Motivation

I found Michael Rutter’s article to be quite nicely written and very well balanced, and I thought that his cautious approach to genetic studies of propensity for criminal behavior might also be helpfully applied to the other neurological works.
Particularly, it seems like it might be useful to think of the fMRI studies and the oxytocin study as just making probabilistic arguments about physiological brain states and human behavior. For example, it seems that the Sanfey, Rilling et al. study might suggest that activation of the ACC probably is greater when there are unfair offers in an ultimatum game from human partners than when there are fair offers (or when there are either fair or unfair offers from computers), even if it does not suggest that, all things considered, fair offers necessarily cause greater activation of the ACC. Perhaps this is just because of my methodological ignorance about fMRI studies, but it seems to me that this is a particularly relevant limitation to keep in mind given the rather small number of subjects included in each of the fMRI studies.