Sense of agency and responsibility: integrating legal and neurocognitive accounts

This interdisciplinary project compares the concepts of responsibility for action in criminal law, and in psychology/neuroscience. All known human societies have some concept of individual responsibility for action. Legal systems generally view individuals as responsible because they have control over their actions: they are conscious, rational agents who 'could have done otherwise'. Rapidly-expanding scientific knowledge suggests a different view, in which an individual's actions are the result of neurobiological brain processes that are mechanistic, and largely independent of conscious experience. Recent expert consensus identified the tension between legal and neuroscientific views of responsibility as an important current debate between scientific knowledge and wider human culture. Interdisciplinary research, including new data, is required to identify the similarities and differences between legal and scientific views of responsibility. The present project acts as a research beacon, bridging this interdisciplinary gap. It does so by legal research that highlights the importance of psychology, and by experimental psychology research that addresses the possible mechanistic neurobiological bases of specific aspects of legal responsibility.

First, the project begins by identifying the ways in which English criminal law makes reference to subjective experience and other psychological concepts in its doctrine of responsibility. We will review key cases in which an agent's intention is relevant to responsibility, because of oblique intention, automatism/insanity, or loss of control. For each case, we will write parallel legal analyses, and psychological/neuroscientific commentary, highlighting how recent scientific knowledge might inform the legal discussion. The resulting publication(s) will present the points of similarity and tension between legal and scientific ways of viewing human action. It will also suggest fruitful areas for further research in both law and neuroscience.

Second, the project will include a series of 5 behavioural experiments. The experiments aim at quantifying the human sense of agency, using an established implicit measure based on human time perception: stronger agency and sense of responsibility leads to a shorter perceived interval between an action and its outcome. Using this measure, we will perform 3 simple experiments to investigate how agents' understanding of the value of an action outcome changes the experience of acting. Put simply, how does the sense of agency over good outcomes differ from that over bad outcomes? Developing experimental paradigms to study this would clarify the legal assumption that the intention to act is based on knowing the "nature and quality of the act". The results of these experiments will be relevant to automatism, insanity and oblique intention. A further two studies will investigate how extreme negative circumstances affect the sense of responsibility, aiming to provide an experimental comparison to legal "loss of control" defences. We will assess how our experimental measures of sense of agency are altered when the agent's action serves to terminate a persistent and painful sensation, produced by a controlled heat-pain stimulator. Taken together, the experiments aim to provide systematic and pertinent data to inform future research and discussion of the important links between neuroscience/psychology and law.

Finally, at the end of the project we will organise an expert workshop bringing together international experts in the law/neuroscience field. This serves as a focus to present our results, to exchange interdisciplinary perspectives, and to consider future research agendas for this fundamental topic in science and culture.

Although this proposal represents basic academic research, it will have wider impact. Multiple indicators show a growing and widespread interest in reconciling two views of human nature and of society that appear increasingly divergent: the view of a society of rational, responsible agents that underlies the law, and the view of the individual as a biological machine, whose actions are orchestrated by a complex but ultimately deterministic brain. The impact and importance of this tension cannot be underestimated: it has been highlighted by the Royal Society "Brainwaves" report, to which Co-Investigator Claydon contributed, and it forms the focus of large-scale research actions such as the MacArthur project in the United States. These initiatives all identify lack of research on the interface between law and psychology/neuroscience as a major knowledge gap, and an important societal need. Therefore, we anticipate that the present work will impact these projects and discussions in the first instance, and through them the wider social debate on the neurobiological bases of individual intentionality and agency.

The research will aimpact three specific stakeholder, user and professional groups: lawyers, technologists, and psychiatrists:

1. The work will have immediate impact through the investigators' dissemination activities within non-academic stakeholder groups. For example, both Haggard and Claydon participate in the European Association for Neuroscience and Law (EANL). Haggard will give a keynote address on 'Agency and Responsibility' at the EANL Winter School in January 2014. EANL brings together practicing lawyers, law-makers, and academic experts in both law and neuroscience. It has an important training brief. EANL's international perspective is highly valuable, because the universal concept of responsibility is expressed with surprising variations across different national jurisdictions.

2. Haggard is actively involved in debates on neuroethical issues associated with technological enhancement of human agency (e.g., organisation of an expert international symposium on "Neuroethics of human experience" at Fondation Brocher, Geneva in 2014; participation in EU FP7 projects BEAMING and VERE with industrial partners from the virtual reality sector). He is an ethical consultant on an ERC virtual reality grant (TRAVERSE). He will ensure the project's impact by transferring knowledge about responsibility and agency to engineers making artificial and augmented agencies for new human-interaction technologies.

3. Forensic psychiatry is another important impact area for this research. Forensic psychiatrists are often asked by courts whether an individual has a sufficient sense of responsibility, and/or sufficient intentional control of action. One impact of the research is to provide empirical scientific research data to refine the legal questions which would be most appropriately asked of those giving scientific evidence. This could be in relation to the threshold conditions of liability or in relation to mental conditions which arguably prevent the formation of the mens rea required for the criminal act. This would have the great advantage of making the provision of forensic evidence in court less complicated for forensic scientists. In particular, criteria and diagnostic tests for the sense of responsibility are controversial, or non-existent. Nevertheless, there is considerable agreement on the need for more extensive data, and a more evidence-based approach to clinical judgement, in this area. Haggard has already collaborated with practicing psychiatrists on evidence-based projects (e.g., 3 publications on sense of agency in schizophrenia published in international journals in the last decade). However, this impact needs to be extended to the practitioner base. To this end, we plan to propose a Commentary piece in an appropriate journal.