Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy

Sunday, November 8, 2020

Where loneliness can lead

Samantha Rose Hill
aeon.co
Originally published 16 Oct 20

Here is an excerpt:

Why loneliness is not obvious.

Arendt’s answer was: because loneliness radically cuts people off from human connection. She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others. The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness. Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’, because in loneliness we are unable to realise our full capacity for action as human beings. When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings.

In order to illustrate why loneliness is the essence of totalitarianism and the common ground of terror, Arendt distinguished isolation from loneliness, and loneliness from solitude. Isolation, she argued, is sometimes necessary for creative activity. Even the mere reading of a book, she says requires some degree of isolation. One must intentionally turn away from the world to make space for the experience of solitude but, once alone, one is always able to turn back.

Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude. The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think, while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself. The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible.

Saturday, November 7, 2020

Psychopathy as moral blindness: a qualifying exploration of the blindness-analogy in psychopathy theory and research

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen (2020) 
Philosophical Explorations, 23:3, 214-233
DOI: 10.1080/13869795.2020.1799662

Abstract

The term psychopathy refers to a personality disorder associated with callous personality traits and antisocial behaviors. Throughout its research history, psychopathy has frequently been described as a peculiar form of moral blindness, engendering a narrative about a patient stereotype incapable of taking a genuine moral perspective, similar to a blind person who is deprived of proper visual perceptions. However, recent empirical research has shown that clinically diagnosed psychopaths are morally more fit than initially thought, and the blindness-analogy now comes across as largely misleading. In this contribution, the moral-blindness analogy is explored in an attempt to qualify anew its relevance in psychopathy theory and research. It is demonstrated that there are indeed theoretically relevant parallels to be drawn between blindness and psychopathy, parallels that are especially illuminating when accounting for the potential symptomatology, dimensionality, and etiological nature of the disorder.

Concluding remarks

In summary, what has been proposed throughout this paper is a perspective in terms of how to interpret and improve psychopathy research, an approach which lends itself to theorize psychopathy as a peculiar form of moral blindness. Following leading research, it was posited that psychopathy must, first of all, be understood as an emotional disorder, that is, a disorder of substantial emotional attenuation. Building on Prinz’s constructivist sentimentalism, it was demonstrated how said emotional incapacity could manifest in moral psychological impairments, as an inability to perceive the degrees of moral rightness and wrongness. Prinz’s theory was then expanded by adding (or amending) that psychopaths are not necessarily impaired in terms of perceiving the categorical value of a given moral situation, i.e. judging whether something is either right or wrong. Indeed, psychopaths must perceive this basic information by the mere fact that they do have some levels of valanced emotional experience. Instead, what is predicted is that globally low emotion attenuation (i.e. psychopathy) leads to observable differences in terms of
judging the degree of rightness and wrongness of a situation.

Friday, November 6, 2020

Deluded, with reason

Huw Green
aeon.co
Originally published 31 Aug 20

Here is an excerpt:

Of course, beliefs don’t exist only in a private mental context, but can also be held in place by our relationships and social commitments. Consider how political identities often involve a cluster of commitments to various beliefs, even where there is no logical connection between them – for instance, how a person who advocates for say, trans rights, is also more likely to endorse Left-wing economic policies. As the British clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell and his colleagues note in their preprint, ‘De-rationalising Delusions’ (2019), beliefs facilitate affiliation and intragroup trust. They cite earlier philosophical work by others that suggests ‘reasoning is not for the refinement of personal knowledge … but for argumentation, social communication and persuasion’. Indeed, our relationships usually ground our beliefs in a beneficial way, preventing us from developing ideas too disparate from those of our peers, and helping us to maintain a set of ‘healthy’ beliefs that promote our basic wellbeing and continuity in our sense of self.

Given the social function of beliefs, it’s little surprise that delusions usually contain social themes. Might delusion then be a problem of social affiliation, rather than a purely cognitive issue? Bell’s team make just this claim, proposing that there is a broader dysfunction to what they call ‘coalitional cognition’ (important for handling social relationships) involved in the generation of delusions. Harmful social relationships and experiences could play a role here. It is now widely acknowledged that there is a connection between traumatic experiences and symptoms of psychosis. It’s easy to see how trauma could have a pervasive impact on a person’s sense of how safe and trustworthy the world feels, in turn affecting their belief systems.

The British philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe and his colleagues made this point in their 2014 paper, observing how ‘traumatic events are often said to “shatter” a way of experiencing the world and other people that was previously taken for granted’. They add that a ‘loss of trust in the world involves a pronounced and widespread sense of unpredictability’ that could make people liable to delusions because the ideas we entertain are likely to be shaped by what feels plausible in the context of our subjective experience. Loss of trust is not the same as the absence of a grounding belief, but I would argue that it bears an important similarity. When we lose trust in something, we might say that we find it hard to believe in it. Perhaps loss of certain forms of ordinary belief, especially around close social relationships, makes it possible to acquire beliefs of a different sort altogether.

Thursday, November 5, 2020

Are psychopaths moral‐psychologically impaired? Reassessing emotion‐theoretical explanations

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen
Mind & Language. 2020; 1– 17. 

Abstract

Psychopathy has been theorized as a disorder of emotion, which impairs moral judgments. However, these theories are increasingly being abandoned as empirical studies show that psychopaths seem to make proper moral judgments. In this contribution, these findings are reassessed, and it is argued that prevalent emotion‐theories of psychopathy appear to operate with the unjustified assumption that psychopaths have no emotions, which leads to the hypothesis that psychopaths are completely unable to make moral judgments. An alternative and novel explanation is proposed, theorizing psychopathy as a degree‐specific emotional deficiency, which causes degree‐specific differences in moral judgments.

From the Conclusion Section

Motivated by a suite of ostensibly undermining empirical studies, this paper sought to defend and qualify emotion-theories of psychopathy by explicating in detail the philosophical and psychological commitments these theories appear to be implicitly endorsing, namely, a (constructivist) sentimentalist framework. This explication demonstrated, above all, that psychopathy studies appear to operate with an inconsistent set of hypotheses when trying to capture the differences between diagnosed psychopaths and controls in terms of their moral judgments and values. This led to a consideration of alternative research designs particularly aimed at capturing the potential moral psychological differences that follows from having diminished emotional dispositions, namely, degree-specific differences related to the two-dimensional value spectrum, as opposed to differences related to answers on moral categorical issues.

Wednesday, November 4, 2020

The psychology and neuroscience of partisanship

Harris, E. A., Pärnamets, et al.
psyarxiv.com

Abstract

Why have citizens become increasingly polarized? The answer is that there is increasing identification with political parties —a process known as partisanship (Mason, 2018). This chapter will focus on the role that social identity plays in contemporary politics (Greene, 2002). These party identities influence political preferences, such that partisans are more likely to agree with policies that were endorsed by their political party, regardless of the policy content, and, in some cases, their own ideological beliefs (Cohen, 2003; Samuels & Zucco Jr, 2014). There are many social and structural factors that are related to partisanship, including polarization (Lupu, 2015), intergroup threat (e.g., Craig & Richeson, 2014), and media exposure (Tucker et al., 2018; Barberá, 2015). Our chapter will focus on the psychology and neuroscience of partisanship within these broader socio-political contexts. This will help reveal the roots of partisanship across political contexts.

Conclusion

A burgeoning literature suggests that partisanship is a form of social identity with interesting and wide-reaching implications for our brains and behavior. In some ways, the effects of partisanship mirror those of other forms of group identity, both behaviorally and in the brain. However, partisanship also has interesting biological antecedents and effects in political domains such as belief in fake news and conspiracy theories, as well as voting behavior. As political polarization rises in many nations across the world, partisanship will become an increasingly divisive and influential form of social identity in those countries, thus highlighting the urgency to understand its psychological and neural underpinnings.

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Americans hate political opponents more than they love their own party, study finds

Sandee LaMotte
CNN.com
Updated 29 Oct 2020

Americans now hate people in the opposite political party more than they love their own party, with disrupting implications about behavior, a new study finds.

"Compared to a few decades ago, Americans today are much more opposed to dating or marrying an opposing partisan; they are also wary of living near or working for one," according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science.

"They tend to discriminate, as when paying an opposing partisan less than a copartisan for identical job performance or recommending that an opposing partisan be denied a scholarship despite being the more qualified applicant," the study said.

Leveraging data from 1975 through 2017 in nine Western democracies -- Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States -- the researchers found that by 2017 what they call "out-party hate" was stronger in the United States than in any other nation.

"The current state of political sectarianism produces prejudice, discrimination and cognitive distortion, undermining the ability of government to serve its core functions of representing the people and solving the nation's problems," said lead author Eli Finkel, a professor of social psychology at both Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Kellogg School of Management, in a statement.

The Political is Personal: Daily Politics as a Chronic Stressor

Feinberg, M., Ford, et al.
(2020, September 19).

Abstract

Politics and its controversies have permeated everyday life, but the daily impact of politics is largely unknown. Here, we conceptualize politics as a chronic stressor with important consequences for people’s daily lives. We used longitudinal, daily-diary methods to track U.S. participants as they experienced daily political events across two weeks (Study 1: N=198, observations=2,167) and, separately, across three weeks (Study 2: N=811, observations=12,790) to explore how daily political events permeate people’s lives and how they cope with this influence of politics. In both studies, daily political events consistently evoked negative emotions, which corresponded to worse psychological and physical well-being, but also increased motivation to take political action (e.g., volunteer, protest) aimed at changing the political system that evoked these emotions in the first place. Understandably, people frequently tried to regulate their politics-induced emotions; and successfully regulating these emotions using cognitive strategies (reappraisal and distraction) predicted greater well-being, but also weaker motivation to take action. Although people can protect themselves from the emotional impact of politics, frequently-used regulation strategies appear to come with a trade-off between well being and action. To examine whether an alternative approach to one’s emotions could avoid this trade-off, we measured emotional acceptance in Study 2 (i.e., accepting one’s emotions without trying to change them) and found that successful acceptance predicted greater daily well-being but no impairment to political action. Overall, this research highlights how politics can be a chronic stressor in people’s daily lives, underscoring the far-reaching influence politicians have beyond the formal powers endowed unto them.

Conclusion

In all, our research bridges political psychology and affective science theory and methods, and highlights how these distinct literatures can intersect to answer important, unexplored questions. Our findings show that the political is very much personal–a pattern with powerful consequences for people’s daily lives. More generally, by demonstrating how political events personally impact the average citizen, including their psychological and physical health, our study reveals the far-reaching impact politicians have, beyond the formal powers endowed unto them.

Monday, November 2, 2020

What We’re Not Talking about When We Talk about Addiction

Hanna Pickard
The Hastings Center
Originally posted 28 Aug 20

Abstract

The landscape of addiction is dominated by two rival models: a moral model and a model that characterizes addiction as a neurobiological disease of compulsion. Against both, I offer a scientifically and clinically informed alternative. Addiction is a highly heterogeneous condition that is ill-characterized as involving compulsive use. On the whole, drug consumption in addiction remains goal directed: people take drugs because drugs have tremendous value. This view has potential implications for the claim that addiction is, in all cases, a brain disease. But more importantly, it has implications for clinical and policy interventions. To help someone overcome addiction, you need to understand and address why they persist in using drugs despite negative consequences. If they are not compelled, then the explanation must advert to the value of drugs for them as an individual. What blocks us from acknowledging this reality is not science but fear: that it will ignite moralism about drugs and condemnation of drug users. The solution is not to cleave to the concept of compulsion but to fight moralism directly.

Sunday, November 1, 2020

Believing in Overcoming Cognitive Biases

T. S. Doherty & A. E. Carroll
AMA J Ethics. 2020;22(9):E773-778. 
doi: 10.1001/amajethics.2020.773.

Abstract

Like all humans, health professionals are subject to cognitive biases that can render diagnoses and treatment decisions vulnerable to error. Learning effective debiasing strategies and cultivating awareness of confirmation, anchoring, and outcomes biases and the affect heuristic, among others, and their effects on clinical decision making should be prioritized in all stages of education.

Here is an excerpt:

The practice of reflection reinforces behaviors that reduce bias in complex situations. A 2016 systematic review of cognitive intervention studies found that guided reflection interventions were associated with the most consistent success in improving diagnostic reasoning. A guided reflection intervention involves searching for and being open to alternative diagnoses and willingness to engage in thoughtful and effortful reasoning and reflection on one’s own conclusions, all with supportive feedback or challenge from a mentor.

The same review suggests that cognitive forcing strategies may also have some success in improving diagnostic outcomes. These strategies involve conscious consideration of alternative diagnoses other than those that come intuitively. One example involves reading radiographs in the emergency department. According to studies, a common pitfall among inexperienced clinicians in such a situation is to call off the search once a positive finding has been noticed, which often leads to other abnormalities (eg, second fractures) being overlooked. Thus, the forcing strategy in this situation would be to continue a search even after an initial fracture has been detected.