What do you think about using functional MRI scans for non-medical purposes such as marketing, politics or law? Do you think its ethical for economists to not just ask you what you think of certain products but to actually look at what ares of your brain react in response to them? Im particularly interested in peoples opinions on using MRI in law suits. Can you really convict someone of a crime based on the way they think?
With informed consent, for studies, I think it's fine.
Lawsuits/criminal cases etc are a much more complex topic. Polygraphs often get used in the US, even though they are shown to be extremely ineffective. They have a high false-positive rate, yet juries have a tendency to view a positive result as ironclad proof of guilt. I think any suggestion of using MRIs for the same purpose would have to come with a much, much lower false-positive rate, and even then using it could be dangerous, as the few who get false positives could well end up wrongly imprisoned, regardless of the nature of the rest of the evidence against them.
my main problem with it is that even if a fMRI correctly shows the way someone thinks toward a specific stimuli, and it appears to be incriminating, there is a huge difference between thinking about something and actually doing it. Also, thinking about quite different things can actually cause the same areas of the brain to respond anyway.
Well, supposedly they can tell the difference between remembering doing something and merely thinking about it. There's still the major issue of false-positives, though.
