between certain brain areas or a persons’ constitution of neurotransmitter and its actions support the idea of a predetermined life.

How can we hold a person responsible when science proves us that its genetic make-up led to certain actions or at least make their occurrence much more likely? This would lead to major social implications, since our whole society is built on the assumption of personal responsibility. We would need to reconsider our education as well as our legal system. Luckily, our brain is much more complex, in fact it has plasticity. Plasticity means that it can change due to experiences, nutrition and the environment. Thus, plasticity can be used as a counterargument against the idea of biological predeterminism and allows for the idea of personal responsibility. This is further supported by implicit theories of agency which are robust cultural theories that have existed for many years and were transmitted from one generation to the next. Most people prefer the idea of everyone possessing a free will and dislike the concept of engaging in by predetermined actions. This might be a reason for why the concept of brain plasticity has become so popular in terms of training or boosting one’s own brain. People like to embrace the idea that they can enhance or limit their neural functions by their lifestyle choices. Good nutrition and mental exercise should maximize their abilities whereas substance abuse and risky behaviors might endanger their capacities. Dementia research has revealed that humans especially fear the idea that the disease will dissolve one’s own personal identity, independence, self-determination, and self-control.

Does neuroscience have the power to influence society?

The last question the article discusses is whether neuroscientific explanations are capable of reducing stigmas set by society. Indeed, there is evidence that supports this idea. Neuroscientific ideas have been embraced in order to explain the deviance of subpopulations such as mentally ill people from the “norm”. This has led to more tolerance in society. Unfortunately, it also enhanced social distance, perceived dangerousness, fear, perceived unpredictability and harsh treatments. Of course, this also applies to attitudes towards gender, race and obesity and even may act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. For instance, a man acts more aggressively because it is expected of him, and a woman may perform poorly on mathematical tasks, because there is the stereotype that women perform poor at mathematics. Neuroscientific findings may also increase the calorie intake of someone suffering from obesity or promote fatalism among mentally ill people regarding their recovery, because they believe that this is the result of their biological components and that they cannot control it.

A negative social implication of biological elements as the basis of social categories is for instance the reinforcement of psychological essentialism. Essentialism can be defined as “the attribution of a group’s characteristic to an unalterable and causal essence” and involves several elements. These are the establishment of discrete, impermeable category boundaries, the perception of within-category homogeneity, the use of explaining and predicting a group’s superficial traits in terms of the essence and the naturalization of a category. This promotes the differences between groups, reinforcing an “us-them split” now also on a biological basis. This gives the stereotypes of particular social groups a natural constitution which makes them seem to be more legitimate. This may thus reinforce stigmatization and discrimination.

In sum, it is hard to disentangle whether neuroscience has positive or negative effects on society’s attitudes towards social subgroups. This seems to differ across domains, having enhancing effects on attitudes towards homosexuality rather than on race, gender, mental illness or obesity.