Neuroscience has identified brain structures and functions that correlate with psychopathic tendencies. Since psychopathic traits can be traced back to physical neural attributes, it has been argued that psychopaths are not truly responsible for their actions and therefore should not be blamed for their psychopathic behaviors. This experimental research aims to evaluate what effect communicating this theory of psychopathy has on the moral behavior of lay people. If psychopathy is blamed on the brain, people may feel less morally responsible for their own psychopathic tendencies and therefore may be more likely to display those tendencies. An online study will provide participants with false feedback about their psychopathic traits supposedly based on their digital footprint (i.e., Facebook likes), thus classifying them as having either above-average or below-average psychopathic traits and describing psychopathy in cognitive or neurobiological terms. This particular study will assess the extent to which lay people are influenced by feedback regarding their psychopathic traits, and how this might affect their moral behavior in online tasks. Public recognition of these potential negative consequences of neuroscience communication will also be assessed. A field study using the lost letter technique will be conducted to examine lay people's endorsement of neurobiological, as compared to cognitive, explanations of criminal behavior. This field and online experimental research could inform the future communication of neuroscience to the public in a way that is sensitive to the potential negative consequences of communicating such science. In particular, this research may have implications for the future means by which neurobiological predictors of offending can be safely communicated to offenders.

Certain experiments have shown that reasoning may weaken the stability of people's preferences, especially with regard to well-learned perceptual judgment and decision-making tasks, while learning has an opposite, consistency-enhancing effect on preferences. We examined the effects of these factors in a visual multi-attribute decision-making task where reasoning, in contrast, has been found to benefit judgments by making them more stable. The initial assumption in this study was that this benefit would be typical for novel tasks, like the one employed here, and that it would decrease when the task is thoroughly learned. This assumption was examined in three experiments by contrasting it with an alternative assumption that this previously obtained beneficial effect is caused solely by learning, not by reasoning. It was found that learning indeed makes preferences more stable by consolidating the weights of the attributes. Reasoning, however, does not benefit this task when it is completely novel but facilitates learning and stability of the preferences long run, therefore increasing the consistency of the participants in the macrolevel. Copyright (c) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper investigates why and how founding entrepreneurs bond with their ventures. We develop and test theory about the nature of bonding in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of 42 subjects (21 entrepreneurs and 21 parents). We find that entrepreneurs and parents show similar signs of affective bonding, that self-confidence plays a role in bonding style, and that the degree to which entrepreneurs include their ventures in the self and to which parents include their child in the self influences their ability to make critical assessments. Our findings suggest that bonding is similar for entrepreneurs and parents and that venture stimuli influence reward systems, self-regulatory functions, and mental factors that are associated with judgment.