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 Universal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Universal. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

The sympathetic plot, its psychological origins, and implications for the evolution of fiction

Singh, M. (2021). 
Emotion Review, 13(3), 183–198.
https://doi.org/10.1177/17540739211022824

Abstract

For over a century, scholars have compared stories and proposed universal narrative patterns. Despite their diversity, nearly all of these projects converged on a common structure: the sympathetic plot. The sympathetic plot describes how a goal-directed protagonist confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and wins rewards. Stories with these features frequently exhibit other common elements, including an adventure and an orphaned main character. Here, I identify and aim to explain the sympathetic plot. I argue that the sympathetic plot is a technology for entertainment that works by engaging two sets of psychological mechanisms. First, it triggers mechanisms for learning about obstacles and how to overcome them. It builds interest by confronting a protagonist with a problem and induces satisfaction when the problem is solved. Second, it evokes sympathetic joy. It establishes the protagonist as an ideal cooperative partner pursuing a justifiable goal, convincing audiences that they should assist the character. When the protagonist succeeds, they receive rewards, and audiences feel sympathetic joy, an emotion normally triggered when cooperative partners triumph. The psychological capacities underlying the sympathetic plot are not story-specific adaptations. Instead, they evolved for purposes like learning and cooperation before being co-opted for entertainment by storytellers and cultural evolution.

Summary

Why do people everywhere tell stories about abused stepdaughters who marry royalty and revel in awarded riches? Whence all the virtuous orphans? The answer, I have argued, is entertainment.Tales in which a likable main character overcomes difficulty and reaps rewards create a compelling cognitive dreamscape. They twiddle psychological mechanisms involved in learning and cooperation, narrowing attention and inducing sympathetic joy. Story imitates life, or at least the elements of life to which we’ve evolved pleasurable responses.


Note: Many times, our patients narrate stories of their lives.  Narrative patterns may help psychologists understand internal motivations of our patients, how they view their life trajectories, and how we can help them alter their storylines for improved mental health.

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure

Jackson, C. J., Watts, J. and others.
Science  20 Dec 2019:
Vol. 366, Issue 6472, pp. 1517-1522
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw8160

Abstract

Many human languages have words for emotions such as “anger” and “fear,” yet it is not clear whether these emotions have similar meanings across languages, or why their meanings might vary. We estimate emotion semantics across a sample of 2474 spoken languages using “colexification”—a phenomenon in which languages name semantically related concepts with the same word. Analyses show significant variation in networks of emotion concept colexification, which is predicted by the geographic proximity of language families. We also find evidence of universal structure in emotion colexification networks, with all families differentiating emotions primarily on the basis of hedonic valence and physiological activation. Our findings contribute to debates about universality and diversity in how humans understand and experience emotion.

Monday, August 6, 2018

Why Should We Be Good?

Matt McManus
Quillette.com
Originally posted July 7, 2018

Here are two excerpts:

The negative motivation arises from moral dogmatism. There are those who wish to dogmatically assert their own values without worrying that they may not be as universal as one might suppose. For instance, this is often the case with religious fundamentalists who worry that secular society is increasingly unmoored from proper values and traditions. Ironically, the dark underside of this moral dogmatism is often a relativistic epistemology. Ethical dogmatists do not want to be confronted with the possibility that it is possible to challenge their values because they often cannot provide good reasons to back them up.

(cut)

These issues are all of considerable philosophical interest. In what follows, I want to press on just one issue that is often missed in debates between those who believe there are universal values, and those who believe that what is ethically correct is relative to either a culture or to the subjective preference of individuals. The issue I wish to explore is this: even if we know which values are universal, why should we feel compelled to adhere to them? Put more simply, even if we know what it is to be good, why should we bother to be good? This is one of the major questions addressed by what is often called meta-ethics.

The information is here.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Is there a universal morality?

Massimo Pigliucci
The Evolution Institute
Originally posted March 2018

Here is the conclusion:

The first bit means that we are all deeply inter-dependent on other people. Despite the fashionable nonsense, especially in the United States, about “self-made men” (they are usually men), there actually is no such thing. Without social bonds and support our lives would be, as Thomas Hobbes famously put it, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The second bit, the one about intelligence, does not mean that we always, or even often, act rationally. Only that we have the capability to do so. Ethics, then, especially (but not only) for the Stoics becomes a matter of “living according to nature,” meaning not to endorse whatever is natural (that’s an elementary logical fallacy), but rather to take seriously the two pillars of human nature: sociality and reason. As Marcus Aurelius put it, “Do what is necessary, and whatever the reason of a social animal naturally requires, and as it requires.” (Meditations, IV.24)

There is something, of course, the ancients did get wrong: they, especially Aristotle, thought that human nature was the result of a teleological process, that everything has a proper function, determined by the very nature of the cosmos. We don’t believe that anymore, not after Copernicus and especially Darwin. But we do know that human beings are indeed a particular product of complex and ongoing evolutionary processes. These processes do not determine a human essence, but they do shape a statistical cluster of characters that define what it means to be human. That cluster, in turn, constrains — without determining — what sort of behaviors are pro-social and lead to human flourishing, and what sort of behaviors don’t. And ethics is the empirically informed philosophical enterprise that attempts to understand and articulate that distinction.

The information is here.

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling

Daniel Smith and others
Nature Communications, 8: 1853
doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-02036-8

Storytelling is a human universal. From gathering around the camp-fire telling tales of ancestors to watching the latest television box-set, humans are inveterate producers and consumers of stories. Despite its ubiquity, little attention has been given to understanding the function and evolution of storytelling. Here we explore the impact of storytelling on hunter gatherer cooperative behaviour and the individual-level fitness benefits to being a skilled storyteller. Stories told by the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer population, convey messages relevant to coordinating behaviour in a foraging ecology, such as cooperation, sex equality and egalitarianism. These themes are present in narratives from other foraging societies. We also show that the presence of good storytellers is associated with increased cooperation. In return, skilled storytellers are preferred social partners and have greater reproductive success, providing a pathway by which group-beneficial behaviours, such as storytelling, can evolve via individual-level selection. We conclude that one of the adaptive functions of storytelling among hunter gatherers may be to organise cooperation.

The article is here.

Implications for psychotherapy and couples counseling.

Thursday, August 3, 2017

The Wellsprings of Our Morality

Daniel M.T. Fessler
What can evolution tell us about morality?
http://www.humansandnature.org

Mother Nature is amoral, yet morality is universal. The natural world lacks both any guiding hand and any moral compass. And yet all human societies have moral rules, and, with the exception of some individuals suffering from pathology, all people experience profound feelings that shape their actions in light of such rules. Where then did these constellations of rules and feelings come from?

The term “morality” jumbles rules and feelings, as well as judgments of others’ actions that result from the intersection of rules and feelings. Rules, like other features of culture, are ideas transmitted from person to person: “It is laudable to do X,” “It is a sin to do Y,” etc. Feelings are internal states evoked by events, or by thoughts of future possibilities: “I am proud that she did X,” “I am outraged that he did Y,” and so on. Praise or condemnation are social acts, often motivated by feelings, in response to other people’s behavior. All of this is commonly called “morality.”

So, what does it mean to say that morality is universal? You don’t need to be an anthropologist to recognize that, while people everywhere experience strong feelings about others’ behavior—and, as a result, reward or punish that behavior—cultures differ with regard to the beliefs on which they base such judgments. Is injustice a graver sin than disrespect for tradition? Which is more important, the autonomy of the individual or the harmony of the group? The answer is that it depends on whom you ask.

The information is here.

Monday, June 8, 2015

Is Morality Innate?

By Jesse J. Prinz
Forthcoming in W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology. Oxford University Press

Here is an excerpt:

The link between morality and human nature has been a common theme since ancient times, and, with the rise of modern empirical moral psychology, it remains equally popular today. Evolutionary ethicists, ethologists, developmental psychologists, social neuroscientists, and even some cultural
anthropologists tend to agree that morality is part of the bioprogram (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; de Waal, 1996; Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Hauser, 2006; Ruse, 1991; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Turiel, 2002). Recently, researchers have begun to look for moral modules in the brain, and they have been increasingly tempted to speculate about the moral acquisition device, and innate faculty for norm acquisition akin to celebrated language acquisition device, promulgated by Chomsky (Dwyer, 1999; Mikhail, 2000; Hauser, this volume). All this talk of modules and mechanism may make some shudder, especially if they recall that eugenics emerged out of an effort to find the biological sources of evil. Yet the tendency to postulate an innate moral faculty is almost irresistible. For one thing, it makes us appear nobler as a species, and for another, it offers an explanation of the fact that people in every corner of the globe seem to have moral rules. Moral nativism is, in this respect, an optimistic doctrine—one that makes our great big world seem comfortingly smaller.

The chapter is here.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

We Aren’t the World

By Ethan Watters
Pacific Standard
Originally published February 25, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

The potential implications of the unexpected results were quickly apparent to Henrich. He knew that a vast amount of scholarly literature in the social sciences—particularly in economics and psychology—relied on the ultimatum game and similar experiments. At the heart of most of that research was the implicit assumption that the results revealed evolved psychological traits common to all humans, never mind that the test subjects were nearly always from the industrialized West. Henrich realized that if the Machiguenga results stood up, and if similar differences could be measured across other populations, this assumption of universality would have to be challenged.

Henrich had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk. He began to wonder: What other certainties about “human nature” in social science research would need to be reconsidered when tested across diverse populations?

The entire article is here.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

The Moral Instinct

By Steven Pinker
The New York Times Magazine
Originally published January 13, 2008 (and still relevant)

Here are some excerpts:

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”

The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it.” People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause.

The entire article is here.