The Objectivity Illusion in Medical Practice

Donald Redelmeier & Lee Ross
The Association for Psychological Science
Published November 2018

Insights into pitfalls in judgment and decision-making are essential for the practice of medicine. However, only the most exceptional physicians recognize their own personal biases and blind spots. More typically, they are like most humans in believing that they see objects, events, or issues “as they really are” and, accordingly, that others who see things differently are mistaken. This illusion of personal objectivity reflects the implicit conviction of a one-to-one correspondence between the perceived properties and the real nature of an object or event. For patients, such naïve realism means a world of red apples, loud sounds, and solid chairs. For practitioners, it means a world of red rashes, loud murmurs, and solid lymph nodes. However, a lymph node that feels normal to one physician may seem suspiciously enlarged and hard to another physician, with a resulting disagreement about the indications for a lymph node biopsy. A research study supporting a new drug or procedure may seem similarly convincing to one physician but flawed to another.

Convictions about whose perceptions are more closely attuned to reality can be a source of endless interpersonal friction. Spouses, for example, may disagree about appropriate thermostat settings, with one perceiving the room as too cold while the other finds the temperature just right. Moreover, each attributes the other’s perceptions to some pathology or idiosyncrasy.

The info is here.

A choice may not feel like a choice when morality is at play

Susan Kelley
Cornell Chronicle
Originally posted November 15, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

People who viewed the issues as moral – regardless of which side of the debate they stood on – felt less of a sense of choice when faced with the decisions. “In contrast, people who made a decision that was not imbued with morality were more likely to view it as a choice,” Smith said.

The researchers saw this weaker sense of choice play out in the participants’ attention patterns. When deciding among morally relevant options displayed on a computer screen, they devoted less visual attention to the option that they ultimately rejected, suggesting they were less likely to even consider immoral options as viable alternatives in their decision-making, the study said.

Moreover, participants who felt they had fewer options tended to choose more variety later on. After deciding among moral options, the participants tended to opt for more variety when given the choice of seven different types of chocolate in an unrelated task. “It’s a very subtle effect but it’s indicative that people are trying to reassert their sense of autonomy,” Smith said.

Understanding the way that people make morally relevant decisions has implications for business ethics, he said: “If we can figure out what influences people to behave ethically or not, we can better empower managers with tools that might help them reduce unethical behavior in the workplace.”

The info is here.

The original research is here.

People Are Averse to Machines Making Moral Decisions

Yochanan E. Bigman and Kurt Gray
In press, Cognition

Abstract

Do people want autonomous machines making moral decisions? Nine studies suggest that that
the answer is ‘no’—in part because machines lack a complete mind. Studies 1-6 find that people
are averse to machines making morally-relevant driving, legal, medical, and military decisions,
and that this aversion is mediated by the perception that machines can neither fully think nor
feel. Studies 5-6 find that this aversion exists even when moral decisions have positive outcomes.
Studies 7-9 briefly investigate three potential routes to increasing the acceptability of machine
moral decision-making: limiting the machine to an advisory role (Study 7), increasing machines’
perceived experience (Study 8), and increasing machines’ perceived expertise (Study 9).
Although some of these routes show promise, the aversion to machine moral decision-making is
difficult to eliminate. This aversion may prove challenging for the integration of autonomous
technology in moral domains including medicine, the law, the military, and self-driving vehicles.

The research is here.

How Do Expectations Shape Perception?

Floris P. de Lange, Micha Heilbron, & Peter Kok
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Available online 29 June 2018

Abstract

Perception and perceptual decision-making are strongly facilitated by prior knowledge about the probabilistic structure of the world. While the computational benefits of using prior expectation in perception are clear, there are myriad ways in which this computation can be realized. We review here recent advances in our understanding of the neural sources and targets of expectations in perception. Furthermore, we discuss Bayesian theories of perception that prescribe how an agent should integrate prior knowledge and sensory information, and investigate how current and future empirical data can inform and constrain computational frameworks that implement such probabilistic integration in perception.

Highlights

• Expectations play a strong role in determining the way we perceive the world.

• Prior expectations can originate from multiple sources of information, and correspondingly have different neural sources, depending on where in the brain the relevant prior knowledge is stored.

• Recent findings from both human neuroimaging and animal electrophysiology have revealed that prior expectations can modulate sensory processing at both early and late stages, and both before and after stimulus onset. The response modulation can take the form of either dampening the sensory representation or enhancing it via a process of sharpening.

• Theoretical computational frameworks of neural sensory processing aim to explain how the probabilistic integration of prior expectations and sensory inputs results in perception.

The research is here.

How to Look Away

Megan Garber
The Atlantic
Originally published June 20, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

It is a dynamic—the democratic alchemy that converts seeing things into changing them—that the president and his surrogates have been objecting to, as they have defended their policy. They have been, this week (with notable absences), busily appearing on cable-news shows and giving disembodied quotes to news outlets, insisting that things aren’t as bad as they seem: that the images and the audio and the evidence are wrong not merely ontologically, but also emotionally. Don’t be duped, they are telling Americans. Your horror is incorrect. The tragedy is false. Your outrage about it, therefore, is false. Because, actually, the truth is so much more complicated than your easy emotions will allow you to believe. Actually, as Fox News host Laura Ingraham insists, the holding pens that seem to house horrors are “essentially summer camps.” And actually, as Fox & Friends’ Steve Doocy instructs, the pens are not cages so much as “walls” that have merely been “built … out of chain-link fences.” And actually, Kirstjen Nielsen wants you to remember, “We provide food, medical, education, all needs that the child requests.” And actually, too—do not be fooled by your own empathy, Tom Cotton warns—think of the child-smuggling. And of MS-13. And of sexual assault. And of soccer fields. There are so many reasons to look away, so many other situations more deserving of your outrage and your horror.

It is a neat rhetorical trick: the logic of not in my backyard, invoked not merely despite the fact that it is happening in our backyard, but because of it. With seed and sod that we ourselves have planted.

Yes, yes, there are tiny hands, reaching out for people who are not there … but those are not the point, these arguments insist and assure. To focus on those images—instead of seeing the system, a term that Nielsen and even Trump, a man not typically inclined to think in networked terms, have been invoking this week—is to miss the larger point.

The article is here.

Why We Don’t Let Coworkers Help Us, Even When We Need It

Mark Bolino and Phillip S. Thompson
Harvard Business Review
Originally published March 15, 2018

Here is the conclusion:

Taken together, our studies suggest that employees who are unwilling to accept help when they need it may undermine their own performance and the effectiveness of their team or unit. In light of those potential costs, managers should directly address the negative beliefs that people are harboring. For instance, research shows that employees tend to look to their leaders to determine who is trustworthy and who isn’t. So, to build people’s trust in their coworkers’ motives and competence, managers can demonstrate their faith in those employees by giving them challenging assignments, ownership of certain decisions, direct access to sensitive information or valuable stakeholders, and so on. Further, since giving help and receiving it go hand in hand, managers should create an environment where assisting one another is encouraged and recognized. They can do this by calling attention to successful collaborations and explaining how they’ve contributed to the organization’s larger goals and mission. And they should show their own willingness to help and be helped, since employees are more likely to see the merits of citizenship behaviors when they observe their leaders engaging in such behaviors themselves.

Finally, it’s important not to send mixed messages. If employees who go it alone get ahead more quickly than those who give and receive support, people will pick up on that discrepancy — and they’ll go back to looking out for number one, to their detriment and the organization’s.

The article is here.

The Peter Principle: Promotions and Declining Productivity

Edward P. Lazear
Hoover Institution and Graduate School of Business
Revision 10/12/00

Abstract

Many have observed that individuals perform worse after having received a promotion. The
most famous statement of the idea is the Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to
their level of incompetence. There are a number of possible explanations. Two are explored. The
most traditional is that the prospect of promotion provides incentives which vanish after the
promotion has been granted; thus, tenured faculty slack off. Another is that output as a statistical
matter is expected to fall. Being promoted is evidence that a standard has been met. Regression
to the mean implies that future productivity will decline on average. Firms optimally account for the
regression bias in making promotion decisions, but the effect is never eliminated. Both explanations
are analyzed. The statistical point always holds; the slacking off story holds only under certain
compensation structures.

The paper is here.

The Essence of the Individual: The Pervasive Belief in the True Self Is an Instance of Psychological Essentialism

Andrew G. Christy, Rebecca J. Schlegel, and Andrei Cimpian
Preprint

Abstract

Eight studies (N = 2,974) were conducted to test the hypothesis that the widespread folk belief in the true self is an instance of psychological essentialism. Results supported this hypothesis. Specifically, participants’ reasoning about the true self displayed the telltale features of essentialist reasoning (immutability, discreteness, consistency, informativeness, inherence, and biological basis; Studies 1–4); participants’ endorsement of true-self beliefs correlated with individual differences in other essentialist beliefs (Study 5); and experimental manipulations of essentialist thought in domains other than the self were found to “spill over” and affect the extent to which participants endorsed true-self beliefs (Studies 6–8). These findings advance theory on the origins and functions of true-self beliefs, revealing these beliefs to be a specific instance of a broader tendency to explain phenomena in the world in terms of underlying essences.

The preprint is here.

The real problem (of consciousness)

Anil K Seth

Aeon.com

Originally posted November 2, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

The classical view of perception is that the brain processes sensory information in a bottom-up or ‘outside-in’ direction: sensory signals enter through receptors (for example, the retina) and then progress deeper into the brain, with each stage recruiting increasingly sophisticated and abstract processing. In this view, the perceptual ‘heavy-lifting’ is done by these bottom-up connections. The Helmholtzian view inverts this framework, proposing that signals flowing into the brain from the outside world convey only prediction errors – the differences between what the brain expects and what it receives. Perceptual content is carried by perceptual predictions flowing in the opposite (top-down) direction, from deep inside the brain out towards the sensory surfaces. Perception involves the minimisation of prediction error simultaneously across many levels of processing within the brain’s sensory systems, by continuously updating the brain’s predictions. In this view, which is often called ‘predictive coding’ or ‘predictive processing’, perception is a controlled hallucination, in which the brain’s hypotheses are continually reined in by sensory signals arriving from the world and the body. ‘A fantasy that coincides with reality,’ as the psychologist Chris Frith eloquently put it in Making Up the Mind (2007).

Armed with this theory of perception, we can return to consciousness. Now, instead of asking which brain regions correlate with conscious (versus unconscious) perception, we can ask: which aspects of predictive perception go along with consciousness? A number of experiments are now indicating that consciousness depends more on perceptual predictions, than on prediction errors. In 2001, Alvaro Pascual-Leone and Vincent Walsh at Harvard Medical School asked people to report the perceived direction of movement of clouds of drifting dots (so-called ‘random dot kinematograms’). They used TMS to specifically interrupt top-down signalling across the visual cortex, and they found that this abolished conscious perception of the motion, even though bottom-up signals were left intact.

The article is here.

Humans selectively edit reality before accepting it

Olivia Goldhill
Quartz
Originally published March 26, 2017

Knowledge is power, so the saying goes, which makes it all the more striking how determined humans are to avoid useful information. Research in psychology, economics, and sociology has, over the course of several decades, highlighted countless examples of cases where humans are apt to ignore information. A review of these earlier studies by Carnegie Mellon University researchers, published this month in the Journal of Economic Literature, shows the extent to which humans avoid information and so selectively edit their own reality.

Rather than highlighting all the myriad ways humans fail to proactively seek out useful information, the paper’s authors focus on active information avoidance: Cases where individuals know information is available and have free access to that information, yet choose not to consider it. Examples of this phenomenon, revealed by the previous studies, include investors not looking at their financial portfolios when the stock market is down; patients taking STD tests and then failing to obtain the results; professionals refusing to look at their colleagues’ feedback on their work; and even the propensity of wealthy people to avoid poor neighborhoods so they don’t feel awareness of and guilt over their own privilege.

The article is here.

The Associations between Ethical Organizational Culture,Burnout, and Engagement: A Multilevel Study

Mari Huhtala, Asko Tolvanen, Saija Mauno, and Taru Feldt
J Bus Psychol
DOI 10.1007/s10869-014-9369-2

Abstract/Purpose

Ethical culture is a specific form of organizational culture (including values and systems that can promote ethical behavior), and as such a socially constructed phenomenon. However, no previous studies have investigated the degree to which employees’ perceptions of their organization’s ethical culture are shared within work units (departments), which was the first aim of this study. In addition, we studied the associations between ethical culture and occupational well-being (i.e., burnout and work engagement) at both the individual and work-unit levels.

Design/Methodology/Approach

The questionnaire data were gathered from 2,146 respondents with various occupations in 245 different work units in one public sector organization. Ethical organizational culture was measured with the corporate ethical virtues scale, including eight sub-dimensions.

Findings

Multilevel structural equation modeling showed that 12–27 % of the total variance regarding the dimensions of ethical culture was explained by departmental homogeneity (shared experiences). At both the within and between levels, higher perceptions of ethical culture associated with lower burnout and higher work engagement.

Implications

The results suggest that organizations should support ethical practices at the work-unit level, to enhance work engagement, and should also pay special attention to work units with a low ethical culture because these work environments can expose employees to burnout.

Originality/Value

This is one of the first studies to find evidence of an association between shared experiences of ethical culture and collective feelings of both burnout and work engagement.

A copy of the article is here.

The Adaptive Utility of Deontology: Deontological Moral Decision-Making Fosters Perceptions of Trust and Likeability

Sacco, D.F., Brown, M., Lustgraaf, C.J.N. et al.
Evolutionary Psychological Science (2016).
doi:10.1007/s40806-016-0080-6

Abstract

Although various motives underlie moral decision-making, recent research suggests that deontological moral decision-making may have evolved, in part, to communicate trustworthiness to conspecifics, thereby facilitating cooperative relations. Specifically, social actors whose decisions are guided by deontological (relative to utilitarian) moral reasoning are judged as more trustworthy, are preferred more as social partners, and are trusted more in economic games. The current study extends this research by using an alternative manipulation of moral decision-making as well as the inclusion of target facial identities to explore the potential role of participant and target sex in reactions to moral decisions. Participants viewed a series of male and female targets, half of whom were manipulated to either have responded to five moral dilemmas consistent with an underlying deontological motive or utilitarian motive; participants indicated their liking and trust toward each target. Consistent with previous research, participants liked and trusted targets whose decisions were consistent with deontological motives more than targets whose decisions were more consistent with utilitarian motives; this effect was stronger for perceptions of trust. Additionally, women reported greater dislike for targets whose decisions were consistent with utilitarianism than men. Results suggest that deontological moral reasoning evolved, in part, to facilitate positive relations among conspecifics and aid group living and that women may be particularly sensitive to the implications of the various motives underlying moral decision-making.

The research is here.

Editor's Note: This research may apply to psychotherapy, leadership style, and politics.

The Case Against Reality

Amanda Gefter
The Atlantic
Originally published April 25, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

Getting at questions about the nature of reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental physics. On one side you’ll find researchers scratching their chins raw trying to understand how a three-pound lump of gray matter obeying nothing more than the ordinary laws of physics can give rise to first-person conscious experience. This is the aptly named “hard problem.”

On the other side are quantum physicists, marveling at the strange fact that quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localized in space until we come along to observe them. Experiment after experiment has shown—defying common sense—that if we assume that the particles that make up ordinary objects have an objective, observer-independent existence, we get the wrong answers. The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

The article is here.

Of Tooth and Claw: Predator Self-Identifications Mediate Gender Differences in Interpersonal Arrogance

Robinson, M.D., Bair, J.L., Liu, T. et al. Sex Roles (2016).
Sex Roles, pp 1-15.
doi:10.1007/s11199-016-0706-y

Abstract

Men often score higher than women do on traits or tendencies marked by hostile dominance. The purpose of the present research was to contribute to an understanding of these gender differences. Four studies (total N = 494 U.S. undergraduates) administered a modified animal preference test in which participants could choose to be predator or prey animals, but not labeled as such. Men were consistently more interested in being predator animals than women were, displaying a sort of hostile dominance in their projective preferences. Predator self-identifications, in turn, mediated gender differences in outcomes related to hostile dominance. Studies 1 and 2 provided initial evidence for this model in the context of variations in interpersonal arrogance, and Studies 3 and 4 extended the model to nonverbal displays and daily life prosociality, respectively. The findings indicate that gender differences in hostile dominance are paralleled by gender differences in preferring to think about the self in predator-like terms. Accordingly, the findings provide new insights into aggressive forms of masculine behavior.

The Case Against Reality

Amanda Gefter
The Atlantic
Originally posted April 22, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

Getting at questions about the nature of reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental physics. On one side you’ll find researchers scratching their chins raw trying to understand how a three-pound lump of gray matter obeying nothing more than the ordinary laws of physics can give rise to first-person conscious experience. This is the aptly named “hard problem.”

The article is here.

Perceiving the World Through Group-Colored Glasses: A Perceptual Model of Intergroup Relations

Y. Jenny Xiao, Géraldine Coppin, and Jay J. Van Bavel
Psychological Inquiry Vol. 27 , Iss. 4, 2016

Abstract

Extensive research has investigated societal and behavioral consequences of social group affiliation and identification but has been relatively silent on the role of perception in intergroup relations. We propose the perceptual model of intergroup relations to conceptualize how intergroup relations are grounded in perception. We review the growing literature on how intergroup dynamics shape perception across different sensory modalities and argue that these perceptual processes mediate intergroup relations. The model provides a starting point for social psychologists to study perception as a function of social group dynamics and for perception researchers to consider social influences. We highlight several gaps in the literature and outline areas for future research. Uncovering the role of perception in intergroup relations offers novel insights into the construction of shared reality and may help devise new and unique interventions targeted at the perceptual level.

The article is here.

When Disagreement Gets Ugly: Perceptions of Bias and the Escalation of Conflict

Kathleen A. Kennedy and Emily Pronin
Pers Soc Psychol Bull 2008 34: 833

Abstract

It is almost a truism that disagreement produces conflict. This article suggests that perceptions of bias can drive this relationship. First, these studies show that people perceive those who disagree with them as biased. Second, they show that the conflict-escalating approaches that people take toward those who disagree with them are mediated by people's tendency to perceive those who disagree with them as biased. Third, these studies manipulate the mediator and show that experimental manipulations that prompt people to perceive adversaries as biased lead them to respond more conflictually—and that such responding causes those who engage in it to be viewed as more biased and less worthy of cooperative gestures. In summary, this article provides evidence for a “bias-perception conflict spiral,” whereby people who disagree perceive each other as biased, and those perceptions in turn lead them to take conflict-escalating actions against each other (which in turn engender further perceptions of bias, continuing the spiral).

The article is here.

For those who do marital counseling or work in any adversarial system.

The Problem With Slow Motion

By Eugene Caruso, Zachary Burns & Benjamin Converse
The New York Times - Gray Matter
Originally published August 5, 2016

Here are two excerpts:

Watching slow-motion footage of an event can certainly improve our judgment of what happened. But can it also impair judgment?

(cut)

Those who saw the shooting in slow motion felt that the actor had more time to act than those who saw it at regular speed — and the more time they felt he had, the more likely they were to see intention in his action. (We found similar results in a separate study involving video footage of a prohibited “helmet to helmet” tackle in the National Football League, where the question was whether the player intended to strike the opposing player in the proscribed manner.)

The article is here.

Stereotype Threat, Epistemic Injustice, and Rationality

Stacey Goguen
Draft, forthcoming (2016) in Brownstein and Saul (eds), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Vol I,
Oxford University Press.

Stereotype threat is most well-known for its ability to hinder performance. However, it actually has a  wide range of effects. For instance, it can also cause stress, anxiety, and self-doubt. These additional effects are as important and as central to the phenomenon as its effects on performance are. As a result, stereotype threat has more far-reaching implications than many philosophers have realized. In particular, the phenomenon has a number of unexplored “epistemic effects.

These are effects on our epistemic lives — i.e., the ways we engage with the world as actual and potential knowers. In this paper I flesh out the implications of a specific epistemic effect: self-doubt. Certain kinds of self-doubt can deeply affect our epistemic lives by exacerbating moments of epistemic injustice and by perniciously interacting with ideals of rationality. In both cases, self-doubt can lead to one questioning one’s own humanity or full personhood. Because stereotype threat can trigger this kind of self-doubt, it can affect various aspects of ourselves besides our ability to perform to our potential. It can also affect our very sense of self. In this paper, I argue that we should adopt a more comprehensive account of stereotype threat that explicitly acknowledges all of the known effects of the phenomenon. Doing so will allow us to better investigate the epistemological implications of stereotype threat, as well as the full extent of its reach into our lives. I focus on fleshing out stereotype threat’s effect of self-doubt, and how this effect can influence the very foundations of our epistemic lives. I do this by arguing that self-doubt from stereotype threat can constitute an epistemic injustice, and that this sort of self-doubt can be exacerbated by stereotypes of irrationality. As a result, self-doubt from stereotype threat can erode our faith in ourselves as full human persons and as rational, reliable knowers.

The full text is here.

When Doctors Should Say 'I Don't Know'

By Julie Beck
The Atlantic
Originally published February 29, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Doctors’ tools, knowledge, and treatments have improved since the bloodletting days, and we now have the ability to scan and analyze the body down to the cellular level. But “precision is not the same thing as certainty,” Hatch writes, and often, doctors are just making guesses based on the best evidence they have—a measuring of risks and benefits and probabilities that can be easily influenced by their preconceptions.

Medicine is a high-stakes game of uncertainty, complicated by the fact that people are naturally predisposed to seek certainty whenever possible. If you don’t know what something is, it could be a threat, out there on the ancient savannah of evolutionary psychology logic. That goes for patients and doctors alike, and if both parties are in agreement that certainty is best, it’s possible that they’ll just blow past the risks of a treatment, or the dubiousness of a diagnosis, for the sake of having an answer.

The article is here.