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 Skills. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Skills. Show all posts

Sunday, October 17, 2021

The Cognitive Science of Technology

D. Stout
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Available online 4 August 2021

Abstract

Technology is central to human life but hard to define and study. This review synthesizes advances in fields from anthropology to evolutionary biology and neuroscience to propose an interdisciplinary cognitive science of technology. The foundation of this effort is an evolutionarily motivated definition of technology that highlights three key features: material production, social collaboration, and cultural reproduction. This broad scope respects the complexity of the subject but poses a challenge for theoretical unification. Addressing this challenge requires a comparative approach to reduce the diversity of real-world technological cognition to a smaller number of recurring processes and relationships. To this end, a synthetic perceptual-motor hypothesis (PMH) for the evolutionary–developmental–cultural construction of technological cognition is advanced as an initial target for investigation.

Highlights
  • Evolutionary theory and paleoanthropological/archaeological evidence motivate a theoretical definition of technology as socially reproduced and elaborated behavior involving the manipulation and modification of objects to enact changes in the physical environment.
  • This definition helps to resolve or obviate ongoing controversies in the anthropological, neuroscientific, and psychological literature relevant to technology.
  • A review of evidence from across these disciplines reveals that real-world technologies are diverse in detail but unified by the underlying demands and dynamics of material production. This creates opportunities for meaningful synthesis using a comparative method.
  • A ‘perceptual‐motor hypothesis’ proposes that technological cognition is constructed on biocultural evolutionary and developmental time scales from ancient primate systems for sensorimotor prediction and control.

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Responding to Unprofessional Behavior by Trainees — A “Just Culture” Framework

J. A. Wasserman, M. Redinger, and T. Gibb
New England Journal of Medicine
February 20, 2020
doi: 10.1056/NEJMms1912591

Professionalism lapses by trainees can be addressed productively if viewed through a lens of medical error, drawing on “just culture” principles. With this approach, educators can promote a formative learning environment while fairly addressing problematic behaviors.

Addressing lapses in professionalism is critical to professional development. Yet characterizing the ways in which the behavior of emerging professionals may fall short and responding to those behaviors remain difficult.

Catherine Lucey suggests that we “consider professionalism lapses to be either analogous to or a form of medical error,” in order to create “a ‘just environment’ in which people are encouraged to report professionalism challenges, lapses, and near misses.” Applying a framework of medical error promotes an understanding of professionalism as a set of skills whose acquisition requires a psychologically safe learning environment.

 Lucey and Souba also note that professionalism sometimes requires one to act counter to one’s other interests and motivations (e.g., to subordinate one’s own interests to those of others); the skills required to navigate such dilemmas must be acquired over time, and therefore trainees’ behavior will inevitably sometimes fall short.

We believe that lapses in professional behavior can be addressed productively if we view them through this lens of medical error, drawing on “just culture” principles and related procedural approaches.

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The Just Culture Approach

Thanks to a movement catalyzed by an Institute of Medicine report, error reduction has become a priority of health systems over the past two decades. Their efforts have involved creating a “culture of psychological safety” that allows for open dialogue, dissent, and transparent reporting. Early iterations involved “blame free” approaches, which have increasingly given way to an emphasis on balancing individual and system accountability.

Drawing on these just culture principles, a popular approach for defining and responding to medical error recognizes the qualitative differences among inadvertent human error, at-risk behavior, and reckless behavior (the Institute for Safe Medication Practices also provides an excellent elaboration of these categories).

“Inadvertent human errors” result from suboptimal individual functioning, but without intention or the knowledge that a behavior is wrong or error-prone (e.g., an anesthesiologist inadvertently grabbing a paralyzing agent instead of a reversal agent). These errors are not considered blameworthy, and proper response involves consolation and assessment of systemic changes to prevent them in the future.

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Evolutionary Thinking Can Help Companies Foster More Ethical Culture

Brian Gallagher
ethicalsystems.org
Originally published August 20, 2019


Here are two excerpts:

How might human beings be mismatched to the modern business environment?

Many problems of the modern workplace have not been viewed through a mismatch lens, so at this point these are still hypotheses. But let’s take the role of managers, for example. Humans have a strong aversion to dominance, which is a result of our egalitarian nature that served us well in the small-scale societies in which we evolved. One of the biggest causes of job dissatisfaction, people report, is the interaction with their line manager. Many people find this relationship extremely stressful, as it infringes on their sense of autonomy, to be dominated by someone who controls them and gives them orders. Or take the physical work environment that looks nothing like our ancestral environment—our ancestors were always outside, working as they socialized and getting plenty of physical exercise while they hunted and gathered in tight social groups. Now we are forced to spend much of our daytime in tall buildings with small offices surrounded by genetic strangers and no natural scenes to speak of.

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What can business leaders learn from evolutionary psychology about how to structure relationships between bosses and employees?

One of the most important lessons from our research is that leaders are effective to the extent that they enable their teams to be effective. This sounds obvious, but leadership is really about the team and the followers. Individuals gladly follow leaders who they respect because of their skills and competence, and they have a hard time, by contrast, following a leader who is dominant and threatening. Yet human nature is also such that if you give someone power, they will use it—there is a fundamental leader-follower conflict. To keep managers from following the easy route of threat and dominance, every healthy organization should have mechanisms in place to curtail their power. In small-scale societies, as the anthropological literature makes clear, leaders are kept in check because they can only exercise influence in their domain of expertise, nothing else. What’s more, there should be room to gossip about and ridicule leaders, and leaders should be regularly replaced in order to prevent them building up a power base. Why not have feedback sessions where employees can provide regular inputs in the assessment of their bosses? Why not include workers in hiring board members? Many public and private organizations in Europe are currently experimenting with these power-leveling mechanisms.

The info is here.

Monday, June 17, 2019

Why High-Class People Get Away With Incompetence

Heather Murphy
The New York Times
Originally posted May 20, 2019

Here are two excerpt:

The researchers suggest that part of the answer involves what they call “overconfidence.” In several experiments, they found that people who came from a higher social class were more likely to have an inflated sense of their skills — even when tests proved that they were average. This unmerited overconfidence, they found, was interpreted by strangers as competence.

The findings highlight yet another way that family wealth and parents’ education — two of a number of factors used to assess social class in the study — affect a person’s experience as they move through the world.

“With this research, we now have reason to think that coming from a higher social class confers yet another advantage,” said Jessica A. Kennedy, a professor of management at Vanderbilt University, who was not involved in the study.

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Researchers said they hoped that the takeaway was not to strive to be overconfident. Wars, stock market crashes and many other crises can be blamed on overconfidence, they said. So how do managers, employers, voters and customers avoid overvaluing social class and being duped by incompetent wealthy people? Dr. Kennedy said she had been encouraged to find that if you show people actual facts about a person, the elevated status that comes with overconfidence often fades away.

The info is here.

Monday, May 9, 2016

How Animals Think

By Alison Gopnik
The Atlantic
May 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Psychologists often assume that there is a special cognitive ability—a psychological secret sauce—that makes humans different from other animals. The list of candidates is long: tool use, cultural transmission, the ability to imagine the future or to understand other minds, and so on. But every one of these abilities shows up in at least some other species in at least some form. De Waal points out various examples, and there are many more. New Caledonian crows make elaborate tools, shaping branches into pointed, barbed termite-extraction devices. A few Japanese macaques learned to wash sweet potatoes and even to dip them in the sea to make them more salty, and passed that technique on to subsequent generations. Western scrub jays “cache”—they hide food for later use—and studies have shown that they anticipate what they will need in the future, rather than acting on what they need now.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that these human abilities also appear in other species. After all, the whole point of natural selection is that small variations among existing organisms can eventually give rise to new species. Our hands and hips and those of our primate relatives gradually diverged from the hands and hips of common ancestors. It’s not that we miraculously grew hands and hips and other animals didn’t. So why would we alone possess some distinctive cognitive skill that no other species has in any form?

The article is here.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Bill would allow therapists to refuse clients over religious beliefs

Holly Meyer
The Tennessean
Originally published March 2, 2016

A bill that would allow counselors and therapists to refuse to see clients whose cases violate their religious beliefs has taken a step forward in the Tennessee state House.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Dan Howell, R-Georgetown, would let counselors and therapists refer clients without risking repercussions, such as a civil lawsuit or criminal action. The state House Health Subcommittee advanced the legislation Tuesday to the full committee.

The subcommittee recommended passage of the legislation with an amendment that changes the bill's language from "sincerely held religious beliefs" to "sincerely held principles."

The article is here.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Episode 23: Ethics and Skills for Psychologist as Supervisor-Post-Doctoral Supervision - Part 3

Podcasts 21, 22, and 23 will provide supervisors and supervisees with an understanding of the skills and ethical issues surrounding supervision, including the Pennsylvania State Board of Psychology’s Regulations dealing with postdoctoral supervision. The workshop will review the basic requirements for ethical supervision, common pitfalls, and give supervisors an understanding of the requirements that must be met for obtaining post-doctoral supervision.

In this episode, John's guest is Don McAleer, Psy.D., ABPP, a psychologist and post-doctoral supervisor, and Samuel J. Knapp, Ed.D., ABPP, psychologist and Professional Affairs Officer at the Pennsylvania Psychological Association.

At the end of the podcast series the participants will be able to:

1.  Describe essential factors involved in ethically sound and effective supervision;
2.  List or identify the State Board of Psychology requirements for post-doctoral supervision.
3.  Explain ways to improve supervisee's level of competence, self-reflection, and professionalism; &
4.  Identify strategies to comply with the Pennsylvania State Board of Psychology regulations on supervision of post-doctoral trainees.




The associated SlideShare presentation can be found here.






Friday, January 23, 2015

How To Spot A Bad Therapist: 10 Major Signs

By Tamara Hill
PsychCentral Blog

Here is an excerpt:

It is often much easier to spot a good therapist than it is to spot a bad therapist. We all look for kind, loving, compassionate, and caring people to connect with. Yet, we are hardly able to pinpoint when we are being taken advantage of for a variety of reasons. It’s who we are and how we have been molded in society and even in our families to think about “professionals.” The first few nonverbal signs we look for when we meet someone new is genuine smiling, eye contact, and maybe touch (a touch on the arm or hand) to convey friendliness, and a positive tone of voice. When we do not see these things, we often do one of two things:

  1. Ignore the behavior: Because the therapist may offer cheap rates, may be close to home, or offers other incentives, you may be more willing to ignore any signs of incompetence.
  2. Make excuses: “Maybe she/he is having a bad day,” or “maybe he/she just doesn’t like me.” “Maybe he/she needs time to warm up to me!” Does this sound familiar?

Editor's Note: While a psychologist may not do any of the 10 signs, there are probably other activities that we do during therapy that may be countertherapeutic or unhelpful.  Asking for honest feedback from patients about what we are doing well and not doing well may help your overall skill level and competence.  Many times, psychologists ask patients to self-reflect.  Maybe it is important for psychologists to take the time to self-reflect.

Monday, June 16, 2014

A test that fails

By Casey Miller & Keivan Stassun
Nature 303-304(2014) doi:10.1038/nj7504-303a
Published online 11 June 2014

Universities in the United States rely too heavily on the graduate record examinations (GRE) — a standardized test introduced in 1949 that is an admissions requirement for most US graduate schools. This practice is poor at selecting the most capable students and severely restricts the flow of women and minorities into the sciences.

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So what should universities do? Instead of filtering by GRE scores, graduate programmes can select applicants on the basis of skills and character attributes that are more predictive of doing well in scientific research and of ultimate employability in the STEM workforce. Appraisers should look not only at indicators of previous achievements, but also at evidence of ability to overcome the tribulations of becoming a PhD-level scientist.

Friday, May 2, 2014

Q&A: Why 40% of us think we're in the top 5%

By Christie Nicholson
www.smartplanet.com
Originally published April 15, 2014

Here are two excerpt:

Since then Dunning has performed many studies on incompetence. And he has uncovered something particularly disturbing: We humans are terrible at self-assessment, often grading ourselves as far more intelligent and capable than we actually are. This widespread inability can lead to negative consequences for management and for recognizing genius.

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Giving feedback especially in the workplace is a very touchy situation, and companies make reviews more touchy by directly connecting it to things like pay raises. There are two reasons people may not be receptive to feedback: One is it’s going to come as a complete surprise to them, because they probably don’t know what their weaknesses are, second is that it’s just a natural human tendency to be defensive.

So, you have to work around that. There are three different things you can do as a manager. The first thing is if you are going to give feedback make sure that it’s about a person’s behavior or their actions. Do not make it about their character or their ability.

The entire article is here.

Monday, April 7, 2014

Be employable, study philosophy

The discipline teaches you how to think clearly, a gift that can be applied to just about any line of work

By Shannon Rupp
Salon
Originally published July 1, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

The phrase caveat emptor is never more useful to remember than when paying tuition fees. Which reminds me: At what point does the minister of advanced education ask if it’s prudent to spend taxpayers’ money subsidizing trade school programs training people for dead trades? Just wondering.

Which is why I also recall a philosophy teaching assistant, who took a sabbatical from his fat-salaried job in the computer industry to do a company-funded PhD. He had benefited from that wave of computer development that hired logical thinkers to be trained in the new-fangled gizmos. For a brief, shining moment, BAs in philosophy had been hot commodities at places like IBM. One of his pals even wrote patents for companies that developed innovative tools and techniques. It turns out you need to define that new chair-like thing that isn’t quite a chair before you can patent it.

The entire article is here.

Editor's Note: Comedian Steve Martin has a degree in philosophy.