Parsing the Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Third-Party Punishment

The evolved capacity for third-party punishment is considered crucial to the emergence and maintenance of elaborate human social organization and is central to the modern provision of fairness and justice within society. Although it is well established that the mental state of the offender and the severity of the harm he caused are the two primary predictors of punishment decisions, the precise cognitive and brain mechanisms by which these distinct components are evaluated and integrated into a punishment decision are poorly understood.Using a brain-scanning technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we implemented a novel experimental design to functionally dissociate the mechanisms underlying evaluation, integration, and decision. This work revealed that multiple parts of the brain – some analytic, some subconscious or emotional – work in a systematic pattern to decide blameworthiness, assess harms, integrate those two decisions, and then ultimately select how a person should be punished. Specifically, harm and mental state evaluations are conducted in two different brain networks and then combined in the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate areas of the brain, while the amygdala acts as a pivotal hub of the interaction between harm and mental state. This integrated information is then used by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex when the brain is making a decision on punishment amount. These findings provide a blueprint of the brain mechanisms by which neutral third parties make punishment decisions

Synthesizing the Vertical and the Horizontal: A World-Ecological Analysis of 'the Industrial Revolution', Part I

\u27The Industrial Revolution\u27 is simultaneously one of the most under-examined and overly-simplified concepts in all of social science. One of the ways it is highly under-examined is in the arena of the ecological, particularly through the lens of critical world-history. This paper attempts to analyze the phenomenon through the lens of the world-ecology synthesis, in three distinct phases: First, the history of the conceptualization of the Industrial Revolution is examined at length, paying special attention to the knowledge foundations that determine these conceptualizations. Secondly, I sift out what I believe is the dominant model throughout most of modern and now postmodern history, which I identify as the techno-economic narrative. I then present the main critical world-historical challenge to that argument (that the Industrial Revolution was a unified, linear, two-century phenomenon) by outlining the critical interpretations of Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, among others, leading a view of industrialization that is over the very long term, or what Braudel referred to as the longue durée. This long-view form of critical historical analysis is unabashedly Marxist, so there is some foray into various pieces of the Marxian canon, pieces that are often left untouched or at the least under-utilized in many politico-economic analyses of environmental history and politico-ecological narratives as well. Thirdly, I attempt to bring this new long-form view of industrialization more firmly into the ecological, but filtering the basic presuppositions of the \u27techno-economic\u27 narratives and the Marxist \u27critical world-historical\u27 narratives through the presuppositions of Jason W. Moore\u27s world-ecology synthesis. What we arrive at through this filtering process is a very different view of the Industrial Revolution than we are used to hearing about. This is Part I of a much larger research process, one that I intend to bring into the present and future by looking at the development process of the BRICS as the next extension of the Industrial Revolution. What this paper is most concerned with is re-igniting what I think is a valuable debate among theorists, economic historians, and Marxist ecological thinkers, the debate about what exactly this phenomenon was, is, and will be. My small contribution is to re-define it in relationship to its really-existing history, including its antecedents and possible future expansions