People are increasingly following their heart and not the Bible - poll

Ryan Foley

Christian Today

Originally published 2 DEC 23

A new study reveals that less than one-third of Americans believe the Bible should serve as the foundation for determining right and wrong, even as most people express support for traditional moral values.

The fourth installment of the America's Values Study, released by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University Tuesday, asked respondents for their thoughts on traditional moral values and what they would like to see as "America's foundation for determining right and wrong." The survey is based on responses from 2,275 U.S. adults collected in July 2022.

Overall, when asked to identify what they viewed as the primary determinant of right and wrong in the U.S., a plurality of participants (42%) said: "what you feel in your heart." An additional 29% cited majority rule as their desired method for determining right and wrong, while just 29% expressed a belief that the principles laid out in the Bible should determine the understanding of right and wrong in the U.S. That figure rose to 66% among Spiritually Active, Governance Engaged Conservative Christians.

The only other demographic subgroups where at least a plurality of respondents indicated a desire for the Bible to serve as the determinant of right and wrong in the U.S. were respondents who attend an evangelical church (62%), self-described Republicans (57%), theologically defined born-again Christians (54%), self-identified conservatives (49%), those who are at least 50 years of age (39%), members of all Protestant congregations (39%), self-identified Christians (38%) and those who attend mainline Protestant churches (36%).

By contrast, an outright majority of respondents who do not identify with a particular faith at all (53%), along with half of LGBT respondents (50%), self-described moderates (47%), political independents (47%), Democrats (46%), self-described liberals (46%) and Catholic Church attendees (46%) maintained that "what you feel in your heart" should form the foundation of what Americans view as right and wrong.

The info is here.

How robots can learn to follow a moral code

Neil Savage

Nature.com

Originally posted 26 OCT 23

Here is an excerpt:

Defining ethics

The ability to fine-tune an AI system’s behaviour to promote certain values has inevitably led to debates on who gets to play the moral arbiter. Vosoughi suggests that his work could be used to allow societies to tune models to their own taste — if a community provides examples of its moral and ethical values, then with these techniques it could develop an LLM more aligned with those values, he says. However, he is well aware of the possibility for the technology to be used for harm. “If it becomes a free for all, then you’d be competing with bad actors trying to use our technology to push antisocial views,” he says.

Precisely what constitutes an antisocial view or unethical behaviour, however, isn’t always easy to define. Although there is widespread agreement about many moral and ethical issues — the idea that your car shouldn’t run someone over is pretty universal — on other topics there is strong disagreement, such as abortion. Even seemingly simple issues, such as the idea that you shouldn’t jump a queue, can be more nuanced than is immediately obvious, says Sydney Levine, a cognitive scientist at the Allen Institute. If a person has already been served at a deli counter but drops their spoon while walking away, most people would agree it’s okay to go back for a new one without waiting in line again, so the rule ‘don’t cut the line’ is too simple.

One potential approach for dealing with differing opinions on moral issues is what Levine calls a moral parliament. “This problem of who gets to decide is not just a problem for AI. It’s a problem for governance of a society,” she says. “We’re looking to ideas from governance to help us think through these AI problems.” Similar to a political assembly or parliament, she suggests representing multiple different views in an AI system. “We can have algorithmic representations of different moral positions,” she says. The system would then attempt to calculate what the likely consensus would be on a given issue, based on a concept from game theory called cooperative bargaining.

The info is here.

Here is my summary:

Autonomous robots will need to be able to make ethical decisions in order to safely and effectively interact with humans and the world around them.

The article proposes a number of ways that robots can be taught to follow a moral code. One approach is to use supervised learning, in which robots are trained on a dataset of moral dilemmas and their corresponding solutions. Another approach is to use reinforcement learning, in which robots are rewarded for making ethical decisions and punished for making unethical decisions.

The article also discusses the challenges of teaching robots to follow a moral code. One challenge is that moral codes are often complex and nuanced, and it can be difficult to define them in a way that can be understood by a robot. Another challenge is that moral codes can vary across cultures, and it is important to develop robots that can adapt to different moral frameworks.

The article concludes by arguing that teaching robots to follow a moral code is an important ethical challenge that we need to address as we develop more sophisticated artificial intelligence systems.

Moral Future-Thinking: Does the Moral Circle Stand the Test of Time?

Law, K. F., Syropoulos, S., et al. (2023, August 10). 

PsyArXiv

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/c75ny

Abstract

The long-term collective welfare of humanity may lie in the hands of those who are presently living. But do people normatively include future generations in their moral circles? Across four studies conducted on Prolific Academic (N Total=823), we find evidence for a progressive decline in the subjective moral standing of future generations, demonstrating decreasing perceived moral obligation, moral concern, and prosocial intentions towards other people with increasing temporal distance. While participants generally tend to display present-oriented moral preferences, we also reveal individual differences that mitigate this tendency and predict pro-future outcomes, including individual variation in longtermism beliefs and the vividness of one’s imagination. Our studies reconcile conflicting evidence in the extant literature on moral judgment and future-thinking, shed light on the role of temporal distance in moral circle expansion, and offer practical implications for better valuing and safeguarding the shared future of humanity.

Here's my summary:

This research investigates whether people normatively include future generations in their moral circles. The authors conducted four studies with a total of 823 participants, and found evidence for a progressive decline in the subjective moral standing of future generations with increasing temporal distance. This suggests that people generally tend to display present-oriented moral preferences.

However, the authors also found individual differences that mitigate this tendency and predict pro-future outcomes. These factors include individual variation in longtermism beliefs and the vividness of one's imagination. The authors also found that people are more likely to include future generations in their moral circles when they are primed to think about them or when they are asked to consider the long-term consequences of their actions.

The authors' findings reconcile conflicting evidence in the extant literature on moral judgment and future-thinking. They also shed light on the role of temporal distance in moral circle expansion and offer practical implications for better valuing and safeguarding the shared future of humanity.

Overall, the research paper provides evidence that people generally tend to prioritize the present over the future when making moral judgments. However, the authors also identify individual factors and contextual conditions that can promote moral future-thinking. These findings could be used to develop interventions that encourage people to consider the long-term consequences of their actions and to take steps to protect the well-being of future generations.

The moral psychology of Artificial Intelligence

Bonnefon, J., Rahwan, I., & Shariff, A.

(2023, September 22). 

https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-030123-113559

Abstract

Moral psychology was shaped around three categories of agents and patients: humans, other animals, and supernatural beings. Rapid progress in Artificial Intelligence has introduced a fourth category for our moral psychology to deal with: intelligent machines. Machines can perform as moral agents, making decisions that affect the outcomes of human patients, or solving moral dilemmas without human supervi- sion. Machines can be as perceived moral patients, whose outcomes can be affected by human decisions, with important consequences for human-machine cooperation. Machines can be moral proxies, that human agents and patients send as their delegates to a moral interaction, or use as a disguise in these interactions. Here we review the experimental literature on machines as moral agents, moral patients, and moral proxies, with a focus on recent findings and the open questions that they suggest.

Conclusion

We have not addressed every issue at the intersection of AI and moral psychology. Questions about how people perceive AI plagiarism, about how the presence of AI agents can reduce or enhance trust between groups of humans, about how sexbots will alter intimate human relations, are the subjects of active research programs.  Many more yet unasked questions will only be provoked as new AI  abilities  develops. Given the pace of this change, any review paper will only be a snapshot.  Nevertheless, the very recent and rapid emergence of AI-driven technology is colliding with moral intuitions forged by culture and evolution over the span of millennia.  Grounding an imaginative speculation about the possibilities of AI with a thorough understanding of the structure of human moral psychology will help prepare for a world shared with, and complicated by, machines.

Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs

Huber, C., Dreber, A., et al. (2023).

PNAS of the United States of America, 120(23).

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2215572120

Abstract

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.

Significance

Using experiments involves leeway in choosing one out of many possible experimental designs. This choice constitutes a source of uncertainty in estimating the underlying effect size which is not incorporated into common research practices. This study presents the results of a crowd-sourced project in which 45 independent teams implemented research designs to address the same research question: Does competition affect moral behavior? We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis involving 18,123 experimental participants. Importantly, however, the variation in effect size estimates across the 45 designs is substantially larger than the variation expected due to sampling errors. This “design heterogeneity” highlights that the generalizability and informativeness of individual experimental designs are limited.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the research:

• Competition can have a small, but significant, negative effect on moral behavior.
• This effect is likely due to the fact that competition can lead to people being more self-interested and less concerned about the well-being of others.
• The findings of this research have important implications for our understanding of how competition affects moral behavior.

The research is here.

Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures

Atari, M., Haidt, J., et al. (2023).

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Advance online publication.

Abstract

Moral foundations theory has been a generative framework in moral psychology in the last 2 decades. Here, we revisit the theory and develop a new measurement tool, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire–2 (MFQ-2), based on data from 25 populations. We demonstrate empirically that equality and proportionality are distinct moral foundations while retaining the other four existing foundations of care, loyalty, authority, and purity. Three studies were conducted to develop the MFQ-2 and to examine how the nomological network of moral foundations varies across 25 populations. Study 1 (N = 3,360, five populations) specified a refined top-down approach for measurement of moral foundations. Study 2 (N = 3,902, 19 populations) used a variety of methods (e.g., factor analysis, exploratory structural equations model, network psychometrics, alignment measurement equivalence) to provide evidence that the MFQ-2 fares well in terms of reliability and validity across cultural contexts. We also examined population-level, religious, ideological, and gender differences using the new measure. Study 3 (N = 1,410, three populations) provided evidence for convergent validity of the MFQ-2 scores, expanded the nomological network of the six moral foundations, and demonstrated the improved predictive power of the measure compared with the original MFQ. Importantly, our results showed how the nomological network of moral foundations varied across cultural contexts: consistent with a pluralistic view of morality, different foundations were influential in the network of moral foundations depending on cultural context. These studies sharpen the theoretical and methodological resolution of moral foundations theory and provide the field of moral psychology a more accurate instrument for investigating the many ways that moral conflicts and divisions are shaping the modern world.

A pdf is here.

Here's my summary:

The article examines how the moral foundations theory (MFT) of morality applies to cultures outside of the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) world. MFT proposes that there are six universal moral foundations: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. However, previous research has shown that the relative importance of these foundations can vary across cultures.

The authors of the article conducted three studies to examine the nomological network of morality (i.e., the relationships between different moral foundations) in 25 populations. They found that the nomological network of morality varied significantly across cultures. For example, in some cultures, the foundation of care was more strongly related to the foundation of fairness, while in other cultures, the foundation of loyalty was more strongly related to the foundation of authority.

The authors argue that these findings suggest that MFT needs to be revised to take into account cultural variation. They propose that the nomological network of morality is shaped by a combination of universal moral principles and local cultural norms. This means that there is no single "correct" way to think about morality, and that what is considered moral in one culture may not be considered moral in another.

The article's findings have important implications for our understanding of morality and for cross-cultural research. They suggest that we need to be careful about making assumptions about the moral beliefs of people from other cultures. We also need to be aware of the ways in which culture can influence our own moral judgments.

Moral injury in post-9/11 combat-experienced military veterans: A qualitative thematic analysis.

Kalmbach, K. C., Basinger, E. D.,  et al. (2023). 

Psychological Services. Advance online publication.

https://doi.org/10.1037/ser0000792

Abstract

War zone exposure is associated with enduring negative mental health effects and poorer responses to treatment, in part because this type of trauma can entail crises of conscience or moral injury. Although a great deal of attention has been paid to posttraumatic stress disorder and fear-based physiological aspects of trauma and suffering, comparatively less attention has been given to the morally injurious dimension of trauma. Robust themes of moral injury were identified in interviews with 26 post-9/11 military veterans. Thematic analysis identified 12 themes that were subsumed under four categories reflecting changes, shifts, or ruptures in worldview, meaning making, identity, and relationships. Moral injury is a unique and challenging clinical construct with impacts on the individual as well as at every level of the social ecological system. Recommendations are offered for addressing moral injury in a military population; implications for community public health are noted.

Impact Statement

Military veterans who experienced moral injury—events that violate deeply held moral convictions or beliefs—reported fundamental changes following the morally injurious event (MIE). The MIE ruptured their worldview, or sense of right and wrong, and they struggled to reconcile a prior belief system or identity with their existence post-MIE. Absent a specific evidence-based intervention, clinicians are encouraged to consider adaptations to existing treatment models but to be aware that moral injury often does not respond to treatment as usual for PTSD or adjacent comorbid conditions.

The article is paywalled, with the link noted above.

My addition:

The thematic analysis identified 12 themes related to moral injury, which were grouped into four categories:

• Changes in worldview: Veterans who experienced moral injury often reported changes in their worldview, such as questioning their beliefs about the world, their place in it, and their own goodness.
• Changes in meaning making: Veterans who experienced moral injury often struggled to make meaning of their experiences, which could lead to feelings of emptiness, despair, and hopelessness.
• Changes in identity: Veterans who experienced moral injury often reported changes in their identity, such as feeling like they were no longer the same person they were before the war.
• Changes in relationships: Veterans who experienced moral injury often reported changes in their relationships with family, friends, and others. They may have felt isolated, misunderstood, or ashamed of their experiences.

Police are Getting DNA Data from People who Think They Opted Out

Jordan Smith

The Intercept

Originally posted 18 Aug 23

Here is an excerpt:

The communications are a disturbing example of how genetic genealogists and their law enforcement partners, in their zeal to close criminal cases, skirt privacy rules put in place by DNA database companies to protect their customers. How common these practices are remains unknown, in part because police and prosecutors have fought to keep details of genetic investigations from being turned over to criminal defendants. As commercial DNA databases grow, and the use of forensic genetic genealogy as a crime-fighting tool expands, experts say the genetic privacy of millions of Americans is in jeopardy.

Moore did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

To Tiffany Roy, a DNA expert and lawyer, the fact that genetic genealogists have accessed private profiles — while simultaneously preaching about ethics — is troubling. “If we can’t trust these practitioners, we certainly cannot trust law enforcement,” she said. “These investigations have serious consequences; they involve people who have never been suspected of a crime.” At the very least, law enforcement actors should have a warrant to conduct a genetic genealogy search, she said. “Anything less is a serious violation of privacy.”

(cut)

Exploitation of the GEDmatch loophole isn’t the only example of genetic genealogists and their law enforcement partners playing fast and loose with the rules.

Law enforcement officers have used genetic genealogy to solve crimes that aren’t eligible for genetic investigation per company terms of service and Justice Department guidelines, which say the practice should be reserved for violent crimes like rape and murder only when all other “reasonable” avenues of investigation have failed. In May, CNN reported on a U.S. marshal who used genetic genealogy to solve a decades-old prison break in Nebraska. There is no prison break exception to the eligibility rules, Larkin noted in a post on her website. “This case should never have used forensic genetic genealogy in the first place.”

A month later, Larkin wrote about another violation, this time in a California case. The FBI and the Riverside County Regional Cold Case Homicide Team had identified the victim of a 1996 homicide using the MyHeritage database — an explicit violation of the company’s terms of service, which make clear that using the database for law enforcement purposes is “strictly prohibited” absent a court order.

“The case presents an example of ‘noble cause bias,’” Larkin wrote, “in which the investigators seem to feel that their objective is so worthy that they can break the rules in place to protect others.”

The story is here.

My take:

Forensic genetic genealogists have been skirting GEDmatch privacy rules by searching users who explicitly opted out of sharing DNA with law enforcement. This means that police can access the DNA of people who thought they were protecting their privacy by opting out of law enforcement searches.

The practice of forensic genetic genealogy has been used to solve a number of cold cases, but it has also raised concerns about privacy and civil liberties. Some people worry that the police could use DNA data to target innocent people or to build a genetic database of the entire population.

GEDmatch has since changed its privacy policy to make it more difficult for police to access DNA data from users who have opted out. However, the damage may already be done. Police have already used GEDmatch data to solve dozens of cases, and it is unclear how many people have had their DNA data accessed without their knowledge or consent.

The Plunging Number of Primary Care Physicians Reaches a Tipping Point.

Elisabeth Rosenthal

KFF Health News

Originally posted 8 September 23

Here are two excerpts:

The percentage of U.S. doctors in adult primary care has been declining for years and is now about 25% — a tipping point beyond which many Americans won’t be able to find a family doctor at all.

Already, more than 100 million Americans don’t have usual access to primary care, a number that has nearly doubled since 2014. One reason our coronavirus vaccination rates were low compared with those in countries such as China, France, and Japan could be because so many of us no longer regularly see a familiar doctor we trust.

Another telling statistic: In 1980, 62% of doctor’s visits for adults 65 and older were for primary care and 38% were for specialists, according to Michael L. Barnett, a health systems researcher and primary care doctor in the Harvard Medical School system. By 2013, that ratio had exactly flipped and has likely “only gotten worse,” he said, noting sadly: “We have a specialty-driven system. Primary care is seen as a thankless, undesirable backwater.” That’s “tragic,” in his words — studies show that a strong foundation of primary care yields better health outcomes overall, greater equity in health care access, and lower per capita health costs.

One explanation for the disappearing primary care doctor is financial. The payment structure in the U.S. health system has long rewarded surgeries and procedures while shortchanging the diagnostic, prescriptive, and preventive work that is the province of primary care. Furthermore, the traditionally independent doctors in this field have little power to negotiate sustainable payments with the mammoth insurers in the U.S. market.

Faced with this situation, many independent primary care doctors have sold their practices to health systems or commercial management chains (some private equity-owned) so that, today, three-quarters of doctors are now employees of those outfits.

(cut)

Some relatively simple solutions are available, if we care enough about supporting this foundational part of a good medical system. Hospitals and commercial groups could invest some of the money they earn by replacing hips and knees to support primary care staffing; giving these doctors more face time with their patients would be good for their customers’ health and loyalty if not (always) the bottom line.

Reimbursement for primary care visits could be increased to reflect their value — perhaps by enacting a national primary care fee schedule, so these doctors won’t have to butt heads with insurers. And policymakers could consider forgiving the medical school debt of doctors who choose primary care as a profession.

They deserve support that allows them to do what they were trained to do: diagnosing, treating, and getting to know their patients.

The info is here.

Here is my warning:

The number of primary care physicians in the US is declining, and this trend is reaching a tipping point. More than 100 million Americans don't have usual access to primary care, and this number has nearly doubled since 2014. This shortage of primary care physicians could have a negative impact on public health, as people without access to primary care are more likely to delay or forgo needed care.

Seeing and sanctioning structural unfairness

Flores-Robles, G., & Gantman, A. P. (2023, June 28).

PsyArXiv

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/u9tfh

Abstract

People tend to explain wrongdoing as the result of a bad actor or bad system. In five studies (four U.S. online convenience, one U.S. representative sample), we tested whether the way people understand unfairness affects how they sanction it. In Pilot 1A (N = 40), people interpreted unfair offers in an economic game as the result of a bad actor (vs. unfair rules), unless incentivized (Pilot 1B, N = 40), which, in Study 1 (N = 370), predicted costly punishment of individuals (vs. changing unfair rules). In Studies 2 (N = 500) and 3, (N = 470, representative of age, gender, and ethnicity in the U.S), we found that people paid to change the rules for the final round of the game (vs. punished individuals), when they were randomly assigned a bad system (vs. bad actor) explanation for prior identical unfair offers. Explanations for unfairness affect how people sanction it.

Statement of Relevance

Humans are facing massive problems including economic and social inequality. These problems are often framed in the media, and by friends and experts, as a problem either of individual action (e.g., racist beliefs) or of structures (e.g., discriminatory housing laws). The current research uses a context-free economic game to ask whether these explanations have any effect on what people think should happen next. We find that people tend to explain unfair offers in the game in terms of bad actors (unless incentivized) which is related to punishing individuals over changing the game itself.  When people are told that the unfairness they witnessed was the result of a bad actor, they prefer to punish that actor; when they are told that the same unfair behavior is the result of unfair rules, they prefer to change the rules. Our understanding of the mechanisms of inequality affect how we want to sanction it.

My summary:

The article discusses how people tend to explain wrongdoing as the result of a bad actor or bad system.  In essence, this is a human, decision-making process. The authors conducted five studies to test whether the way people understand unfairness affects how they sanction it. They found that people are more likely to punish individuals for unfair behavior when they believe that the behavior is the result of a bad actor. However, they are more likely to try to change the system (or the rules) when they believe that the behavior is the result of a bad system.

The authors argue that these findings have important implications for ethics, morality, and values. They suggest that we need to be more aware of the way we explain unfairness, because our explanations can influence how we respond to it. How an individual frames the issue is a key to correct possible solutions, as well as biases.  They also suggest that we need to be more critical of the systems that we live in, because these systems can create unfairness.

The article raises a number of ethical, moral, and value-related questions. For example, what is the responsibility of individuals to challenge unfair systems? What is the role of government in addressing structural unfairness? And what are the limits of individual and collective action in addressing unfairness?

The article does not provide easy answers to these questions. However, it does provide a valuable framework for thinking about unfairness and how we can respond to it.

It’s not only political conservatives who worry about moral purity

K. Gray, W. Blakey, & N. DiMaggio

psychce.co

Originally posted 13 July 23

Here are two excerpts:

What does this have to do with differences in moral psychology? Well, moral psychologists have suggested that politically charged arguments about sexuality, spirituality and other subjects reflect deep differences in the moral values of liberals and conservatives. Research involving scenarios like this one has seemed to indicate that conservatives, unlike liberals, think that maintaining ‘purity’ is a moral good in itself – which for them might mean supporting what they construe as the ‘sanctity of marriage’, for example.

It may seem strange to think about ‘purity’ as a core driver of political differences. But purity, in the moral sense, is an old concept. It pops up in the Hebrew Bible a lot, in taboos around food, menstruation, and divine encounters. When Moses meets God at the Burning Bush, God says to Moses: ‘Do not come any closer, take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.’ Why does God tell Moses to take off his shoes? Not because his shoes magically hurt God, but because shoes are dirty, and it’s disrespectful to wear your shoes in the presence of the creator of the universe. Similarly, in ancient Greece, worshippers were often required to endure long purification rituals before looking at sacred religious idols or engaging in different spiritual rites. These ancient moral practices seem to reflect an intuition that ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’.

In the modern era, purity has repeatedly appeared at the centre of political battlegrounds, as in clashes between US conservatives and liberals over sexual education and mores in the 1990s. It was around this time that the psychologist Jonathan Haidt began formulating a theory to help explain the moral divide. Moral foundations theory argues that liberals and conservatives are divided because they rely on distinct moral values, including purity, to different degrees.

(cut)

A harm-focused perspective on moral judgments related to ‘purity’ could help us better understand and communicate with moral opponents. We all grasp the importance of protecting ourselves and our loved ones from harm. Learning that people on the ‘other side’ of a political divide care about questions of purity because they connect these to their understanding of harm can help us empathise with different moral opinions. It is easy for a liberal to dismiss a conservative’s condemnation of dead-chicken sex when it is merely said to be ‘impure’; it is harder to be dismissive if it’s suggested that someone who makes a habit of that behaviour might end up harming people.

Explicitly grounding discussions of morality in perceptions of harm could help us all to be better citizens of a ‘small-L liberal’ society – one in which the right to swing our fists ends where others’ noses begin. If something seems disgusting, impure and immoral to you, take some time to try to articulate the harms you intuitively perceive. Talking about these potential harms may help other people understand where you are coming from. Of course, someone might not share your judgment that harm is being done. But identifying perceived harms at least puts the conversation in terms that everyone understands.

The info is here.

Here is my summary:

The authors define purity as "the state of being free from contamination or pollution."  They argue that people on both the left and the right care about purity because they associate it with safety and well-being.

They provide examples of how liberals and conservatives can both use purity-related language, such as "desecrate" and "toxic." They propose a new explanation of moral judgments that suggests that people care about purity when they perceive that 'impure' acts can lead to harm.

The (moral) language of hate

Brendan Kennedy et al.

PNAS Nexus, Volume 2,

Issue 7, July 2023, 210

https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad210

Abstract

Humans use language toward hateful ends, inciting violence and genocide, intimidating and denigrating others based on their identity. Despite efforts to better address the language of hate in the public sphere, the psychological processes involved in hateful language remain unclear. In this work, we hypothesize that morality and hate are concomitant in language. In a series of studies, we find evidence in support of this hypothesis using language from a diverse array of contexts, including the use of hateful language in propaganda to inspire genocide (Study 1), hateful slurs as they occur in large text corpora across a multitude of languages (Study 2), and hate speech on social-media platforms (Study 3). In post hoc analyses focusing on particular moral concerns, we found that the type of moral content invoked through hate speech varied by context, with Purity language prominent in hateful propaganda and online hate speech and Loyalty language invoked in hateful slurs across languages. Our findings provide a new psychological lens for understanding hateful language and points to further research into the intersection of morality and hate, with practical implications for mitigating hateful rhetoric online.

Significance Statement

Only recently have researchers begun to propose that violence and prejudice may have roots in moral intuitions. Can it be the case, we ask, that the act of verbalizing hatred involves a moral component, and that hateful and moral language are inseparable constructs? Across three studies focusing on the language of morality and hate, including historical text analysis of Nazi propaganda, implicit associations across 25 languages, and extremist right-wing communications on social media, we demonstrate that moral language, and specifically, Purity-related language (i.e. language about physical purity, avoidance of disgusting things, and resisting our carnal desires in favor of a higher, divine nature) and Loyalty related language are concomitant with hateful and exclusionary language.

-----------------

Here are some of the key findings of the study:

• Hateful language is often associated with moral foundations such as purity, loyalty, and authority.
• The type of moral content invoked through hate speech varies by context.
• Purity language is prominent in hateful propaganda and online hate speech.
• Loyalty language is invoked in hateful slurs across languages.
• Authority language is invoked in hateful rhetoric that targets political figures or institutions.

The study's findings have important implications for understanding and mitigating hate speech.  By understanding the moral foundations that underlie hateful language, we can develop more effective strategies for countering it. For example, we can challenge the moral claims made by hate speech and offer alternative moral frameworks that promote tolerance and understanding.

Beyond killing one to save five: Sensitivity to ratio and probability in moral judgment

Ryazanov, A.A., Wang, S.T, et al. (2023).

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Volume 108, September 2023, 104499

Abstract

A great deal of current research on moral judgments centers on moral dilemmas concerning tradeoffs between one and five lives. Whether one considers killing one innocent person to save five others to be morally required or impermissible has been taken to determine whether one is appealing to consequentialist or non-consequentialist reasoning. But this focus on tradeoffs between one and five may obscure more nuanced commitments involved in moral decision-making that are revealed when the numbers and ratio of lives to be traded off are varied, and when the probabilities of each outcome occurring are less than certain. Four studies examine participants' reactions to scenarios that diverge in these ways from the standard ones. Study 1 examines the extent to which people are sensitive to the ratio of lives saved to lives ended by a particular action. Study 2 verifies that the ratio rather than the difference between the two values is operative. Study 3 examines whether participants treat probabilistic harm to some as equivalent to certainly harming fewer, holding expected ratio constant. Study 4 explores an analogous issue regarding the sensitivity of probabilistic saving. Participants are remarkably sensitive to expected ratio for probabilistic harms while deviating from expected value for probabilistic saving. Collectively, the studies provide evidence that people's moral judgments are consistent with the principle of threshold deontology.

General discussion

Collectively, our studies show that people are sensitive to expected ratio in moral dilemmas, and that they show this sensitivity across a range of probabilities. The particular kind of sensitivity to expected value participants display is consistent with the view that people's moral judgments are based on one single principle of threshold deontology. If one examines only participants' reactions to a single dilemma with a given ratio, one might naturally tend to sort participants' judgments into consequentialists (the ones who condone killing to save others) or non-consequentialists (the ones who do not). But this can be misleading, as is shown by the result that the number of participants who make judgments consistent with consequentialism in a scenario with ratio of 5:1 decreases when the ratio decreases (as if a larger number of people endorse deontological principles under this lower ratio). The fact that participants make some judgments that are consistent with consequentialism does not entail that these judgments are expressive of a generally consequentialist moral theory. When the larger set of judgments is taken into account, the only theory with which they are consistent is threshold deontology. On this theory, there is a general deontological constraint against killing, but this constraint is overridden when the consequences of inaction are bad enough. The variability across participants suggests that participants have different thresholds of the ratio at which the consequences count as “bad enough” for switching from supporting inaction to supporting action. This is consistent with the wide literature showing that participants' judgments can shift within the same ratio, depending on, for example, how the death of the one is caused.

The research is here.

My summary:

This research provides new insights into how people make moral judgments. It suggests that people are not simply weighing the number of lives saved against the number of lives lost, but that they are also taking into account the ratio of lives saved to lives lost and the probability of each outcome occurring. This research has important implications for our understanding of moral decision-making and for the development of moral education programs.

How and why people want to be more moral

Sun, J., Wilt, J. A., Meindl, et al. (2023).

Journal of Personality.

https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12812

Abstract

Objective

What types of moral improvements do people wish to make? Do they hope to become more good, or less bad? Do they wish to be more caring? More honest? More loyal? And why exactly do they want to become more moral? Presumably, most people want to improve their morality because this would benefit others, but is this in fact their primary motivation? Here, we begin to investigate these questions.

Method

Across two large, preregistered studies (N = 1818), participants provided open-ended descriptions of one change they could make in order to become more moral; they then reported their beliefs about and motives for this change.

Results

In both studies, people most frequently expressed desires to improve their compassion and more often framed their moral improvement goals in terms of amplifying good behaviors than curbing bad ones. The strongest predictor of moral motivation was the extent to which people believed that making the change would have positive consequences for their own well-being.

Conclusions

Together, these studies provide rich descriptive insights into how ordinary people want to be more moral, and show that they are particularly motivated to do so for their own sake.

The research is paywalled here.

My summary:

• People most frequently expressed desires to improve their compassion. This suggests that people are motivated to become more moral in order to be more caring and helpful to others.

• People more often framed their moral improvement goals in terms of amplifying good behaviors than curbing bad ones. This suggests that people are motivated to become more moral by doing more good things, rather than by simply avoiding doing bad things.

• The strongest predictor of moral motivation was the extent to which people believed that making the change would have positive consequences for their own well-being. This suggests that people are motivated to become more moral for their own sake, as well as for the sake of others.

Social Media and Morality

Van Bavel, J. J., Robertson, C. et al. (2023, June 6).

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ywevq

Abstract

Nearly five billion people around the world now use social media, and this number continues to grow. One of the primary goals of social media platforms is to capture and monetize human attention. One means by which individuals and groups can capture attention and drive engagement on these platforms is by sharing morally and emotionally evocative content. We review a growing body of research on the interrelationship of social media and morality–as well the consequences for individuals and society. Moral content often goes “viral” on social media, and social media makes moral behavior (such as punishment) less costly. Thus, social media often acts as an accelerant for existing moral dynamics – amplifying outrage, status seeking, and intergroup conflict, while also potentially amplifying more constructive facets of morality, such as social support, pro-sociality, and collective action. We discuss trends, heated debates, and future directions in this emerging literature.

From Discussions and Future Directions

Addressing the interplay between social media and morality 

There is a growing recognition among scholars and the public that social media has deleterious consequences for society and there is a growing appetite for greater transparency and some form of regulation of social media platforms (Rathje et al., 2023). To address the adverse consequences of social media, solutions at the system level are necessary (e.g., Chater & Loewenstein, 2022), but individual- or group-level solutions may be useful for creating behavioral change before system-level change is in place and for increasing public support for system-level solutions (Koppel et. al., 2023). In the following section, we discuss a range of solutions that address the adverse consequences of the interplay between social media and morality.

Regulation is one of the most heavily debated ways of mitigating the adverse features of social media. Regulating social media can be done both on platforms as well at the national or cross-national level, but always involves discussions about who should decide what should be allowed on which platforms (Kaye, 2019). Currently, there is relatively little editorial oversight with the content even on mainstream platforms, yet the connotations with censorship makes regulation inherently controversial. For instance, Americans believe that social media companies censor political viewpoints (Vogels et al., 2020) and believe it is hard to regulate social media because people cannot agree upon what should and should not be removed (PewResearch Center, 2019). Moreover, authoritarian states can suppress dissent through the regulation of speech on social media.

In general, people on the political left are supportive of regulating social media platforms (Kozyreva, 2023; Rasmussen, 2022), reflecting liberals’ general tendency to more supportive, and conservatives' tendency to more opposing, of regulatory policies (e.g. Grossman, 2015). In the context of content on social media, one explanation is that left-leaning people infer more harm from aggressive behaviors. In other words, they may perceive immoral behaviors on social media as more harmful for the victim, which in turn justifies regulation (Graham 2009; Crawford 2017; Walter 2019; Boch 2020). There are conflicting results, however, on whether people oppose regulating hate speech (Bilewicz et. al. 2017; Rasmussen 2023a) because they use hate to derogate minority and oppressed groups (Sidanius, Pratto, and Bobo 1996; Federico and Sidanius, 2002) or because of principled political preferences deriving from conservatism values (Grossman 2016; Grossman 2015; Sniderman & Carmines, 1997; Sniderman & Piazza, 1993; Sniderman, Piazza, Tetlock, & Kendrick, 1991). While sensitivity to harm contributes to making people on the political left more supportive of regulating social media, it is contested whether opposition from the political right derives from group-based dominance or principled opposition.

Click the link above to get to the research.

Here is a summary from me:

• Social media can influence our moral judgments. Studies have shown that people are more likely to make moral judgments that align with the views of their social media friends and the content they consume on social media. For example, one study found that people who were exposed to pro-environmental content on social media were more likely to make moral judgments that favored environmental protection.
• Social media can lead to moral disengagement. Moral disengagement is a psychological process that allows people to justify harmful or unethical behavior. Studies have shown that social media can contribute to moral disengagement by making it easier for people to distance themselves from the consequences of their actions. For example, one study found that people who were exposed to violent content on social media were more likely to engage in moral disengagement.
• Social media can promote prosocial behavior. Prosocial behavior is behavior that is helpful or beneficial to others. Studies have shown that social media can promote prosocial behavior by connecting people with others who share their values and by providing opportunities for people to help others. For example, one study found that people who used social media to connect with others were more likely to volunteer their time to help others.
• Social media can be used to spread misinformation and hate speech. Misinformation is false or misleading information that is spread intentionally or unintentionally. Hate speech is speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, or sexual orientation. Social media platforms have been used to spread misinformation and hate speech, which can have a negative impact on society.

Overall, the research on social media and morality suggests that social media can have both positive and negative effects on our moral judgments and behavior. It is important to be aware of the potential risks and benefits of social media and to use it in a way that promotes positive moral values.

Belief in Five Spiritual Entities Edges Down to New Lows

Megan Brenan

news.gallup.com

Originally posted 20 July 23

The percentages of Americans who believe in each of five religious entities -- God, angels, heaven, hell and the devil -- have edged downward by three to five percentage points since 2016. Still, majorities believe in each, ranging from a high of 74% believing in God to lows of 59% for hell and 58% for the devil. About two-thirds each believe in angels (69%) and heaven (67%).

Gallup has used this framework to measure belief in these spiritual entities five times since 2001, and the May 1-24, 2023, poll finds that each is at its lowest point. Compared with 2001, belief in God and heaven is down the most (16 points each), while belief in hell has fallen 12 points, and the devil and angels are down 10 points each.

This question asks respondents whether they believe in each concept or if they are unsure, and from 13% to 15% currently say they are not sure. At the same time, nearly three in 10 U.S. adults do not believe in the devil or hell, while almost two in 10 do not believe in angels and heaven, and 12% say they do not believe in God.

As the percentage of believers has dropped over the past two decades, the corresponding increases have occurred mostly in nonbelief, with much smaller increases in uncertainty. This is true for all but belief in God, which has seen nearly equal increases in uncertainty and nonbelief.

In the current poll, about half of Americans, 51%, believe in all five spiritual entities, while 11% do not believe in any of them. Another 7% are not sure about all of them, while the rest (31%) believe in some and not others.

Gallup periodically measures Americans’ belief in God with different question wordings, producing slightly different results. While the majority of U.S. adults say they believe in God regardless of the question wording, when not offered the option to say they are unsure, significantly more (81% in a survey conducted last year) said they believe in God.

The poll results are here.

My take: Despite the decline in belief, majorities of Americans still believe in each of the five spiritual entities. This suggests that religion remains an important part of American culture, even as the country becomes more secularized.

The illusion of moral decline

Mastroianni, A.M., Gilbert, D.T.

Nature (2023).

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06137-x

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources, the underuse of social support and social influence.

Discussion

Participants in the foregoing studies believed that morality has declined, and they believed this in every decade and in every nation we studied. They believed the decline began somewhere around the time they were born, regardless of when that was, and they believed it continues to this day. They believed the decline was a result both of individuals becoming less moral as they move through time and of the replacement of more moral people by less moral people. And they believed that the people they personally know and the people who lived before they did are exceptions to this rule. About all these things, they were almost certainly mistaken. One reason they may have held these mistaken beliefs is that they may typically have encountered more negative than positive information about the morality of contemporaries whom they did not personally know, and the negative information may have faded more quickly from memory or lost its emotional impact more quickly than the positive information did, leading them to believe that people today are not as kind, nice, honest or good as once upon a time they were.

Here are some important points:

• There are a number of reasons why people might believe that morality is declining. One reason is that people tend to focus on negative news stories, which can give the impression that the world is a more dangerous and immoral place than it actually is. Another reason is that people tend to remember negative events more vividly than positive events, which can also lead to the impression that morality is declining.
• Despite the widespread belief in moral decline, there is no evidence to suggest that morality is actually getting worse. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that morality has been improving over time. For example, crime rates have been declining for decades, and people are more likely to volunteer and donate to charity than they were in the past.
• The illusion of moral decline can have a number of negative consequences. It can lead to cynicism, apathy, and a sense of hopelessness. It can also make it more difficult to solve social problems, because people may believe that the problem is too big or too complex to be solved.

Perceptions of Harm and Benefit Predict Judgments of Cultural Appropriation

Mosley, A. J., Heiphetz, L., et al. (2023).

Social Psychological and Personality Science, 

19485506231162401.

Abstract

What factors underlie judgments of cultural appropriation? In two studies, participants read 157 scenarios involving actors using cultural products or elements of racial/ethnic groups to which they did not belong. Participants evaluated scenarios on seven dimensions (perceived cultural appropriation, harm to the community from which the cultural object originated, racism, profit to actors, extent to which cultural objects represent a source of pride for source communities, benefits to actors, and celebration), while the type of cultural object and the out-group associated with the object being appropriated varied. Using both the scenario and the participant as the units of analysis, perceived cultural appropriation was most strongly associated with perceived greater harm to the source community. We discuss broader implications for integrating research on inequality and moral psychology. Findings also have translational implications for educators and activists interested in increasing awareness about cultural appropriation.

General Discussion

People disagree about what constitutes cultural appropriation (Garcia Navaro, 2021). Prior research has indicated that prototypical cases of cultural appropriation include dominant-group members (e.g., White people) using cultural products stemming from subordinated groups (e.g., Black people; Katzarska-Miller et al., 2020; Mosley & Biernat, 2020). Minority group members’ use of dominant-group cultural products (termed “cultural dominance” by Rogers, 2006) is less likely to receive that label. However, even in prototypical cases, considerable variability in perceptions exists across actions (Mosley & Biernat, 2020). Furthermore, some perceivers—especially highly racially identified White Americans—view Black actors’ use of White cultural products as equally or more appropriative than White actors’ use of Black cultural products (Mosley et al., 2022).

These studies build on extant work by examining how features of out-group cultural use might contribute to construals of appropriation. We created a large set of scenarios, extending beyond the case of White–Black relations to include a greater diversity of racial groups (Native American, Hispanic, and Asian cultures). In all three studies, scenario-level analyses indicated that actions perceived to cause harm to the source community were also likely to be seen as appropriative, and those actions perceived to bring benefits to actors were less likely to be seen as appropriative. The strong connection between perceived source community harm and judgments of cultural appropriation corroborates research on the importance of harm to morally relevant judgments (Gray et al., 2014; Rozin & Royzman, 2001). At the same time, scenarios perceived to benefit actors—at least among the particular set of scenarios used here—were those that elicited a lower appropriation essence. However, at the level of individual perceivers, actor benefit (along with actor profit and some other measures) positively predicted appropriation perceptions. Perceiving benefit to an actor may contribute to a sense that the action is problematic to the source community (i.e., appropriative). Our findings are akin to findings on smoking and life expectancy: At the aggregate level, countries with higher rates of cigarette consumption have longer population life expectancies, but at the individual level, the more one smokes, the lower their life expectancy (Krause & Saunders, 2010). Scenarios that bring more benefit to actors are judged less appropriative, but individuals who see actor benefit in scenarios view them as more appropriative.

In all studies, participants perceived actions as more appropriative when White actors engaged with cultural products from Black communities, rather than the reverse pattern. This provides further evidence that the prototypical perpetrator of cultural appropriation is a high-status group member (Mosley & Biernat, 2020), where high-status actors have greater power and resources to exploit, marginalize, and cause harm to low-status source communities (Rogers, 2006).

Perhaps surprisingly, perceived appropriation and perceived celebration were positively correlated. Appropriation and celebration might be conceptualized as alternative, opposing construals of the same event. But this positive correlation may attest to the ambiguity, subjectivity, and disagreement about perceiving cultural appropriation: The same action may be construed as appropriative and (not or) celebratory. However, these construals were nonetheless distinct: Appropriation was positively correlated with perceived racism and harm, but celebration was negatively correlated with these factors.

The research is here.

An empirical perspective on moral expertise: Evidence from a global study of philosophers

Niv, Y., & Sulitzeanu‐Kenan, R. (2022).

Bioethics, 36(9), 926–935.

https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13079

Abstract

Considerable attention in bioethics has been devoted to moral expertise and its implications for handling applied moral problems. The existence and nature of moral expertise has been a contested topic, and particularly, whether philosophers are moral experts. In this study, we put the question of philosophers’ moral expertise in a wider context, utilizing a novel and global study among 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. We find that despite the skepticism in recent literature, the vast majority of philosophers do believe in moral expertise and in the contribution of philosophical training and experience to its acquisition. Yet, they still differ on what philosophers’ moral expertise consists of. While they widely accept that philosophers possess superior analytic abilities regarding moral matters, they diverge on whether they also possess improved ability to judge moral problems. Nonetheless, most philosophers in our sample believe that philosophers possess an improved ability to both analyze and judge moral problems and that they commonly see these two capacities as going hand in hand. We also point at significant associations between personal and professional attributes and philosophers’ beliefs, such as age, working in the field of moral philosophy, public involvement, and association with the analytic tradition. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate about moral expertise.

From the Discussion section

First, the distribution of philosophers’ beliefs regarding moral expertise highlights that despite the recent skepticism regarding philosophers’ moral expertise, as expressed in the bioethical literature, the vast majority of philosophers do believe in moral expertise and in the contribution of philosophical training and experience to its acquisition. The view, which holds that philosophers are not moral experts, that is, lack an advantage in both moral analysis and judgment capacities, is held by a relatively small minority (estimated at 10.7%). Yet, the findings suggest that philosophers still differ regarding what their moral expertise consists of and highlight that the crux of the debate is not whether philosophers are better moral analyzers, as a near consensus of 88.33% exists that they are. Rather opinions diverge over whether philosophers are also better moral judgers. We estimated that 38.88% of respondents believe that philosophers are only narrow moral experts while 49.45% of them believe that they are broad moral experts.

These findings can primarily be of great sociological interest. They map the views of a global sample of philosophers regarding the ancient question of the merit of philosophy, reflect what philosophers think their profession enables them to do, and consequently, what they might contribute to society. As our findings indicate, for its practitioners, philosophy is not merely an abstract reflection, but also an endeavor that facilitates moral capabilities that can be of use to handle the moral problems we confront in our daily lives.

Furthermore, we may carefully consider the possibility that the distribution of philosophers’ beliefs can also play an evidential role in the dispute about moral expertise. On the one hand, philosophers, more than others, may be best suited to accurately evaluate the merits and limitations of their capabilities. They have gained extensive experience in reflecting on philosophical matters, thus they might better understand what philosophical inquiry requires and how well they have successfully handled such tasks in the past. Their beliefs might express collective wisdom that indicates what the right answers are. As an illustration, the fact that many physicians, with years of experience in medicine, similarly trust their ability to effectively diagnose and treat illness, gives us good reasons to believe that they are. We have good reasons to believe that physicians will better know their merits and limitations. Therefore, the finding that the majority of philosophers believe that their training and experience grant them better ability to both analyze and judge moral problems offers some evidence in favor of this view.

The research is here.

Fairytales have always reflected the morals of the age. It’s not a sin to rewrite them

Martha Gill

The Guardian

Originally posted 4 June 23

Here are two excerpts:

General outrage greeted “woke” updates to Roald Dahl books this year, and still periodically erupts over Disney remakes, most recently a forthcoming film with a Latina actress as Snow White, and a new Peter Pan & Wendy with “lost girls”. The argument is that too much fashionable refurbishment tends to ruin a magical kingdom, and that cult classics could do with the sort of Grade I listing applied to heritage buildings. If you want to tell new stories, fine – but why not start from scratch?

But this point of view misses something, which is that updating classics is itself an ancient part of literary culture; in fact, it is a tradition, part of our heritage too. While the larger portion of the literary canon is carefully preserved, a slice of it has always been more flexible, to be retold and reshaped as times change.

Fairytales fit within this latter custom: they have been updated, periodically, for many hundreds of years. Cult figures such as Dracula, Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes fit there too, as do superheroes: each generation, you might say, gets the heroes it deserves. And so does Bond. Modernity is both a villain and a hero within the Bond franchise: the dramatic tension between James – a young cosmopolitan “dinosaur” – and the passing of time has always been part of the fun.

This tradition has a richness to it: it is a historical record of sorts. Look at the progress of the fairy story through the ages and you get a twisty tale of dubious progress, a moral journey through the woods. You could say fairytales have always been politically correct – that is, tweaked to reflect whatever morals a given cohort of parents most wanted to teach their children.

(cut)

The idea that we are pasting over history – censoring important artefacts – is wrongheaded too. It is not as if old films or books have been burned, wiped from the internet or removed from libraries. With today’s propensity for writing things down, common since the 1500s, there is no reason to fear losing the “original” stories.

As for the suggestion that minority groups should make their own stories instead – this is a sly form of exclusion. Ancient universities and gentlemen’s clubs once made similar arguments; why couldn’t exiled individuals simply set up their own versions? It is not so easy. Old stories weave themselves deep into the tapestry of a nation; newer ones will necessarily be confined to the margins.

The info is here.

My take: Updating classic stories can be beneficial and even necessary to promote inclusion, diversity, equity, and fairness. By not updating these stories, we risk perpetuating harmful stereotypes and narratives that reinforce the dominant culture. When we update classic stories, we can create new possibilities for representation and understanding that can help to build a more just and equitable world.  Dominant cultures need to cede power to promote more unity in a multicultural nation.