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 Mental State. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mental State. Show all posts

Friday, December 7, 2018

Lay beliefs about the controllability of everyday mental states.

Cusimano, C., & Goodwin, G.
In press, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Abstract

Prominent accounts of folk theory of mind posit that people judge others’ mental states to be uncontrollable, unintentional, or otherwise involuntary. Yet, this claim has little empirical support: few studies have investigated lay judgments about mental state control, and those that have done so yield conflicting conclusions. We address this shortcoming across six studies, which show that, in fact, lay people attribute to others a high degree of intentional control over their mental states, including their emotions, desires, beliefs, and evaluative attitudes. For prototypical mental states, people’s judgments of control systematically varied by mental state category (e.g., emotions were seen as less controllable than desires, which in turn were seen as less controllable than beliefs and evaluative attitudes). However, these differences were attenuated, sometimes completely, when the content of and context for each mental state were tightly controlled. Finally, judgments of control over mental states correlated positively with judgments of responsibility and blame for them, and to a lesser extent, with judgments that the mental state reveals the agent’s character. These findings replicated across multiple populations and methods, and generalized to people’s real-world experiences. The present results challenge the view that people judge others’ mental states as passive, involuntary, or unintentional, and suggest that mental state control judgments play a key role in other important areas of social judgment and decision making.

The research is here.

Important research for those practicing psychotherapy.

Friday, August 28, 2015

Deconstructing intent to reconstruct morality

Fiery Cushman
Current Opinion in Psychology
Volume 6, December 2015, Pages 97–103

Highlights

• Mental state inference is a foundational element of moral judgment.
• Its influence is usually captured by contrasting intentional and accidental harm.
• The folk theory of intentional action comprises many distinct elements.
• Moral judgment shows nuanced sensitivity to these constituent elements.
• Future research will profit from attention to the constituents of intentional action.

Mental state representations are a crucial input to human moral judgment. This fact is often summarized by saying that we restrict moral condemnation to ‘intentional’ harms. This simple description is the beginning of a theory, however, not the end of one. There is rich internal structure to the folk concept of intentional action, which comprises a series of causal relations between mental states, actions and states of affairs in the world. Moral judgment shows nuanced patterns of sensitivity to all three of these elements: mental states (like beliefs and desires), the actions that a person performs, and the consequences of those actions. Deconstructing intentional action into its elemental fragments will enable future theories to reconstruct our understanding of moral judgment.

The entire article is here.