Is Psychological Research on Self-Control Relevant to Criminal Law?

During recent years, scholars have asked whether scientific discoveries should have implications for criminal law. Specifically, some argue that findings in genetics and neuroscience will or should alter our assumption that most adults are responsible for their conduct. Criminal law should rest on a proper understanding of human behavior, and, therefore, scholars should mine scientific explanations of behavior for normatively relevant facts. New and future discoveries from neuroscience occupy most of recent academic commentary on science and criminal responsibility. This focus on novel and merely potential neuroscientific findings makes Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff’s recent arguments all the more fascinating: she argues that criminal law scholars have neglected a rich body of social-psychological research developed over two decades on the mechanisms of self-control. Hollander-Blumoff aims to remedy this neglect by examining the research for doctrinal and theoretical implications and inviting other scholars to join the endeavor. Hollander-Blumoff cites conflicting conceptions of “self-control” at work in law and psychology to support a persuasive conclusion: the law’s distinction between controlled and uncontrolled behavior is based on a normative judgment, not on some non-evaluative “empirical reality.” Thus, neuroscience’s empirical methods cannot determine how the law should define “control.” Indeed, we should be skeptical about neuroscience’s current relevance to criminal responsibility. Neuroscience seeks to explain the causes of human conduct in terms of neural mechanisms. The law, on the other hand, concerns itself with folk-psychological explanations of behavior: to understand why a person—as opposed to a brain—fired a gun, we must investigate her beliefs, desires, and intentions at the time. That the law assumes a psychological model of behavior speaks in favor of Hollander-Blumoff’s invitation to explore the self-