Filip Gęsiarz and Molly J. Crockett
Front. Behav. Neurosci., 27 May 2015
Discussion
In this review we summarized evidence showing how the RLDM framework can integrate diverse findings describing what motivates prosocial behaviors. We suggested that the goal-directed system, given sufficient time and cognitive resources, weighs the costs of prosocial behaviors against their benefits, and chooses the action that best serves one’s goals, whether they be to merely maintain a good reputation or to genuinely enhance the welfare of another. We also suggested that to appreciate some of the benefits of other-regarding acts, such as the possibility of reciprocity, agents must have a well-developed theory of mind and an ability to foresee the cumulative value of future actions—both of which seem to involve model-based computations.
Furthermore, we reviewed findings demonstrating that the habitual system encodes the consequences of social interactions in the form of prediction errors and uses these signals to update the expected value of actions. Repetition of prosocial acts, resulting in positive outcomes, gradually increases their expected value and can lead to the formation of prosocial habits, which are performed without regard to their consequences. We speculated that the expected value of actions on a subjective level might be experienced as a ‘warm glow’ (Andreoni, 1990), linking our proposition to the behavioral economics literature. We also suggested that the notion of prosocial habits shares many features of the social heuristics hypothesis (Rand et al., 2014), implying that the habitual system could be a possible neurocognitive mechanism explaining the expression of social heuristics.
Finally, we have posited that the Pavlovian system, in response to another’s distress cues, evokes an automatic approach response towards stimuli enhancing another’s well-being—even if that response brings negative consequences.
The entire article is here.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Interview with Dan Ariely
Featured Collaborator of the Month with www.ethicalsystems.org
Originally published on April 24, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
Why are cheating and dishonesty so widespread?
They are part of human nature. We have this incredible balance between honesty and dishonesty. We are taught from a young age to be dishonest in the social realm. We are taught not to tell people that they smell, or that it was the train that made us late instead of us being lazy, if people have a new haircut we say that it is very nice. We learn in the social realm that cheating is in fact desirable to some degree and then we move to the business / professional realm.
Now the rules are different. Now dishonesty is not as good. We don't separate those. Modern society creates a situation where the overlap between our social and professional lives are very high. All of a sudden, the people you interact with socially are the same as you interact with non socially, i.e. in your professional life. These tradeoffs become complex.
It is also important to realize that dishonesty is also about short term vs. long term. Saying something dishonest is a good solution in the short term but not necessarily in the long term, but we don't make this trade off correctly. For example, you say "I love your work" or "Your presentation as great," but then you get stuck with listening to, or having to fix, more of it. Much like other activities we over focus on the short term.
The entire article is here.
Originally published on April 24, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
Why are cheating and dishonesty so widespread?
They are part of human nature. We have this incredible balance between honesty and dishonesty. We are taught from a young age to be dishonest in the social realm. We are taught not to tell people that they smell, or that it was the train that made us late instead of us being lazy, if people have a new haircut we say that it is very nice. We learn in the social realm that cheating is in fact desirable to some degree and then we move to the business / professional realm.
Now the rules are different. Now dishonesty is not as good. We don't separate those. Modern society creates a situation where the overlap between our social and professional lives are very high. All of a sudden, the people you interact with socially are the same as you interact with non socially, i.e. in your professional life. These tradeoffs become complex.
It is also important to realize that dishonesty is also about short term vs. long term. Saying something dishonest is a good solution in the short term but not necessarily in the long term, but we don't make this trade off correctly. For example, you say "I love your work" or "Your presentation as great," but then you get stuck with listening to, or having to fix, more of it. Much like other activities we over focus on the short term.
The entire article is here.
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How.
By John Bohannon
i09
Originally published May 27, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.
Think of the measurements as lottery tickets. Each one has a small chance of paying off in the form of a “significant” result that we can spin a story around and sell to the media. The more tickets you buy, the more likely you are to win. We didn’t know exactly what would pan out—the headline could have been that chocolate improves sleep or lowers blood pressure—but we knew our chances of getting at least one “statistically significant” result were pretty good.
Whenever you hear that phrase, it means that some result has a small p value. The letter p seems to have totemic power, but it’s just a way to gauge the signal-to-noise ratio in the data. The conventional cutoff for being “significant” is 0.05, which means that there is just a 5 percent chance that your result is a random fluctuation. The more lottery tickets, the better your chances of getting a false positive. So how many tickets do you need to buy?
The whole article on the scam research that fooled millions is here.
i09
Originally published May 27, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.
Think of the measurements as lottery tickets. Each one has a small chance of paying off in the form of a “significant” result that we can spin a story around and sell to the media. The more tickets you buy, the more likely you are to win. We didn’t know exactly what would pan out—the headline could have been that chocolate improves sleep or lowers blood pressure—but we knew our chances of getting at least one “statistically significant” result were pretty good.
Whenever you hear that phrase, it means that some result has a small p value. The letter p seems to have totemic power, but it’s just a way to gauge the signal-to-noise ratio in the data. The conventional cutoff for being “significant” is 0.05, which means that there is just a 5 percent chance that your result is a random fluctuation. The more lottery tickets, the better your chances of getting a false positive. So how many tickets do you need to buy?
The whole article on the scam research that fooled millions is here.
The Gray Areas Of Assisted Suicide
By April Dembosky
Kaiser Health News
Originally published May 21, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
People don’t talk about it, but it happens. Just over 3 percent of U.S. doctors said they have written a prescription for life-ending medication, according to an anonymous survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1998. Almost 5 percent of doctors reported giving a patient a lethal injection.
Other studies suggest oncologists, and doctors on the West Coast, are more likely to be asked for life-ending medication, or euthanasia, in which the doctor administers the lethal dose.
“Those practices are undercover. They are covert,” says Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices, an advocacy group. “To the degree that patients are part of the decision-making, it is by winks and nods.”
Coombs Lee’s organization helped tell the story of Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old woman who moved from California to Oregon to be able to end her life legally after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Now the organization is backing legislation in California to make it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients who request it.
The entire article is here.
Kaiser Health News
Originally published May 21, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
People don’t talk about it, but it happens. Just over 3 percent of U.S. doctors said they have written a prescription for life-ending medication, according to an anonymous survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1998. Almost 5 percent of doctors reported giving a patient a lethal injection.
Other studies suggest oncologists, and doctors on the West Coast, are more likely to be asked for life-ending medication, or euthanasia, in which the doctor administers the lethal dose.
“Those practices are undercover. They are covert,” says Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices, an advocacy group. “To the degree that patients are part of the decision-making, it is by winks and nods.”
Coombs Lee’s organization helped tell the story of Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old woman who moved from California to Oregon to be able to end her life legally after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Now the organization is backing legislation in California to make it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients who request it.
The entire article is here.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Who polices the 'Ethics Police'?
By Robert Klitzman
CNN
Originally posted May 26, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
Most people take for granted is that some protective mechanism -- laws or watchdogs -- ensures that experiments are ethical. Indeed, research ethics committees or institutional review boards (IRBs) do review all human experiments. But they have become increasingly controversial.
Why? In part because they operate behind closed doors and, scientists now argue, often stymy, rather than support key studies.
Investigators commonly call IRBs "the Ethics Police" and complain that these boards unnecessarily block or delay studies. As a researcher, I, too, have sometimes been frustrated by them.
Yet despite the controversy in the field, the public knows little about them, despite how they affect all our lives.
The entire article is here.
CNN
Originally posted May 26, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
Most people take for granted is that some protective mechanism -- laws or watchdogs -- ensures that experiments are ethical. Indeed, research ethics committees or institutional review boards (IRBs) do review all human experiments. But they have become increasingly controversial.
Why? In part because they operate behind closed doors and, scientists now argue, often stymy, rather than support key studies.
Investigators commonly call IRBs "the Ethics Police" and complain that these boards unnecessarily block or delay studies. As a researcher, I, too, have sometimes been frustrated by them.
Yet despite the controversy in the field, the public knows little about them, despite how they affect all our lives.
The entire article is here.
Danger: Electronic Records Ahead
By Stephen A. Ragusea, Psy. D., ABPP
The National Psychologist
Some 30 years ago, I was building a psychiatric hospital in central Pennsylvania and we discussed the possibility of starting-up the new facility’s operation with all electronic records. It was the early days of computer use but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Ultimately, we decided against the plan because we couldn’t find a technical mechanism to guaranty the security of patient records against the threat of unauthorized access.
That was a long time ago.
The truth is that not much has changed in the last three decades regarding computer security, except for one thing: Our society seems to have decided that open health records are more important than confidentiality.
As a society, we not only keep our records electronically, but we increasingly are making those records available to anybody with a password. There are real advantages to that kind of system for cardiac patients in crisis. But, making psychological records available in such a system would scare the hell out of me; it would be extraordinarily dangerous and fraught with unintended consequences.
The entire article is here.
The National Psychologist
Some 30 years ago, I was building a psychiatric hospital in central Pennsylvania and we discussed the possibility of starting-up the new facility’s operation with all electronic records. It was the early days of computer use but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Ultimately, we decided against the plan because we couldn’t find a technical mechanism to guaranty the security of patient records against the threat of unauthorized access.
That was a long time ago.
The truth is that not much has changed in the last three decades regarding computer security, except for one thing: Our society seems to have decided that open health records are more important than confidentiality.
As a society, we not only keep our records electronically, but we increasingly are making those records available to anybody with a password. There are real advantages to that kind of system for cardiac patients in crisis. But, making psychological records available in such a system would scare the hell out of me; it would be extraordinarily dangerous and fraught with unintended consequences.
The entire article is here.
Monday, June 8, 2015
Is Morality Innate?
By Jesse J. Prinz
Forthcoming in W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology. Oxford University Press
Here is an excerpt:
The link between morality and human nature has been a common theme since ancient times, and, with the rise of modern empirical moral psychology, it remains equally popular today. Evolutionary ethicists, ethologists, developmental psychologists, social neuroscientists, and even some cultural
anthropologists tend to agree that morality is part of the bioprogram (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; de Waal, 1996; Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Hauser, 2006; Ruse, 1991; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Turiel, 2002). Recently, researchers have begun to look for moral modules in the brain, and they have been increasingly tempted to speculate about the moral acquisition device, and innate faculty for norm acquisition akin to celebrated language acquisition device, promulgated by Chomsky (Dwyer, 1999; Mikhail, 2000; Hauser, this volume). All this talk of modules and mechanism may make some shudder, especially if they recall that eugenics emerged out of an effort to find the biological sources of evil. Yet the tendency to postulate an innate moral faculty is almost irresistible. For one thing, it makes us appear nobler as a species, and for another, it offers an explanation of the fact that people in every corner of the globe seem to have moral rules. Moral nativism is, in this respect, an optimistic doctrine—one that makes our great big world seem comfortingly smaller.
The chapter is here.
Forthcoming in W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology. Oxford University Press
Here is an excerpt:
The link between morality and human nature has been a common theme since ancient times, and, with the rise of modern empirical moral psychology, it remains equally popular today. Evolutionary ethicists, ethologists, developmental psychologists, social neuroscientists, and even some cultural
anthropologists tend to agree that morality is part of the bioprogram (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; de Waal, 1996; Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Hauser, 2006; Ruse, 1991; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Turiel, 2002). Recently, researchers have begun to look for moral modules in the brain, and they have been increasingly tempted to speculate about the moral acquisition device, and innate faculty for norm acquisition akin to celebrated language acquisition device, promulgated by Chomsky (Dwyer, 1999; Mikhail, 2000; Hauser, this volume). All this talk of modules and mechanism may make some shudder, especially if they recall that eugenics emerged out of an effort to find the biological sources of evil. Yet the tendency to postulate an innate moral faculty is almost irresistible. For one thing, it makes us appear nobler as a species, and for another, it offers an explanation of the fact that people in every corner of the globe seem to have moral rules. Moral nativism is, in this respect, an optimistic doctrine—one that makes our great big world seem comfortingly smaller.
The chapter 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.
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.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
Can self-preservation be virtuous in disaster situations?
By Justin Oakley
Journal of Medical Ethics
doi:10.1136/medethics-2013-101631
Ordinary moral rules and virtues can be found seriously inadequate in circumstances where natural catastrophes afflict large numbers of people. Satoshi Kodama provides a strong defence of the rule of tsunami-tendenko being invoked as an evacuation policy in these exceptional situations, such as that facing many people in the Tōhoku region of Japan during the severe earthquake and subsequent tsunami there on 11 March 2011.1 As Kodama explains, tsunami-tendenko tells a person in such situations to prioritise self-preservation over attempting to help others, and people living in earthquake-prone and tsunami-prone areas have learned from past experience that acting on such a rule is likely to save more lives overall than is acting on a policy of searching for and attempting to help others escape the disaster.
Tsunami-tendenko seems to be a reasonable general principle for people to follow in such exceptional circumstances, particularly where disasters strike suddenly, and the resulting chaos can make efforts to locate others not only extremely difficult but in some cases suicidal. Kodama provides plausible indirect consequentialist arguments for this principle to be used in these dramatic situations.
The entire article is here.
Journal of Medical Ethics
doi:10.1136/medethics-2013-101631
Ordinary moral rules and virtues can be found seriously inadequate in circumstances where natural catastrophes afflict large numbers of people. Satoshi Kodama provides a strong defence of the rule of tsunami-tendenko being invoked as an evacuation policy in these exceptional situations, such as that facing many people in the Tōhoku region of Japan during the severe earthquake and subsequent tsunami there on 11 March 2011.1 As Kodama explains, tsunami-tendenko tells a person in such situations to prioritise self-preservation over attempting to help others, and people living in earthquake-prone and tsunami-prone areas have learned from past experience that acting on such a rule is likely to save more lives overall than is acting on a policy of searching for and attempting to help others escape the disaster.
Tsunami-tendenko seems to be a reasonable general principle for people to follow in such exceptional circumstances, particularly where disasters strike suddenly, and the resulting chaos can make efforts to locate others not only extremely difficult but in some cases suicidal. Kodama provides plausible indirect consequentialist arguments for this principle to be used in these dramatic situations.
The entire article is here.
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