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 Linguistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linguistics. Show all posts

Friday, May 4, 2018

Psychology will fail if it keeps using ancient words like “attention” and “memory”

Olivia Goldhill
Quartz.com
Originally published April 7, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Then there are “jangle fallacies,” when two things that are the same are seen as different because they have different names. For example, “working memory” is used to describe the ability to keep information mind. It’s not clear this is meaningfully different from simply “paying attention” to particular aspects of information.

Scientific concepts should be operationalized, meaning measurable and testable in experiments that produce clear-cut results. “You’d hope that a scientific concept would name something that one can use to then make predictions about how it’s going to work. It’s not clear that ‘attention’ does that for us,” says Poldrack.

It’s no surprise “attention” and “memory” don’t perfectly map onto the brain functions scientists know of today, given that they entered the lexicon centuries ago, when we knew very little about the internal workings of the brain or our own mental processes. Psychology, Poldrack argues, cannot be a precise science as long as it relies on these centuries-old, lay terms, which have broad, fluctuating usage. The field has to create new terminology that accurately describes mental processes. “It hurts us a lot because we can’t really test theories,” says Poldrack. “People can talk past one another. If one person says I’m studying ‘working memory’ and the other people says ‘attention,’ they can be finding things that are potentially highly relevant to one another but they’re talking past one another.”

The information is here.

Thursday, October 6, 2016

How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language

By Julie Sedivy
Scientific American
Originally published September 14, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing modes of thinking—one of these, a quick, gut-level “feeling,” and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more deliberate mode simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language cues our cognitive system to prepare for strenuous activity. This may seem paradoxical, but is in line with findings that reading math problems in a hard-to-read font makes people less likely to make careless mistakes (although these results have proven difficult to replicate).

An alternative explanation is that differences arise between native and foreign tongues because our childhood languages vibrate with greater emotional intensity than do those learned in more academic settings. As a result, moral judgments made in a foreign language are less laden with the emotional reactions that surface when we use a language learned in childhood.

Friday, December 4, 2015

Researchers uncover patterns in how scientists lie about their data

Science Simplified
Originally posted November 16, 2015

Even the best poker players have "tells" that give away when they're bluffing with a weak hand. Scientists who commit fraud have similar, but even more subtle, tells, and a pair of Stanford researchers have cracked the writing patterns of scientists who attempt to pass along falsified data.

The work, published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, could eventually help scientists identify falsified research before it is published.

There is a fair amount of research dedicated to understanding the ways liars lie. Studies have shown that liars generally tend to express more negative emotion terms and use fewer first-person pronouns. Fraudulent financial reports typically display higher levels of linguistic obfuscation – phrasing that is meant to distract from or conceal the fake data – than accurate reports.

The entire research review is here.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Linguistic Traces of a Scientific Fraud: The Case of Diederik Stapel

By David Markowitz and Jeffrey Hancock
Published: August 25, 2014
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0105937

Abstract

When scientists report false data, does their writing style reflect their deception? In this study, we investigated the linguistic patterns of fraudulent (N = 24; 170,008 words) and genuine publications (N = 25; 189,705 words) first-authored by social psychologist Diederik Stapel. The analysis revealed that Stapel's fraudulent papers contained linguistic changes in science-related discourse dimensions, including more terms pertaining to methods, investigation, and certainty than his genuine papers. His writing style also matched patterns in other deceptive language, including fewer adjectives in fraudulent publications relative to genuine publications. Using differences in language dimensions we were able to classify Stapel's publications with above chance accuracy. Beyond these discourse dimensions, Stapel included fewer co-authors when reporting fake data than genuine data, although other evidentiary claims (e.g., number of references and experiments) did not differ across the two article types. This research supports recent findings that language cues vary systematically with deception, and that deception can be revealed in fraudulent scientific discourse.

The entire article is here.

Friday, June 6, 2014

Gained in translation

When moral dilemmas are posed in a foreign language, people become more coolly utilitarian

The Economist
Originally posted May 17, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Morally speaking, this is a troubling result. The language in which a dilemma is posed should make no difference to how it is answered. Linguists have wondered whether different languages encode different assumptions about morality, which might explain the result. But the effect existed for every combination of languages that the researchers looked at, so culture does not seem to explain things. Other studies in “trolleyology” have found that East Asians are less likely to make the coldly utilitarian calculation, and indeed none of the Korean subjects said they would push the fat man when asked in Korean. But 7.5% were prepared to when asked in English.

The explanation seems to lie in the difference between being merely competent in a foreign language and being fluent. The subjects in the experiment were not native bilinguals, but had, on average, begun the study of their foreign language at age 14. (The average participant was 21.) The participants typically rated their ability with their acquired tongue at around 3.0 on a five-point scale. Their language skills were, in other words, pretty good—but not great.

The entire article is here.