In sentencing guilty defendants, jurors and judges weigh ‘mitigating circumstances’, which createsympathy for a defendant. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to measureneural activity in ordinary citizens who are potential jurors, as they decide on mitigation ofpunishment for murder. We found that sympathy activated regions associated with mentalisingand moral conflict (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus and temporo-parietal junction).sentencing also activated precuneus and anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that mitigationis based on negative affective responses to murder, sympathy for mitigating circumstances andcognitive control to choose numerical punishments. Individual differences on the inclination tomitigate, the sentence reduction per unit of judged sympathy, correlated with activity in theright middle insula, an area known to represent interoception of visceral states. These resultscould help the legal system understand how potential jurors actually decide, and contribute togrowing knowledge about whether emotion and cognition are integrated sensibly in difficultjudgments.
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