Why Partisanship Is Such a Worthy Foe of Objective Truth

Charlotte Hu
Discover Magazine
Originally published February 20, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Take, for example, an experiment that demonstrated party affiliation affected people’s perception of a protest video. When participants felt the video depicted liberally minded protesters, Republicans were more in favor of police intervention than Democrats. The opposite emerged when participants thought the video showed a conservative protest. The visual information was identical, but people drew vastly different conclusions that were shaded by their political group affiliation.

“People are more likely to behave in and experience emotions in ways that are congruent with the activated social identity,” says Bavel. In other words, people will go along with the group, even if the ideas oppose their own ideologies—belonging may have more value than facts.

The situation is extenuated by social media, which creates echo chambers on both the left and the right. In these concentric social networks, the same news articles are circulated, validating the beliefs of the group and strengthening their identity association with the group.

The article is here.

Court ruling on expert testimony could open door to junk science

Andis Robeznieks
AMA Wire
Originally posted October 20, 2017

The New Jersey Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling soon that may affect more than 2,000 cases before the state’s courts. The court’s decision could have an even more far-reaching impact and might eventually undermine medical research, patient-physician decision making and informed consent.

The issue is whether scientific testimony expressing refuted theories that have not been subjected to peer review and do not follow the traditional hierarchy of scientific evidence should be admissible in litigation involving plaintiffs who claim their inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) was caused by the drug isotretinoin, marketed as Accutane by Hoffmann-La Roche, formerly headquartered in Nutley, N.J.

The first lawsuit on this matter was filed in July 2003. A hearing on whether the plaintiffs’ witnesses would be allowed to testify was held in February 2015, after which trial Judge Nelson C. Johnson barred their testimony. In May 2015, Johnson dismissed 2,076 related cases based on his ruling about the evidence.

This past July, a three-judge panel of the state appellate court reversed both the ruling barring the testimony and the dismissal of the cases. Hoffman-La Roche has requested the state Supreme Court to review this ruling.

The pressor is here.

The Visual Guide to Morality: Vision as an Integrative Analogy for Moral Experience, Variability and Mechanism

Chelsea Schein, Neil Hester and Kurt Gray
Social and Personality Psychology Compass 10/4 (2016): 231–251

Abstract

Analogies help organize, communicate and reveal scientific phenomena. Vision may be the best analogy for understanding moral judgment. Although moral psychology has long noted similarities between seeing and judging, we systematically review the “morality is like vision” analogy through
three elements: experience, variability and mechanism. Both vision and morality are experienced as automatic, durable and objective. However, despite feelings of objectivity, both vision and morality show substantial variability across biology, culture and situation. The paradox of objective experience and cultural subjectivity is best understood through constructionism, as both vision and morality involve the flexible combination of more basic ingredients. Specifically, both vision and morality involve a mechanism that demonstrates Gestalt, combination and coherence. The “morality is like vision” analogy not only provides intuitive organization and compelling communication for moral psychology but also speaks to debates in the field, such as intuition versus reason, pluralism versus universalism and modularity versus constructionism.

The article is here.