How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

by Lisa Feldman Barrett

what it means to control your behavior and therefore be responsible for your actions. The law (like much of psychology) usually considers responsibility in two parts: actions caused by you, where you have more responsibility, and actions caused by the situation, where you have less. This simple dichotomy of internal versus external does not mesh with the reality of the predictive brain. In a construction view of human nature, every human action involves three types of responsibility, not two. The first is traditional: your behavior in the moment. You pull the trigger. You grab the money and run. (The legal system names this behavior actus reus, the harmful action.) The second type of responsibility involves your specific predictions (chapter 4) that brought about the unlawful act (known as mens rea, the guilty mind). Your behavior is not caused in a single moment; it is always driven by prediction. When you steal money from an open cash register, you are an agent in the moment, but the ultimate cause of your behavior also includes concepts like “Cash Register,” “Money,” “Ownership,” and “Stealing.” Each of these concepts is associated with a large and diverse population of instances in your brain, and based on them, you issued predictions that led to your action. Now, if other people with similar concepts in the same situation (i.e., the reasonable person) would also steal the cash, well, you might be less culpable for your actions. However, they may well have left the cas...