Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Irrational Behavior. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irrational Behavior. Show all posts

Friday, January 25, 2019

Decision-Making and Self-Governing Systems

Adina L. Roskies
Neuroethics
October 2018, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp 245–257

Abstract

Neuroscience has illuminated the neural basis of decision-making, providing evidence that supports specific models of decision-processes. These models typically are quite mechanical, the realization of abstract mathematical “diffusion to bound” models. While effective decision-making seems to be essential for sophisticated behavior, central to an account of freedom, and a necessary characteristic of self-governing systems, it is not clear how the simple models neuroscience inspires can underlie the notion of self-governance. Drawing from both philosophy and neuroscience I explore ways in which the proposed decision-making architectures can play a role in systems that can reasonably be thought of as “self-governing”.

Here is an excerpt:

The importance of prospection for self-governance cannot be underestimated. One example in which it promises to play an important role is in the exercise of and failures of self-control. Philosophers have long been puzzled by the apparent possibility of akrasia or weakness of will: choosing to act in ways that one judges not to be in one’s best interest. Weakness of will is thought to be an example of irrational choice. If one’s theory of choice is that one always decides to pursue the option that has the highest value, and that it is rational to choose what one most values, it is hard to explain irrational choices. Apparent cases of weakness of will would really be cases of mistaken valuation: overvaluing an option that is in fact not the most valuable option. And indeed, if one cannot rationally criticize the strength of desires (see Hume’s famous observation that “it is not against reason that I should prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger”), we cannot explain irrational choice.

The article is here.

Friday, October 26, 2018

Ethics, a Psychological Perspective

Andrea Dobson
www.infoq.com
Originally posted September 22, 2018

Key Takeaways
  • With emerging technologies like machine learning, developers can now achieve much more than ever before. But this new power has a down side. 
  • When we talk about ethics - the principles that govern a person's behaviour - it is impossible to not talk about psychology. 
  • Processes like obedience, conformity, moral disengagement, cognitive dissonance and moral amnesia all reveal why, though we see ourselves as inherently good, in certain circumstances we are likely to behave badly.
  • Recognising that although people aren’t rational, they are to a large degree predictable, has profound implications on how tech and business leaders can approach making their organisations more ethical.
  • The strongest way to make a company more ethical is to start with the individual. Companies become ethical one person at a time, one decision at a time. We all want to be seen as good people, known as our moral identity, which comes with the responsibility to have to act like it.

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

The Academic Mob and Its Fatal Toll

Brad Cran
Quillette.com
Originally published March 2, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

In her essay “The Anatomy of an Academic Mobbing,” Joan Friedenberg states that “most mobbers see their actions as perfectly justified by the perceived depravity of their target, at least until they are asked to account for it with some degree of thoughtfulness, such as in a court deposition, by a journalist or in a judicial hearing.”

The flip side to the depravity of the target is the righteousness of the mob. What makes members of the mob so passionately inhumane is that their position as righteous becomes instantly wrapped up in the successful destruction of the target. As Friedenberg writes “An unsuccessful account leaves the mobber entirely morally culpable.”

Moral culpability creates fear and stokes irrational behavior, not within the target but within the mob itself. If a mob fails to cast out the target then eventually the mob will have to come to terms with the rights of the person they tried to destroy and the fact that all people, regardless of manufactured depravity, are deserving of humanity and basic fair treatment.

Every effort will be made to increase the allegation count, magnify the severity of each accusation, reinterpret any past actions of the target as malicious, and wipe away any sign that the target ever had a single redeemable quality that could point to the fact that they are undeserving of total destruction and shunning. For this reason “bullying” is a common accusation levelled against mobbing targets.

The article is here.

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

The Psychology of Clinical Decision Making: Implications for Medication Use

Jerry Avorn
February 22, 2018
N Engl J Med 2018; 378:689-691

Here is an excerpt:

The key problem is medicine’s ongoing assumption that clinicians and patients are, in general, rational decision makers. In reality, we are all influenced by seemingly irrational preferences in making choices about reward, risk, time, and trade-offs that are quite different from what would be predicted by bloodless, if precise, quantitative calculations. Although we physicians sometimes resist the syllogism, if all humans are prone to irrational decision making, and all clinicians are human, then these insights must have important implications for patient care and health policy. There have been some isolated innovative applications of that understanding in medicine, but despite a growing number of publications about the psychology of decision making, most medical care — at the bedside and the systems level — is still based on a “rational actor” understanding of how we make decisions.

The choices we make about prescription drugs provide one example of how much further medicine could go in taking advantage of a more nuanced understanding of decision making under conditions of uncertainty — a description that could define the profession itself. We persist in assuming that clinicians can obtain comprehensive information about the comparative worth (clinical as well as economic) of alternative drug choices for a given condition, assimilate and evaluate all the findings, and synthesize them to make the best drug choices for our patients. Leaving aside the access problem — the necessary comparative effectiveness research often doesn’t exist — actual drug-utilization data make it clear that real-world prescribing choices are in fact based heavily on various “irrational” biases, many of which have been described by behavioral economists and other decision theorists.

The article is here.

Monday, October 30, 2017

Nobel Prize in Economics Awarded to American Richard Thaler

David Gauthier-Villars in Stockholm and Ben Leubsdorf in Washington
The Wall Street Journal
Originally posted October 9, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

Mr. Thaler “has given us new insight into how human psychology shapes decision-making,” the academy said.

Asked to describe the takeaway from his research, Mr. Thaler told the academy and reporters: “The most important lesson is that economic agents are humans and that economic models have to incorporate that.”

(cut)

“I’ll try to spend it as irrationally as possible,” Mr. Thaler said.

The article is here.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Courage and Compassion: Virtues in Caring for So-Called “Difficult” Patients

Michael Hawking, Farr A. Curlin, and John D. Yoon
AMA Journal of Ethics. April 2017, Volume 19, Number 4: 357-363.

Abstract

What, if anything, can medical ethics offer to assist in the care of the “difficult” patient? We begin with a discussion of virtue theory and its application to medical ethics. We conceptualize the “difficult” patient as an example of a “moral stress test” that especially challenges the physician’s character, requiring the good physician to display the virtues of courage and compassion. We then consider two clinical vignettes to flesh out how these virtues might come into play in the care of “difficult” patients, and we conclude with a brief proposal for how medical educators might cultivate these essential character traits in physicians-in-training.

Here is an excerpt:

To give a concrete example of a virtue that will be familiar to anyone in medicine, consider the virtue of temperance. A temperate person exhibits appropriate self-control or restraint. Aristotle describes temperance as a mean between two extremes—in the case of eating, an extreme lack of temperance can lead to morbid obesity and its excess to anorexia. Intemperance is a hallmark of many of our patients, particularly among those with type 2 diabetes, alcoholism, or cigarette addiction. Clinicians know all too well the importance of temperance because they see the results for human beings who lack it—whether it be amputations and dialysis for the diabetic patient; cirrhosis, varices, and coagulopathy for the alcoholic patient; or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer for the lifelong smoker. In all of these cases, intemperance inhibits a person’s ability to flourish. These character traits do, of course, interact with social, cultural, and genetic factors in impacting an individual’s health, but a more thorough exploration of these factors is outside the scope of this paper.

The article is here.

Sunday, September 17, 2017

The behavioural ecology of irrational behaviours

Philippe Huneman Johannes Martens
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
September 2017, 39:23

Abstract

Natural selection is often envisaged as the ultimate cause of the apparent rationality exhibited by organisms in their specific habitat. Given the equivalence between selection and rationality as maximizing processes, one would indeed expect organisms to implement rational decision-makers. Yet, many violations of the clauses of rationality have been witnessed in various species such as starlings, hummingbirds, amoebas and honeybees. This paper attempts to interpret such discrepancies between economic rationality (defined by the main axioms of rational choice theory) and biological rationality (defined by natural selection). After having distinguished two kinds of rationality we introduce irrationality as a negation of economic rationality by biologically rational decision-makers. Focusing mainly on those instances of irrationalities that can be understood as exhibiting inconsistency in making choices, i.e. as non-conformity of a given behaviour to axioms such as transitivity or independence of irrelevant alternatives, we propose two possible families of Darwinian explanations that may account for these apparent irrationalities. First, we consider cases where natural selection may have been an indirect cause of irrationality. Second, we consider putative cases where violations of rationality axioms may have been directly favored by natural selection. Though the latter cases (prima facie) seem to clearly contradict our intuitive representation of natural selection as a process that maximizes fitness, we argue that they are actually unproblematic; for often, they can be redescribed as cases where no rationality axiom is violated, or as situations where no adaptive solution exists in the first place.

The article is here.

Saturday, January 7, 2017

The Irrationality Within Us

By Elly Vintiadis
Scientific American blog
Originally published on December 12, 2016

We like to think of ourselves as special because we can reason and we like to think that this ability expresses the essence of what it is to be human. In many ways this belief has formed our civilization; throughout history, we have used supposed differences in rationality to justify moral and political distinctions between different races, genders, and species, as well as between “healthy” and “diseased” individuals. Even to this day, people often associate mental disorder with irrationality and this has very real effects on people living with mental disorders.

But are we really that rational? And is rationality really what distinguishes people who live with mental illness from those who do not? It seems not. After decades of research, there is compelling evidence that we are not as rational as we think we are and that, rather than irrationality being the exception, it is part of who we normally are.

So what does it mean to be rational? We usually distinguish between two kinds of rationality.  Epistemic rationality, which is involved in acquiring true beliefs about the world and which sets the standard for what we ought to believe, and instrumental rationality which is involved in decision-making and behavior and is the standard for how we ought to act.

The article is here.

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Interview with Dan Ariely

Featured Collaborator of the Month with www.ethicalsystems.org
Originally published on April 24, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Why are cheating and dishonesty so widespread?

They are part of human nature. We have this incredible balance between honesty and dishonesty. We are taught from a young age to be dishonest in the social realm. We are taught not to tell people that they smell, or that it was the train that made us late instead of us being lazy, if people have a new haircut we say that it is very nice. We learn in the social realm that cheating is in fact desirable to some degree and then we move to the business / professional realm.

Now the rules are different. Now dishonesty is not as good. We don't separate those. Modern society creates a situation where the overlap between our social and professional lives are very high. All of a sudden, the people you interact with socially are the same as you interact with non socially, i.e. in your professional life. These tradeoffs become complex.

It is also important to realize that dishonesty is also about short term vs. long term. Saying something dishonest is a good solution in the short term but not necessarily in the long term, but we don't make this trade off correctly. For example, you say "I love your work" or "Your presentation as great," but then you get stuck with listening to, or having to fix, more of it. Much like other activities we over focus on the short term.

The entire article is here.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

SciCafe: The Evolution of Irrationality

SciCafe
Originally posted April 2014

Laurie Santos presented her research on the evolution of irrationality and insights from primates. Don't worry if you missed it: we have a video of her presentation, including clips of monkeys "shopping" for treats! Santos explores the roots of human irrationality by watching our primate relatives make decisions in "monkeynomics."


Monday, October 21, 2013

Sense and Superstition

By JANE L. RISEN and A. DAVID NUSSBAUM
The New York Times
Published: October 4, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Research finds that people, superstitious or not, tend to believe that negative outcomes are more likely after they “jinx” themselves. Boast that you’ve been driving for 20 years without an accident, and your concern about your drive home that evening rises. The superstitious may tell you that your concern is well founded because the universe is bound to punish your hubris. Psychological research has a less magical explanation: boasting about being accident-free makes the thought of getting into an accident jump to mind and, once there, that thought makes you worry.

That makes sense intuitively. What’s less intuitive is how a simple physical act, like knocking on wood, can alleviate that concern.

The entire story is here.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Dan Ariely tells truth about dishonesty, being irrational

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely says it's human to act irrationally, that most people lie, but that we can trust each other.

By Karen Ravn
The Los Angeles Times
Originally published September 6, 2013

Most of us would rather not think of ourselves as irrational or dishonest. But in the books "Predictably Irrational" and "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty," Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, makes the case that we're all probably both. And what's more, he says, that's not entirely bad.

Does everyone behave irrationally sometimes?

Absolutely yes. Irrationality is not about stupidity. It's about being human. Actually it's about both. Sometimes we behave irrationally because we don't think, or we don't think long-term. But other times it's because we're human, because we're kind and generous and not selfish. So we're all irrational from time to time, and occasionally it's a good thing. How often we do it is hard to say. But consider texting and driving. If you text only 10% of the time that you drive, or even 1%, is that a lot or a little? The trouble is, however rarely you do it, the danger is just tremendous when you do.

The entire interview is here.