The psychologist rethinking human emotion

David Shariatmadari

The Guardian

Originally posted 25 Sept 20

Here is an excerpt:

Barrett’s point is that if you understand that “fear” is a cultural concept, a way of overlaying meaning on to high arousal and high unpleasantness, then it’s possible to experience it differently. “You know, when you have high arousal before a test, and your brain makes sense of it as test anxiety, that’s a really different feeling than when your brain makes sense of it as energised determination,” she says. “So my daughter, for example, was testing for her black belt in karate. Her sensei was a 10th degree black belt, so this guy is like a big, powerful, scary guy. She’s having really high arousal, but he doesn’t say to her, ‘Calm down’; he says, ‘Get your butterflies flying in formation.’” That changed her experience. Her brain could have made anxiety, but it didn’t, it made determination.”

In the lectures Barrett gives to explain this model, she talks of the brain as a prisoner in a dark, silent box: the skull. The only information it gets about the outside world comes via changes in light (sight), air pressure (sound) exposure to chemicals (taste and smell), and so on. It doesn’t know the causes of these changes, and so it has to guess at them in order to decide what to do next.

How does it do that? It compares those changes to similar changes in the past, and makes predictions about the current causes based on experience. Imagine you are walking through a forest. A dappled pattern of light forms a wavy black shape in front of you. You’ve seen many thousands of images of snakes in the past, you know that snakes live in the forest. Your brain has already set in train an array of predictions.

The point is that this prediction-making is consciousness, which you can think of as a constant rolling process of guesses about the world being either confirmed or proved wrong by fresh sensory inputs. In the case of the dappled light, as you step forward you get information that confirms a competing prediction that it’s just a stick: the prediction of a snake was ultimately disproved, but not before it grew so strong that neurons in your visual cortex fired as though one was actually there, meaning that for a split second you “saw” it. So we are all creating our world from moment to moment. If you didn’t, your brain wouldn’t be able make the changes necessary for your survival quickly enough. If the prediction “snake” wasn’t already in train, then the shot of adrenaline you might need in order to jump out of its way would come too late.

The info is here.

When Did We Become Fully Human? What Fossils and DNA Tell Us About the Evolution of Modern Intelligence

Nick Longrich

singularityhub.com

Originally posted 18 OCT 2020 

Here are two excerpts:

Because the fossil record is so patchy, fossils provide only minimum dates. Human DNA suggests even earlier origins for modernity. Comparing genetic differences between DNA in modern people and ancient Africans, it’s estimated that our ancestors lived 260,000 to 350,000 years ago. All living humans descend from those people, suggesting that we inherited the fundamental commonalities of our species, our humanity, from them.

All their descendants—Bantu, Berber, Aztec, Aboriginal, Tamil, San, Han, Maori, Inuit, Irish—share certain peculiar behaviors absent in other great apes. All human cultures form long-term pair bonds between men and women to care for children. We sing and dance. We make art. We preen our hair, adorn our bodies with ornaments, tattoos and makeup.

We craft shelters. We wield fire and complex tools. We form large, multigenerational social groups with dozens to thousands of people. We cooperate to wage war and help each other. We teach, tell stories, trade. We have morals, laws. We contemplate the stars, our place in the cosmos, life’s meaning, what follows death.

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First, we journeyed out of Africa, occupying more of the planet. There were then simply more humans to invent, increasing the odds of a prehistoric Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci. We also faced new environments in the Middle East, the Arctic, India, Indonesia, with unique climates, foods and dangers, including other human species. Survival demanded innovation.

Many of these new lands were far more habitable than the Kalahari or the Congo. Climates were milder, but Homo sapiens also left behind African diseases and parasites. That let tribes grow larger, and larger tribes meant more heads to innovate and remember ideas, more manpower, and better ability to specialize. Population drove innovation.

The info is here.

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 U.S. Has an Empathy Deficit—Here’s what we can do about it.

Judith Hall and Mark Leary

Scientific American

Originally poste 17 Sept 20

Here are two excerpts:

Fixing this empathy deficit is a challenge because it is not just a matter of having good political or corporate leaders or people treating each other with good will and respect. It is, rather, because empathy is a fundamentally squishy term. Like many broad and complicated concepts, empathy can mean many things. Even the researchers who study it do not always say what they mean, or measure empathy in the same way in their studies—and they definitely do not agree on a definition. In fact, there are stark contradictions: what one researcher calls empathy is not empathy to another.

When laypeople are surveyed on how they define empathy, the range of answers is wide as well. Some people think empathy is a feeling; others focus on what a person does or says. Some think it is being good at reading someone’s nonverbal cues, while others include the mental orientation of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes. Still others see empathy as the ability or effort to imagine others’ feelings, or as just feeling “connected” or “relating” to someone. Some think it is a moral stance to be concerned about other people’s welfare and a desire to help them out. Sometimes it seems like “empathy” is just another way of saying “being a nice and decent person.” Actions, feelings, perspectives, motives, values—all of these are “empathy” according to someone.

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Whatever people think empathy is, it’s a powerful force and human beings need it. These three things might help to remedy our collective empathy deficit:

Take the time to ask those you encounter how they are feeling, and really listen. Try to put yourself in their shoes. Remember that we all tend to underestimate other people’s emotional distress, and we’re most likely to do so when those people are different from us.

Remind yourself that almost everyone is at the end of their rope these days. Many people barely have enough energy to handle their own problems, so they don’t have their normal ability to think about yours.

The info is here.

Racism among white Christians is higher than among the nonreligious. That's no coincidence.

Robert Jones
nbcnews.com
Originally published 27 July 20

Here are two excerpts:

As a white Christian who was raised Southern Baptist and shaped by a denominational college and seminary, it pains me to see these patterns in the data. Even worse, these questions only hint at the magnitude of the problem.

To determine the breadth of these attitudes, I created a "Racism Index," a measure consisting of 15 questions designed to get beyond personal biases and include perceptions of structural injustice. These questions included the three above, as well as questions about the treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system and general perceptions of race, racism and racial discrimination.

Even at a glance, the Racism Index reveals a clear distinction. Compared to nonreligious whites, white Christians register higher median scores on the Racism Index, and the differences among white Christian subgroups are largely differences of degree rather than kind.

Not surprisingly, given their concentration in the South, white evangelical Protestants have the highest median score (0.78) on the Racism Index. But it is a mistake to see this as merely a Southern or an evangelical problem. The median scores of white Catholics (0.72) and white mainline Protestants (0.69) — groups that are more culturally dominant in the Northeast and the Midwest — are not far behind. Notably, the median score for each white Christian subgroup is significantly above the median scores of the general population (0.57), white religiously unaffiliated Americans (0.42) and Black Protestants (0.24).

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The results point to a stark conclusion: While most white Christians think of themselves as people who hold warm feelings toward African Americans, holding racist views is nonetheless positively and independently associated with white Christian identity. Again, this troubling relationship holds not just for white evangelical Protestants, but also for white mainline Protestants and white Catholics.

The info is here.

Moral Molecules: Morality as a combinatorial system

Curry, O. S., Alfano, M.,
Brandt, M. J., & Pelican, C. (2020, June 9).
https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/xnstk

Abstract

Is morality a combinatorial system in which a small number of simple moral ‘elements’ combine to form a large number of complex moral ‘molecules’? According to the theory of morality-as-cooperation, morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. As evolutionary game theory has shown, there are many types of cooperation; hence, the theory explains many types of morality, including: family values, group loyalty, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness and property rights. As with any set of discrete items, these seven ‘elements’ can, in principle, be combined in multiple ways. But are they in practice? In this paper, we show that they are. For each combination of two elements, we hypothesise candidate moral molecules; and we successfully locate examples of them in the professional and popular literature. These molecules include: fraternity, blood revenge, family pride, filial piety, gavelkind, primogeniture, friendship, patriotism, tribute, diplomacy, common ownership, honour, confession, turn taking, restitution, modesty, mercy, munificence, arbitration, mendicancy, and queuing. Thus morality – like many other physical, biological, psychological and cultural systems – is indeed a combinatorial system. And morality-as-cooperation provides a principled and systematic taxonomy that has the potential to explain all moral ideas, possible and actual. Pursuing the many implications of this theory will help to place the study of morality on a more secure scientific footing.

Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations.

Christie Wilcox
Quanta Magazine
Originally posted 23 April 20

Here are several excerpts:

The immediate benefit of sex for the algae is that they form resistant diploid spores that can outlast a bad environment. When better conditions return, the algal cells return to their haploid state through meiosis. But as Nedelcu and her colleagues point out, the process of meiosis also offers unique opportunities for genomic improvement that go beyond diversity.

Like all multicellular organisms, these algae have ways of healing small breaks or errors in their DNA. But if the damage is bad enough, those mechanisms struggle to accurately repair it. In those cases, having a second copy of that strand of DNA to use as a template for the repairs can be a lifesaver. “That’s basically what most organisms have by being diploid,” Nedelcu explained.

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Such indirect benefits may extend far beyond meiosis. “Sex also refers to copulation and sexual behaviors,” McDonough said. Researchers studying everything from crickets to mice are starting to see that having sex can have all sorts of unexpected upsides.

Unexpected, that is, because it’s generally assumed not only that sex is inefficient compared to asexual reproduction, but that it imposes an energy burden on the individuals involved. Producing eggs or sperm, finding a mate, the act of mating — all of it takes energy and resources. Consequently, there’s a trade-off between reproduction and other things an organism might do to survive longer, such as growing bigger or bolstering its immune system.

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Of course, those consequences go both ways: Cultural beliefs and views on sex influence how we go about studying and interpreting the results from research on other organisms. Our biases regarding sexual activity — like which kinds are or aren’t “normal” or proper — “have essentially affected what it is that we’ve deemed important to study in animals,” Worthington said.

McDonough agrees that our preconceptions of what sex should look like and the reasons why an individual should or shouldn’t have it have biased our understanding of animal behavior. They point to the research on same-sex behaviors in animals as a prime example of this. McDonough and their colleagues noticed that the scientific discourse surrounding same-sex behaviors involves a lot of weak or baseless assumptions — for example, that engaging in sexual acts is inherently costly, so same-sex sexual interactions must provide some overwhelming benefit, such as a large increase in lifetime reproductive output, for the behavior to arise and stick around through natural selection. But “in many situations, it isn’t costly, and it may have some kind of benefit that we don’t understand,” McDonough said.

The info is here.

Cultural evolution, Covid-19, and preparing for what’s next

Michael Muthukrishna

London School of Economics
and Political Science
Originally posted 22 April 2020

Here is an excerpt:

A recent analysis suggests that countries with efficient governments and tight, norm-enforcing cultures have the slowest rate of increase in Covid-19 cases adjusted for population size and the fewest deaths controlling for GDP per capita, inequality, and median age, weighting for time. Together, these explain 41% of the variance. Put another way, societies with institutions that advocate behaviours that reduce caseloads and citizens who conform to those behaviours are successful in managing this outbreak. Countries with institutions with behaviours that do not reduce caseloads and citizens who conform, and countries with institutions who advocate appropriate behaviours, but citizens who do not conform have worse outcomes. In addition to general government efficiency and a tendency to enforce norms, past research has implicated a package of behaviours classed as “collectivism” as having evolved as an adaptation to material insecurity, including pathogen prevalence, and other pressures that required avoiding individualistic behaviours that threatened the group welfare or challenges that required collective action. That is, collectivist cultures may have evolved a suite of behaviours that are well adapted to epidemics: less mouth-to-mouth romantic kissing and physical affection in general, more vigilance of others, even in-group members, social learning, conformity, obedience to authority, avoidance orientation, and so on. Indeed, a quick and dirty re-analysis of Gelfand et al’s models replacing tightness with collectivism, shows that collectivism alone predicts 36% of the variance, and together with the controls, predicts 48% of the variance (see Table 1).

The info is here.

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.

The Polarization of Reality

A. Alesina, A. Miano, and S. Stantcheva
American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings

Evidence is growing that Americans are polarized not only in their views on policy issues and attitudes towards government and society, but also in their perceptions of the same, factual reality.

In this paper we conceptualize how to think about the polarization of reality and review recent papers that show that Republican and Democrats as well as Trump and non-Trump voters since 2016) view the same reality through a different lens. Perhaps as a result, they hold different views about policies and what should be done to address different economic and social issues.

The direction of causality is unclear: On the one hand, individuals could select into political affiliation based on their perceptions of reality. On the other hand, political affiliation affects the information one receives, the groups one interacts with, and the media one is exposed to, which in turn can shape perceptions of reality.

Regardless of the direction of causality though, this is not about having different attitudes about economic or social phenomena or policies that could justifiably be viewed differently from different angles.

What is striking is rather to have different perceptions of realities that can be factually checked.

We highlight evidence about differences in perceptions across the political spectrum on social mobility, inequality, immigration, and public policies.


We also show that providing information leads to different reassessments of reality and different responses along the policy support margin, depending on one’s political leanings.

The paper can be downloaded here.

The dangerous veneer of ‘science’

Regini Rini
Times Literary Supplement
Originally posted Feb 20

"Race science” seems to be the hideous new trend of 2020. Last month, an article in the journal Philosophical Psychology calling for greater investigation of purported genetic bases for racial IQ differences became the focus of intense academic controversy. Then came a new book, Human Diversity, from Charles Murray, prompting the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie to tweet: “i guess we’re gonna spend february arguing with phrenologists”. And then just this week, a twenty-seven-year-old consultant to the British government quickly resigned following media reports of his apparent musings on eugenics.

What’s going on? Why are we suddenly talking about this nonsense again? Donald Trump, and the winks he tosses to torch-wielding “blood and soil” marchers, may have something to do with it. Clearly there is a market for white coats who cater to white hoods. But the “race science” racket is growing, and we needn’t assume that all its practitioners have such transparently bigoted motives. Rather, I suspect that some are in it for the iconoclastic thrill of prodding at bien pensant pieties from behind the intellectual shield of capital-S Science.

There has always been a certain sort of mind that delights in saying whatever is verboten, from the Marquis de Sade to Christopher Hitchens. The writer George Packer worries that, in the high-stakes moral atmosphere of the Trump era, we no longer have cultural space for such fearless exploration of opinion. But I think this gets things exactly backwards. Trumpism is partly a result of the fact that it is now much easier to acquire an audience for heterodoxy. You don’t have to be a gifted essayist; you need only a Twitter account and lack of moral inhibition. Thoughtful iconoclasts aren’t silenced, they’re merely lost amid the din of so many icons being artlessly shattered.

The info is here.

Folk standards of sound judgment: Rationality vs. Reasonableness

Igor Grossman and others
PsyArXiv Preprints
Last edited on 10 Jan 20

Abstract

Normative theories of judgment either focus on rationality – decontextualized preference maximization, or reasonableness – the pragmatic balance of preferences and socially-conscious norms. Despite centuries of work on such concepts, a critical question appears overlooked: How do people’s intuitions and behavior align with the concepts of rationality from game theory and reasonableness from legal scholarship? We show that laypeople view rationality as abstract and preference-maximizing, simultaneously viewing reasonableness as social-context-sensitive and socially-conscious, as evidenced in spontaneous descriptions, social perceptions, and linguistic analyses of the terms in cultural products (news, soap operas, legal opinions, and Google books). Further, experiments among North Americans and Pakistani bankers, street merchants, and samples engaging in exchange (vs. market-) economy show that rationality and reasonableness lead people to different conclusions about what constitutes good judgment in Dictator Games, Commons Dilemma and Prisoner’s Dilemma: Lay rationality is reductionist and instrumental, whereas reasonableness integrates preferences with particulars and moral concerns.

The research is here.

The cultural evolution of prosocial religions

Norenzayan, A., and others.
(2016). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, E1.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X14001356

Abstract

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10–12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term, cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and by-product approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate.

The paper is here.

Zombie Ethics: Don’t Keep These Wrong Ideas About Ethical Leadership Alive

Bruce Weinstein
Forbes.com
Originally poste 18 Feb 20

Here is an excerpt:

Zombie Myth #1: There are no right and wrong answers in ethics

A simple thought experiment should permanently dispel this myth. Think about a time when you were disciplined or punished for something you firmly believed was unfair. Perhaps you were accused at work of doing something you didn’t do. Your supervisor Mike warned you not to do it again, even though you had plenty of evidence that you were innocent. Even Mike didn’t fire you, your good reputation has been sullied for no good reason.

Suppose you tell your colleague Janice this story, and she responds, “Well, to you Mike’s response was unfair, but from Mike’s point of view, it was absolutely fair.” What would you say to Janice?

A. “You’re right. There are no right or wrong answers in ethics.”

B. “No, Janice. Mike didn’t have a different point of view. He had a mistaken point of view. There are facts at hand, and Mike refused to consider them.”

Perhaps you believed myth #1 before this incident occurred. Now that you’ve been on the receiving end of a true injustice, you see this myth for what it really is: a zombie idea that needs to go to its grave permanently.

Zombie myth #2: Ethics varies from culture to culture and place to place 

It’s tempting to treat this myth as true. For example, bribery is a widely accepted way to do business in many countries. At a speech I gave to commercial pilots, an audience member said that the high-level executives on a recent flight weren’t allowed disembark until someone “took care of” a customs official. Either they could give him some money under the table and gain entry into the country, or they could leave.

But just because a practice is widely accepted doesn’t mean it is acceptable. That’s why smart businesses prohibit engaging in unfair international business practices, even if it means losing clients.

The info is here.

Is it okay to sacrifice one person to save many? How you answer depends on where you’re from.

Sigal Samuel
vox.com
Originally posted 24 Jan 20

Here is an excerpt:

It turns out that people across the board, regardless of their cultural context, give the same response when they’re asked to rank the moral acceptability of acting in each case. They say Switch is most acceptable, then Loop, then Footbridge.

That’s probably because in Switch, the death of the worker is an unfortunate side effect of the action that saves the five, whereas in Footbridge, the death of the large man is not a side effect but a means to an end — and it requires the use of personal force against him.

It turns out that people across the board, regardless of their cultural context, give the same response when they’re asked to rank the moral acceptability of acting in each case. They say Switch is most acceptable, then Loop, then Footbridge.

That’s probably because in Switch, the death of the worker is an unfortunate side effect of the action that saves the five, whereas in Footbridge, the death of the large man is not a side effect but a means to an end — and it requires the use of personal force against him.

The info is here.

Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think

Brian Gallagher and Kevin Berger
Nautil.us
Originally published 14 Feb 19

Here is an excerpt:

When it comes to misinformation, twas always thus. What’s changed now?

O’Connor: It’s always been the case that humans have been dependent on social ties to gain knowledge and belief. There’s been misinformation and propaganda for hundreds of years. If you’re a governing body, you have interests you’re trying to protect. You want to control what people believe. What’s changed is social media and the structure of communication between people. Now people have tremendous ability to shape who they interact with. Say you’re an anti-vaxxer. You find people online who are also anti-vaxxers and communicate with them rather than people who challenge your beliefs.

The other important thing is that this new structure means that all sorts of influencers—the Russian government, various industry groups, other government groups—have direct access to people. They can communicate with people in a much more personal way. They can pose on Twitter and Facebook as a normal person who you might want to interact with. If you look at Facebook in the lead up to the 2016 election, the Russian Internet Research Agency created animal-lovers groups, Black Lives Matter groups, gun-rights groups, and anti-immigrant groups. They could build trust with people who would naturally be part of these groups. And once they grounded that trust, they could influence them by getting them not to vote or by driving polarization, causing more extreme rhetoric. They can make other people trust them in ways that would have been very difficult without social media.

Weatherall: People tend to trust their friends, their family, people who they share other affinities with. So if the message can look like it’s coming from those people, it can be very effective. Another thing that’s become widespread is the ability to produce easily shareable visual media. The memes we see on Twitter or on Facebook don’t really say anything, they conjure up an emotion—an emotion associated with an ideology or belief you might have. It’s a type of misinformation that supports your beliefs without ever coming out and saying something false or saying anything.

The interview is here.

How One Person Can Change the Conscience of an Organization

Nicholas W. Eyrich, Robert E. Quinn, and
David P. Fessell
Harvard Business Review
Originally published 27 Dec 19

Here is an excerpt:

A single person with a clarity of conscience and a willingness to speak up can make a difference. Contributing to the greater good is a deep and fundamental human need. When a leader, even a mid-level or lower level leader, skillfully brings a voice and a vision, others will follow and surprising things can happen—even culture change on a large scale. While Yamada did not set out to change a culture, his actions were catalytic and galvanized the organization. As news of the new “not for profit” focus of Tres Cantos spread, many of GSK’s top scientists volunteered to work there. Yamada’s voice spoke for many others, offering a clear path and a vision for a more positive future for all.

The info is here.

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.

Can Ethics be Taught? Evidence from Securities Exams and Investment Adviser Misconduct

Kowaleski, Z., Sutherland, A. and Vetter, F.
Available at SSRN
Posted 10 Oct 19

Abstract

We study the consequences of a 2010 change in the investment adviser qualification exam that
reallocated coverage from the rules and ethics section to the technical material section. Comparing advisers with the same employer in the same location and year, we find those passing the exam with more rules and ethics coverage are one-fourth less likely to commit misconduct. The exam change appears to affect advisers’ perception of acceptable conduct, and not just their awareness of specific rules or selection into the qualification. Those passing the rules and ethics-focused exam are more likely to depart employers experiencing scandals. Such departures also predict future scandals. Our paper offers the first archival evidence on how rules and ethics training affects conduct and labor market activity in the financial sector.

From the Conclusion

Overall, our results can be understood through the lens of Becker’s model of crime (1968, 1992). In this model, “many people are constrained by moral and ethical considerations, and did not commit crimes even when they were profitable and there was no danger of detection… The amount of crime is determined not only by the rationality and preferences of would-be criminals, but also by the economic and social environment created by… opportunities for employment, schooling, and training programs.” (Becker 1992, pp. 41-42). In our context, ethics training can affect an individual’s behavior by increasing the value of their reputation, as well as the psychological costs of committing misconduct. But such effects will be moderated by the employer’s culture, which affects the stigma of offenses, as well as the individual’s beliefs about appropriate conduct.

The research is here.

Can Business Schools Have Ethical Cultures, Too?

Brian Gallagher
www.ethicalsystems.org
Originally posted 18 Nov 19

Here is an excerpt:

The informal aspects of an ethical culture are pretty intuitive. These include role models and heroes, norms, rituals, stories, and language. “The systems can be aligned to support ethical behavior (or unethical behavior),” Eury and Treviño write, “and the systems can be misaligned in a way that sends mixed messages, for instance, the organization’s code of conduct promotes one set of behaviors, but the organization’s norms encourage another set of behaviors.” Although Smeal hasn’t completely rid itself of unethical norms, it has fostered new ethical ones, like encouraging teachers to discuss the school’s honor code on the first day of class. Rituals can also serve as friendly reminders about the community’s values—during finals week, for example, the honor and integrity program organizes complimentary coffee breaks, and corporate sponsors support ethics case competitions. Eury and Treviño also write how one powerful story has taken hold at Smeal, about a time when the college’s MBA program, after it implemented the honor code, rejected nearly 50 applicants for plagiarism, and on the leadership integrity essay, no less. (Smeal was one of the first business schools to use plagiarism-detection software in its admissions program.)

Given the inherently high turnover rate at a school—and a diverse student population—it’s a constant challenge to get the community’s newcomers to aspire to meet Smeal’s honor and integrity standards. Since there’s no stopping students from graduating, Eury and Treviño stress the importance of having someone like Smeal’s honor and integrity director—someone who, at least part-time, focuses on fostering an ethical culture. “After the first leadership integrity director stepped down from her role, the college did not fill her position for a few years in part because of a coming change in deans,” Eury and Treviño write. The new Dean eventually hired an honor and integrity director who served in her role for 3-and-a-half years, but, after she accepted a new role in the college, the business school took close to 8 months to fill the role again. “In between each of these leadership changes, the community continued to change and grow, and without someone constantly ‘tending to the ethical culture garden,’ as we like to say, the ‘weeds’ will begin to grow,” Eury and Treviño write. Having an honor and integrity director makes an “important symbolic statement about the college’s commitment to tending the culture but it also makes a more substantive contribution to doing so.”

The info is here.