John Bargh
The Washington Post
Originally published November 22, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents. And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans’ attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats. Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals.
In both instances, we had manipulated a deeper underlying reason for political attitudes, the strength of the basic motivation of safety and survival. The boiling water of our social and political attitudes, it seems, can be turned up or down by changing how physically safe we feel.
This is why it makes sense that liberal politicians intuitively portray danger as manageable — recall FDR’s famous Great Depression era reassurance of “nothing to fear but fear itself,” echoed decades later in Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address — and why President Trump and other Republican politicians are instead likely to emphasize the dangers of terrorism and immigration, relying on fear as a motivator to gain votes.
In fact, anti-immigration attitudes are also linked directly to the underlying basic drive for physical safety. For centuries, arch-conservative leaders have often referred to scapegoated minority groups as “germs” or “bacteria” that seek to invade and destroy their country from within. President Trump is an acknowledged germaphobe, and he has a penchant for describing people — not only immigrants but political opponents and former Miss Universe contestants — as “disgusting.”
The article is here.
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Liberals and conservatives are similarly motivated to avoid exposure to one another's opinions
Jeremy A. Frimer, Linda J. Skitka, Matt Motyl
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 72, September 2017, Pages 1-12
Abstract
Ideologically committed people are similarly motivated to avoid ideologically crosscutting information. Although some previous research has found that political conservatives may be more prone to selective exposure than liberals are, we find similar selective exposure motives on the political left and right across a variety of issues. The majority of people on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate willingly gave up a chance to win money to avoid hearing from the other side (Study 1). When thinking back to the 2012 U.S. Presidential election (Study 2), ahead to upcoming elections in the U.S. and Canada (Study 3), and about a range of other Culture War issues (Study 4), liberals and conservatives reported similar aversion toward learning about the views of their ideological opponents. Their lack of interest was not due to already being informed about the other side or attributable election fatigue. Rather, people on both sides indicated that they anticipated that hearing from the other side would induce cognitive dissonance (e.g., require effort, cause frustration) and undermine a sense of shared reality with the person expressing disparate views (e.g., damage the relationship; Study 5). A high-powered meta-analysis of our data sets (N = 2417) did not detect a difference in the intensity of liberals' (d = 0.63) and conservatives' (d = 0.58) desires to remain in their respective ideological bubbles.
The research is here.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 72, September 2017, Pages 1-12
Abstract
Ideologically committed people are similarly motivated to avoid ideologically crosscutting information. Although some previous research has found that political conservatives may be more prone to selective exposure than liberals are, we find similar selective exposure motives on the political left and right across a variety of issues. The majority of people on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate willingly gave up a chance to win money to avoid hearing from the other side (Study 1). When thinking back to the 2012 U.S. Presidential election (Study 2), ahead to upcoming elections in the U.S. and Canada (Study 3), and about a range of other Culture War issues (Study 4), liberals and conservatives reported similar aversion toward learning about the views of their ideological opponents. Their lack of interest was not due to already being informed about the other side or attributable election fatigue. Rather, people on both sides indicated that they anticipated that hearing from the other side would induce cognitive dissonance (e.g., require effort, cause frustration) and undermine a sense of shared reality with the person expressing disparate views (e.g., damage the relationship; Study 5). A high-powered meta-analysis of our data sets (N = 2417) did not detect a difference in the intensity of liberals' (d = 0.63) and conservatives' (d = 0.58) desires to remain in their respective ideological bubbles.
The research is here.
Monday, December 4, 2017
Ray Kurzweil on Turing Tests, Brain Extenders, and AI Ethics
Nancy Kaszerman
Wired.com
Originally posted November 13, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
There has been a lot of focus on AI ethics, how to keep the technology safe, and it's kind of a polarized discussion like a lot of discussions nowadays. I've actually talked about both promise and peril for quite a long time. Technology is always going to be a double-edged sword. Fire kept us warm, cooked our food, and burned down our houses. These technologies are much more powerful. It's also a long discussion, but I think we should go through three phases, at least I did, in contemplating this. First is delight at the opportunity to overcome age-old afflictions: poverty, disease, and so on. Then alarm that these technologies can be destructive and cause even existential risks. And finally I think where we need to come out is an appreciation that we have a moral imperative to continue progress in these technologies because, despite the progress we've made—and that's a-whole-nother issue, people think things are getting worse but they're actually getting better—there's still a lot of human suffering to be overcome. It's only continued progress particularly in AI that's going to enable us to continue overcoming poverty and disease and environmental degradation while we attend to the peril.
And there's a good framework for doing that. Forty years ago, there were visionaries who saw both the promise and the peril of biotechnology, basically reprogramming biology away from disease and aging. So they held a conference called the Asilomar Conference at the conference center in Asilomar, and came up with ethical guidelines and strategies—how to keep these technologies safe. Now it's 40 years later. We are getting clinical impact of biotechnology. It's a trickle today, it'll be a flood over the next decade. The number of people who have been harmed either accidentally or intentionally by abuse of biotechnology so far has been zero. It's a good model for how to proceed.
The article is here.
Wired.com
Originally posted November 13, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
There has been a lot of focus on AI ethics, how to keep the technology safe, and it's kind of a polarized discussion like a lot of discussions nowadays. I've actually talked about both promise and peril for quite a long time. Technology is always going to be a double-edged sword. Fire kept us warm, cooked our food, and burned down our houses. These technologies are much more powerful. It's also a long discussion, but I think we should go through three phases, at least I did, in contemplating this. First is delight at the opportunity to overcome age-old afflictions: poverty, disease, and so on. Then alarm that these technologies can be destructive and cause even existential risks. And finally I think where we need to come out is an appreciation that we have a moral imperative to continue progress in these technologies because, despite the progress we've made—and that's a-whole-nother issue, people think things are getting worse but they're actually getting better—there's still a lot of human suffering to be overcome. It's only continued progress particularly in AI that's going to enable us to continue overcoming poverty and disease and environmental degradation while we attend to the peril.
And there's a good framework for doing that. Forty years ago, there were visionaries who saw both the promise and the peril of biotechnology, basically reprogramming biology away from disease and aging. So they held a conference called the Asilomar Conference at the conference center in Asilomar, and came up with ethical guidelines and strategies—how to keep these technologies safe. Now it's 40 years later. We are getting clinical impact of biotechnology. It's a trickle today, it'll be a flood over the next decade. The number of people who have been harmed either accidentally or intentionally by abuse of biotechnology so far has been zero. It's a good model for how to proceed.
The article is here.
Psychologist felt 'honest, sincere' before $800K healthcare fraud exposed
John Agar
MLive.com
Originally posted November 21, 2017
A psychologist who defrauded insurance companies of $800,000 spent half of the money on vacations, concert tickets and a mobile-recording business, the government said.
George E. Compton Jr., 63, of Sturgis, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Gordon Quist to 28 months in prison.
Compton, who pleaded guilty to healthcare fraud, said he was "ashamed" of his actions.
"Until this investigation, I did not hesitate to describe myself as an honest, sincere man," he wrote in a letter to the judge. "Seeing myself from a different perspective has been trying to say the least. ... The worst punishment for my admitted crimes will be the exclusion from the very work I love."
The government said he billed insurance companies for counseling sessions he did not provide, from Jan. 1, 2013, until June 30, 2016.
The article is here.
MLive.com
Originally posted November 21, 2017
A psychologist who defrauded insurance companies of $800,000 spent half of the money on vacations, concert tickets and a mobile-recording business, the government said.
George E. Compton Jr., 63, of Sturgis, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Gordon Quist to 28 months in prison.
Compton, who pleaded guilty to healthcare fraud, said he was "ashamed" of his actions.
"Until this investigation, I did not hesitate to describe myself as an honest, sincere man," he wrote in a letter to the judge. "Seeing myself from a different perspective has been trying to say the least. ... The worst punishment for my admitted crimes will be the exclusion from the very work I love."
The government said he billed insurance companies for counseling sessions he did not provide, from Jan. 1, 2013, until June 30, 2016.
The article is here.
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Lack of Intellectual Humility Plagues Our Times, Say Researchers
Paul Ratner
BigThink.com
Originally posted November 12, 2017
Researchers from Duke University say that intellectual humility is an important personality trait that has become in short supply in our country.
Intellectual humility is like open-mindedness. It is basically an awareness that your beliefs may be wrong, influencing a person’s ability to make decisions in politics, health and other areas of life. An intellectually humble person can have strong opinions, say the authors, but will still recognize they are not perfect and are willing to be proven wrong.
This trait is not linked to a specific partisan view, with researchers finding no difference in levels of the characteristic between conservatives, liberals, religious or non-religious people. In fact, the scientists possibly managed to put to rest an age-old stereotype, explained the study’s lead author Mark Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke.
The article is here.
BigThink.com
Originally posted November 12, 2017
Researchers from Duke University say that intellectual humility is an important personality trait that has become in short supply in our country.
Intellectual humility is like open-mindedness. It is basically an awareness that your beliefs may be wrong, influencing a person’s ability to make decisions in politics, health and other areas of life. An intellectually humble person can have strong opinions, say the authors, but will still recognize they are not perfect and are willing to be proven wrong.
This trait is not linked to a specific partisan view, with researchers finding no difference in levels of the characteristic between conservatives, liberals, religious or non-religious people. In fact, the scientists possibly managed to put to rest an age-old stereotype, explained the study’s lead author Mark Leary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke.
The article is here.
Saturday, December 2, 2017
Japanese doctor who exposed a drug too good to be true calls for morality and reforms
Tomoko Otake
Japan Times
Originally posted November 15, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
Kuwajima says the Diovan case is a sobering reminder that large-scale clinical trials published in top medical journals should not be blindly trusted, as they can be exploited by drugmakers rushing to sell their products before their patents run out.
“I worked at a research hospital and had opportunities to try new or premarket drugs on patients, so I knew from early on that Diovan and the same class of drugs called ARB wouldn’t work, especially for elderly patients,” Kuwajima recalled in a recent interview at Tokyo Metropolitan Geriatric Hospital, where he has retired from full-time practice but still sees patients two days a week. “I had a strong sense of crisis that hordes of elderly people — whose ranks were growing as the population grayed — would be prescribed a drug that didn’t work.”
Kuwajima said he immediately found the Diovan research suspicious because the results were just too good to be true. This was before Novartis admitted that it had paid five professors conducting studies at their universities a total of ¥1.1 billion in “research grants,” and even had Shirahashi, a Novartis employee purporting to be a university lecturer, help with statistical analyses for the papers.
The article is here.
Japan Times
Originally posted November 15, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
Kuwajima says the Diovan case is a sobering reminder that large-scale clinical trials published in top medical journals should not be blindly trusted, as they can be exploited by drugmakers rushing to sell their products before their patents run out.
“I worked at a research hospital and had opportunities to try new or premarket drugs on patients, so I knew from early on that Diovan and the same class of drugs called ARB wouldn’t work, especially for elderly patients,” Kuwajima recalled in a recent interview at Tokyo Metropolitan Geriatric Hospital, where he has retired from full-time practice but still sees patients two days a week. “I had a strong sense of crisis that hordes of elderly people — whose ranks were growing as the population grayed — would be prescribed a drug that didn’t work.”
Kuwajima said he immediately found the Diovan research suspicious because the results were just too good to be true. This was before Novartis admitted that it had paid five professors conducting studies at their universities a total of ¥1.1 billion in “research grants,” and even had Shirahashi, a Novartis employee purporting to be a university lecturer, help with statistical analyses for the papers.
The article is here.
Friday, December 1, 2017
The Essence of the Individual: The Pervasive Belief in the True Self Is an Instance of Psychological Essentialism
Andrew G. Christy, Rebecca J. Schlegel, and Andrei Cimpian
Preprint
Abstract
Eight studies (N = 2,974) were conducted to test the hypothesis that the widespread folk belief in the true self is an instance of psychological essentialism. Results supported this hypothesis. Specifically, participants’ reasoning about the true self displayed the telltale features of essentialist reasoning (immutability, discreteness, consistency, informativeness, inherence, and biological basis; Studies 1–4); participants’ endorsement of true-self beliefs correlated with individual differences in other essentialist beliefs (Study 5); and experimental manipulations of essentialist thought in domains other than the self were found to “spill over” and affect the extent to which participants endorsed true-self beliefs (Studies 6–8). These findings advance theory on the origins and functions of true-self beliefs, revealing these beliefs to be a specific instance of a broader tendency to explain phenomena in the world in terms of underlying essences.
The preprint is here.
Preprint
Abstract
Eight studies (N = 2,974) were conducted to test the hypothesis that the widespread folk belief in the true self is an instance of psychological essentialism. Results supported this hypothesis. Specifically, participants’ reasoning about the true self displayed the telltale features of essentialist reasoning (immutability, discreteness, consistency, informativeness, inherence, and biological basis; Studies 1–4); participants’ endorsement of true-self beliefs correlated with individual differences in other essentialist beliefs (Study 5); and experimental manipulations of essentialist thought in domains other than the self were found to “spill over” and affect the extent to which participants endorsed true-self beliefs (Studies 6–8). These findings advance theory on the origins and functions of true-self beliefs, revealing these beliefs to be a specific instance of a broader tendency to explain phenomena in the world in terms of underlying essences.
The preprint is here.
Selling Bad Therapy to Trauma Victims
Jonathan Shedler
Psychology Today
Originally published November 19, 2017
Here is the conclusion:
First, do no harm
Many health insurance companies discriminate against psychotherapy. Congress has passed laws mandating mental health “parity” (equal coverage for medical and mental health conditions) but health insurers circumvent them. This has led to class action lawsuits against health insurance companies, but discrimination continues.
One way that health insurers circumvent parity laws is by shunting patients to the briefest and cheapest therapies — just the kind of therapies recommended by the APA’s treatment guidelines. Another way is by making therapy so impersonal and dehumanizing that patients drop out. Health insurers do not publicly say the treatment decisions are driven by economic self-interest. They say the treatments are scientifically proven — and point to treatment guidelines like those just issued by the APA.
It’s bad enough that most Americans don’t have adequate mental health coverage, without also being gaslighted and told that inadequate therapy is the best therapy.
The APA’s ethics code begins, “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.” APA has an honorable history of fighting for patients’ access to good care and against health insurance company abuses.
Blinded by RCT ideology, APA inadvertently handed a trump card to the worst apples in the health insurance industry.
The article is here.
Psychology Today
Originally published November 19, 2017
Here is the conclusion:
First, do no harm
Many health insurance companies discriminate against psychotherapy. Congress has passed laws mandating mental health “parity” (equal coverage for medical and mental health conditions) but health insurers circumvent them. This has led to class action lawsuits against health insurance companies, but discrimination continues.
One way that health insurers circumvent parity laws is by shunting patients to the briefest and cheapest therapies — just the kind of therapies recommended by the APA’s treatment guidelines. Another way is by making therapy so impersonal and dehumanizing that patients drop out. Health insurers do not publicly say the treatment decisions are driven by economic self-interest. They say the treatments are scientifically proven — and point to treatment guidelines like those just issued by the APA.
It’s bad enough that most Americans don’t have adequate mental health coverage, without also being gaslighted and told that inadequate therapy is the best therapy.
The APA’s ethics code begins, “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.” APA has an honorable history of fighting for patients’ access to good care and against health insurance company abuses.
Blinded by RCT ideology, APA inadvertently handed a trump card to the worst apples in the health insurance industry.
The article is here.
Thursday, November 30, 2017
Artificial Intelligence & Mental Health
Smriti Joshi
Chatbot News Daily
Originally posted
Here is an excerpt:
There are many barriers to getting quality mental healthcare, from searching for a provider who practices in a user's geographical location to screening multiple potential therapists in order to find someone you feel comfortable speaking with. The stigma associated with seeking mental health treatment often leaves people silently suffering from a psychological issue. These barriers stop many people from finding help and AI is being looked at a potential tool to bridge this gap between service providers and service users.
Imagine how many people would be benefitted if artificial intelligence could bring quality and affordable mental health support to anyone with an internet connection. A psychiatrist or psychologist examines a person’s tone, word choice, and the length of a phrase etc and these are all crucial cues to understanding what’s going on in someone’s mind. Machine learning is now being applied by researchers to diagnose people with mental disorders. Harvard University and University of Vermont researchers are working on integrating machine learning tools and Instagram to improve depression screening. Using color analysis, metadata, and algorithmic face detection, they were able to reach 70 percent accuracy in detecting signs of depression. The research wing at IBM is using transcripts and audio from psychiatric interviews, coupled with machine learning techniques, to find patterns in speech to help clinicians accurately predict and monitor psychosis, schizophrenia, mania, and depression. A research, led by John Pestian, a professor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre showed that machine learning is up to 93 percent accurate in identifying a suicidal person.
The post is here.
Chatbot News Daily
Originally posted
Here is an excerpt:
There are many barriers to getting quality mental healthcare, from searching for a provider who practices in a user's geographical location to screening multiple potential therapists in order to find someone you feel comfortable speaking with. The stigma associated with seeking mental health treatment often leaves people silently suffering from a psychological issue. These barriers stop many people from finding help and AI is being looked at a potential tool to bridge this gap between service providers and service users.
Imagine how many people would be benefitted if artificial intelligence could bring quality and affordable mental health support to anyone with an internet connection. A psychiatrist or psychologist examines a person’s tone, word choice, and the length of a phrase etc and these are all crucial cues to understanding what’s going on in someone’s mind. Machine learning is now being applied by researchers to diagnose people with mental disorders. Harvard University and University of Vermont researchers are working on integrating machine learning tools and Instagram to improve depression screening. Using color analysis, metadata, and algorithmic face detection, they were able to reach 70 percent accuracy in detecting signs of depression. The research wing at IBM is using transcripts and audio from psychiatric interviews, coupled with machine learning techniques, to find patterns in speech to help clinicians accurately predict and monitor psychosis, schizophrenia, mania, and depression. A research, led by John Pestian, a professor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre showed that machine learning is up to 93 percent accurate in identifying a suicidal person.
The post is here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)