The Lion, the Myth, and the Morality Tale

By Brandon Ferdig
The American Thinker
Originally posted August 8, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

There’s nothing inherently wrong with myth and symbolism. They are emotional-mental tools used to categorize our world, to seek its improvement, to add meaning, to sink our emotional teeth into life and cultivate richness around our experience. Epic is awesome.

It was awesome for those who cried when seeing Barack Obama elected because of the interpreted representative step forward and victory of our nation. It’s awesome to feel moved by the sight of an animal that represents and elicits majesty. And it’s awesome to find other like-minded folks and bond in celebration or fight for a better world.

But there’s a risk.

To the degree that we subscribe to a particular ideology is the potential for us to color the events of our world with its tint. Suddenly we have something invested into these events -- our world view, our ego -- and exaggerated responses result. We’ll fight to defend our ideology, details and facts be damned. Get with like-minded folks, and you can create a mob.

The entire article is here.

Psychologists are known for being liberal, but why?

By Elliot Berkman
The Conversation
Originally published July 14, 2015

Is the field of social psychology biased against political conservatives? There has been intense debate about this question since an informal poll of over 1,000 attendees at a social psychology meeting in 2011 revealed the group to be overwhelmingly liberal.

Formal surveys have produced similar results, showing the ratio of liberals to conservatives in the broader field of psychology is 14-to-1.

Since then, social psychologists have tried to figure out why this imbalance exists.

The primary explanation offered is that the field has an anticonservative bias. I have no doubt that this bias exists, but it’s not strong enough to push people who lean conservative out of the field at the rate they appear to be leaving.

I believe that a less prominent explanation is more compelling: learning about social psychology can make you more liberal. I know about this possibility because it is exactly what happened to me.

The entire article is here.

Can a Longtime Fraud Help Fix Science?

Diederik Stapel faked more than 50 studies in social psychology. What can we learn from his misdeeds?

By Tom Bartlett
The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 22, 2015

Diederik Stapel was once known as a clever, prolific social psychologist. The Dutch researcher’s studies on subjects like unconscious stereotyping and the effect of environment on emotion aimed to explain the strangeness of human behavior. Why do we do what we do? How can a deeper understanding of our motivations lead to a better, more humane world?

Now Stapel is known for perpetrating one of science’s most audacious frauds. Since 2011, when his fakery was first exposed, more than 50 of Stapel’s papers have been retracted. He made up data for dozens of studies he never conducted. The extent of his deceit is jaw-dropping, and his downfall felt like an indictment of the field.

I thought of Stapel recently when news broke about a heralded young political-science researcher named Michael LaCour, who had apparently faked data for a high-profile study of gay marriage. Like Stapel, he was able to fool colleagues for years. Like Stapel, his lies cast doubt on the safeguards in science.

The entire story is here.

Death Denial

By Marc Parry
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published May 22, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

The terror trio’s conclusion: People react differently to conscious and unconscious thoughts of death. While thinking about death directly, Pyszczynski says, folks do rational things to get away from it, like trying to get healthy. It’s when death lurks on the fringes of consciousness that they cling to worldviews and seek self-esteem. "That helps explain why these ideas might seem strange to some people," says Pyszczynski, a professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. "You can’t really introspect on it. While you’re thinking about death, this isn’t what you do."

Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Greenberg published their work consistently in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. But early on, as Greenberg tells it, "its main impact was to get us ostracized by the rest of the field of social psychology." Part of that was due to the disconcerting subject matter. Colleagues referred to them as "the death guys."

The entire article is here.

Replication, falsification, and the crisis of confidence in social psychology

By Brian D. Earp & David Trafimow
Front. Psychol. | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00621

Abstract

The (latest) “crisis in confidence” in social psychology has generated much heated discussion about the importance of replication, including how such replication should be carried out as well as interpreted by scholars in the field. What does it mean if a replication attempt “fails”—does it mean that the original results, or the theory that predicted them, have been falsified? And how should “failed” replications affect our belief in the validity of the original research? In this paper, we consider the “replication” debate from a historical and philosophical perspective, and provide a conceptual analysis of both replication and falsification as they pertain to this important discussion. Along the way, we introduce a Bayesian framework for assessing “failed” replications in terms of how they should affect our confidence in purported findings.

The entire article is here.

Social psychologist relinquishes chair after data manipulation charges

By Frank van Kolfschooten
ScienceInsider
Originally published April 20, 2015

Here are two excerpt:

In the controversial studies, Förster investigated how "priming" by subtle cues—such as a smell or hearing a poem—can change a person's cognitive response. Suspicions against his work were first raised in 2012 by a whistleblower who filed a complaint at UvA. In June 2013, an integrity committee at the university concluded that data patterns in the studies were “practically impossible,” and recommended the publication of “expressions of concern” in the journals involved.

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"I will leave the materialistic and soulless production approach in science," the text reads, however. "I am going my own way now.” Förster didn’t respond to e-mailed questions from ScienceInsider about his decision.

The entire article is here.

Me, My “Self” and You: Neuropsychological Relations between Social Emotion, Self-Awareness, and Morality

By Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Emotion Review July 2011 vol. 3 no. 3 313-315

Abstract

Social emotions about others’ mind states, for example, compassion for psychological pain or admiration for virtue, are an important foundation for morality because they help us decide how to treat other people. Although these emotions are ostensibly concerned with the mental qualities and situations of others, they can precipitate intimately subjective reflections on the quality of one’s own social life and mind, and via these reflections incite a desire to engage in meaningful moral actions. Our interview and neural data suggest that the shift from social emotion to introspection may be facilitated by conscious mental evaluation of emotion-related visceral sensations.

The entire paper is here.

What White Privilege Really Means

It’s not about what whites get. It’s about what blacks don’t.

By Reihan Salam
Slate.com
Originally published December 17m 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Why does the white privilege conversation ignore the ways in which Asian Americans have used their social ties to achieve success, or the yawning chasm that separates upper-middle-income Mormon Californians from impoverished Appalachian whites? The simple answer is that we talk about white privilege as a clumsy way of talking about black exclusion.

Even white Americans of modest means are more likely to have inherited something, in the form of housing wealth or useful professional connections, than the descendants of slaves. In his influential 2005 book When Affirmative Action Was White, Ira Katznelson recounts in fascinating detail the various ways in which the New Deal and Fair Deal social programs of the 1930s and 1940s expanded economic opportunities for whites while doing so unevenly at best for blacks, particularly in the segregated South. Many rural whites who had known nothing but the direst poverty saw their lives transformed as everything from rural electrification to generous educational benefits for veterans allowed them to build human capital, earn higher incomes, and accumulate savings. This legacy, in ways large and small, continues to enrich the children and grandchildren of the whites of that era. This is the stuff of white privilege.

The entire article is here.

The self is moral

We tend to think that our memories determine our identity, but it’s moral character that really makes us who we are

By Nina Strohminger

Aeon Magazine

Originally published November 17, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Recent studies by the philosopher Shaun Nichols at the University of Arizona and myself support the view that the identity-conferring part of a person is his moral capacities. One of our experiments pays homage to Locke’s thought experiment by asking subjects which of a slew of traits a person would most likely take with him if his soul moved to a new body. Moral traits were considered more likely to survive a body swap than any other type of trait, mental or physical. Interestingly, certain types of memories – those involving people – were deemed fairly likely to survive the trip. But generic episodic memories, such as one’s commute to work, were not. People are not so much concerned with memory as with memory’s ability to connect us to others and our capacity for social action.

(cut)

Why does our identity detector place so much emphasis on moral capacities? These aren’t our most distinctive features. Our faces, our fingertips, our quirks, our autobiographies: any of these would be a more reliable way of telling who’s who. Somewhat paradoxically, identity has less to do with what makes us different from other people than with our shared humanity. 

The entire article is here.

Podcast Episode #7: The Moral Self, Moral Injury, and Moral Emotions with Dr. Strohminger can be found here.

Is Social Psychology Biased Against Republicans?

By Maria Konnikova
The New Yorker
Originally published October 30, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Social psychology, Haidt went on, had an obvious problem: a lack of political diversity that was every bit as dangerous as a lack of, say, racial or religious or gender diversity. It discouraged conservative students from joining the field, and it discouraged conservative members from pursuing certain lines of argument. It also introduced bias into research questions, methodology, and, ultimately, publications. The topics that social psychologists chose to study and how they chose to study them, he argued, suffered from homogeneity. The effect was limited, Haidt was quick to point out, to areas that concerned political ideology and politicized notions, like race, gender, stereotyping, and power and inequality. “It’s not like the whole field is undercut, but when it comes to research on controversial topics, the effect is most pronounced,” he later told me. (Haidt has now put his remarks in more formal terms, complete with data, in a paper forthcoming this winter in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.)

The entire article is here.

Fresh Misconduct Charges Hit Dutch Social Psychology

By Frank van Kolfschooten
Science
Originally published May 6, 2014

Scientists here are still searching their souls about two previous scandals--involving Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in 2011 and Dirk Smeesters of Erasmus University in Rotterdam a year later.

Now they have learned that a national research integrity panel has found evidence of data manipulation in the work of Jens Forster, a social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam (UvA).

The university has already announced that it will request the retraction of one of Forster's articles.

The case is drawing widespread international attention as well, in part because Forster, who's German and came to Amsterdam in 2007, enjoys a sterling reputation.

"He is among the most creative and influential social psychologists of his generation," says Jeffrey Sherman of the University of California, Davis.

The entire article is here, behind a paywall.

Do The Right Thing: Making Ethical Decisions in Everyday Life

By Tom Marshall
The New York Times
Originally published April 1, 2014

Overview

Something happens — a moment of injustice, a threat to the nation, a potentially criminal act. Why do some people speak out or take action, while others remain silent? And how can we encourage more people to recognize the moment when bravery is required?

In this lesson, we explore ethical dilemmas that face normal people around the world, in all walks of life. Some of their cases are familiar, while others are obscure. But they hold one thing in common: They feature individuals who followed the guidance of their own moral code, often risking personal injury or community censure to do so. We’ll ask students to examine the underlying characteristics of such episodes, and consider whether some acts are more deserving of support than others.

The entire article is here.

What Are Social Psychologists Talking About in 2014?

By Robert Kurzban
Evolutionary Psychology Blog
Originally published February 19, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

The highlight for me was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the evolutionary psychology preconference, sponsored by the Evolution and Human Behavior Society. (I myself was speaking at a different preconference, so did not make the entirety of the event. Still, I managed to sneak away for a while in order to attend some talks.) David Buss gave a thoroughly engaging presentation, as usual, as did his intellectual descendant, Martie Haselton, who showed some very interesting new results relevant to the recent debate regarding the ovulatory cycle results. Very generally the nodes of Buss’ tree were well represented. His students and his students’ students continue to make their respective marks on the field. A nice feature of the preconference is that only one talk takes place at a time; there are no parallel sessions. Conferences such as HBES, in contrast, require one to choose where one is going to direct one’s attention, and I’m grateful that I didn’t face that particular problem at SPSP. (See picture above for a group shot.) Jessica Li and Stephanie Cantú did an excellent job organizing, and I for one am very grateful for the work they did on the preconference, though still very uncertain about the diacritical mark on Stephanie’s name.

The entire blog post is here.

Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese

By Larry Getlen
The New York Post
Originally published February 16, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

But as journalist Kevin Cook details in his new book, “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America” (W.W. Nor­ton), some of the real thoughtlessness came from a police commissioner who lazily passed a falsehood to a journalist, and a media that fell so deeply in love with a story that it couldn’t be bothered to determine whether it was true.

The account of the murder at the top of this story is accurate, based on Cook’s reporting. Instead of a narrative of apathy, the media could have told instead of the people who tried to help, and of the complex circumstances — many boiling down to a lack not of compassion, but of information — that prevented some ­others from calling for aid.

One could argue that Genovese became a legend not on the day she was killed, but 10 days later, when New York City Police Commissioner Michael “Bull” Murphy had lunch with The New York Times’ new city editor — later to become the paper’s executive ­editor — Abe Rosenthal.
After Rosenthal brought up a case Murphy wished to avoid discussing, the commissioner pivoted to the Genovese case.

“Brother, that Queens story is one for the books. Thirty-eight witnesses,” Murphy said. “I’ve been in this business a long time, but this beats everything.”

The entire story is here.

Jennifer Saul on Implicit Bias

Philosophybites.com
Originally published December 7, 2013

Are we more biased than we imagine? In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Jennifer Saul investigates a range of ways in which we are prone to implicit bias and the philosophical implications of these biases.

The podcast is here.

The Crisis in Social Psychology: Paul Bloom on Bloggingheads.tv

Paul Bloom interviews Joseph Simmons about the crisis in social psychology.  They discuss the experimental method, the ability to replicate studies, false positives, and studies with "sexy findings".



The entire web site is here.

Behind Flurry of Killing, Potency of Hate

By KATRIN BENNHOLD
The New York Times
Published: October 12, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

“What you’re seeing in that moment,” he said in an interview last week, “is not a human being.”

It is dangerous to assume that it takes a monster to commit a monstrosity, said Herbert Kelman, professor emeritus of social ethics at Harvard.

“We are all capable of such things,” said Mr. Kelman, 86, whose family fled Vienna under the Nazis in 1939. “It doesn’t excuse anything, it doesn’t justify anything and it is by no means a full explanation. But it’s something that is worth remembering: We are dealing in a sense with human behavior responding to certain circumstances.”

Overcoming a deep-seated proscription against killing is not easy. In his book “Ordinary Men,” Christopher R. Browning described how a German police battalion staffed with fathers, businessmen and plumbers struggled as they executed thousands of Jews in Poland.

The entire story is here.

Judging Moral Issues in a Multicultural Society: Moral Reasoning and Social Dominance Orientation

By Stefano Passini & Paola Villano
Swiss Journal of Psychology

Abstract

People’s reactions to crimes sometimes change depending on whether the perpetrators are members of their own ingroup or an outgroup. This observation results in questions concerning how moral reasoning works in intergroup situations. In this research, we analyzed the combined effect of the nationality of the protagonist in a moral dilemma and the participant’s social dominance orientation (SDO) attitudes on the participant’s level of moral reasoning. A total of 230 Italian participants responded to two moral dilemmas taken from the Defining Issues Test, which had been modified so that one was about an Italian and the other about a Romanian. The results showed a significant interaction between the dilemma, the protagonist’s nationality, and the participant’s SDO: The P scores (postconventional reasoning) of low-SDO participants were on the same level when they were judging people of either nationality, while high-SDO participants tended to have a higher P score when judging Italians as opposed to Romanians.

Introduction

Although multiculturalism is on the rise in public opinion and politics, people sometimes judge criminal and deviant actions differently depending on the group membership of the person involved. For instance, the Italian media regularly report people being run over and even killed by drunk drivers. People's reactions to such events, however, differ depending on whether the perpetrators are members of their own ingroup or members of an outgroup. Moreover, when the aggressors are immigrants, the media do not consider these events to be related to the problems of road safety and alcohol alone. They often also relate these events to issues of immigration and national security, and they tend to judge the event more harshly than when the aggressors are ingroup members (see van Dijk, 2000). This shift of attention from the event itself to the person involved - in terms of his/her nationality - poses new questions concerning how moral reasoning works in intergroup situations.

The entire article can be found here, hiding behind a paywall.

How online ratings affect your judgment

MedicalNewsToday
Originally published August 12, 2013

Here are two excerpts:

A new study co-authored by an MIT professor suggests that many people are, in fact, heavily influenced by the positive opinions other people express online - but are much less swayed by negative opinions posted in the same venues. Certain topics, including politics, see much more of this "herding" effect than others.

(cut)

"This herding behavior happens systematically on positive signals of quality and ratings," says Sinan Aral, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and one of three authors of the study. At the same time, Aral notes, the results "were asymmetric between positive and negative herding." Comments given negative ratings attracted more negative judgments, but that increase was drowned out by what the researchers call a "correction effect" of additional positive responses.

The entire article is here.

Physicians Under the Influence: Social Psychology and Industry Marketing Strategies

By Sunita Sah and Adriane Fugh-Berman
April 30, 2013

Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Volume 14, No. 3, August 2013,
Forthcoming Edmond J. Safra Working Papers, Forthcoming

Abstract

Pharmaceutical and medical device companies apply social psychology to influence physicians’ prescribing behavior and decision-making. Physicians fail to recognize their vulnerability to commercial influences; due to self-serving bias, rationalization, and cognitive dissonance. Professionalism offers little protection; even the most conscious and genuine commitment to ethical behavior cannot eliminate unintentional, subconscious bias. Six principles of influence — reciprocation, commitment, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity — are key to the industry’s routine marketing strategies, which rely on the illusion that the industry is a generous avuncular partner to physicians. In order to resist industry influence, physicians must accept that they are vulnerable to subconscious bias, and have both the motivation and means to resist industry influence. A culture in which accepting industry gifts engenders shame, rather than gratitude, will reduce conflicts of interest. If greater academic prestige accrues to distant, rather than close relationships with industry, a new social norm may emerge that promotes patient care and scientific integrity. In addition to educating faculty and students about the social psychology underlying sophisticated, but potentially manipulative marketing and about how to resist it, academic medical institutions should develop strong organizational policies to counteract the medical profession’s improper dependence on industry.

The entire paper is here.