Polarization and extremism emerge from rational choice

Kvam, P. D., & Baldwin, M. 

(2020, October 21).

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/x7tqr

Abstract

Polarization is often thought to be the product of biased information search, motivated reasoning, or other psychological biases. However, polarization and extremism can still occur in the absence of any bias or irrational thinking. In this paper, we show that polarization occurs among groups of decision makers who are implementing rational choice strategies that maximize decision efficiency. This occurs because extreme information enables decision makers to make up their minds and stop considering new information, whereas moderate information is unlikely to trigger a decision. Furthermore, groups of decision makers will generate extremists -- individuals who hold strong views despite being uninformed and impulsive. In re-analyses of seven previous empirical studies on both perceptual and preferential choice, we show that both polarization and extremism manifest across a wide variety of choice paradigms. We conclude by offering theoretically-motivated interventions that could reduce polarization and extremism by altering the incentives people have when gathering information.

Conclusions

In a decision scenario that incentivizes a trade-off between time and decision quality, a population of rational decision makers will become polarized. In this paper, we have shown this through simulations, a mathematical proof (supplementary materials) and demonstrated it empirically in seven studies.   This  leads  us  to  an  unfortunate  but  unavoidable  conclusion that decision making is a bias-inducing process by which  participants  gather  representative  information  from their environment and, through the decision rules they implement, distort it toward the extremes. Such a process also generates extremists, who hold extreme views and carry undue influence over cultural discourse (Navarro et al.,2018) despite being relatively uninformed and impulsive (low thresh-olds;Kim & Lee,2011). We have suggested several avenues for interventions, foremost among them providing incentives favoring estimation or judgments as opposed to incentives for timely decision making. Our hope is that future work testing and implementing these interventions will reduce the prevalence of polarization and extremism across social domains currently occupied by decision makers.

‘All You Want Is to Be Believed’: The Impacts of Unconscious Bias in Health Care

April Dembosky

KHN.com

Originally published 21 Oct 20

Here is an excerpt:

Research shows how doctors’ unconscious bias affects the care people receive, with Latino and Black patients being less likely to receive pain medications or get referred for advanced care than white patients with the same complaints or symptoms, and more likely to die in childbirth from preventable complications.

In the hospital that day in May, Monterroso was feeling woozy and having trouble communicating, so she had a friend and her friend’s cousin, a cardiac nurse, on the phone to help. They started asking questions: What about Karla’s accelerated heart rate? Her low oxygen levels? Why are her lips blue?

The doctor walked out of the room. He refused to care for Monterroso while her friends were on the phone, she said, and when he came back, the only thing he wanted to talk about was Monterroso’s tone and her friends’ tone.

“The implication was that we were insubordinate,” Monterroso said.

She told the doctor she didn’t want to talk about her tone. She wanted to talk about her health care. She was worried about possible blood clots in her leg and she asked for a CT scan.

“Well, you know, the CT scan is radiation right next to your breast tissue. Do you want to get breast cancer?” Monterroso recalled the doctor saying to her. “I only feel comfortable giving you that test if you say that you’re fine getting breast cancer.”

Monterroso thought to herself, “Swallow it up, Karla. You need to be well.” And so she said to the doctor: “I’m fine getting breast cancer.”

He never ordered the test.

Monterroso asked for a different doctor, for a hospital advocate. No and no, she was told. She began to worry about her safety. She wanted to get out of there. Her friends, all calling every medical professional they knew to confirm that this treatment was not right, came to pick her up and drove her to the University of California-San Francisco. The team there gave her an EKG, a chest X-ray and a CT scan.

The info is here.

11th Circuit blocks South FL prohibitions on 'conversion therapy' for minors as unconstitutional

Michael Moline

Florida Pheonix

Originally posted 20 Nov 20

Here is an excerpt:

“We understand and appreciate that the therapy is highly controversial. But the First Amendment has no carve-out for controversial speech. We hold that the challenged ordinances violate the First Amendment because they are content-based regulations of speech that cannot survive strict scrutiny,” Grant wrote.

Judge Beverly Martin dissented, pointing to condemnations of the practice by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the American School Counselor Association, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the World Health Organization.

“Today’s majority opinion puts a stop to municipal efforts to regulate ‘sexual orientation change efforts’ (commonly known as ‘conversion therapy’), which is known to be a harmful therapeutic practice,” Martin wrote.

“The majority invalidates laws enacted to curb these therapeutic practices, despite strong evidence of the harm they cause, as well as the laws’ narrow focus on licensed therapists practicing on patients who are minors. Although I am mindful of the free-speech concerns the majority expresses, I respectfully dissent from the decision to enjoin these laws.”

Matt Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, the conservative legal organization that represented two counselors who challenged the ordinance, welcomed the ruling.

“This is a huge victory for counselors and their clients to choose the counsel of their choice free of political censorship from government ideologues. This case is the beginning of the end of similar unconstitutional counseling bans around the country,” he said in a written statement.

The info is here.

Psychologist’s paper retracted after Dutch national body affirms misconduct findings

Adam Marcus

Retraction Watch

Originally posted 23 Nov 20

A cognitive psychologist in Germany has lost one of two papers slated for retraction after her former institution found her guilty of misconduct. 

In a 2019 report, Leiden University found that Lorenza Colzato, now of TU Dresden, had failed to obtain ethics ethics approval for some of her studies, manipulated her data and fabricated results in grant applications. Although the institution did not identify Colzato by name, Retraction Watch confirmed her identity. 

The Leiden report — the conclusions of which were affirmed by the Netherlands Board on Research Integrity last month — called for the retraction of two papers by Colzato and her co-authors, three of whom acted as whistleblowers in the case. As the trio told us in an interview last December: 

We worked with the accused for many years, during which we observed and felt forced to get involved in several bad research practices. These practices would range from small to large violations. Since early on we were aware that this was not OK or normal, and so we tried to stand up to this person early on.

However, we very quickly learned that complaining could only lead to nasty situations such as long and prolonged criticism at a professional and personal level. … But seeing this behavior recurring and steadily escalating, and seeing other people in the situations we had been in, led us to feel like we could no longer stay silent. We had become more independent (despite still working in the same department), and felt like we had to ‘break’ that system. About one year ago, we brought the issues to the attention of the scientific Director of our Institute, who took our story seriously from the beginning. Upon evaluating the evidence, together we decided the Director would file a complaint. Out of fear for retaliation, we initially did not join as formal complainants but eventually gathered the courage to join the complaint and disclose our role.

The now-retracted paper, which Colzato wrote with Laura Steenbergen — a former colleague at Leiden and one of the eventual whistleblowers — was titled “Overweight and cognitive performance: High body mass index is associated with impairment in reactive control during task switching.” It appeared in 2017 in Frontiers in Nutrition. 

The info is here.

An evolutionary explanation for ineffective altruism

Burum, B., Nowak, M.A. & Hoffman, M. 

Nat Hum Behav (2020). 

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00950-4

Abstract

We donate billions to charities each year, yet much of our giving is ineffective. Why are we motivated to give but not to give effectively? Building on evolutionary game theory, we argue that donors evolved (genetically or culturally) to be insensitive to efficacy because people tend not to reward efficacy, as social rewards tend to depend on well-defined and highly observable behaviours. We present five experiments testing key predictions of this account that are difficult to reconcile with alternative accounts based on cognitive or emotional limitations. Namely, we show that donors are more sensitive to efficacy when helping themselves or their families. Moreover, social rewarders don’t condition on efficacy or other difficult-to-observe behaviours, such as the amount donated.

From the Conclusion

This paper has argued that altruism in a behavioural sense is an act that benefits another person, while it is altruistically motivated when the ultimate goal of such act is the welfare of that other. In evolutionary sense, altruism means the sacrifice of fitness for the benefit of other organisms. 

According to the evolutionary theories of altruism, behaviour which promotes the reproductive success of the receiver at the cost of the altruist is favoured by natural selection, because it is either beneficial for the altruist in the long run, or for his genes, or for the group he belongs to. Thus, in line with Trivers, it can be argued that “models that attempt to explain altruistic behaviour in terms of natural selection are models designed to take the altruism out of altruism” (Trivers 1971: 35).

Strategic Regulation of Empathy.

Weisz, E., & Cikara, M. (2020, October 9).

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2kr46

Abstract

Empathy is an integral part of socio-emotional well-being, yet recent research has highlighted some of its downsides. Here we examine literature that establishes when, how much, and what aspects of empathy promote specific outcomes. After reviewing a theoretical framework which characterizes empathy as a suite of separable components, we examine evidence showing how dissociations of these components affect important socio-emotional outcomes and describe emerging evidence suggesting that these components can be independently and deliberately modulated. Finally, we advocate for a new approach to a multi-component view of empathy which accounts for the interrelations among components. This perspective advances scientific conceptualization of empathy and offers suggestions for tailoring empathy to help people realize their social, emotional, and occupational goals.

From the Conclusion

The goal of this review has been to evaluate the burgeoning literature on how components of empathy—in isolation or in concert—differentially affect key outcomes including prosocial behavior, relationship quality, occupational burnout, and negotiation. As such, an important takeaway from this review is that components of empathy can be leveraged to facilitate attainment of important goals. A second takeaway is that in order to effectively intervene on empathy in service of promoting specific outcomes, it is important to understand how these components track together (or not) in people’s everyday experiences. Relatedly, the field of empathy would benefit from thoroughly characterizing the structural and temporal relationships among these components to better understand how they work together (or in isolation) to drive key outcomes. 

Thus it seems that the time is right for the field of empathy research to enter anew wave, which explicitly examines the spontaneous separation or co-occurrence of dissociable empathy-related components, especially in behavioral—both laboratory and field—experiments. Several social neuroscience studies have indicated that this is an important aspect of empathy-related inquiry; as such, it is a promising next step for empathy-related research in more naturalistic contexts. The next wave of empathy research is in position to make incredibly important discoveries about when and for whom specific empathic components reliably predict behavioral outcomes, and to understand how empathy can be regulated to help people realize critical social, emotional and occupational goals.

Artificial Intelligence and Legal Disruption: A New Model for Analysis

Hin-Yan Liu,  et .al (2020) 

Law, Innovation and Technology, 

12:2, 205-258

DOI: 10.1080/17579961.2020.1815402

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly expected to disrupt the ordinary functioning of society. From how we fight wars or govern society, to how we work and play, and from how we create to how we teach and learn, there is almost no field of human activity which is believed to be entirely immune from the impact of this emerging technology. This poses a multifaceted problem when it comes to designing and understanding regulatory responses to AI. This article aims to: (i) defend the need for a novel conceptual model for understanding the systemic legal disruption caused by new technologies such as AI; (ii) to situate this model in relation to preceding debates about the interaction of regulation with new technologies (particularly the ‘cyberlaw’ and ‘robolaw’ debates); and (iii) to set out a detailed model for understanding the legal disruption precipitated by AI, examining both pathways stemming from new affordances that can give rise to a regulatory ‘disruptive moment’, as well as the Legal Development, Displacement or Destruction that can ensue. The article proposes that this model of legal disruption can be broadly generalisable to understanding the legal effects and challenges of other emerging technologies.

From Concluding Thoughts

As artificial intelligence is often claimed to be an exponential technology, and law progresses incrementally in a linear fashion, there is bound to be a point at which the exponential take off crosses the straight line if these assumptions hold. Everything to the left of this intersection, where AI is below the line, is where hype about the technology does not quite live up to expectations and is generally disappointing in terms of functioning and capability. To the right of this intersection, however, the previously dull technology takes on a surprising and startling tone as it rapidly outpaces both predictions about its capacities and collective abilities to contextualise, accommodate or situate it. It is widely claimed that we are now nearing this intersection. If these claims hold up, the law is one of the institutions that stands to be shocked by the rapid progression and incorporation of AI into society. If this is right, then it is important to start projecting forward in an attempt to minimise the gap between exponential technologies and linear expectations. The legal disruption framework we have presented does exactly this. Furthermore, even if these claims turn out to be misguided, thinking though such transformations sheds different light upon the legal enterprise which hopes to illuminate the entire law.

A pdf of the article is here.

The Value of Not Knowing: Partisan Cue-Taking and Belief Updating of the Uninformed, the Ambiguous, and the Misinformed

Jianing Li & Michael W Wagner

Journal of Communication, Volume 70,

Issue 5, October 2020, Pages 646–669.

https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaa022

Abstract

The problem of a misinformed citizenry is often used to motivate research on misinformation and its corrections. However, researchers know little about how differences in informedness affect how well corrective information helps individuals develop knowledge about current events. We introduce a Differential Informedness Model that distinguishes between three types of individuals, that is, the uninformed, the ambiguous, and the misinformed, and establish their differences with two experiments incorporating multiple partisan cues and issues. Contrary to the common impression, the U.S. public is largely uninformed rather than misinformed of a wide range of factual claims verified by journalists. Importantly, we find that the success of belief updating after exposure to corrective information (via a fact-checking article) is dependent on the presence, the certainty, and the accuracy of one’s prior belief. Uninformed individuals are more likely to update their beliefs than misinformed individuals after exposure to corrective information. Interestingly, the ambiguous individuals, regardless of whether their uncertain guesses were correct, do not differ from uninformed individuals with respect to belief updating.

From the Discussion Section

First, and contrary to the impression that many citizens are misinformed, the majority of our respondents are uninformed of a wide range of claims important enough to be verified by journalists. Only a small group of respondents hold confident, inaccurate beliefs.  This builds on the work of Pasek et al. (2015) by distinguishing between the uninformed, who admit that they “don’t know,” the ambiguous, who take a guess with varying degrees of accuracy, and the misinformed, who hold steadfast false beliefs. In the current environment where concerns over misinformation often lead to heightened attention to belief accuracy, our findings highlight the necessity to bridge between work on political ignorance and misperception and the benefit of leveraging belief accuracy, belief presence and belief certainty to better assess public informedness.

(emphasis added)

A pdf of the research is here.

The epidemiology of moral bioenhancement

R. B. Gibson

Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-020-09980-1

Abstract 

In their 2008 paper, Persson and Savulescu suggest that for moral bioenhancement (MBE) to be effective at eliminating the danger of ‘ultimate harm’ the intervention would need to be compulsory. This is because those most in need of MBE would be least likely to undergo the intervention voluntarily. By drawing on concepts and theories from epidemiology, this paper will suggest that MBE may not need to be universal and compulsory to be effective at significantly improving the collective moral standing of a human populace and reducing the threat of ultimate harm. It will identify similarities between the mechanisms that allow biological contagions (such as a virus) and behaviours (such as those concerned with ethical and unethical actions) to develop, spread, and be reinforced within a population. It will then go onto suggest that, just as with the epidemiological principle of herd immunity, if enough people underwent MBE to reach a minimum threshold then the incidence and spread of immoral behaviours could be significantly reduced, even in those who have not received MBE.

Conclusion 

The phenomenon of herd immunity is one that is critical in the field of vaccine epidemiology and public health. Once it takes effect, even those individuals who are unable to undergo vaccination are still able to benefit from a functional immunity from a biological agent. As such, a compulsory and universal programme of vaccination is not always necessary to achieve a sufficient protection rate against a contagious biological agent. It is this same line of reasoning which this paper has sought to employ, envisioning MBE as a form of vaccination against those types of behaviour that would lead to the realisation of UH (Ultimate Harm). Consequentially, this allows for the possibility of sufficient protection against the undesirable behaviours that would lead to UH without a need for a universal and compulsory enhancement programme.

A pdf can be found here.