Lay beliefs about the controllability of everyday mental states.

Cusimano, C., & Goodwin, G.
In press, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Abstract

Prominent accounts of folk theory of mind posit that people judge others’ mental states to be uncontrollable, unintentional, or otherwise involuntary. Yet, this claim has little empirical support: few studies have investigated lay judgments about mental state control, and those that have done so yield conflicting conclusions. We address this shortcoming across six studies, which show that, in fact, lay people attribute to others a high degree of intentional control over their mental states, including their emotions, desires, beliefs, and evaluative attitudes. For prototypical mental states, people’s judgments of control systematically varied by mental state category (e.g., emotions were seen as less controllable than desires, which in turn were seen as less controllable than beliefs and evaluative attitudes). However, these differences were attenuated, sometimes completely, when the content of and context for each mental state were tightly controlled. Finally, judgments of control over mental states correlated positively with judgments of responsibility and blame for them, and to a lesser extent, with judgments that the mental state reveals the agent’s character. These findings replicated across multiple populations and methods, and generalized to people’s real-world experiences. The present results challenge the view that people judge others’ mental states as passive, involuntary, or unintentional, and suggest that mental state control judgments play a key role in other important areas of social judgment and decision making.

The research is here.

Important research for those practicing psychotherapy.

Natural-born existentialists

Ronnie de Sousa
aeon.com
Originally posted December 10, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

Much the same might be true of some of the emotional dispositions bequeathed to us by natural selection. If we follow some evolutionary psychologists in thinking that evolution has programmed us to value solidarity and authority, for example, we must recognise that those very same mechanisms promote xenophobia, racism and fascism. Some philosophers have made much of the fact that we appear to have genuinely altruistic motives: sometimes, human beings actually sacrifice themselves for complete strangers. If that is indeed a native human trait, so much the better. But it can’t be good because it’s natural. For selfishness and cruelty are no less natural. Again, naturalness can’t reasonably be why we value what we care about.

A second reason why evolution is not providence is that any given heritable trait is not simply either ‘adaptive’ or ‘maladaptive’ for the species. Some cases of fitness are frequency-dependent, which means that certain traits acquire a stable distribution in a population only if they are not universal.

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The third reason we should not equate the natural with the good is the most important. Evolution is not about us. In repeating the well-worn phrase that is supposed to sum up natural selection, ‘survival of the fittest’, we seldom think to ask: the fittest what? It won’t do to think that the phrase refers to fitness in individuals such as you and me. Even the fittest individuals never survive at all. We all die. What does survive is best described as information, much of which is encoded in the genes. That remains true despite the fashionable preoccupation with ‘epigenetic’ or otherwise non-DNA-encoded factors. The point is that ‘the fittest’ refers to just whatever gets replicated in subsequent generations – and whatever that is, it isn’t us. Every human is radically new, and – at least until cloning becomes routine – none will ever recur.

The article is here.

Freud in the scanner

M. M. Owen
aeon.co
Originally published December 7, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

This is why Freud is less important to the field than what Freud represents. Researching this piece, I kept wondering: why hang on to Freud? He is an intensely polarising figure, so polarising that through the 1980s and ’90s there raged the so-called Freud Wars, fighting on one side of which were a whole team of authors driven (as the historian of science John Forrester put it in 1997) by the ‘heartfelt wish that Freud might never have been born or, failing to achieve that end, that all his works and influence be made as nothing’. Indeed, a basic inability to track down anyone with a dispassionate take on psychoanalysis was a frustration of researching this essay. The certitude that whatever I write here will enrage some readers hovers at the back of my mind as I think ahead to skimming the comments section. Preserve subjectivity, I thought, fine, I’m onboard. But why not eschew the heavily contested Freudianism for the psychotherapy of Irvin D Yalom, which takes an existentialist view of the basic challenges of life? Why not embrace Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, which prioritises our fundamental desire to give life meaning, or the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, whose first principle is that subjectivity precedes all else?

Within neuropsychoanalysis, though, Freud symbolises the fact that, to quote the neuroscientist Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain (1998), you can ‘look for laws of mental life in much the same way that a cardiologist might study the heart or an astronomer study planetary motion’. And on the clinical side, it is simply a fact that before Freud there was really no such thing as therapy, as we understand that word today. In Yalom’s novel When Nietzsche Wept (1992), Josef Breuer, Freud’s mentor, is at a loss for how to counsel the titular German philosopher out of his despair: ‘There is no medicine for despair, no doctor for the soul,’ he says. All Breuer can recommend are therapeutic spas, ‘or perhaps a talk with a priest’.

The article is here.

The Root of All Cruelty

Paul Bloom
The New Yorker
Originally published November 20, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

Early psychological research on dehumanization looked at what made the Nazis different from the rest of us. But psychologists now talk about the ubiquity of dehumanization. Nick Haslam, at the University of Melbourne, and Steve Loughnan, at the University of Edinburgh, provide a list of examples, including some painfully mundane ones: “Outraged members of the public call sex offenders animals. Psychopaths treat victims merely as means to their vicious ends. The poor are mocked as libidinous dolts. Passersby look through homeless people as if they were transparent obstacles. Dementia sufferers are represented in the media as shuffling zombies.”

The thesis that viewing others as objects or animals enables our very worst conduct would seem to explain a great deal. Yet there’s reason to think that it’s almost the opposite of the truth.

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But “Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships” (Cambridge), by the anthropologist Alan Fiske and the psychologist Tage Rai, argues that these standard accounts often have it backward. In many instances, violence is neither a cold-blooded solution to a problem nor a failure of inhibition; most of all, it doesn’t entail a blindness to moral considerations. On the contrary, morality is often a motivating force: “People are impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social relationships, imposing suffering or death is necessary, natural, legitimate, desirable, condoned, admired, and ethically gratifying.” Obvious examples include suicide bombings, honor killings, and the torture of prisoners during war, but Fiske and Rai extend the list to gang fights and violence toward intimate partners. For Fiske and Rai, actions like these often reflect the desire to do the right thing, to exact just vengeance, or to teach someone a lesson. There’s a profound continuity between such acts and the punishments that—in the name of requital, deterrence, or discipline—the criminal-justice system lawfully imposes. Moral violence, whether reflected in legal sanctions, the killing of enemy soldiers in war, or punishing someone for an ethical transgression, is motivated by the recognition that its victim is a moral agent, someone fully human.

The article is here.

Is Addiction a Brain Disease?

Kent C. Berridge
Neuroethics (2016). pp 1-5.
doi:10.1007/s12152-016-9286-3

Abstract

Where does normal brain or psychological function end, and pathology begin? The line can be hard to discern, making disease sometimes a tricky word. In addiction, normal ‘wanting’ processes become distorted and excessive, according to the incentive-sensitization theory. Excessive ‘wanting’ results from drug-induced neural sensitization changes in underlying brain mesolimbic systems of incentive. ‘Brain disease’ was never used by the theory, but neural sensitization changes are arguably extreme enough and problematic enough to be called pathological. This implies that ‘brain disease’ can be a legitimate description of addiction, though caveats are needed to acknowledge roles for choice and active agency by the addict. Finally, arguments over ‘brain disease’ should be put behind us. Our real challenge is to understand addiction and devise better ways to help. Arguments over descriptive words only distract from that challenge.

The article is here.

On the misguided pursuit of happiness and ethical decision making: The roles of focalism and the impact bias in unethical and selfish behavior

Laura J. Noval
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
Volume 133, March 2016, Pages 1–16

Abstract

An important body of research in the field of behavioral ethics argues that individuals behave unethically and selfishly because they want to obtain desired outcomes, such as career advancement and monetary rewards. Concurrently, a large body of literature in social psychology has shown that the subjective value of an outcome is determined by its anticipated emotional impact. Such impact has been consistently found to be overestimated both in its intensity and in its duration (i.e. impact bias) due to focalism (i.e. excessive focus on the desired outcome). Across four empirical studies, this investigation demonstrates that reducing focalism and thereby attenuating the impact bias in regards to desired outcomes decreases people’s tendency to engage in both unethical and selfish behavior to obtain those outcomes.

Highlights

• Individuals engage in unethical and selfish behavior to obtain desired outcomes, such as monetary or career rewards.
• The anticipated emotional impact of the outcomes individuals seek to obtain is overestimated (i.e. impact bias).
• The impact bias results from focalism (i.e. excessive focus on an outcome).
• In four studies, focalism and the impact bias about desired outcomes were experimentally reduced.
• The focalism reduction resulted in a decreased tendency of individuals to engage in unethical and selfish behavior.

The article is here.

Toward a general theory of motivation: Problems, challenges, opportunities, and the big picture

Roy F. Baumeister
Motivation and Emotion
pp 1-10

Abstract

Motivation theories have tended to focus on specific motivations, leaving open the intellectually and scientifically challenging problem of how to construct a general theory of motivation. The requirements for such a theory are presented here. The primacy of motivation emphasizes that cognition, emotion, agency, and other psychological processes exist to serve motivation. Both state (impulses) and trait (basic drives) forms of motivation must be explained, and their relationship must be illuminated. Not all motivations are the same, and indeed it is necessary to explain how motivation evolved from the simple desires of simple animals into the complex, multifaceted forms of human motivation. Motivation responds to the local environment but may also adapt to it, such as when desires increase after satiation or diminish when satisfaction is chronically unavailable. Addiction may be a special case of motivation—but perhaps it is much less special or different than prevailing cultural stereotypes suggest. The relationship between liking and wanting, and the self-regulatory management of motivational conflict, also require explanation by an integrative theory.

The paper is here. 

Philosophy (Psychology): Personal Identity

Wireless Philosophy
Published on Jun 8, 2015

Using the method of experimental philosophy, Nina Strohminger (Yale University) and Shaun Nichols (University of Arizona) compare philosophical and everyday answers to the question "Which aspect of the self is most essential for personal identity?"



Dr. Nina Strohminger was kind enough to share thoughts on her research in the Ethics and Psychology podcast: The Moral Self, Moral Injury, and Moral Emotions.

Alzheimer's Challenges Notions Of Memory And Identity

By Tania Lombrozo
NPR.org
Originally published on March 4, 2014

Here are some excerpts:

The startling result was that memory wasn't a frontrunner when it came to what sustains someone's "true self." Instead, the winner was morality. A person who had trouble learning new information or forgot childhood memories, for example, was regarded as less fundamentally altered than one who became cruel or selfish, or even one who acquired positive moral traits, such as honesty or forgiveness.

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The lesson from Zaitchik's research is that while Alzheimer's patients suffer from serious conceptual impairments relative to their healthy counterparts, these impairments aren't uniform across domains. An Alzheimer's patient can be wrong about whether zebras have stripes or a car is alive, but have social and moral reasoning abilities that are relatively intact.

The entire article is here.