Trouble at the lab

Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not

The Economist
Originally posted October 19, 2013

“I SEE a train wreck looming,” warned Daniel Kahneman, an eminent psychologist, in an open letter last year. The premonition concerned research on a phenomenon known as “priming”. Priming studies suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparently irrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice. They have been a boom area in psychology over the past decade, and some of their insights have already made it out of the lab and into the toolkits of policy wonks keen on “nudging” the populace.

Dr Kahneman and a growing number of his colleagues fear that a lot of this priming research is poorly founded. Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. Many of these replications have failed. In April, for instance, a paper in PLoS ONE, a journal, reported that nine separate experiments had not managed to reproduce the results of a famous study from 1998 purporting to show that thinking about a professor before taking an intelligence test leads to a higher score than imagining a football hooligan.

The entire article is here.

Suicide Rate Climbs by 30 Percent in Kansas as Government Slashes Mental Health Budgets

Allison Kilkenny on October 21, 2013

The Nation

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment recently released a startling report (PDF) showing a 30 percent increase in suicides from 2011. Nationwide, the number of deaths by suicide surpassed the number of deaths by motor vehicle accidents in 2009, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided data.

The Wichita Eagle reports that the largest increase in suicides in Kansas occurred among white males, who already were the segment of the population most likely to take their own lives. More than 80 percent of suicides in Kansas last year were men, like Scott Dennis, a 42-year-old fitness company owner.

The entire story is here.

Do Emotions Play a Constitutive Role in Moral Cognition?

By Bryce Huebner
Georgetown University
February 2013

Behavioral experiments have revealed that the presence of an emotion-eliciting stimulus can affect the severity of a person's moral judgments, while imaging experiments have revealed that moral judgments evoke increased activity in brain regions classically associated with emotion, and studies using patient populations have confirmed that damage to these areas has a significant impact on the ability to make moral judgments. To many, these data seem to suggest that emotions may play a robustly causal or perhaps even a constitutive role in moral cognition (Cushman, Young, & Greene 2010; Greene et al. 2001, 2004; Nichols 2002, 2004; Paxton & Greene 2010; Plakias 2013; Prinz 2007; Strohminger et al. 2011; Valdesolo & DeSteno 2006). But others have noted that the existing data are also consistent with the possibility that emotions operate outside of moral cognition, ‘gating’ off morally significant information, or ‘amplifying’ the output of distinctively moral computations (Decety & Cacioppo 2012; Huebner, Dwyer, & Huaser 2009; Mikhail 2011; Pizarro, Inbar, & Helion 2011). While it is commonly thought that this debate can be settled by collecting further data, I maintain that the theoretical foundations of moral psychology are themselves to blame for this intractable dispute, and my primary aim in this paper is to make a case for this claim.

The entire paper is here. 

Does Studying Economics Breed Greed?

By Adam Grant
Author of Give and Take
LinkedIn article
Published October 21, 2013

In 1776, Adam Smith famously wrote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Economists have run with this insight for hundreds of years, and some experts think they’ve run a bit too far. Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell, believes that his profession is squashing cooperation and generosity.  And he believes he has the evidence to prove it.

Consider these data points:

Less charitable giving: in the U.S., economics professors gave less money to charity than professors in other fields—including history, philosophy, education, psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, physics, chemistry, and biology. More than twice as many economics professors gave zero dollars to charity than professors from the other fields.

More deception for personal gain: economics students in Germany were more likely than students from other majors to recommend an overpriced plumber when they were paid to do it.

Greater acceptance of greed: Economics majors and students who had taken at least three economics courses were more likely than their peers to rate greed as “generally good,” “correct,” and “moral.”

The entire article is here.

“HIPAA-COMPLIANT” Texting of PHI: The Good. The Bad. The Ugly.

By Alaap Shah and Ali Lakhani
TechHealth Perspectives
Originally published October 14, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

Currently, there is a great deal of uncertainty around whether “HIPAA-compliant” texting of ePHI can be accomplished.  Even greater confusion exists around whether certain texting platforms themselves can be “HIPAA-compliant”.  Before you start to send ePHI via text message, there are a number of issues to consider.

The entire article is here.

The Not-So-Hidden Cause Behind the A.D.H.D. Epidemic

By MAGGIE KOERTH-BAKER
The New York Times
Published: October 15, 2013

Here are two excerpts:

Of the 6.4 million kids who have been given diagnoses of A.D.H.D., a large percentage are unlikely to have any kind of physiological difference that would make them more distractible than the average non-A.D.H.D. kid. It’s also doubtful that biological or environmental changes are making physiological differences more prevalent. Instead, the rapid increase in people with A.D.H.D. probably has more to do with sociological factors — changes in the way we school our children, in the way we interact with doctors and in what we expect from our kids.

Which is not to say that A.D.H.D. is a made-up disorder.

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This lack of rigor leaves room for plenty of diagnoses that are based on something other than biology. Case in point: The beginning of A.D.H.D. as an “epidemic” corresponds with a couple of important policy changes that incentivized diagnosis. The incorporation of A.D.H.D. under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act in 1991 — and a subsequent overhaul of the Food and Drug Administration in 1997 that allowed drug companies to more easily market directly to the public — were hugely influential, according to Adam Rafalovich, a sociologist at Pacific University in Oregon.

The entire article is here.

Moral Mind-Sets: Abstract Thinking Increases a Preference for “Individualizing” Over “Binding” Moral Foundations

By Jaime L. Napier and Jamie B. Luguri
Social Psychological and Personality Science
November 2013 vol. 4 no. 6 754-759

Abstract

Moral foundations theory contends that people’s morality goes beyond concerns about justice and welfare, and asserts that humans have five innate foundations of morality: harm and fairness (individualizing foundations) and in-group loyalty, deference to authority, and purity (binding foundations). The current research investigates whether people’s moral judgments are consistently informed by these five values, or whether individualizing and binding foundations might be differentially endorsed depending on individuals’ mind-sets. Results from our study demonstrated that when participants were experimentally manipulated to think abstractly (vs. concretely), which presumably makes their higher level core values salient, they increased in their valuations of the individualizing foundations and decreased in their valuations of the binding foundations. This effect was not moderated by political ideology. Implications and areas for future directions are discussed.

The entire article is here.

Are Forensic Evaluations “Health Care” and Are They Regulated by HIPAA?

By Bruce Borkosky,  Jon M. Pellett, and Mark S. Thomas
Psychological Injury and Law
June 2013

Abstract

Forensic mental health providers (FMHPs) typically do not release records to the examinee. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) federal regulations might change this position, given that they have created a basic right of access to health care records. This legislation has led to a disagreement regarding whether HIPAA regulates forensic evaluations. The primary argument (and the majority of scholarly citations) has been that such evaluations do not constitute “health care.” Specifically, in this position, the nature and purpose of forensic evaluations are not considered related to treatment (amelioration of psychopathology) of the patient. In addition, it asserts that HIPAA applies solely to treatment services; thus, forensic evaluations are inapplicable to HIPAA. We describe the evidence for and against this argument, the strengths and limitations of the evidence, and recent court decisions related to it. The weakest part of the “HIPAA does not regulate forensics” argument is that HIPAA has no exclusion criteria based on type of services. It only creates an inclusion criteria for providers; once “covered,” all services provided by that provider are thence forward “covered.” Authoritative evidence for patient access can be found in the HIPAA regulations themselves, the US Department of Health and Human Services’ commentaries, additional statements and disciplinary cases, the research literature, other agency opinion, and legal opinion. It appears that the evidence strongly suggests that, for those forensic mental health practitioners who are covered entities, HIPAA does apply to forensic evaluations. The implication is that FMHPs potentially face various federal, state, and civil sanctions for refusing to permit patient access to records.

The article is here.

Economics as a moral science

by INGRID ROBEYNS on OCTOBER 31, 2013
The Crooked Timber

Here are some excerpts:

Why is it relevant now? In the lively discussion on what kind of science (or something else) economics is which is currently raging on the blogs, we should also consider the view of those who have argued that economics is a moral science. This, in Tony Atkinson’s words means that “Economists need to be more explicit about the relation between the welfare criteria and the objectives of government, policymakers and individual citizens”. Atkinson traces the expression back to Keynes, who had written in a letter that ‘economics is essentially a moral science’. More recent defenders of that view include Kenneth Boulding in his 1968 AEA presidential address, who defended the strong view that economics inherently depends on the acceptance of some values, and thus inherently has an ethical component.

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My view is this: economics shouldn’t aspire to be a value-free science, but an intellectual enterprise that combines elements from the sciences with elements from ‘the arts’ done in a manner that makes it value-commitments explicit. Values in economics have many sources. There are values involved in the choice of questions that are asked (and not asked). Value judgements are embedded in the normative principles (such as the Pareto-criterion) that are endorsed. Value judgments flow from the choices in how basic categories and notions are conceptualized (is ‘labour’ only what we do for pay, or also what we do to reproduce the human species?).

The entire post is here.