The world is broken—and human kindness is the only solution

Anee Kingston
McClean's
Originally published June 19, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

The U.S. government has literally institutionalized cruelty, caging migrant children and arresting “Good Samaritans” helping ailing migrants at the Mexican border. Austerity programs, including those in Ontario, are targeting the vulnerable—the poor, children, those on the margins. The divisive, toxic political climate gave rise to the British group Compassion in Politics, founded last fall by activists and academics. “People look at British politics and see a lack of compassion in policy on refugees, immigration, housing, Brexit,” group co-founder Ma
tt Hawkins tells Maclean’s. Forty years of neo-liberal, free-market policies created widening inequities, falling incomes and a sense of desperation, he says. “There’s frustration with a political system that puts party above universal progress, majorities in Parliament over collaboration.” Support has been overwhelmingly positive, Hawkins says, including from the moral philosopher Peter Singer and Noam Chomsky; there’s interest in Australia and they’re liaising with Ardern’s office. In May, a cross-party group of British MPs called for legislation to contain a “compassion threshold.”

The loudest cries for compassion, tellingly, are heard within systems literally created to care for people. Compassionomics: The Revolutionary Scientific Evidence that Caring Makes a Difference, by American physician-scientists Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli, published in April, is the latest book to sound the alarm about systemic inhumanity within “patient-based” medicine. The authors identify a “compassion crisis” in U.S. health care; treating patients more kindly, they argue, improves health outcomes, reduces doctor burnout and lowers costs.

Canada is in similar straits, Toronto physician Brian Goldman, author of the 2018 bestseller The Power of Kindness: Why Empathy is Essential in Everyday Life, tells Maclean’s. “We’ve designed a system that edits out empathy, that makes it almost impossible.” Something has to crack, Goldman says: “We’ve reached the limit of the myth of the superman-superwoman [doctor] who can juggle 10 things at once.”

The info is here.

Why are smarter individuals more prosocial? A study on the mediating roles of empathy and moral identity

Qingke Guoa, Peng Suna, Minghang Caia, Xiling Zhang, & Kexin Song
Intelligence
Volume 75, July–August 2019, Pages 1-8

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine whether there is an association between intelligence and prosocial behavior (PSB), and whether this association is mediated by empathy and moral identity. Chinese version of the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices, the Self-Report Altruism Scale Distinguished by the Recipient, Interpersonal Reactivity Index, and the Internalization subscale of the Self-Importance of Moral Identity Scale were administered to 518 (N female = 254, M age = 19.79) undergraduate students. The results showed that fluid intelligence was significantly correlated with self-reported PSB; moral identity, perspective taking, and empathic concern could account for the positive association between intelligence and PSB; the mediation effects of moral identity and empathy were consistent across gender.

The article is here.

Here is part of the Discussion:

This is consistent with previous findings that highly intelligent individuals are more likely to engage in prosocial and civic activities (Aranda & Siyaranamual, 2014; Bekkers & Wiepking, 2011; Wiepking & Maas, 2009). One explanation of the intelligence-prosocial association is that highly intelligent individuals are better able to perceive and understand the desires and feelings of the person in need, and are quicker in making proper decisions and figuring out which behaviors should be enacted (Eisenberg et al., 2015; Gottfredson, 1997). Another explanation is that highly intelligent individuals are smart enough to realize that PSB is rewarding in the long run. PSB is rewarding because the helper is more likely to be selected as a coalition partner or a mate (Millet & Dewitte, 2007; Zahavi, 1977).

Nudging the better angels of our nature: A field experiment on morality and well-being.

Adam Waytz, & Wilhelm Hofmann
Emotion, Feb 28 , 2019, No Pagination Specified

Abstract

A field experiment examines how moral behavior, moral thoughts, and self-benefiting behavior affect daily well-being. Using experience sampling technology, we randomly grouped participants over 10 days to either behave morally, have moral thoughts, or do something positive for themselves. Participants received treatment-specific instructions in the morning of 5 days and no instructions on the other 5 control days. At each day’s end, participants completed measures that examined, among others, subjective well-being, self-perceived morality and empathy, and social isolation and closeness. Full analyses found limited evidence for treatment- versus control-day differences. However, restricting analyses to occasions on which participants complied with instructions revealed treatment- versus control-day main effects on all measures, while showing that self-perceived morality and empathy toward others particularly increased in the moral deeds and moral thoughts group. These findings suggest that moral behavior, moral thoughts, and self-benefiting behavior are all effective means of boosting well-being, but only moral deeds and, perhaps surprisingly, also moral thoughts strengthen the moral self-concept and empathy. Results from an additional study assessing laypeople’s predictions suggest that people do not fully intuit this pattern of results.

Here is part of the Discussion:

Overall, inducing moral thoughts and behaviors toward others enhanced feelings of virtuousness compared to the case for self-serving behavior. This makes sense given that people likely internalized their moral thoughts and behaviors in the two moral conditions, whereas the treat-yourself condition did not direct participants toward morality. Restricting analyses to days when people complied with treatment-specific instructions revealed significant positive effects on satisfaction for all treatments. That is, compared to receiving no instructions to behave morally, think morally, or treat oneself, receiving and complying with such instructions on treatment-specific days increased happiness and satisfaction with one’s life. Although the effect size was highest in the treat-yourself condition, improvements in satisfaction were statistically equivalent across conditions. Overall, the moral deeds condition in this compliant-only analysis revealed the broadest improvements across other measures related to well-being, whereas the treat-yourself condition was the only condition to significantly reduce exhaustion. Examining instances when participants reported behaving morally, thinking morally, or behaving self-servingly, independent of treatment, revealed comparable results for moral deeds and self-treats enhancing well-being generally, with moral thoughts enhancing most measures of well-being as well.

The research is here.

It’s Not Enough to Be Right—You Also Have to Be Kind

Ryan Holiday
www.medium.com
Originally posted on March 20, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Reason is easy. Being clever is easy. Humiliating someone in the wrong is easy too. But putting yourself in their shoes, kindly nudging them to where they need to be, understanding that they have emotional and irrational beliefs just like you have emotional and irrational beliefs—that’s all much harder. So is not writing off other people. So is spending time working on the plank in your own eye than the splinter in theirs. We know we wouldn’t respond to someone talking to us that way, but we seem to think it’s okay to do it to other people.

There is a great clip of Joe Rogan talking during the immigration crisis last year. He doesn’t make some fact-based argument about whether immigration is or isn’t a problem. He doesn’t attack anyone on either side of the issue. He just talks about what it feels like—to him—to hear a mother screaming for the child she’s been separated from. The clip has been seen millions of times now and undoubtedly has changed more minds than a government shutdown, than the squabbles and fights on CNN, than the endless op-eds and think-tank reports.

Rogan doesn’t even tell anyone what to think. (Though, ironically, the clip was abused by plenty of editors who tried to make it partisan). He just says that if you can’t relate to that mom and her pain, you’re not on the right team. That’s the right way to think about it.

The info is here.

Should doctors cry at work?

Fran Robinson
BMJ 2019;364:l690

Many doctors admit to crying at work, whether openly empathising with a patient or on their own behind closed doors. Common reasons for crying are compassion for a dying patient, identifying with a patient’s situation, or feeling overwhelmed by stress and emotion.

Probably still more doctors have done so but been unwilling to admit it for fear that it could be considered unprofessional—a sign of weakness, lack of control, or incompetence. However, it’s increasingly recognised as unhealthy for doctors to bottle up their emotions.

Unexpected tragic events
Psychiatry is a specialty in which doctors might view crying as acceptable, says Annabel Price, visiting researcher at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, and a consultant in liaison psychiatry for older adults.

Having discussed the issue with colleagues before being interviewed for this article, she says that none of them would think less of a colleague for crying at work: “There are very few doctors who haven’t felt like crying at work now and again.”

A situation that may move psychiatrists to tears is finding that a patient they’ve been closely involved with has died by suicide. “This is often an unexpected tragic event: it’s very human to become upset, and sometimes it’s hard not to cry when you hear difficult news,” says Price.

The info is here.

Empathy is hard work: People choose to avoid empathy because of its cognitive costs

Daryl Cameron, Cendri Hutcherson, Amanda Ferguson,  and others
PsyArXiv Preprints
Last edited January 25, 2019

Abstract

Empathy is considered a virtue, yet fails in many situations, leading to a basic question: when given a choice, do people avoid empathy? And if so, why? Whereas past work has focused on material and emotional costs of empathy, here we examined whether people experience empathy as cognitively taxing and costly, leading them to avoid it. We developed the Empathy Selection Task, which uses free choices to assess desire to empathize. Participants make a series of binary choices, selecting situations that lead them to engage in empathy or an alternative course of action. In each of 11 studies (N=1,204) and a meta-analysis, we found a robust preference to avoid empathy, which was associated with perceptions of empathy as effortful, aversive, and inefficacious. Experimentally increasing empathy efficacy eliminated empathy avoidance, suggesting cognitive costs directly cause empathy choice. When given the choice to share others’ feelings, people act as if it’s not worth the effort.

The research is here.

The ends justify the meanness: An investigation of psychopathic traits and utilitarian moral endorsement

JustinBalasha and Diana M.Falkenbach
Personality and Individual Differences
Volume 127, 1 June 2018, Pages 127-132

Abstract

Although psychopathy has traditionally been synonymous with immorality, little research exists on the ethical reasoning of psychopathic individuals. Recent examination of psychopathy and utilitarianism suggests that psychopaths' moral decision-making differs from nonpsychopaths (Koenigs et al., 2012). The current study examined the relationship between psychopathic traits (PPI-R, Lilienfeld & Widows, 2005; TriPM, Patrick, 2010) and utilitarian endorsement (moral dilemmas, Greene et al., 2001) in a college sample (n = 316). The relationships between utilitarian decisions and triarchic dimensions were explored and empathy and aggression were examined as mediating factors. Hypotheses were partially supported, with Disinhibition and Meanness traits relating to personal utilitarian decisions; aggression partially mediated the relationship between psychopathic traits and utilitarian endorsements. Implications and future directions are further discussed.

Highlights

• Authors examined the relationship between psychopathy and utilitarian decision-making.

• Empathy and aggression were explored as mediating factors.

• Disinhibition and Meanness were positively related to personal utilitarian decisions.

• Meanness, Coldheartedness, and PPI-R-II were associated with personal utilitarian decisions.

• Aggression partially mediated the relationship between psychopathy and utilitarian decisions.

The research can be found here.

Therapy Is No Longer a Politics-Free Zone

Peggy Drexler
The Wall Street Journal
Originally posted November November 23, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

A May 2018 survey published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology—which devoted an entire issue to how mental health professionals can understand and deal with the dramatic increase in clients feeling politics-related anxiety—found that of 604 psychotherapy patients from 50 states, only 32 percent said their therapist didn’t disclose their political beliefs, while 30 percent said their therapists divulged their views and the other 38 percent said their therapists very clearly made their beliefs known. “The old rules are pretty straightforward: Don’t talk about it,” says Dr. Steven Schlozman. a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “But our country right now is so about what side you’re on that almost every interaction people have these days is characterized by that.”

Full disclosure may be surprising, but it isn’t necessarily unwelcome. A 2018 poll conducted by market research firm Branded Research found that 61 percent of more than 8,000 therapy patients surveyed say it is “very” or “somewhat” important that they and their therapist share the same political values. Manhattan clinical psychologist Sarah Gundle, the co-clinical director of Octave, a “behavioral health studio” that opened in October offering individual and group therapy—including support groups for those feeling politics-related stress or anxiety—recalls a recent patient who wanted to know where she stood.

The info is here.

Therapist empathy and client outcome: An updated meta-analysis

Elliott, R., Bohart, A. C., Watson, J. C., & Murphy, D. (2018).
Psychotherapy, 55(4), 399-410.

Abstract

Put simply, empathy refers to understanding what another person is experiencing or trying to express. Therapist empathy has a long history as a hypothesized key change process in psychotherapy. We begin by discussing definitional issues and presenting an integrative definition. We then review measures of therapist empathy, including the conceptual problem of separating empathy from other relationship variables. We follow this with clinical examples illustrating different forms of therapist empathy and empathic response modes. The core of our review is a meta-analysis of research on the relation between therapist empathy and client outcome. Results indicated that empathy is a moderately strong predictor of therapy outcome: mean weighted r = .28 (p < .001; 95% confidence interval [.23, .33]; equivalent of d = .58) for 82 independent samples and 6,138 clients. In general, the empathy–outcome relation held for different theoretical orientations and client presenting problems; however, there was considerable heterogeneity in the effects. Client, observer, and therapist perception measures predicted client outcome better than empathic accuracy measures. We then consider the limitations of the current data. We conclude with diversity considerations and practice recommendations, including endorsing the different forms that empathy may take in therapy.

The research is here.

Clinical Impact Statement—

Question: Does therapist empathy predict success in psychotherapy? 

Findings: In general, clients have moderately better outcomes in psychotherapy when clients, therapists, and observers perceive therapists as understanding them. 

Meaning: Empathy is an important element of any therapeutic relationship, and worth the investment of time and effort required to do it well and consistently. 

Next Steps: Careful research using diverse methods is needed to firmly establish and explain the causal role of therapist empathy in bringing about client outcome; clinicians can contribute by identifying situations in which empathy may be particularly valuable or conversely contraindicated.

Do We Need To Teach Ethics And Empathy To Data Scientists?

Kalev Leetaru

Forbes.com

Originally posted October 8, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

One of the most frightening aspects of the modern web is the speed at which it has struck down decades of legislation and professional norms regarding personal privacy and the ethics of turning ordinary citizens into laboratory rats to be experimented on against their wills. In the space of just two decades the online world has weaponized personalization and data brokering, stripped away the last vestiges of privacy, centralized control over the world’s information and communications channels, changed the public’s understanding of the right over their digital selves and profoundly reshaped how the scholarly world views research ethics, informed consent and the right to opt out of being turned into a digital guinea pig.

It is the latter which in many ways has driven each of the former changes. Academia’s changing views towards IRB and ethical review has produced a new generation of programmers and data scientists who view research ethics as merely an outdated obsolete historical relic that was an obnoxious barrier preventing them from doing as they pleased to an unsuspecting public.

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Ironically, however, when asked whether she would consent to someone mass harvesting all of her own personal information from all of the sites she has willingly signed up for over the years, the answer was a resounding no. When asked how she reconciled the difference between her view that users of platforms willingly relinquish their right to privacy, while her own data should be strictly protected, she was unable to articulate a reason other than that those who create and study the platforms are members of the “societal elite” who must be granted an absolute right to privacy, while “ordinary” people can be mined and manipulated at will. Such an empathy gap is common in the technical world, in which people’s lives are dehumanized into spreadsheets of numbers that remove any trace of connection or empathy.

The info is here.

How Evil Happens

Noga Arikha
www.aeon.co
Originally posted July 30, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

An account of the inability to feel any emotion for such perceived enemies can take us closer to understanding what it is like to have crossed the line beyond which one can maim and kill in cold blood. Observers at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague note frequently the absence of remorse displayed by perpetrators. The clinical psychologist Françoise Sironi, who assesses perpetrators for the ICC and treats them and their victims, has directly seen what Lifton called the ‘murder of the self’ at work – notably with Kang Kek Iew, the man known as ‘Duch’, who proudly created and directed the Khmer Rouge S-21 centre for torture and extermination in Cambodia. Duch was one of those who felt absolutely no remorse. His sole identity was his role, dutifully kept up for fear of losing himself and falling into impotence. He did not comprehend what Sironi meant when she asked him: ‘What happened to your conscience?’ The very question was gibberish to him.

Along with what Fried calls this ‘catastrophic’ desensitisation to emotional cues, cognitive functions remain intact – another Syndrome E symptom. A torturer knows exactly how to hurt, in full recognition of the victim’s pain. He – usually he – has the cognitive capacity, necessary but not sufficient for empathy, to understand the victim’s experience. He just does not care about the other’s pain except instrumentally. Further, he does not care that he does not care. Finally, he does not care that caring does, in fact, matter. The emotionally inflected judgment that underlies the moral sense is gone.

The information is here.

Could Moral Enhancement Interventions be Medically Indicated?

Sarah Carter
Health Care Analysis
December 2017, Volume 25, Issue 4, pp 338–353

Abstract

This paper explores the position that moral enhancement interventions could be medically indicated (and so considered therapeutic) in cases where they provide a remedy for a lack of empathy, when such a deficit is considered pathological. In order to argue this claim, the question as to whether a deficit of empathy could be considered to be pathological is examined, taking into account the difficulty of defining illness and disorder generally, and especially in the case of mental health. Following this, Psychopathy and a fictionalised mental disorder (Moral Deficiency Disorder) are explored with a view to consider moral enhancement techniques as possible treatments for both conditions. At this juncture, having asserted and defended the position that moral enhancement interventions could, under certain circumstances, be considered medically indicated, this paper then goes on to briefly explore some of the consequences of this assertion. First, it is acknowledged that this broadening of diagnostic criteria in light of new interventions could fall foul of claims of medicalisation. It is then briefly noted that considering moral enhancement technologies to be akin to therapies in certain circumstances could lead to ethical and legal consequences and questions, such as those regarding regulation, access, and even consent.

The paper is here.

Curiosity and What Equality Really Means

Atul Gawande
The New Yorker
Originally published June 2, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

We’ve divided the world into us versus them—an ever-shrinking population of good people against bad ones. But it’s not a dichotomy. People can be doers of good in many circumstances. And they can be doers of bad in others. It’s true of all of us. We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.

Regarding people as having lives of equal worth means recognizing each as having a common core of humanity. Without being open to their humanity, it is impossible to provide good care to people—to insure, for instance, that you’ve given them enough anesthetic before doing a procedure. To see their humanity, you must put yourself in their shoes. That requires a willingness to ask people what it’s like in those shoes. It requires curiosity about others and the world beyond your boarding zone.

We are in a dangerous moment because every kind of curiosity is under attack—scientific curiosity, journalistic curiosity, artistic curiosity, cultural curiosity. This is what happens when the abiding emotions have become anger and fear. Underneath that anger and fear are often legitimate feelings of being ignored and unheard—a sense, for many, that others don’t care what it’s like in their shoes. So why offer curiosity to anyone else?

Once we lose the desire to understand—to be surprised, to listen and bear witness—we lose our humanity. Among the most important capacities that you take with you today is your curiosity. You must guard it, for curiosity is the beginning of empathy. When others say that someone is evil or crazy, or even a hero or an angel, they are usually trying to shut off curiosity. Don’t let them. We are all capable of heroic and of evil things. No one and nothing that you encounter in your life and career will be simply heroic or evil. Virtue is a capacity. It can always be lost or gained. That potential is why all of our lives are of equal worth.

The article is here.

A Mathematical Framework for Superintelligent Machines

Daniel J. Buehrer
IEEE Access

Here is an excerpt:

Allowing machines to modify their own model of the world and themselves may create “conscious” machines, where the measure of consciousness may be taken to be the number of uses of feedback loops between a class calculus’s model of the world and the results of what its robots actually caused to happen in the world. With this definition, if the programs, neural networks, and Bayesian networks are put into read-only hardware, the machines will not be conscious since they cannot learn. We
would not have to feel guilty of recycling these sims or robots (e.g. driverless cars) by melting them in incinerators or throwing them into acid baths, since they are only machines. However, turning off a conscious sim without its consent should be considered murder, and appropriate punishment should be administered in every country.

Unsupervised hierarchical adversarially learned inference has already shown to perform much better than human handcrafted features. The feedback mechanism tries to minimize the Jensen-Shanon information divergence between the many levels of a generative adversarial network and the corresponding inference network, which can correspond to a stack of part-of levels of a fuzzy class calculus IS-A hierarchy. 

From the viewpoint of humans, a sim should probably have an objective function for its reinforcement learning that allows it to become an excellent mathematician and scientist in order to “carry forth an ever-advancing civilization”. But such a conscious superintelligence “should” probably also make use of parameters to try to emulate the well-recognized “virtues” such as empathy, friendship, generosity, humility, justice, love, mercy, responsibility, respect, truthfulness, trustworthiness, etc.

The information is here.

Empathy and outcome meta-analysis

Elliott, Robert and Bohart, Arthur C. and Watson, Jeanne C. and Murphy, David
(2018) Psychotherapy 

Abstract


Put simply, empathy refers to understanding what another person is experiencing or trying to express. Therapist empathy has a long history as a hypothesized key change process in psychotherapy. We begin by discussing definitional issues and presenting an integrative definition. We then review measures of therapist empathy, including the conceptual problem of separating empathy from other relationship variables. We follow this with clinical examples illustrating different forms of therapist empathy and empathic response modes. The core of our review is a meta-analysis of research on the relation between therapist empathy and client outcome. Results indicated that empathy is a moderately strong predictor of therapy outcome: mean weighted r= .28 (p< .001; 95% confidence interval: .23 –.33; equivalent of d= .58) for 82 independent samples and 6,138 clients. In general, the empathy-outcome relation held for different theoretical orientations and client presenting problems; however, there was considerable heterogeneity in the effects. Client, observer, and therapist perception measures predicted client outcome better than empathic accuracy measures. We then consider the limitations of the current data. We conclude with diversity considerations and practice recommendations, including endorsing the different forms that empathy may take in therapy.

You can request a copy of the article here.

The Moral Importance of Reflective Empathy

Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu
J. Neuroethics (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-017-9350-7

Abstract

This is a reply to Jesse Prinz and Paul Bloom’s skepticism about the moral importance of empathy. It concedes that empathy is spontaneously biased to individuals who are spatio-temporally close, as well as discriminatory in other ways, and incapable of accommodating large numbers of individuals. But it is argued that we could partly correct these shortcomings of empathy by a guidance of reason because empathy for others consists in imagining what they feel, and, importantly, such acts of imagination can be voluntary – and, thus, under the influence of reflection – as well as automatic. Since empathizing with others motivates concern for their welfare, a reflectively justified empathy will lead to a likewise justified altruistic concern. In addition, we argue that such concern supports another central moral attitude, namely a sense of justice or fairness.

From the Conclusion

All in all, the picture that emerges is this. We have beliefs about how other individuals feel and how we can help them to feel better. There is both a set of properties such that: (1) if we believe individuals have any of these properties, this facilitates spontaneous empathy with these individuals, i.e. disposes us to imagine spontaneously how they feel, and (2) a set of properties such that if we believe that individuals have any of them, this hinders spontaneous empathy with them. In the former case, we will be spontaneously concerned about the well-being of these individuals; in the latter case, it will take voluntary reflection to empathize and be concerned about the individuals in question. We are also in possession of a sense of justice or fairness which not only animates us to benefit those whom justice requires to be benefited, but also to harm those whom justice requires be harmed.

The article can be accessed here.

Don’t look to the president for moral leadership

Julia Azari
vox.com
Originally posted February 19, 2018

President Trump’s reaction to last week’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, has drawn heavy criticism.

His initial round of tweets, reminding the country that the Florida shooter had been known to display “bad and erratic behavior,” and that such behavior should be “reported to the authorities” were not well-received. Critics called the response “victim-blaming.” Survivors of the shooting were neither comforted nor inspired.

Of course, we live in a time of partisan polarization, and it’s easy to suggest that there are many Americans who are unlikely to respond positively to any message from President Trump. That’s probably true. But none other than liberal snowflake Ari Fleischer — press secretary to George W. Bush — offered a broader indictment: “Some of the biggest errors Pres. Trump has made are what he did NOT say. He did not immediately condemn the KKK after Charlottesville. He did not immediately condemn domestic violence or offer sympathy for Rob Porter’s ex-wives. He should speak today about the school shooting.” Trump did address the incident in a speech on Thursday.

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Anti-Trump Republican Rick Wilson tweeted on Sunday that Trump isn’t a president but a “moral stress test.” His speech on Thursday and his visit to Florida over the weekend appeared to impress very few people. At the time of this writing, the president’s response appears to have culminated in a series of tweets chastising the FBI for not pursuing reports about the Florida shooter and linking the FBI’s failure to its Russia investigation.

The article is here.

The neuroscience of morality and social decision-making

Keith Yoder and Jean Decety
Psychology, Crime & Law
doi: 10.1080/1068316X.2017.1414817

Abstract
Across cultures humans care deeply about morality and create institutions, such as criminal courts, to enforce social norms. In such contexts, judges and juries engage in complex social decision-making to ascertain a defendant’s capacity, blameworthiness, and culpability. Cognitive neuroscience investigations have begun to reveal the distributed neural networks which interact to implement moral judgment and social decision-making, including systems for reward learning, valuation, mental state understanding, and salience processing. These processes are fundamental to morality, and their underlying neural mechanisms are influenced by individual differences in empathy, caring and justice sensitivity. This new knowledge has important implication in legal settings for understanding how triers of fact reason. Moreover, recent work demonstrates how disruptions within the social decision-making network facilitate immoral behavior, as in the case of psychopathy. Incorporating neuroscientific methods with psychology and clinical neuroscience has the potential to improve predictions of recidivism, future dangerousness, and responsivity to particular forms of rehabilitation.

The article is here.

From the Conclusion section:

Current neuroscience work demonstrates that social decision-making and moral reasoning rely on multiple partially overlapping neural networks which support domain general processes, such as executive control, saliency processing, perspective-taking, reasoning, and valuation. Neuroscience investigations have contributed to a growing understanding of the role of these process in moral cognition and judgments of blame and culpability, exactly the sorts of judgments required of judges and juries. Dysfunction of these networks can lead to dysfunctional social behavior and a propensity to immoral behavior as in the case of psychopathy. Significant progress has been made in clarifying which aspects of social decision-making network functioning are most predictive of future recidivism. Psychopathy, in particular, constitutes a complex type of moral disorder and a challenge to the criminal justice system.

Worth reading.....

Punish the Perpetrator or Compensate the Victim?

Yingjie Liu, Lin Li, Li Zheng, and Xiuyan Guo
Front. Psychol., 28 November 2017

Abstract

Third-party punishment and third-party compensation are primary responses to observed norms violations. Previous studies mostly investigated these behaviors in gain rather than loss context, and few study made direct comparison between these two behaviors. We conducted three experiments to investigate third-party punishment and third-party compensation in the gain and loss context. Participants observed two persons playing Dictator Game to share an amount of gain or loss, and the proposer would propose unfair distribution sometimes. In Study 1A, participants should decide whether they wanted to punish proposer. In Study 1B, participants decided to compensate the recipient or to do nothing. This two experiments explored how gain and loss contexts might affect the willingness to altruistically punish a perpetrator, or to compensate a victim of unfairness. Results suggested that both third-party punishment and compensation were stronger in the loss context. Study 2 directly compare third-party punishment and third-party compensation in the both contexts, by allowing participants choosing between punishment, compensation and keeping. Participants chose compensation more often than punishment in the loss context, and chose more punishments in the gain context. Empathic concern partly explained between-context differences of altruistic compensation and punishment. Our findings provide insights on modulating effect of context on third-party altruistic decisions.

The research is here.

These are the Therapist Behaviors that are Helpful or Harmful

Christian Jarrett
Research Digest
Originally published November 23, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

The most helpful therapy moments involved specific treatment techniques, such as times the therapist gave the client a concrete strategy they could use in everyday life; instances when the therapist made connections for the client (such as identifying events that affected their depression symptoms); or helped them process their emotions. Other helpful moments involved fundamental therapist skills, such as listening and expressing empathy, offering support or praise, or when the therapist discussed the process of therapy, including what the client wants from it.

The clients said they found these moments helpful because they learned a new skill, felt heard or understood, gained insight and/or were better able to process their emotions.

In terms of hindering therapist behaviours, these often seemed the same, superficially at least, as the helpful behaviours, including instances when the therapist listened, attempted to express empathy, or attempted to structure the session. The difference seemed to be in the execution or timing of these behaviours. The clients said they found these moments unhelpful when they were off-topic (for instance, their therapist listened to them “rambling” on about irrelevant details without intervening); when they felt like they were being judged; or they felt it was too soon for them to confront a particular issue.

The article is here.