Deluded, with reason

Huw Green

aeon.co

Originally published 31 Aug 20

Here is an excerpt:

Of course, beliefs don’t exist only in a private mental context, but can also be held in place by our relationships and social commitments. Consider how political identities often involve a cluster of commitments to various beliefs, even where there is no logical connection between them – for instance, how a person who advocates for say, trans rights, is also more likely to endorse Left-wing economic policies. As the British clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell and his colleagues note in their preprint, ‘De-rationalising Delusions’ (2019), beliefs facilitate affiliation and intragroup trust. They cite earlier philosophical work by others that suggests ‘reasoning is not for the refinement of personal knowledge … but for argumentation, social communication and persuasion’. Indeed, our relationships usually ground our beliefs in a beneficial way, preventing us from developing ideas too disparate from those of our peers, and helping us to maintain a set of ‘healthy’ beliefs that promote our basic wellbeing and continuity in our sense of self.

Given the social function of beliefs, it’s little surprise that delusions usually contain social themes. Might delusion then be a problem of social affiliation, rather than a purely cognitive issue? Bell’s team make just this claim, proposing that there is a broader dysfunction to what they call ‘coalitional cognition’ (important for handling social relationships) involved in the generation of delusions. Harmful social relationships and experiences could play a role here. It is now widely acknowledged that there is a connection between traumatic experiences and symptoms of psychosis. It’s easy to see how trauma could have a pervasive impact on a person’s sense of how safe and trustworthy the world feels, in turn affecting their belief systems.

The British philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe and his colleagues made this point in their 2014 paper, observing how ‘traumatic events are often said to “shatter” a way of experiencing the world and other people that was previously taken for granted’. They add that a ‘loss of trust in the world involves a pronounced and widespread sense of unpredictability’ that could make people liable to delusions because the ideas we entertain are likely to be shaped by what feels plausible in the context of our subjective experience. Loss of trust is not the same as the absence of a grounding belief, but I would argue that it bears an important similarity. When we lose trust in something, we might say that we find it hard to believe in it. Perhaps loss of certain forms of ordinary belief, especially around close social relationships, makes it possible to acquire beliefs of a different sort altogether.

The info is here.

The Influence of War on Moral Judgments about Harm

Hanne M Watkins and Simon M Laham
Preprint

Abstract

How does war influence moral judgments about harm? While the general rule is “thou shalt not kill,” war appears to provide an unfortunately common exception to the moral prohibition on intentional harm. In three studies (N = 263, N = 557, N = 793), we quantify the difference in moral judgments across peace and war contexts, and explore two possible explanations for the difference. Taken together, the findings of the present studies have implications for moral psychology researchers who use war based scenarios to study broader cognitive or affective processes. If the war context changes judgments of moral scenarios by triggering group-based reasoning or altering the perceived structure of the moral event, using such scenarios to make “decontextualized” claims about moral judgment may not be warranted.

Here is part of the discussion.

A number of researchers have begun to investigate how social contexts may influence moral judgment, whether those social contexts are grounded in groups (Carnes et al, 2015; Ellemers & van den Bos, 2009) or relationships (Fiske & Rai, 2014; Simpson, Laham, & Fiske, 2015). The war context is another specific context which influences moral judgments: in the present study we found that the intergroup nature of war influenced people’s moral judgments about harm in war – even if they belonged to neither of the two groups actually at war – and that the usually robust difference between switch and footbridge scenarios was attenuated in the war context. One implication of these findings is that some caution may be warranted when using war-based scenarios for studying morality in general. As mentioned in the introduction, scenarios set in war are often used in the study of broad domains or general processes of judgment (e.g. Graham et al., 2009; Phillips & Young, 2011; Piazza et al., 2013). Given the interaction of war context with intergroup considerations and with the construed structure of the moral event in the present studies, researchers are well advised to avoid making generalizations to morality writ large on the basis of war-related scenarios (see also Bauman, McGraw, Bartels, & Warren, 2014; Bloom, 2011).

The preprint is here.

The neuroscience of moral cognition: from dual processes to dynamic systems

Jay J Van Bavel, Oriel FeldmanHall, Peter Mende-Siedlecki
Current Opinion in Psychology
Volume 6, December 2015, Pages 167–172

Prominent theories of morality have integrated philosophy with psychology and biology. Although this approach has been highly generative, we argue that it does not fully capture the rich and dynamic nature of moral cognition. We review research from the dual-process tradition, in which moral intuitions are automatically elicited and reasoning is subsequently deployed to correct these initial intuitions. We then describe how the computations underlying moral cognition are diverse and widely distributed throughout the brain. Finally, we illustrate how social context modulates these computations, recruiting different systems for real (vs. hypothetical) moral judgments, examining the dynamic process by which moral judgments are updated. In sum, we advocate for a shift from dual-process to dynamic system models of moral cognition.

The entire article is here.