Disrupting the System Constructively: Testing the Effectiveness of Nonnormative Nonviolent Collective Action

Shuman, E. (2020, June 21).
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rvgup

Abstract

Collective action research tends to focus on motivations of the disadvantaged group, rather than on which tactics are effective at driving the advantaged group to make concessions to the disadvantaged. We focused on the potential of nonnormative nonviolent action as a tactic to generate support for concessions among advantaged group members who are resistant to social change. We propose that this tactic, relative to normative nonviolent and to violent action, is particularly effective because it reflects constructive disruption: a delicate balance between disruption (which can put pressure on the advantaged group to respond), and perceived constructive intentions (which can help ensure that the response to action is a conciliatory one). We test these hypotheses across four contexts (total N = 3650). Studies 1-3 demonstrate that nonnormative nonviolent action (compared to inaction, normative nonviolent action, and violent action) is uniquely effective at increasing support for concessions to the disadvantaged among resistant advantaged group members (compared to advantaged group members more open to social change). Study 3 shows that constructive disruption mediates this effect. Study 4 shows that perceiving a real-world ongoing protest as constructively disruptive predicts support for the disadvantaged, while Study 5 examines these processes longitudinally over 2 months in the context of an ongoing social movement. Taken together, we show that nonnormative nonviolent action can be an effective tactic for generating support for concessions to the disadvantaged among those who are most resistant because it generates constructive disruption.

From the General Discussion

Based on this research, which collective action tactic should disadvantaged groups choose to advance their status? While a simple reading of these findings might suggest that nonnormative nonviolent action is the “most effective” form of action, a closer reading of these findings and other research (Saguy & Szekeres, 2018; Teixeira et al., 2020; Thomas & Louis, 2014) would suggest that what type of action is most effective depends on the goal. We demonstrate that nonnormative nonviolent action is effective for generating support for concessions to the protest that would advance its policy goals from those who were more resistant. On the other hand, other prior research has found that normative nonviolent action was more effective at turning sympathizers into active supporters (Teixeira et al., 2020; Thomas & Louis, 2014)16. Thus, which action tactic will be most useful to the disadvantaged may depend on the goal: If they are facing resistance from the advantaged blocking the achievement of their goals, nonnormative nonviolent action may be more effective. However, if the disadvantaged are seeking to build a movement that includes members of the advantaged group, the nonnormative nonviolent action will likely be more effective. The question is thus not which tactic is “most effective”, but which tactic is most effective to achieve which goal for what audience.

Four Ways to Avoid the Pitfalls of Motivated Moral Reasoning

Notre Dame
Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership

Here is an excerpt:

Four Ways to Control Motivated Reasoning

Motivated reasoning happens all the time, and we can never fully eradicate it. But we can recognize it and guard against its worst effects. Use these guidelines as a way to help quiet your inner lawyer and access your inner judge.

Use the "Front Page" Test

Studies have shown that when we expect our decisions to be made public we are more circumspect. Ask yourself, "Would I be comfortable having this choice published on the front page of a local newspaper?" Doing so provides an opportunity to step back from the conditions that may induce motivated reasoning and engage in more critical thinking.

Don’t Go It Alone

While it is difficult to notice motivated reasoning in ourselves, we can much more easily recognize it in others. Surround yourself with the voices of those you trust, and make sure you’re prepared to listen and acknowledge your limitations. You can even make it someone's job to voice dissent. If you're surrounded only by "yes men" it can be all too easy for motivated reasoning to take over.

Avoid Ambiguity

Motivated reasoning becomes more likely when the rules are fuzzy or vague. Rely on accepted standards and definitions of ethical behavior, and make sure that your principles are clear enough for employees to understand what they mean in practice. In ethics training, make sure to use scenarios and stories to show what ethical behavior looks like. If your values or principles are too general, they may provide convenient justifications for unethical behavior instead of guarding against it.

Stay Humble

In addition to intelligence tests, research suggests that we’re touchy about receiving any feedback we don’t agree with. One study found that when participants received negative feedback about their leadership qualities they were likely to use racial stereotypes to dismiss the person giving the feedback. The next time you receive feedback you’d rather ignore, slow down, pay attention, and consider how the feedback could help you grow as a person and as a leader.

Every Decision Is A Risk. Every Risk Is A Decision.

Maggie Koerth
fivethirtyeight.com
Originally posted 21 July 20

Here is an excerpt:

In general, research has shown that indoors is riskier than outside, long visits riskier than short ones, crowds riskier than individuals — and, look, just avoid situations where you’re being sneezed, yelled, coughed or sung at.

But the trouble with the muddy middle is that a general idea of what is riskier isn’t the same thing as a clear delineation between right and wrong. These charts — even the best ones — aren’t absolute arbiters of safety: They’re the result of surveying experts. In the case of Popescu’s chart, the risk categorizations were assigned based on discussions among herself, Emanuel and Dr. James P. Phillips, the chief of disaster medicine at George Washington University Emergency Medicine. They each independently assigned a risk level to each activity, and then hashed out the ones on which they disagreed.

Take golf. How safe is it to go out to the links? Initially, the three experts had different risk levels assigned to this activity because they were all making different assumptions about what a game of golf naturally involved, Popescu said. “Are people doing it alone? If not, how many people are in a cart? Are they wearing masks? Are they drinking? …. those little variables that can increase the risk,” she told me.

Golf isn’t just golf. It’s how you golf that matters.

Those variables and assumptions aren’t trivial to calculating risk. Nor are they static. There’s different muck under your boggy feet in different parts of the country, at different times. For instance, how safe is it to eat outdoors with friends? Popescu’s chart ranks “outdoor picnic or porch dining” with people outside your household as low risk — a very validating categorization, personally. But a chart produced by the Texas Medical Association, based on a survey of its 53,000 physician members, rates “attending a backyard barbeque” as a moderate risk, a 5 on a scale in which 9 is the stuff most of us have no problem eschewing.

The info is here.

Personality and prosocial behavior: A theoretical framework and meta-analysis

Thielmann, I., Spadaro, G., & Balliet, D. (2020).
Psychological Bulletin, 146(1), 30–90.
https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000217

Abstract

Decades of research document individual differences in prosocial behavior using controlled experiments that model social interactions in situations of interdependence. However, theoretical and empirical integration of the vast literature on the predictive validity of personality traits to account for these individual differences is missing. Here, we present a theoretical framework that identifies 4 broad situational affordances across interdependent situations (i.e., exploitation, reciprocity, temporal conflict, and dependence under uncertainty) and more specific subaffordances within certain types of interdependent situations (e.g., possibility to increase equality in outcomes) that can determine when, which, and how personality traits should be expressed in prosocial behavior. To test this framework, we meta-analyzed 770 studies reporting on 3,523 effects of 8 broad and 43 narrow personality traits on prosocial behavior in interdependent situations modeled in 6 commonly studied economic games (Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, Trust Game, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Public Goods Game, and Commons Dilemma). Overall, meta-analytic correlations ranged between −.18 ≤ ρ̂ ≤ .26, and most traits yielding a significant relation to prosocial behavior had conceptual links to the affordances provided in interdependent situations, most prominently the possibility for exploitation. Moreover, for several traits, correlations within games followed the predicted pattern derived from a theoretical analysis of affordances. On the level of traits, we found that narrow and broad traits alike can account for prosocial behavior, informing the bandwidth-fidelity problem. In sum, the meta-analysis provides a theoretical foundation that can guide future research on prosocial behavior and advance our understanding of individual differences in human prosociality.

Conclusion

Individual differences in prosocial behavior have consistently been documented over decades of research using economic games – and personality traits have been shown to account for such individual variation. The present meta-analysis offers an affordance-based theoretical framework that can illuminate which, when, and how personality traits relate to prosocial behavior across various interdependent situations. Specifically, the framework and meta-analysis identify a few situational affordances that form the basis for the expression of certain traits in prosocial behavior. In this regard, the meta-analysis also shows that no single trait is capable to account for individual variation in prosocial behavior across the variety of interdependent situations that individuals may encounter in everyday social interactions.  Rather, individual differences in prosocial behavior are best viewed as a result of traits being expressed in response to certain situational features that influence the affordances involved in interdependent situations. In conclusion, research on individual differences in prosocial behavior – and corresponding trait conceptualizations – should consider the affordances
provided in interdependent situations to allow for a complete understanding of how personality can shape the many aspects of human prosociality.

San Quentin’s coronavirus outbreak shows why ‘herd immunity’ could mean disaster

Rong-Gong Lin II and Kim Christensen
The Los Angeles Times
Originally published 11 August 20

Here are two excerpts:

San Quentin is an imperfect setting to help understand when herd immunity might be achieved. Prisons are crowded settings that will promote coronavirus transmission more so than among people in other settings, like those who live in single-family homes.

But the San Quentin experience — as well as other data — does show that, in the absence of a vaccine, “in order to get to something that approaches herd immunity, we’re going to have to get something well on the far side of 50% of people infected,” Rutherford said. “Which comes with a resultant large cost in mortality and severe morbidity.

“If you believe the San Quentin stuff, you got to get up to way-up-there before you start seeing slowing of transmission,” Rutherford said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious diseases expert, last week guessed it will probably require 50% to 75% of a population to be immune before achieving herd immunity — a goal that should be achieved not just through infected people recovering but also through vaccination.

California has a long way to go before the vast majority of residents have been infected.

(cut)

Sweden famously pursued a herd immunity strategy when it decided not to impose a severe lockdown.

But now, Sweden has among the highest mortality rates among European countries, and has a worse rate than that of the United States.

The info is here.

Mental Health and Clinical Psychological Science in the Time of COVID-19: Challenges, Opportunities, and a Call to Action

June Gruber et al.
American Psychologist. 
Advance online publication.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000707

Abstract

COVID-19 presents significant social, economic, and medical challenges. Because COVID-19 has already begun to precipitate huge increases in mental health problems, clinical psychological science must assert a leadership role in guiding a national response to this secondary crisis. In this article, COVID-19 is conceptualized as a unique, compounding, multidimensional stressor that will create a vast need for intervention and necessitate new paradigms for mental health service delivery and training. Urgent challenge areas across developmental periods are discussed, followed by a review of psychological symptoms that likely will increase in prevalence and require innovative solutions in both science and practice. Implications for new research directions, clinical approaches, and policy issues are discussed to highlight the opportunities for clinical psychological science to emerge as an updated, contemporary field capable of addressing the burden of mental illness and distress in the wake of COVID-19 and beyond.

(cut)

Concluding Comments

Clinical psychological science is needed more than ever in response to both the acute and enduring psychological effects of COVID-19 (Adhanom Ghebreyesus, 2020). This article is intended to inspire dialogue surrounding the challenges the field faces and how it must adapt to meet the mental health demands of a rapidly evolving psychological landscape. Of course, sustained change will require strong advocacy to ensure that mental health research funding is available to understand and address mental health challenges following COVID-19. To secure a leadership role, clinical psychological scientists must be prepared to raise their voices not only within scientific outlets, but also in public discussions on the airwaves (radio, cable news), alongside colleagues in other scientific fields. Sustained effort, collaboration with other disciplines, and unity within psychology will be necessary to address the multifaceted impacts of COVID-19 on humanity.

What is herd immunity?

Joshua Krisch
Live Science
Originally published July 2020

Here is an excerpt:

Herd immunity doesn't always work

The ingredients for achieving herd immunity naturally are well understood. "You want a disease that is guaranteed to produce robust immunity with largely asymptomatic spread, and have a low R0," Altmann told Live Science. But even if the R0 is relatively high and most patients are symptomatic, herd immunity is still possible with an effective vaccine, and a vaccine program that immunizes the population en masse. "Think of our big, public-health vaccination success-stories: Smallpox and polio, both entirely due to massive, sustained vaccine programs with simple, highly effective vaccines," he said.

Robust immunity is necessary to ensure that those who become immune stay that way long enough for the pathogen to die out. Asymptomatic spread helps, because it means that fewer people are likely to die while the population waits for herd immunity to take hold — and increases the likelihood that there will be enough survivors to affect herd immunity in the first place. A low R0, of course, lowers the bar for how many individuals need to be immune before we see the infection rate flatten and decline.

Nonetheless, some diseases that are seemingly strong candidates for herd immunity never quite achieve it. Despite widespread infection and vaccination, chicken pox, for instance, has never been entirely eradicated from the population. That's because the virus that causes chicken pox remains latent in the nerve roots of those who are infected by it, even after they recover and acquire immunity to the disease. As once-infected individuals grow older their immune systems weaken and the virus can reactivate, causing shingles, which can, in turn, cause chicken pox.

"You might have eradicated chicken pox in a small island community, but then somebody's granny gets an attack of shingles and, over a matter of weeks, every kid on the island gets chicken pox," Hunter said. "You've achieved herd immunity, and [it appears] the virus has died out, but it's actually waiting to come out." Similar phenomena have been observed with tuberculosis, according to the WHO.

Vaccine-induced herd immunity can also fail when a vaccine results in only short-lived immunity within a population. Pertussis and mumps recently reappeared long after vaccine programs were assumed to have eradicated these diseases, and studies suggest that, while vaccine noncompliance played a role, the outbreaks were in part due to the vaccines losing effectiveness over time. "In the past few years we've had both pertussis and mumps outbreaks, and those have primarily resulted from waning immunity over time," Poland said.

The info is here.

Hydroxychloroquine RCTs: 'Ethically, the Choice Is Clear'

F. Perry Wilson
medscape.com
Originally poste 5 August 20

Here is an excerpt:

I am not going to say that HCQ has no effect on COVID-19. We can never be 100% sure of that. But I am sure that if it has an effect, it is quite small. Think of a world where HCQ was a miracle cure for COVID-19. Think how different all of these randomized trials would look. It would be immediately obvious.

Straight talk: HCQ is unlikely to kill you. It will kill someone (rare cases of torsades de pointes occur), but it is unlikely to be you or your patients. It really is a relatively well-tolerated drug. But there are adverse effects, as all of these trials show. And given that, our ethical obligation to "first, do no harm" is paramount here. There simply is not good evidence that HCQ has a robust effect, and there is evidence of at least moderate harm. Ethically, the choice is clear.

A few final caveats. Yes, only one of these trials reported on the use of zinc with HCQ (no effect, by the way). But two things on that particular issue: First, we know that many individuals take zinc supplements, so if, as the argument goes, HCQ is a miracle cure when given with zinc, you'd still see a benefit in an HCQ trial because a subset of people — maybe 25% — are taking zinc.

The zinc issue falls into this "no true Scotsman" land of HCQ studies. Any negative study can be dismissed: "Oh, you didn't give it early enough, or late enough, or with zinc, or with azithromycin, or on Sunday," or whatever. That's not how science works. I'm not saying that any of these studies are perfect, just that they are the best evidence we have right now. The burden of proof is to show that the drug works. Though I'm sure that pharma would be stoked to be able to argue that their latest negative trial can be ignored because their billion-dollar drug wasn't given in concert with vitamin C or whatever.

Yes, I know that another Yale professor is saying that HCQ can save lives.

And to those of you who have pointed out that he is a full professor while I am a mere associate professor, you really know how to hurt a guy. I have no idea why he wrote that article and didn't mention any of the randomized trials. But I embrace the academic freedom that he and I both have to present our best interpretation of the data.

The info is here.

An approach for combining ethical principles with public opinion to guide public policy

E. Awad and others.
Artificial Intelligence
Volume 287, October 2020, 103349

Abstract

We propose a framework for incorporating public opinion into policy making in situations where values are in conflict. This framework advocates creating vignettes representing value choices, eliciting the public's opinion on these choices, and using machine learning to extract principles that can serve as succinct statements of the policies implied by these choices and rules to guide the behavior of autonomous systems.

From the Discussion

In the general case, we would strongly recommend input from experts (including ethicists, legal scholars, policymakers among others). Still, two facts remain: (1) views on life and death are emotionally driven, so it’s hard for people to accept some authority figure telling them how they should behave; (2) Even from an ethical perspective, it’s not always clear which view is the correct one. In such cases, when policy experts cannot reach a consensus, they may use citizens’ preferences as a tie-breaker. Doing so, helps reach a conclusive decision, it promotes values of democracy, it increases public acceptance of this technology (especially when it provides much better safety), and it promotes their sense of involvement and citizenship.  On the other hand, a full dependence on public input would always have the possibility for tyranny of the majority, among other issues raised above. This is why our proposed method provides a suitable approach that combines the utilization of citizen’s input with the responsible oversight by experts.

In this paper, we propose a framework that can help resolve conflicting moral values. In so doing, we exploit two decades of research in the representation and abstraction of values from cases in the service of abstracting and representing the values expressed in crowd-sourced data to the end of informing public policy. As a results, the resolution of competing values is produced in two forms: one that can be implemented in autonomous systems to guide their behavior, and a human-readable representation (policy) of these rules. At the core of this framework, is the collection of data from the
public.