FIGURE 2.

To explain a mismatch between subjective ratings and brain scanning results, I use real data from the study on sexual orientation by Safron et al. (2017). Of course, this by no means suggests that any such orientation is a mental disorder; that case has been settled a long time ago (Zachar and Kendler, 2012). On the left (A) you can see the results for male subjects’ own ratings of how much they liked erotic pictures featuring men or women: the higher the score, the more they preferred the former over the latter. Subjects had been split into a hetero-, bi-, and homosexual group according to a questionnaire on sexual preferences. Note that there is no overlap between the heterosexual and homosexual groups. On the right (B) you can see the corresponding data from the ventral striatum, a brain area frequently associated with erotic experiences. Note that while these data resemble the results from the subjects’ own ratings, there is now some overlap between the heterosexual and homosexual groups; in particular, there is one outlier on top of the “heterosexual” column who identified himself as heterosexual (questionnaire) and stated that he liked female erotic pictures more than those of men (ratings shown in (A)), but whose brain activation falls right into the middle of that of the homosexual group. If we ascribed psychological constructs on the basis of such measurements, this example illustrates substantial implications for people’s mental autonomy and personal identity. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).