"Are You Evil? Profiling That Which Is Truly Wicked" Scientific American

A cognitive scientist employs malevolent logic to define the dark side of the human psyche


By Larry Greenemeier // October 27, 2008

INTRODUCING "E": a computer character
first created in 2005 to embody Bringsjord's
working definition of evil.

TROY, N.Y.—The hallowed halls of academia are not the place you would expect to find someone obsessed with evil (although some students might disagree). But it is indeed evil—or rather trying to get to the roots of evil—that fascinates Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Cognitive Science here. He's so intrigued, in fact, that he has developed a sort of checklist for determining whether someone is demonic, and is working with a team of graduate students to create a computerized representation of a purely sinister person.

"I've been working on what is evil and how to formally define it," says Bringsjord, who is also director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Lab (RAIR). "It's creepy, I know it is."

To be truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some morally wrong action with no prompting from others (whether this person successfully executes his or her plan is beside the point). The evil person must have tried to carry out this plan with the hope of "causing considerable harm to others," Bringsjord says. Finally, "and most importantly," he adds, if this evil person were willing to analyze his or her reasons for wanting to commit this morally wrong action, these reasons would either prove to be incoherent, or they would reveal that the evil person knew he or she was doing something wrong and regarded the harm caused as a good thing.

Bringsjord's research builds on earlier definitions put forth by San Diego State University philosophy professor J. Angelo Corlett as well as the late sociopolitical philosophers and psychologists, Joel Feinberg and Erich Fromm, but most significantly by psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck in his 1983 book, People of the Lie, The Hope for Healing Human Evil. After reading Peck's tome about clinically evil people, "I thought it would be interesting to come up with formal structures that define evil," Bringsjord says, "and, ultimately, to create a purely evil character the way a creative writer would."

He and his research team began developing their computer representation of evil by posing a series of questions beginning with the basics—name, age, sex, etcetera—and progressing to inquiries about this fictional person's beliefs and motivations.

This exercise resulted in "E," a computer character first created in 2005 to meet the criteria of Bringsjord's working definition of evil. Whereas the original E was simply a program designed to respond to questions in a manner consistent with Bringsjord's definition, the researchers have since given E a physical identity: It's a relatively young, white man with short black hair and dark stubble on his face. Bringsjord calls E's appearance "a meaner version" of the character Mr. Perry in the 1989 movieDead Poets Society. "He is a great example of evil," Bringsjord says, adding, however, that he is not entirely satisfied with this personification and may make changes.
                       
The researchers have placed E in his own virtual world and written a program depicting a scripted interview between one of the researcher's avatars and E. In this example, E is programmed to respond to questions based on a case study in Peck's book that involves a boy whose parents gave him a gun that his older brother had used to commit suicide.

The researchers programmed E with a degree of artificial intelligence to make "him" believe that he (and not the parents) had given the pistol to the distraught boy, and then asked E a series of questions designed to glean his logic for doing so. The result is a surreal simulation during which Bringsjord's diabolical incarnation attempts to produce a logical argument for its actions: The boy wanted a gun, E had a gun, so E gave the boy the gun.

Bringsjord and his team by the end of the year hope to have completed the fourth generation of E, which will be able to use artificial intelligence and a limited set of straightforward English (no slang, for example) to "speak" with computer users.

Following the path of a true logician, Bringsjord's interest in the portrayal of virtuousness and evil in literature led to his interest in software that helps writers develop ideas and create stories; this, in turn, spurred him to develop his own software for simulating human behavior, both good and odious, says Barry Smith, a distinguished professor of bioinformatics and ontology at the State University of New York at Buffalo who is familiar with Bringsjord's work. "He's known as someone on the fringe of philosophy and computer science."

Bringsjord and Smith both have an interest in finding ways to better understand human behavior, and their work has attracted the attention of the intelligence community, which is seeking ways to successfully analyze the information they gather on potential terrorists. "To solve problems in intelligence analysis, you need more accurate representations of people," Smith says. "Selmer is trying to build really good representations of human beings in all of their subtlety."

Bringsjord acknowledges that the endeavor to create pure evil, even in a software program, does raise ethical questions, such as, how researchers could control an artificially intelligent character like E if "he" was placed in a virtual world such asSecond Life, a Web-based program that allows people to create digital representations of themselves and have those avatars interact in a number of different ways.

"I wouldn't release E or anything like it, even in purely virtual environments, without engineered safeguards," Bringsjord says. These safeguards would be a set of ethics written into the software, something akin to author Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" that prevent a robot from harming humans, requires a robot to obey humans, and instructs a robot to protect itself—as long as that does not violate either or both of the first two laws.

"Because I have a lot of faith in this approach," he says, "E will be controlled."

Source:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=defining-evil

Empatía y de la violencia comparten las mismas zonas cerebrales

Recojo de un blog muy interesante esta artículo: "A continuación os presento un video muy interesante de una investigación llevada a cabo recientemente en la Universidad de Valencia en la que se ha encontrado que las estructuras cerebrales que se ocupan de la empatía y de la violencia comparten las mismas zonas cerebrales, con esto quieren decir que las estructuras que regulan la violencia coinciden en gran parte con las que regulan la empatia.Este puede ser un gran avance ya que la educación en empatia es el camino mas efectivo para aniquilar la violencia. Cuanto más fomentemos la empatia (esto se puede realizar desde los primeros años de vida) menos violencia se mostrara en los sujetos."



Fuente:
http://psicologiaymente.com/agresion/empatia-y-violencia/

Una persona (sin conocimientos de Morfopsicología) puede distinguir por la cara un criminal // Criminals Look Different From Noncriminals // Test

Contrary to popular belief, you can assess people's character and personality by simply looking at them.  Nice people look nice, and nasty people look nasty, and it appears that humans have innate psychological mechanisms to tell them apart.  Now, in a truly groundbreaking study, recently published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, Jeffrey M. Valla, Stephen J. Ceci, and Wendy M. Williams of Cornell University show that people can tell criminals and noncriminals apart simply by looking at their still photos.  Criminals, it appears, look different from noncriminals.


psychologytoday.com  // by Satoshi Kanazawa

(...) In their experiments, Valla et al. show pictures of the faces of 32 young Caucasian men in their 20s, without scars, tattoos or excessive facial hair, all in neutral expressions.  Sixteen of them are convicted criminals, and the other sixteen are not.  Valla et al. simply ask their experimental participants to indicate how likely they think it is that each man is a certain type of criminal (murderer, rapist, thief, forgerer, assailant, arsonist, and drug dealer) on a 7-point Likert scale from 1 = extremely unlikely to 7 = extremely likely.  Their results from two experiments consistently show that individuals can tell who is a criminal and who is not, by indicating that they believe the actual criminals have higher probability of being a criminal than actual noncriminals.  However, their results also show that individuals cannot tell what type of criminals they are.

(...) For your amusement, I include the visual material that Valla et al. use in one of their experiments.  It contains pictures of 32 men, 16 of whom are convicted criminals (arsonists, assailants, drug dealers, and rapists), and 16 of whom are noncriminals (normal college students).  Can you spot the difference?  Can you tell which of them are criminals and which of them are not?  If you are a woman, can you spot the convicted rapists among them?

If you want to know the answers, you will have to access Valla et al.'s article here.  The answers are in the Appendix at the end of their paper.

Source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201103/criminals-look-different-noncriminals

Non-Criminal – 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 25, 26,30; Arson – 5, 10, 16, 20; Assault – 4, 24, 27, 28; Drug Dealing – 8, 11, 21, 29; Rape – 3,23, 31, 32

JIm Fallon: Explorando la mente de un asesino (TED Talks)

Los asesinos psicópatas son la base de muchos programas de televisión, pero, ¿qué es lo que los hace actuar? El neurocientífico Jim Fallon habla sobre estudios cerebrales y análisis genético que podrían revelar el siniestro origen de la naturaleza (y el cultivo) de los asesinos. En un giro del tipo "si no lo veo no creo", comparte una fascinante historia familiar que hace de su trabajo algo escalofriantemente personal.

Neurobiology of Violence: Adrian Raine talks (4 talk-playlist)

Neuroethical and Neurolegal Implications // An examination of the brain basis to crime and violence // What we can do to prevent future crime and the neuroethical implications



Adrian Raine
Chair, Department of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania
Richard Perry University Professor, Departments of Criminology, Psychiatry, and Psychology, University of Pennsylvania

"My main area of interest is Neurocriminology – an emerging sub-discipline of Criminology which applies neuroscience techniques to probe the causes and cures of crime. My laboratory focus on risk and protective factors for childhood conduct disorder, reactive and proactive aggression, adult antisocial personality disorder, homicide, and psychopathy. Our clinical neuroscience research program encompasses adults, adolescents, children, and toddlers, and we have interests in both male and female antisocial behavior. Techniques we use in our research include structural and functional brain imaging, autonomic and central nervous system psychophysiology, neuroendocrinology, neuropsychology, and x-ray fluorescence. We take a biosocial perspective to our investigation of antisocial behavior in which our end-goal is to integrate social, psychological, and environmental processes with neurobiological approaches to better understand antisocial behavior. We are also interested in other clinical disorders including schizotypal personality, hyperactivity, oppositional defiant disorder, alcohol and drug abuse, depression, PTSD, and anxiety which are comorbid with antisocial behavior."

Source: http://www.crim.upenn.edu/faculty/profiles/raine.html