By Jeroen van den Hoven, Martijn Blaauw, Wolter Pieters, and Martijn Warnier
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
Human beings value their privacy and the protection of their personal sphere of life. They value some control over who knows what about them. They certainly do not want their personal information to be accessible to just anyone at any time. But recent advances in information technology threaten privacy and have reduced the amount of control over personal data and open up the possibility of a range of negative consequences as a result of access to personal data. The 21st century has become the century of Big Data and advanced Information Technology allows for the storage and processing of exabytes of data. The revelations of Edward Snowden have demonstrated that these worries are real and that the technical capabilities to collect, store and search large quantities of data concerning telephone conversations, internet searches and electronic payment are now in place and are routinely used by government agencies. For business firms, personal data about customers and potential customers are now also a key asset. At the same time, the meaning and value of privacy remains the subject of considerable controversy. The combination of increasing power of new technology and the declining clarity and agreement on privacy give rise to problems concerning law, policy and ethics. The focus of this article is on exploring the relationship between information technology (IT) and privacy. We will both illustrate the specific threats that IT and innovations in IT pose for privacy, and indicate how IT itself might be able to overcome these privacy concerns by being developed in a ‘privacy-sensitive way’. We will also discuss the role of emerging technologies in the debate, and account for the way in which moral debates are themselves affected by IT.
The entire entry is here.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Saturday, December 13, 2014
If Everything Is Getting Better, Why Do We Remain So Pessimistic?
By the Cato Institute
Featuring Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; with comments by Brink Lindsey, Vice President for Research, Cato Institute; and Charles Kenny, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development
Originally posted November 19, 2014
Evidence from academic institutions and international organizations shows dramatic improvements in human well-being. These improvements are especially striking in the developing world. Unfortunately, there is often a wide gap between reality and public perceptions, including that of many policymakers, scholars in unrelated fields, and intelligent lay persons. To make matters worse, the media emphasizes bad news, while ignoring many positive long-term trends. Please join us for a discussion of psychological, physiological, cultural, and other social reasons for the persistence of pessimism in the age of growing abundance.
The video and audio can be seen or downloaded here.
Editor's note: This video is important to psychologists to show cultural trends and beliefs that may be perpetrated by media hype. This panel also highlights cognitive distortions, well being, and positive macro trends. If you can, watch the first presenter, Dr. Steven Pinker. If nothing else, you may feel a little better after watching the video.
Featuring Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; with comments by Brink Lindsey, Vice President for Research, Cato Institute; and Charles Kenny, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development
Originally posted November 19, 2014
Evidence from academic institutions and international organizations shows dramatic improvements in human well-being. These improvements are especially striking in the developing world. Unfortunately, there is often a wide gap between reality and public perceptions, including that of many policymakers, scholars in unrelated fields, and intelligent lay persons. To make matters worse, the media emphasizes bad news, while ignoring many positive long-term trends. Please join us for a discussion of psychological, physiological, cultural, and other social reasons for the persistence of pessimism in the age of growing abundance.
The video and audio can be seen or downloaded here.
Editor's note: This video is important to psychologists to show cultural trends and beliefs that may be perpetrated by media hype. This panel also highlights cognitive distortions, well being, and positive macro trends. If you can, watch the first presenter, Dr. Steven Pinker. If nothing else, you may feel a little better after watching the video.
Friday, December 12, 2014
Culture Of Psychological Science At Stake
By Tania Lombrozo
NPR Cosmos and Culture
Originally published November 18, 2014
In a video released today at Edge.org, psychologist Simone Schnall raises interesting questions about the role of replication in social psychology and about what counts as "admissible evidence" in science.
Schnall comes at the topic from recent experience: One of her studies was selected for a replication attempt by a registered replication project, and the replication failed to find the effect from her original study.
An occasional failure to replicate isn't too surprising or disruptive to the field — what makes Schnall's case somewhat unique is the discussion that ensued, which occurred largely on blogs and social media. And it got ugly.
The entire NPR article is here.
Dr. Schnall's Edge Video is here.
NPR Cosmos and Culture
Originally published November 18, 2014
In a video released today at Edge.org, psychologist Simone Schnall raises interesting questions about the role of replication in social psychology and about what counts as "admissible evidence" in science.
Schnall comes at the topic from recent experience: One of her studies was selected for a replication attempt by a registered replication project, and the replication failed to find the effect from her original study.
An occasional failure to replicate isn't too surprising or disruptive to the field — what makes Schnall's case somewhat unique is the discussion that ensued, which occurred largely on blogs and social media. And it got ugly.
The entire NPR article is here.
Dr. Schnall's Edge Video is here.
The Neuroscience of Moral Decision Making
By Molly Crockett
Edge Video Series
Originally published November 18, 2014
Here is an excerpt:
The neurochemistry adds an interesting layer to this bigger question of whether punishment is prosocially motivated, because in some ways it's a more objective way to look at it. Serotonin doesn't have a research agenda; it's just a chemical. We had all this data and we started thinking differently about the motivations of so-called altruistic punishment. That inspired a purely behavioral study where we give people the opportunity to punish those who behave unfairly towards them, but we do it in two conditions. One is a standard case where someone behaves unfairly to someone else and then that person can punish them. Everyone has full information, and the guy who's unfair knows that he's being punished.
Then we added another condition, where we give people the opportunity to punish in secret— hidden punishment. You can punish someone without them knowing that they've been punished. They still suffer a loss financially, but because we obscure the size of the stake, the guy who's being punished doesn't know he's being punished. The punisher gets the satisfaction of knowing that the bad guy is getting less money, but there's no social norm being enforced.
The entire video and transcript is here.
Edge Video Series
Originally published November 18, 2014
Here is an excerpt:
The neurochemistry adds an interesting layer to this bigger question of whether punishment is prosocially motivated, because in some ways it's a more objective way to look at it. Serotonin doesn't have a research agenda; it's just a chemical. We had all this data and we started thinking differently about the motivations of so-called altruistic punishment. That inspired a purely behavioral study where we give people the opportunity to punish those who behave unfairly towards them, but we do it in two conditions. One is a standard case where someone behaves unfairly to someone else and then that person can punish them. Everyone has full information, and the guy who's unfair knows that he's being punished.
Then we added another condition, where we give people the opportunity to punish in secret— hidden punishment. You can punish someone without them knowing that they've been punished. They still suffer a loss financially, but because we obscure the size of the stake, the guy who's being punished doesn't know he's being punished. The punisher gets the satisfaction of knowing that the bad guy is getting less money, but there's no social norm being enforced.
The entire video and transcript is here.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Moral Evaluations Depend Upon Mindreading Moral Occurrent Beliefs
By Clayton R. Critcher, Erik G. Helzer, David Tannenbaum, and David A. Pizarro
Abstract
People evaluate the moral character of others not merely based on what they do, but why they do
it. Because an agent’s state of mind is not directly observable, people typically engage in
mindreading—attempts at inferring mental states—when forming moral evaluations. The present
paper identifies a heretofore unstudied focus of mindreading, moral occurrent beliefs—the
cognitions (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, principles, concerns, rules) accessible in an agent’s mind
while confronting a morally-relevant decision that could provide a moral justification for a
particular course of action. Whereas previous mindreading research has examined how people
“reason back” to make sense of why agents behaved as they did, we instead ask how mindread
occurrent beliefs (MOBs) constrain moral evaluations for an agent’s subsequent actions. Our
studies distinguish three accounts of how MOBs influence moral evaluations, show that people
rely on MOBs spontaneously (instead of merely when experimental measures draw attention to
them), and identify non-moral cues (e.g., whether the situation demands a quick decision) that
guide MOBs. Implications for theory of mind, moral psychology, and social cognition are
discussed.
The entire paper is here.
Abstract
People evaluate the moral character of others not merely based on what they do, but why they do
it. Because an agent’s state of mind is not directly observable, people typically engage in
mindreading—attempts at inferring mental states—when forming moral evaluations. The present
paper identifies a heretofore unstudied focus of mindreading, moral occurrent beliefs—the
cognitions (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, principles, concerns, rules) accessible in an agent’s mind
while confronting a morally-relevant decision that could provide a moral justification for a
particular course of action. Whereas previous mindreading research has examined how people
“reason back” to make sense of why agents behaved as they did, we instead ask how mindread
occurrent beliefs (MOBs) constrain moral evaluations for an agent’s subsequent actions. Our
studies distinguish three accounts of how MOBs influence moral evaluations, show that people
rely on MOBs spontaneously (instead of merely when experimental measures draw attention to
them), and identify non-moral cues (e.g., whether the situation demands a quick decision) that
guide MOBs. Implications for theory of mind, moral psychology, and social cognition are
discussed.
The entire paper is here.
Left Out in the Cold: Seven Reasons Not to Freeze Your Eggs
By Françoise Baylis
Impact Ethics
Originally posted October 16, 2014
Here is an excerpt:
These professional cautions are of no consequence to Facebook or Apple, however. Both of these companies have decided to include egg freezing in their employee benefit package. As an alternative, they could have decided to improve the health benefits offered to all employees. Or, to stay focused on the issue of reproduction, they could have included a full year of family leave in the benefit package. Instead, they chose to pay up to $20,000 for egg freezing. Now call me crazy, but I think this choice just might have to do with their corporate priorities – which include keeping talented workers in their 20s to early 30s in the workplace, not at home caring for babies.
(cut)
Second, contrary to popular belief, egg freezing does not set back a woman’s biological clock. While it is certainly true that eggs from a younger woman are more likely to generate a healthy embryo and a healthy pregnancy than eggs from an older woman, it very much matters that the body into which the embryos will be transferred is the body of an older woman. From a purely biological perspective, it is in the interest of women to have their children while they are younger.
The entire story is here.
Impact Ethics
Originally posted October 16, 2014
Here is an excerpt:
These professional cautions are of no consequence to Facebook or Apple, however. Both of these companies have decided to include egg freezing in their employee benefit package. As an alternative, they could have decided to improve the health benefits offered to all employees. Or, to stay focused on the issue of reproduction, they could have included a full year of family leave in the benefit package. Instead, they chose to pay up to $20,000 for egg freezing. Now call me crazy, but I think this choice just might have to do with their corporate priorities – which include keeping talented workers in their 20s to early 30s in the workplace, not at home caring for babies.
(cut)
Second, contrary to popular belief, egg freezing does not set back a woman’s biological clock. While it is certainly true that eggs from a younger woman are more likely to generate a healthy embryo and a healthy pregnancy than eggs from an older woman, it very much matters that the body into which the embryos will be transferred is the body of an older woman. From a purely biological perspective, it is in the interest of women to have their children while they are younger.
The entire story is here.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry
By Alain Cohn, Ernst Fehr & Michel André Maréchal
Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature13977
Published online 19 November 2014
Abstract
Trust in others’ honesty is a key component of the long-term performance of firms, industries, and even whole countries. However, in recent years, numerous scandals involving fraud have undermined confidence in the financial industry. Contemporary commentators have attributed these scandals to the financial sector’s business culture, but no scientific evidence supports this claim. Here we show that employees of a large, international bank behave, on average, honestly in a control condition. However, when their professional identity as bank employees is rendered salient, a significant proportion of them become dishonest. This effect is specific to bank employees because control experiments with employees from other industries and with students show that they do not become more dishonest when their professional identity or bank-related items are rendered salient. Our results thus suggest that the prevailing business culture in the banking industry weakens and undermines the honesty norm, implying that measures to re-establish an honest culture are very important.
The article can be found here.
Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature13977
Published online 19 November 2014
Abstract
Trust in others’ honesty is a key component of the long-term performance of firms, industries, and even whole countries. However, in recent years, numerous scandals involving fraud have undermined confidence in the financial industry. Contemporary commentators have attributed these scandals to the financial sector’s business culture, but no scientific evidence supports this claim. Here we show that employees of a large, international bank behave, on average, honestly in a control condition. However, when their professional identity as bank employees is rendered salient, a significant proportion of them become dishonest. This effect is specific to bank employees because control experiments with employees from other industries and with students show that they do not become more dishonest when their professional identity or bank-related items are rendered salient. Our results thus suggest that the prevailing business culture in the banking industry weakens and undermines the honesty norm, implying that measures to re-establish an honest culture are very important.
The article can be found here.
"How Do You Change People's Minds About What Is Right And Wrong?"
By David Rand
Edge Video
Originally posted November 18, 2014
I'm a professor of psychology, economics and management at Yale. The thing that I'm interested in, and that I spend pretty much all of my time thinking about, is cooperation—situations where people have the chance to help others at a cost to themselves. The questions that I'm interested in are how do we explain the fact that, by and large, people are quite cooperative, and even more importantly, what can we do to get people to be more cooperative, to be more willing to make sacrifices for the collective good?
There's been a lot of work on cooperation in different fields, and certain basic themes have emerged, what you might call mechanisms for promoting cooperation: ways that you can structure interactions so that people learn to cooperate. In general, if you imagine that most people in a group are doing the cooperative thing, paying costs to help the group as a whole, but there's some subset that's decided "Oh, we don't feel like it; we're just going to look out for ourselves," the selfish people will be better off. Then, either through an evolutionary process or an imitation process, that selfish behavior will spread.
The entire video and transcript is here.
Edge Video
Originally posted November 18, 2014
I'm a professor of psychology, economics and management at Yale. The thing that I'm interested in, and that I spend pretty much all of my time thinking about, is cooperation—situations where people have the chance to help others at a cost to themselves. The questions that I'm interested in are how do we explain the fact that, by and large, people are quite cooperative, and even more importantly, what can we do to get people to be more cooperative, to be more willing to make sacrifices for the collective good?
There's been a lot of work on cooperation in different fields, and certain basic themes have emerged, what you might call mechanisms for promoting cooperation: ways that you can structure interactions so that people learn to cooperate. In general, if you imagine that most people in a group are doing the cooperative thing, paying costs to help the group as a whole, but there's some subset that's decided "Oh, we don't feel like it; we're just going to look out for ourselves," the selfish people will be better off. Then, either through an evolutionary process or an imitation process, that selfish behavior will spread.
The entire video and transcript is here.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
APA Applauds Release of Senate Intelligence Committee Report Summary
American Psychological Association
Press Release
December 9, 2014
Says transparency will help protect human rights in the future
WASHINGTON — The American Psychological Association welcomed the release today of the Executive Summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the George W. Bush administration. The document’s release recognizes American citizens’ right to know about the prior action of their government and is the best way to ensure that, going forward, the United States engages in national security programs that safeguard human rights and comply with international law.
The new details provided by the report regarding the extent and barbarity of torture techniques used by the CIA are sickening and morally reprehensible.
Two psychologists mentioned prominently in the report under pseudonyms, but identified in media reports as James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, are not members of the American Psychological Association. Jessen was never a member; Mitchell resigned in 2006. Therefore, they are outside the reach of the association’s ethics adjudication process. Regardless of their membership status with APA, if the descriptions of their actions are accurate, they should be held fully accountable for violations of human rights and U.S. and international law.
Last month, the APA announced an independent review of the allegation by New York Times reporter and author James Risen that the association colluded with the Bush administration to support enhanced interrogation techniques that constituted torture. The review is being conducted by attorney David Hoffman of the law office Sidley Austin. Hoffman will be reviewing the released Senate Intelligence Committee report as a part of his APA review. Anyone with relevant information they wish to share with Hoffman is encouraged to communicate with him directly by email or phone at (312) 456-8468.
The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. APA's membership includes nearly 130,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.
Press Release
December 9, 2014
Says transparency will help protect human rights in the future
WASHINGTON — The American Psychological Association welcomed the release today of the Executive Summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the George W. Bush administration. The document’s release recognizes American citizens’ right to know about the prior action of their government and is the best way to ensure that, going forward, the United States engages in national security programs that safeguard human rights and comply with international law.
The new details provided by the report regarding the extent and barbarity of torture techniques used by the CIA are sickening and morally reprehensible.
Two psychologists mentioned prominently in the report under pseudonyms, but identified in media reports as James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, are not members of the American Psychological Association. Jessen was never a member; Mitchell resigned in 2006. Therefore, they are outside the reach of the association’s ethics adjudication process. Regardless of their membership status with APA, if the descriptions of their actions are accurate, they should be held fully accountable for violations of human rights and U.S. and international law.
Last month, the APA announced an independent review of the allegation by New York Times reporter and author James Risen that the association colluded with the Bush administration to support enhanced interrogation techniques that constituted torture. The review is being conducted by attorney David Hoffman of the law office Sidley Austin. Hoffman will be reviewing the released Senate Intelligence Committee report as a part of his APA review. Anyone with relevant information they wish to share with Hoffman is encouraged to communicate with him directly by email or phone at (312) 456-8468.
The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. APA's membership includes nearly 130,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.
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