How Plain Talk Helps You "Walk the Walk"

Brett Beasley

Notre Dame Center for Ethical Leadership

Originally posted April 2022

Here is an excerpt:

How Unclear Values Cloud Our Moral Vision

Was Orwell right? Some may disagree with his take on the link between bad writing and bad politics. But it appears that Orwell's theory applies well to something he never considered: Corporate values statements. A new study shows that unclear writing in values statements matters. Unclarity sends a signal that a corporation can't be trusted. And, according to the study's authors, it's a reliable signal, too. They find that corporations that hide behind fuzzy, unclear values often do have something to hide.

The team of researchers behind the study, led by David Markowitz (Oregon), considered the values statements of 188 S&P 500 manufacturing companies. Markowitz was joined by Maryam Kouchaki (Northwestern), Jeffrey T. Hancock (Stanford), and Francesca Gino (Harvard).

They drew inspiration from earlier studies that had shown that companies with negative annual earnings write in a less clear manner in their reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). They reasoned that a similar process might occur with ethics as well.

Together the team was able to chronicle which companies had ethics infractions (like environmental violations, fraud, and anticompetitive activity). They also determined which codes of conduct were "linguistically obfuscated." These codes were full of abstraction, jargon, and long, overly complex explanations.

The results of the study proved their hypothesis correct: Companies with ethics infractions did resort to unclear language in order to hide them.

The researchers began to ask additional questions. They wanted to know if unclear language actually works. Does it effectively hide a company's problems? They showed corporate values statements to study participants and asked about their perceptions of the companies behind them. The participants saw the companies with clearly-written values statements as more moral, warmer, and more trustworthy, compared to those with jargon-laden values statements.

The Deception Spiral

Then the researchers decided to go a step further. They had shown that unclear language is often a consequence of unethical behavior. Now they wanted to see if it could cause unethical behavior as well. This would help them determine if something like the vicious cycle Orwell theorized really could exist.

This time, they took their work to the lab. They showed study participants values statements and then handed participants a list with scrambled words like “TTISRA” and “LONSEM.” They asked participants to unscramble the words and gave them opportunities to earn money. They introduced an element of competition as well. They could earn bonuses for unscrambling a greater number of words than 80% of the participants in their group.

At the same time, the researchers laid a trap. “TTISRA,” could be unscrambled to spell “ARTIST.” “LONSEM” could become “LEMONS.” But they included some words like OPOER, ALVNO, and ANHDU, which do not spell a word no matter how participants rearranged the letters. This trap enabled them to measure whether people cheated during the activity. If the participants said they unscramble the words without solutions, the researchers concluded they must have cheated in reporting their score.

The participants who had seen the unclear statements were more likely to cave to the temptation. Those who had seen the clear statement tended to stay on the moral path. Most importantly, this meant that the researchers had found clear support for a cycle similar to the one Orwell had described. This "deception spiral" as they call it, meant that unethical behavior can lead to unclear statements about values. And unclear statements about values can, in turn, contribute even more to unethical behavior.

The info is here.

MAID Without Borders? Oregon Drops the Residency Requirement

Nancy Berlinger

The Hastings Center: Bioethics

Originally posted 1 APR 22

Oregon, which legalized medical aid-in-dying (MAID) in 1997, has dropped the requirement that had limited MAID access to residents of the state. Under a settlement of a lawsuit filed in federal court by the advocacy group Compassion & Choices, Oregon public health officials will no longer apply or enforce this requirement as part of eligibility criteria for MAID.  The lawsuit was filed on behalf of an Oregon physician who challenged the state’s residency requirement and its consequences for his patients in neighboring Washington State.

In Oregon and in nine other jurisdictions – California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Vermont, and Washington – with Oregon-type provisions (Montana has related but distinct case law), MAID eligibility criteria include being an adult with a life expectancy of six months or less; the capacity to make a voluntary medical decision; and the ability to self-administer lethal medication prescribed by a physician for the purpose of ending life. Because hospice eligibility criteria also include a six-month prognosis, all people who are eligible for MAID are already hospice-eligible, and most people who seek to use a provision are enrolled in hospice.

The legal and practical implications of this policy change are not yet known and are potentially complex. Advocates have called attention to potential legal risks associated with traveling to Oregon to gain access to MAID. For example, a family member or friend who accompanies a terminally ill person to Oregon could be liable under the laws of their state of residence for “assisting a suicide.”

What are the ethical and social implications of this policy change? Here are some preliminary thoughts:

First, it is unlikely that many people will travel to Oregon from states without MAID provisions. MAID is used by extremely small numbers of terminally ill people, and Oregon’s removal of its residency requirement did not change the multistep evaluation process to determine eligibility. To relocate to another state for the weeks that this process takes would not be practicable or financially feasible for many terminally ill, usually older, adults who are already receiving hospice care.

The info is here.

Experts Are Ringing Alarms About Elon Musk’s Brain Implants

Noah Kirsch

Daily Beast

Posted 25 Jan 2021

Here is an excerpt:

“These are very niche products—if we’re really only talking about developing them for paralyzed individuals—the market is small, the devices are expensive,” said Dr. L. Syd Johnson, an associate professor in the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at SUNY Upstate Medical University.

“If the ultimate goal is to use the acquired brain data for other devices, or use these devices for other things—say, to drive cars, to drive Teslas—then there might be a much, much bigger market,” she said. “But then all those human research subjects—people with genuine needs—are being exploited and used in risky research for someone else’s commercial gain.”

In interviews with The Daily Beast, a number of scientists and academics expressed cautious hope that Neuralink will responsibly deliver a new therapy for patients, though each also outlined significant moral quandaries that Musk and company have yet to fully address.

Say, for instance, a clinical trial participant changes their mind and wants out of the study, or develops undesirable complications. “What I’ve seen in the field is we’re really good at implanting [the devices],” said Dr. Laura Cabrera, who researches neuroethics at Penn State. “But if something goes wrong, we really don't have the technology to explant them” and remove them safely without inflicting damage to the brain.

There are also concerns about “the rigor of the scrutiny” from the board that will oversee Neuralink’s trials, said Dr. Kreitmair, noting that some institutional review boards “have a track record of being maybe a little mired in conflicts of interest.” She hoped that the high-profile nature of Neuralink’s work will ensure that they have “a lot of their T’s crossed.”

The academics detailed additional unanswered questions: What happens if Neuralink goes bankrupt after patients already have devices in their brains? Who gets to control users’ brain activity data? What happens to that data if the company is sold, particularly to a foreign entity? How long will the implantable devices last, and will Neuralink cover upgrades for the study participants whether or not the trials succeed?

Dr. Johnson, of SUNY Upstate, questioned whether the startup’s scientific capabilities justify its hype. “If Neuralink is claiming that they’ll be able to use their device therapeutically to help disabled persons, they’re overpromising because they’re a long way from being able to do that.”

Neuralink did not respond to a request for comment as of publication time.

The info is here.

Meta-analysis of human prediction error for incentives, perception, cognition, and action

Corlett, P.R., Mollick, J.A. & Kober, H.

Neuropsychopharmacol. (2022). 

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-021-01264-3

Abstract

Prediction errors (PEs) are a keystone for computational neuroscience. Their association with midbrain neural firing has been confirmed across species and has inspired the construction of artificial intelligence that can outperform humans. However, there is still much to learn. Here, we leverage the wealth of human PE data acquired in the functional neuroimaging setting in service of a deeper understanding, using an MKDA (multi-level kernel-based density) meta-analysis. Studies were identified with Google Scholar, and we included studies with healthy adult participants that reported activation coordinates corresponding to PEs published between 1999–2018. Across 264 PE studies that have focused on reward, punishment, action, cognition, and perception, consistent with domain-general theoretical models of prediction error we found midbrain PE signals during cognitive and reward learning tasks, and an insula PE signal for perceptual, social, cognitive, and reward prediction errors. There was evidence for domain-specific error signals––in the visual hierarchy during visual perception, and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex during social inference. We assessed bias following prior neuroimaging meta-analyses and used family-wise error correction for multiple comparisons. This organization of computation by region will be invaluable in building and testing mechanistic models of cognitive function and dysfunction in machines, humans, and other animals. Limitations include small sample sizes and ROI masking in some included studies, which we addressed by weighting each study by sample size, and directly comparing whole brain vs. ROI-based results.

Discussion

There appeared to be regionally compartmentalized PEs for primary and secondary rewards. Primary rewards elicited PEs in the dorsal striatum and amygdala, while secondary reward PEs were in ventral striatum. This is consistent with the representational transition that occurs with learning. We also found separable PEs for valence domains: caudal regions of the caudate-putamen are involved in the learning of safety signals and avoidance learning, more anterior striatum is selective for rewards, while more posterior is selective for losses. We found posterior midbrain aversive PE, consistent with preclinical findings that dopamine neurons––which respond to negative valence––are located more posteriorly in the midbrain and project to medial prefrontal regions. Additionally, we found both appetitive and aversive PEs in the amygdala, consistent with animal studies. The presence of both appetitive and aversive PE signals in the amygdala is consistent with its expanding role regulating learning based on surprise and uncertainty rather than fear per se. 

Perhaps conspicuous in its absence, given preclinical work, is the hippocampus, which is often held to be a nexus for reward PE, memory PE, and perceptual PE. This may be because the hippocampus is constantly and commonly engaged throughout task performance. Its PEs may not be resolved by the sluggish BOLD response, which is based on local field potentials and may represent the projections into a region (and therefore the striatal PE signals we observed may be the culmination of the processing in CA1, CA3, and subiculum). Furthermore, we have only recently been able to image subfields of the hippocampus (with higher field strengths and more rapid sequences); as higher resolution PE papers accrue we will revisit the meta-analysis of PEs.

The research is here.

How FDA Failures Contributed to the Opioid Crisis

Andrew Kolodny, MD

AMA J Ethics. 2020;22(8):E743-750. 

doi: 10.1001/amajethics.2020.743.

Abstract

Over the past 25 years, pharmaceutical companies deceptively promoted opioid use in ways that were often neither safe nor effective, contributing to unprecedented increases in prescribing, opioid use disorder, and deaths by overdose. This article explores regulatory mistakes made by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in approving and labeling new analgesics. By understanding and correcting these mistakes, future public health crises caused by improper pharmaceutical marketing might be prevented.

Introduction

In the United States, opioid use disorder (OUD) and opioid overdose were once rare. But over the past 25 years, the number of Americans suffering from OUD increased exponentially and in parallel with an unprecedented increase in opioid prescribing. Today, OUD is common, especially in patients with chronic pain treated with opioid analgesics, and opioid overdose is the leading cause of accidental death.

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Oversight Recommendations

While fewer clinicians are initiating long-term opioids, overprescribing is still a problem. According to a recently published report, more than 2.9 million people initiated opioid use in December 2017. The FDA’s continued approval of new opioids exacerbates this problem. Each time a branded opioid hits the market, the company, eager for return on its investment, is given an incentive and, in essence, a license to promote aggressive prescribing. The FDA’s continued approval of new opioids pits the financial interests of drug companies against city, state, and federal efforts to discourage initiation of long-term opioids.

To finally end the opioid crisis, the FDA must enforce the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and it must act on recommendations from the NAS for an overhaul of its opioid approval and removal policies. The broad indication on opioid labels must be narrowed, and an explicit warning against long-term use and high-dose prescribing should be added. The label should reinforce, rather than contradict, guidance from the CDC, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and other public health agencies that are calling for more cautious prescribing.

The information is here.

Can Brain Organoids Be ‘Conscious’? Scientists May Soon Find Out

Anil Seth

Wired.com

Originally posted 20 DEC 21

Here is an excerpt:

The challenge here is that we are still not sure how to define consciousness in a fully formed human brain, let alone in a small cluster of cells grown in a lab. But there are some promising avenues to explore. One prominent candidate for a brain signature of consciousness is its response to a perturbation. If you stimulate a conscious brain with a pulse of energy, the electrical echo will reverberate in complex patterns over time and space. Do the same thing to an unconscious brain and the echo will be very simple—like throwing a stone into still water. The neuroscientist Marcello Massimini and his team at the University of Milan have used this discovery to detect residual or “covert” consciousness in behaviorally unresponsive patients with severe brain injury. What happens to brain organoids when stimulated this way remains unknown—and it is not yet clear how the results might be interpreted.

As brain organoids develop increasingly similar dynamics to those observed in conscious human brains, we will have to reconsider both what we take to be reliable brain signatures of consciousness in humans, and what criteria we might adopt to ascribe consciousness to something made not born.

The ethical implications of this are obvious. A conscious organoid might consciously suffer and we may never recognize its suffering since it cannot express anything.

The info is here.

The hidden ‘replication crisis’ of finance

Robin Wigglesworth 

Financial Times

Originally published 15 NOV 2021

Here is an excerpt:

Is investing suffering from something similar?

That is the incendiary argument of Campbell Harvey, professor of finance at Duke university. He reckons that at least half of the 400 supposedly market-beating strategies identified in top financial journals over the years are bogus. Worse, he worries that many fellow academics are in denial about this.

“It’s a huge issue,” he says. “Step one in dealing with the replication crisis in finance is to accept that there is a crisis. And right now, many of my colleagues are not there yet.”

Harvey is not some obscure outsider or performative contrarian attempting to gain attention through needless controversy. He is the former editor of the Journal of Finance, a former president of the American Finance Association, and an adviser to investment firms like Research Affiliates and Man Group.

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Obviously, the stakes of the replication crisis are much higher in medicine, where lives can be in play. But it is not something that remains confined to the ivory towers of business schools, as investment groups often smell an opportunity to sell products based on apparently market-beating factors, Harvey argues. “It filters into the real world,” he says. “It definitely makes it into people’s portfolios.”

The info is here.

Ethics Pays: Summary for Businesses

Ethicalsystems.org

September 2021

Is good ethics good for business? Crime and sleazy behavior sometimes pay off handsomely. People would not do such things if they didn’t think they were more profitable than the alternatives.

But let us make two distinctions right up front. First, let us contrast individual employees with companies. Of course, it can benefit individual employees to lie, cheat, and steal when they can get away with it. But these benefits usually come at the expense of the firm and its shareholders, so leaders and managers should work very hard to design ethical systems that will discourage such self-serving behavior (known as the “principal-agent problem”).

The harder question is whether ethical violations committed by the firm or for the firm’s benefit are profitable. Cheating customers, avoiding taxes, circumventing costly regulations, and undermining competitors can all directly increase shareholder value.

And here we must make the second distinction: short-term vs. long-term. Of course, bad ethics can be extremely profitable in the short run. Business is a complex web of relationships, and it is easy to increase revenues or decrease costs by exploiting some of those relationships. But what happens in the long run?

Customers are happy and confident in knowing they’re dealing with an honest company. Ethical companies retain the bulk of their employees for the long-term, which reduces costs associated with turnover. Investors have peace of mind when they invest in companies that display good ethics because they feel assured that their funds are protected. Good ethics keep share prices high and protect businesses from takeovers.

Culture has a tremendous influence on ethics and its application in a business setting. A corporation’s ability to deliver ethical value is dependent on the state of its culture. The culture of a company influences the moral judgment of employees and stakeholders. Companies that work to create a strong ethical culture motivate everyone to speak and act with honesty and integrity. Companies that portray strong ethics attract customers to their products and services, and are far more likely to manage their negative environmental and social externalities well.

The information and research citations are here.

Silenced by Fear: The Nature, Sources, and Consequences of Fear at Work

Kish-Gephart, J. J. et al. (2009)

Research in Organizational Behavior, 29, 163-193. 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2009.07.002

Abstract

In every organization, individual members have the potential to speak up about important issues, but a growing body of research suggests that they often remain silent instead, out of fear of negative personal and professional consequences. In this chapter, we draw on research from disciplines ranging from evolutionary psychology to neuroscience, sociology, and anthropology to unpack fear as a discrete emotion and to elucidate its effects on workplace silence. In doing so, we move beyond prior descriptions and categorizations of what employees fear to present a deeper understanding of the nature of fear experiences, where such fears originate, and the different types of employee silence they motivate. Our aim is to introduce new directions for future research on silence as well as to encourage further attention to the powerful and pervasive role of fear across numerous areas of theory and research on organizational behavior.

Discussion 

Fear, a powerful and pervasive emotion, influences human perception, cognition, and behavior in ways and to an extent that we find underappreciated in much of the organizational literature. This chapter draws from a broad range of literatures, including evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and anthropology, to provide a fuller understanding of how fear influences silence in organizations. Our intention is to provide a foundation to inform future theorizing and research on fear’s effects in the workplace, and to elucidate why people at work fear challenging authority and thus how fear inhibits speaking up with even routine problems or suggestions for improvement.

Our review of the literature on fear generated insights with the potential to extend theory on silence in several ways.  First, we proposed that silence should be differentiated based on the intensity of fear experienced and the time available for choosing a response. Both non-deliberative, low-road silence and conscious but schema-driven silence differ from descriptions in extant literature of defensive silence as intentional, reasoned and involving an expectancy-like mental calculus. Thus, our proposed typology (in Fig. 2) suggests the need for content-specific future theory and research. For example, the description of silence as the result of extended, conscious deliberation may fit choices about whistleblowing and major issue selling well, while not explaining how individuals decide to speak up or remain silent in more routine high fear intensity or high immediacy situations. We also theorized that as a natural outcome of humans’ innate tendency to avoid the unpleasant characteristics of fear, employees may develop a type of habituated silence behavior that is largely unrecognized by them.

We expanded understanding of the antecedents of workplace silence by explaining in detail how prior (individual and societal) experiences affect the perceptions, appraisals, and outcomes of fear-based silence. Noting that the fear of challenging authority has roots in the biological mechanisms developed to aid survival in early humans, we argued that this prepared fear is continually developed and reinforced through a lifetime of experiences across most social institutions (e.g., family, school, religion) that implicitly and explicitly convey messages about authority relationships.Over time, these direct and indirect learning experiences, coupled with the characteristics of an evolutionary-based fear module, become the memories and beliefs against which current stimuli in moments of possible voice are compared.

Finally, we proposed two factors to help explain why and how certain individuals speak up to authority despite experiencing some fear of doing so. Though the deck is clearly stacked in favor of fear and silence, anger as a biologically-based emotion and voice efficacy as a learned belief in one’s ability to successfully speak up in difficult voice situations may help employees prevail over fear – in part, through their influence on the control appraisals that are central to emotional experience.

A pdf is here.

Demand five precepts to aid social-media watchdogs

Ethan Zucker

Nature 597, 9 (2021)

Originally punished 31 Aug 21

Here is an excerpt:

I propose the following. First, give researchers access to the same targeting tools that platforms offer to advertisers and commercial partners. Second, for publicly viewable content, allow researchers to combine and share data sets by supplying keys to application programming interfaces. Third, explicitly allow users to donate data about their online behaviour for research, and make code used for such studies publicly reviewable for security flaws. Fourth, create safe-haven protections that recognize the public interest. Fifth, mandate regular audits of algorithms that moderate content and serve ads.

In the United States, the FTC could demand this access on behalf of consumers: it has broad powers to compel the release of data. In Europe, making such demands should be even more straightforward. The European Data Governance Act, proposed in November 2020, advances the concept of “data altruism” that allows users to donate their data, and the broader Digital Services Act includes a potential framework to implement protections for research in the public interest.

Technology companies argue that they must restrict data access because of the potential for harm, which also conveniently insulates them from criticism and scrutiny. They cite misuse of data, such as in the Cambridge Analytica scandal (which came to light in 2018 and prompted the FTC orders), in which an academic researcher took data from tens of millions of Facebook users collected through online ‘personality tests’ and gave it to a UK political consultancy that worked on behalf of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign. Another example of abuse of data is the case of Clearview AI, which used scraping to produce a huge photographic database to allow federal and state law-enforcement agencies to identify individuals.

These incidents have led tech companies to design systems to prevent misuse — but such systems also prevent research necessary for oversight and scrutiny. To ensure that platforms act fairly and benefit society, there must be ways to protect user data and allow independent oversight.

The article is here.

How does COVID affect the brain? Two neuroscientists explain

T. Kilpatrick & S. Petrou

The Conversation

Originally posted 11 Aug 21

Here is an excerpt:

In a UK-based study released as a pre-print online in June, researchers compared brain images taken of people before and after exposure to COVID. They showed parts of the limbic system had decreased in size compared to people not infected. This could signal a future vulnerability to brain diseases and may play a role in the emergence of long-COVID symptoms.

COVID could also indirectly affect the brain. The virus can damage blood vessels and cause either bleeding or blockages resulting in the disruption of blood, oxygen, or nutrient supply to the brain, particularly to areas responsible for problem solving.

The virus also activates the immune system, and in some people, this triggers the production of toxic molecules which can reduce brain function.

Although research on this is still emerging, the effects of COVID on nerves that control gut function should also be considered. This may impact digestion and the health and composition of gut bacteria, which are known to influence the function of the brain.

The virus could also compromise the function of the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland, often known as the “master gland”, regulates hormone production. This includes cortisol, which governs our response to stress. When cortisol is deficient, this may contribute to long-term fatigue.

The article is here.

Landmark research integrity survey finds questionable practices are surprisingly common

Jop De Vrieze

Science Magazine

Originally posted 7 Jul 21

More than half of Dutch scientists regularly engage in questionable research practices, such as hiding flaws in their research design or selectively citing literature, according to a new study. And one in 12 admitted to committing a more serious form of research misconduct within the past 3 years: the fabrication or falsification of research results.

This rate of 8% for outright fraud was more than double that reported in previous studies. Organizers of the Dutch National Survey on Research Integrity, the largest of its kind to date, took special precautions to guarantee the anonymity of respondents for these sensitive questions, says Gowri Gopalakrishna, the survey’s leader and an epidemiologist at Amsterdam University Medical Center (AUMC). “That method increases the honesty of the answers,” she says. “So we have good reason to believe that our outcome is closer to reality than that of previous studies.” The survey team published results on 6 July in two preprint articles, which also examine factors that contribute to research misconduct, on MetaArxiv.

When the survey began last year, organizers invited more than 60,000 researchers to take part—those working across all fields of research, both science and the humanities, at some 22 Dutch universities and research centers. However, many institutions refused to cooperate for fear of negative publicity, and responses fell short of expectations: Only about 6800 completed surveys were received. Still, that’s more responses than any previous research integrity survey, and the response rate at the participating universities was 21%—in line with previous surveys.

One of the preprints focuses on the prevalence of misbehavior—cases of fraud as well as a less severe category of “questionable research practices,” such as carelessly assessing the work of colleagues, poorly mentoring junior researchers, or selectively citing scientific literature. The other article focuses on responsible behavior; this includes correcting one’s own published errors, sharing research data, and “preregistering” experiments—posting hypotheses and protocols ahead of time to reduce the bias that can arise when these are released after data collection.

The info is here.

Freezing Eggs and Creating Patients: Moral Risks of Commercialized Fertility

E. Reis & S. Reis-Dennis

The Hastings Center Report

Originally published 24 Nov 17

Abstract

There's no doubt that reproductive technologies can transform lives for the better. Infertile couples and single, lesbian, gay, intersex, and transgender people have the potential to form families in ways that would have been inconceivable years ago. Yet we are concerned about the widespread commercialization of certain egg-freezing programs, the messages they propagate about motherhood, the way they blur the line between care and experimentation, and the manipulative and exaggerated marketing that stretches the truth and inspires false hope in women of various ages. We argue that although reproductive technology, and egg freezing in particular, promise to improve women's care by offering more choices to achieve pregnancy and childbearing, they actually have the potential to be disempowering. First, commercial motives in the fertility industry distort women's medical deliberations, thereby restricting their autonomy; second, having the option to freeze their eggs can change the meaning of women's reproductive choices in a way that is limiting rather than liberating.

Here is an excerpt:

Egg banks are offering presumably fertile women a solution for potential infertility that they may never face. These women might pay annual egg-freezing storage rates but never use their eggs. In fact, even if a woman who froze eggs in her early twenties waited until her late thirties to use them, there can be no guarantee that those eggs would produce a viable pregnancy. James A. Grifo, program director of NYU Langone Health Fertility Center, has speculated, “[T]here have been reports of embryos that have been frozen for over 15 years making babies, and we think the same thing is going to be true of eggs.” But the truth is that the technology is so new that neither he nor we know how frozen eggs will hold up over a long period of time.

Some women in their twenties might want to hedge their bets against future infertility by freezing their eggs as a part of an egg-sharing program; others might hope to learn from a simple home test of hormone levels whether their egg supply (ovarian reserve) is low—a relatively rare condition. However, these tests are not foolproof. The ASRM has cautioned against home tests of ovarian reserve for women in their twenties because it may lead to “false reassurance or unnecessary anxiety and concern.” This kind of medicalization of fertility may not be liberating; instead, it will exert undue pressure on women and encourage them to rely on egg freezing over other reproductive options when it is far from guaranteed that those frozen eggs (particularly if the women have the condition known as premature ovarian aging) will ultimately lead to successful pregnancies and births.

The info is here.

Before You Answer, Consider the Opposite Possibility—How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes

Ian Leslie

The Atlantic

Originally published 25 Apr 21

Here is an excerpt:

This raises the question of how a wise inner crowd can be cultivated. Psychologists have investigated various methods. One, following Stroop, is to harness the power of forgetting. Reassuringly for those of us who are prone to forgetting, people with poor working memories have been shown to have a wiser inner crowd; their guesses are more independent of one another, so they end up with a more diverse set of estimates and a more accurate average. The same effect has been achieved by spacing the guesses out in time.

More sophisticated methods harness the mind’s ability to inhabit different perspectives and look at a problem from more than one angle. People generate more diverse estimates when prompted to base their second or third guess on alternative assumptions; one effective technique is simply asking people to “consider the opposite” before giving a new answer. A fascinating recent study in this vein harnesses the power of disagreement itself. A pair of Dutch psychologists, Philippe Van de Calseyde and Emir Efendić, asked people a series of questions with numerical answers, such as the percentage of the world’s airports located in the U.S.. Then they asked participants to think of someone in their life with whom they often disagreed—that uncle with whom they always argue about politics—and to imagine what that person would guess.

The respondents came up with second estimates that were strikingly different from their first estimate, producing a much more accurate inner crowd. The same didn’t apply when they were asked to imagine how someone they usually agree with would answer the question, which suggests that the secret is to incorporate the perspectives of people who think differently from us. That the respondents hadn’t discussed that particular question with their disagreeable uncle did not matter. Just the act of thinking about someone with whom they argued a lot was enough to jog them out of habitual assumptions.

The info is here.

Research on Non-verbal Signs of Lies and Deceit: A Blind Alley

T. Brennen & S. Magnussen

Front. Psychol., 14 December 2020

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.613410

Introduction

Research on the detection of lies and deceit has a prominent place in the field of psychology and law with a substantial research literature published in this field of inquiry during the last five to six decades (Vrij, 2000, 2008; Vrij et al., 2019). There are good reasons for this interest in lie detection. We are all everyday liars, some of us more prolific than others, we lie in personal and professional relationships (Serota et al., 2010; Halevy et al., 2014; Serota and Levine, 2015; Verigin et al., 2019), and lying in public by politicians and other public figures has a long and continuing history (Peters, 2015). However, despite the personal problems that serious everyday lies may cause and the human tragedies political lies may cause, it is lying in court that appears to have been the principal initial motivation for the scientific interest in lie detection.

Lying in court is a threat to fair trials and the rule of law. Lying witnesses may lead to the exoneration of guilty persons or to the conviction of innocent ones. In the US it is well-documented that innocent people have been convicted because witnesses were lying in court (Garrett, 2010, 2011; www.innocenceproject.com). In evaluating the reliability and the truthfulness of a testimony, the court considers other evidence presented to the court, the known facts about the case and the testimonies by other witnesses. Inconsistency with the physical evidence or the testimonies of other witnesses might indicate that the witness is untruthful, or it may simply reflect the fact that the witness has observed, interpreted, and later remembered the critical events incorrectly—normal human errors all too well known in the eyewitness literature (Loftus, 2005; Wells and Loftus, 2013; Howe and Knott, 2015).

(as it ends)

Is the rational course simply to drop this line of research? We believe it is. The creative studies carried out during the last few decades have been important in showing that psychological folklore, the ideas we share about behavioral signals of lies and deceit are not correct. This debunking function of science is extremely important. But we have now sufficient evidence that there are no specific non-verbal behavioral signals that accompany lying or deceitful behavior. We can safely recommend that courts disregard such behavioral signals when appraising the credibility of victims, witnesses, and suspected offenders. For psychology and law researchers it may be time to move on.

Baby God: how DNA testing uncovered a shocking web of fertility fraud

Arian Horton

The Guardian

Originally published 2 Dec 20

Here ate two excerpts:

The database unmasked, with detached clarity, a dark secret hidden in plain sight for decades: the physician once named Nevada’s doctor of the year, who died in 2006 at age 94, had impregnated numerous patients with his own sperm, unbeknownst to the women or their families. The decades-long fertility fraud scheme, unspooled in the HBO documentary Baby God, left a swath of families – 26 children as of this writing, spanning 40 years of the doctor’s treatments – shocked at long-obscured medical betrayal, unmoored from assumptions of family history and stumbling over the most essential questions of identity. Who are you, when half your DNA is not what you thought?

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That reality – a once unknowable crime now made plainly knowable – has now come to pass, and the film features interviews with several of Fortier’s previously unknown children, each grappling with and tracing their way into a new web of half-siblings, questions of lineage and inheritance, and reframing of family history. Babst, who started as a cop at 19, dove into her own investigation, sourcing records on Dr Fortier that eventually revealed allegations of sexual abuse and molestation against his own stepchildren.

Brad Gulko, a human genomics scientist in San Francisco who bears a striking resemblance to the young Fortier, initially approached the revelation from the clinical perspective of biological motivations for procreation. “I feel like Dr Fortier found a way to justify in his own mind doing what he wanted to do that didn’t violate his ethical norms too much, even if he pushed them really hard,” he says in the film. “I’m still struggling with that. I don’t know where I’ll end up.”

The film quickly morphed, according to Olson, from an investigation of the Fortier case and his potential motivations to the larger, unresolvable questions of identity, nature versus nurture. “At first it was like ‘let’s get all the facts, we’re going to figure it out, what are his motivations, it will be super clear,’” said Olson. 

The info is here.

11th Circuit blocks South FL prohibitions on 'conversion therapy' for minors as unconstitutional

Michael Moline

Florida Pheonix

Originally posted 20 Nov 20

Here is an excerpt:

“We understand and appreciate that the therapy is highly controversial. But the First Amendment has no carve-out for controversial speech. We hold that the challenged ordinances violate the First Amendment because they are content-based regulations of speech that cannot survive strict scrutiny,” Grant wrote.

Judge Beverly Martin dissented, pointing to condemnations of the practice by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American School Counselor Association, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the World Health Organization.

“Today’s majority opinion puts a stop to municipal efforts to regulate ‘sexual orientation change efforts’ (commonly known as ‘conversion therapy’), which is known to be a harmful therapeutic practice,” Martin wrote.

“The majority invalidates laws enacted to curb these therapeutic practices, despite strong evidence of the harm they cause, as well as the laws’ narrow focus on licensed therapists practicing on patients who are minors. Although I am mindful of the free-speech concerns the majority expresses, I respectfully dissent from the decision to enjoin these laws.”

Matt Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, the conservative legal organization that represented two counselors who challenged the ordinance, welcomed the ruling.

“This is a huge victory for counselors and their clients to choose the counsel of their choice free of political censorship from government ideologues. This case is the beginning of the end of similar unconstitutional counseling bans around the country,” he said in a written statement.

The info is here.

Do antidepressants work?

Jacob Stegenga

aeon.co

Originally published 5 Mar 19

Here is an excerpt:

To see this, consider an analogy. Imagine we are testing a drug for weight loss. For every 100 subjects in the drug group, three subjects lose one kilogramme and 97 subjects gain five kilos. For every 100 subjects in the placebo group, two lose four kilos and 98 subjects do not gain or lose any weight. How effective is the drug for weight loss? The odds ratio of weight loss is 1.5, and yet this number tells us nothing about how much weight people on average gain or lose – indeed, the number entirely conceals the real effects of the drug. Though this is an extreme analogy, it shows how cautious we must be when interpreting this celebrated meta-analysis. Unfortunately, however, in response to this work, many leading psychiatrists celebrated, and news headlines misleadingly claimed ‘The drugs do work.’ On the winding route from the hard work of these researchers to the news reports where you were most likely to hear about that study, a simple number became a lie.

When analysed properly, the best evidence indicates that antidepressants are not clinically beneficial. The meta-analyses worth considering, such as the one above, involve attempts to gather evidence from all trials on antidepressants, including those that remain unpublished. Of course it is impossible to know that a meta-analysis includes all unpublished evidence, because publication bias is characterised by deception, either inadvertent or wilful. Nevertheless, these meta-analyses are serious attempts to address publication bias by finding as much data as possible. What, then, do they show?

In meta-analyses that include as much of the evidence as possible, the severity of depression among subjects who receive antidepressants goes down by approximately two points compared with subjects who receive a placebo. Two points. Remember, a depression score can go down by double that amount simply if a subject stops fidgeting. This result, found by both champions and critics of antidepressants, has been replicated year after year for more than a decade (see, for example, the meta-analyses led by Irving Kirsch in 2008, by J C Fournier in 2010, and by Janus Christian Jakobsen in 2017). The phenomena of blind-breaking, the placebo effect and unresolved publication bias could easily account for this trivial two-point reduction in severity scores.

The info is here.

Violent CRED s toward Out-Groups Increase Trustworthiness: Preliminary Experimental Evidence

Řezníček, D., & Kundt, R. (2020).

Journal of Cognition and Culture, 20(3-4), 262-281. 

doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12340084

Abstract

In the process of cultural learning, people tend to acquire mental representations and behavior from prestigious individuals over dominant ones, as prestigious individuals generously share their expertise and know-how to gain admiration, whereas dominant ones use violence, manipulation, and intimidation to enforce obedience. However, in the context of intergroup conflict, violent thoughts and behavior that are otherwise associated with dominance can hypothetically become prestigious because parochial altruists, who engage in violence against out-groups, act in the interest of their group members, therefore prosocially. This shift would imply that for other in-groups, individuals behaving violently toward out-groups during intergroup conflicts become simultaneously prestigious, making them desirable cultural models to learn from. Using the mechanism of credibility enhancing displays (CRED s), this article presents preliminary vignette-based evidence that violent CRED s toward out-groups during intergroup conflict increase the perceived trustworthiness of a violent cultural model.

From the Discussion section

We found support for hypotheses H1–3 regarding the seemingly paradoxical relationship between trustworthiness, prestige, dominance, and violence during an intergroup conflict (see Figures 1 and 2). Violent cultural model’s trustworthiness was positively predicted by CREDs and prestige, while it was negatively predicted by dominance. This suggests that in-groups violent toward out-groups during an intergroup conflict are not perceived as dominant manipulators who are better to be avoided and not learned from but rather as prestigious heroes who deserve to be venerated. Thus, it appears that a positive perception of violence toward out-groups, as modeled or tested by various researchers (Bowles, 2008; Castano & Leidner, 2012; Choi & Bowles, 2007;Cohen, Montoya, & Insko, 2006; Roccas, Klar, & Liviatan, 2006), is an eligible notion. Our study offers preliminary evidence for the suggestion that fighting violently for one’s group may increase the social status of fighters via prestige, not dominance.

A pdf of the research is here.

How to be an ethical scientist

W. A. Cunningham, J. J. Van Bavel,
& L. H. Somerville
Science Magazine
Originally posted 5 August 20

True discovery takes time, has many stops and starts, and is rarely neat and tidy. For example, news that the Higgs boson was finally observed in 2012 came 48 years after its original proposal by Peter Higgs. The slow pace of science helps ensure that research is done correctly, but it can come into conflict with the incentive structure of academic progress, as publications—the key marker of productivity in many disciplines—depend on research findings. Even Higgs recognized this problem with the modern academic system: “Today I wouldn't get an academic job. It's as simple as that. I don't think I would be regarded as productive enough.”

It’s easy to forget about the “long view” when there is constant pressure to produce. So, in this column, we’re going to focus on the type of long-term thinking that advances science. For example, are you going to cut corners to get ahead, or take a slow, methodical approach? What will you do if your experiment doesn’t turn out as expected? Without reflecting on these deeper issues, we can get sucked into the daily goals necessary for success while failing to see the long-term implications of our actions.

Thinking carefully about these issues will not only impact your own career outcomes, but it can also impact others. Your own decisions and actions affect those around you, including your labmates, your collaborators, and your academic advisers. Our goal is to help you avoid pitfalls and find an approach that will allow you to succeed without impairing the broader goals of science.

Be open to being wrong

Science often advances through accidental (but replicable) findings. The logic is simple: If studies always came out exactly as you anticipated, then nothing new would ever be learned. Our previous theories of the world would be just as good as they ever were. This is why scientific discovery is often most profound when you stumble on something entirely new. Isaac Asimov put it best when he said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny ... .’”

The info is here.