Veil-of-ignorance reasoning mitigates self-serving bias in resource allocation during the COVID-19 crisis

Huang, K. et al.

Judgment and Decision Making

Vol. 16, No. 1, pp 1-19.

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis has forced healthcare professionals to make tragic decisions concerning which patients to save. Furthermore, The COVID-19 crisis has foregrounded the influence of self-serving bias in debates on how to allocate scarce resources. A utilitarian principle favors allocating scarce resources such as ventilators toward younger patients, as this is expected to save more years of life. Some view this as ageist, instead favoring age-neutral principles, such as “first come, first served”. Which approach is fairer? The “veil of ignorance” is a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial decision-making by reducing decision-makers’ use of potentially biasing information about who will benefit most or least from the available options. Veil-of-ignorance reasoning was originally applied by philosophers and economists to foundational questions concerning the overall organization of society. Here we apply veil-of-ignorance reasoning to the COVID-19 ventilator dilemma, asking participants which policy they would prefer if they did not know whether they are younger or older. Two studies (pre-registered; online samples; Study 1, N=414; Study 2 replication, N=1,276) show that veil-of-ignorance reasoning shifts preferences toward saving younger patients. The effect on older participants is dramatic, reversing their opposition toward favoring the young, thereby eliminating self-serving bias. These findings provide guidance on how to remove self-serving biases to healthcare policymakers and frontline personnel charged with allocating scarce medical resources during times of crisis.

A pdf is here.

Feeling authentic serves as a buffer against rejection

Gino, F. and Kouchaki, M.

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Volume 160, September 2020, Pages 36-50

Abstract

Social exclusion is a painful yet common experience in many people’s personal and professional lives. This research demonstrates that feeling authentic serves as a buffer against social rejection, leading people to experience less social pain. Across five studies, using different manipulations of authenticity, different paradigms to create social exclusion, and different measures of feeling rejected, we found that experiencing authenticity led participants to appraise situations as less threatening and to experience lower feelings of rejection from the social exclusion. We also found that perceived threat explains these effects. Our findings suggest that authenticity may be an underused resource for people who perceive themselves to be, or actually are, socially excluded or ostracized. This research has diverse and important implications: Interventions that increase authenticity could be used to reduce perceptions of threatening situations and the pain of impending exclusion episodes in situations ranging from adjustment to college to organizational orientation programs.

Highlights

• Feeling authentic serves as a buffer against social rejection.

• Feeling authentic results in lower feelings of rejections after social exclusion.

• Experiencing authenticity leads people to appraise situations as less threatening.

• These effects are not driven by affect or self-esteem but by authenticity.

• Interventions that increase authenticity buffer against rejection.

From the General Discussion

Despite living in a society where connections with others can be easily made (e.g., through social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook), people often experience loneliness and social exclusion.  Social media allows us to find out what we are missing in our write-and share or snap-and-share culture.  Paradoxically, this real-time ability to stay connected can make the sting of exclusion much more painful. The present studies establish that feeling authentic can dampen threat responses and reduce feelings of rejection and perceived social exclusion.

A pdf is here.

Religious Affiliation and Conceptions of the Moral Domain

Levine, S., Rottman, J., et al.

(2019, November 14). 

Abstract

What is the relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the moral domain? Putting aside the question of whether people from different religions agree about how to answer moral questions, here we investigate a more fundamental question: How much disagreement is there across religions about which issues count as moral in the first place? That is, do people from different religions conceptualize the scope of morality differently? Using a new methodology to map out how individuals conceive of the moral domain, we find dramatic differences among adherents of different religions. Mormon and Muslim participants moralized their religious norms, while Jewish participants did not. Hindu participants in our sample did not seem to make a moral/non-moral distinction of the same kind. These results suggest a profound relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the scope of the moral domain.

From the Discussion

We have found that it is neither true that secular people and religious people share a common conception of the moral domain nor that religious morality is expanded beyond secular morality in a uniform manner. Furthermore, when participants in a group did make a moral/non-moral distinction, there was broad agreement that norms related to harm, justice, and rights counted as moral norms. However, some religious individuals (such as the Mormon and Muslim participants) also moralized norms from their own religion that are not related to these themes. Meanwhile, others (such as the Jewish participants) acknowledged the special status of their own norms but did not moralize them. Yet others (such as the Hindu participants in our sample) seemed to make no distinction between the moral and the non-moral in the way that the other groups did. Our dataset, therefore, suggests that any theory about the lay conception of the scope of morality needs to explain why the Jewish participants in our dataset do not consider their own norms to be moral norms and why Mormons and Muslim participants do.To the extent that SDT and MFT make any predictions about how lay people decide whether a norm is moral, they too must find a way to explain these datasets.

A pdf of the research is here.

Does observability amplify sensitivity to moral frames? Evaluating a reputation-based account of moral preferences

Capraro, V., Jordan, J., & Tappin, B. M. 

(2020, April 9). 

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

Abstract

A growing body of work suggests that people are sensitive to moral framing in economic games involving prosociality, suggesting that people hold moral preferences for doing the “right thing”. What gives rise to these preferences? Here, we evaluate the explanatory power of a reputation-based account, which proposes that people respond to moral frames because they are motivated to look good in the eyes of others. Across four pre-registered experiments (total N = 9,601), we investigated whether reputational incentives amplify sensitivity to framing effects. Studies 1-3 manipulated (i) whether moral or neutral framing was used to describe a Trade-Off Game (in which participants chose between prioritizing equality or efficiency) and (ii) whether Trade-Off Game choices were observable to a social partner in a subsequent Trust Game. These studies found that observability does not significantly amplify sensitivity to moral framing. Study 4 ruled out the alternative explanation that the observability manipulation from Studies 1-3 is too weak to influence behavior. In Study 4, the same observability manipulation did significantly amplify sensitivity to normative information (about what others see as moral in the Trade-Off Game). Together, these results suggest that moral frames may tap into moral preferences that are relatively deeply internalized, such that the power of moral frames is not strongly enhanced by making the morally-framed behavior observable to others.

From the Discussion

Our results have implications for interventions that draw on moral framing effects to encourage socially desirable behavior. They suggest that such interventions can be successful even when behavior is not observable to others and thus reputation is not at stake—and in fact, that the efficacy of moral framing effects is not strongly enhanced by making behavior observable. Thus, our results suggest that targeting contexts where reputation is at stake is not an especially important priority for individuals seeking to maximize the impact of interventions based on moral framing.  This  conclusion  provides  an  optimistic  view  of  the  potential  of such interventions, given that there may be many contexts in which it is difficult to make behavior observable but yet possible to frame a decision in a way that encourages prosociality—for example, when  crowdsourcing  donations  anonymously(or  nearly  anonymously)on  the Internet.Future research should investigate the power of moral framing to promote prosocial behaviour in anonymous contexts outside of the laboratory.

A pdf of the research is here.

Social Identity Theory: The Science of "Us vs. Them"

One of the most fundamental insights in the psychology of prejudice and discrimination is can be found in "social identity theory." The theory, pioneered by Henri Tajfel and his colleagues, helps explain how the mere existence of ingroups and outgroups can give rise to hostility. The "us vs. them" mentality and the tribalism it evokes can be at least part of why groups have such trouble seeing eye to eye.

Originally posted 25 Jan 21

The Mistrust of Science

Atul Gawande

The New Yorker

Originally posted 01 June 2016

Here is an excerpt:

The scientific orientation has proved immensely powerful. It has allowed us to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, to increase our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe. Yet scientific knowledge is not necessarily trusted. Partly, that’s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledge provided by science is overwhelming, people often resist it—sometimes outright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).

Vaccine fears, for example, have persisted despite decades of research showing them to be unfounded. Some twenty-five years ago, a statistical analysis suggested a possible association between autism and thimerosal, a preservative used in vaccines to prevent bacterial contamination. The analysis turned out to be flawed, but fears took hold. Scientists then carried out hundreds of studies, and found no link. Still, fears persisted. Countries removed the preservative but experienced no reduction in autism—yet fears grew. A British study claimed a connection between the onset of autism in eight children and the timing of their vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella. That paper was retracted due to findings of fraud: the lead author had falsified and misrepresented the data on the children. Repeated efforts to confirm the findings were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, vaccine rates plunged, leading to outbreaks of measles and mumps that, last year, sickened tens of thousands of children across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and resulted in deaths.

People are prone to resist scientific claims when they clash with intuitive beliefs. They don’t see measles or mumps around anymore. They do see children with autism. And they see a mom who says, “My child was perfectly fine until he got a vaccine and became autistic.”

Now, you can tell them that correlation is not causation. You can say that children get a vaccine every two to three months for the first couple years of their life, so the onset of any illness is bound to follow vaccination for many kids. You can say that the science shows no connection. But once an idea has got embedded and become widespread, it becomes very difficult to dig it out of people’s brains—especially when they do not trust scientific authorities. And we are experiencing a significant decline in trust in scientific authorities.

The info is here.

5 years old, and still relevant.

Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

Matthew Hutson

The New Yorker

Originally published 15 Feb 21

Here is an excerpt:

Many kinds of researchers—biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and so on—encounter checkpoints at which they are asked about the ethics of their research. This doesn’t happen as much in computer science. Funding agencies might inquire about a project’s potential applications, but not its risks. University research that involves human subjects is typically scrutinized by an I.R.B., but most computer science doesn’t rely on people in the same way. In any case, the Department of Health and Human Services explicitly asks I.R.B.s not to evaluate the “possible long-range effects of applying knowledge gained in the research,” lest approval processes get bogged down in political debate. At journals, peer reviewers are expected to look out for methodological issues, such as plagiarism and conflicts of interest; they haven’t traditionally been called upon to consider how a new invention might rend the social fabric.

A few years ago, a number of A.I.-research organizations began to develop systems for addressing ethical impact. The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (sigchi) is, by virtue of its focus, already committed to thinking about the role that technology plays in people’s lives; in 2016, it launched a small working group that grew into a research-ethics committee. The committee offers to review papers submitted to sigchi conferences, at the request of program chairs. In 2019, it received ten inquiries, mostly addressing research methods: How much should crowd-workers be paid? Is it O.K. to use data sets that are released when Web sites are hacked? By the next year, though, it was hearing from researchers with broader concerns. “Increasingly, we do see, especially in the A.I. space, more and more questions of, Should this kind of research even be a thing?” Katie Shilton, an information scientist at the University of Maryland and the chair of the committee, told me.

Shilton explained that questions about possible impacts tend to fall into one of four categories. First, she said, “there are the kinds of A.I. that could easily be weaponized against populations”—facial recognition, location tracking, surveillance, and so on. Second, there are technologies, such as Speech2Face, that may “harden people into categories that don’t fit well,” such as gender or sexual orientation. Third, there is automated-weapons research. And fourth, there are tools “to create alternate sets of reality”—fake news, voices, or images.

The info is here.

The amoral atheist? A cross-national examination of cultural, motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, and their implications for morality

Ståhl T (2021) 

PLoS ONE 16(2): e0246593. 

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246593

Abstract

There is a widespread cross-cultural stereotype suggesting that atheists are untrustworthy and lack a moral compass. Is there any truth to this notion? Building on theory about the cultural, (de)motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, the present research investigated whether there are reliable similarities as well as differences between believers and disbelievers in the moral values and principles they endorse. Four studies examined how religious disbelief (vs. belief) relates to endorsement of various moral values and principles in a predominately religious (vs. irreligious) country (the U.S. vs. Sweden). Two U.S. M-Turk studies (Studies 1A and 1B, N = 429) and two large cross-national studies (Studies 2–3, N = 4,193), consistently show that disbelievers (vs. believers) are less inclined to endorse moral values that serve group cohesion (the binding moral foundations). By contrast, only minor differences between believers and disbelievers were found in endorsement of other moral values (individualizing moral foundations, epistemic rationality). It is also demonstrated that presumed cultural and demotivational antecedents of disbelief (limited exposure to credibility-enhancing displays, low existential threat) are associated with disbelief. Furthermore, these factors are associated with weaker endorsement of the binding moral foundations in both countries (Study 2). Most of these findings were replicated in Study 3, and results also show that disbelievers (vs. believers) have a more consequentialist view of morality in both countries. A consequentialist view of morality was also associated with another presumed antecedent of disbelief—analytic cognitive style.

Conclusion

The purpose of the present research was to systematically examine how conceptualizations of morality differ between disbelievers and believers, and to explore whether moral psychological differences between these groups could be due to four presumed antecedents of disbelief. The results consistently indicate that disbelievers and believers, in the U.S. as well as in Sweden, are equally inclined to view the individualizing moral foundations, Liberty/oppression, and epistemic rationality as important moral values. However, these studies also point to some consistent cross-national differences in the moral psychology of disbelievers as compared to believers. Specifically, disbelievers are less inclined than believers to endorse the binding moral foundations, and more inclined to engage in consequentialist moral reasoning. The present results further suggest that these differences may stem from disparities in exposure to CREDs, levels of perceived existential threat, and individual differences in cognitive style. It seems plausible that the more constrained and consequentialist view of morality that is associated with disbelief may have contributed to the widespread reputation of atheists as immoral in nature.

(italics added)

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Bottom line: Atheists are just as moral as religious folks, just that atheists don't use morality to promote social identity.  And, CREDS are credibility enhancing displays.

Religion, parochialism and intuitive cooperation

Isler, O., Yilmaz, O. & John Maule, A. 

Nat Hum Behav (2021). 

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-01014-3

Abstract

Religions promote cooperation, but they can also be divisive. Is religious cooperation intuitively parochial against atheists? Evidence supporting the social heuristics hypothesis (SHH) suggests that cooperation is intuitive, independent of religious group identity. We tested this prediction in a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game, where 1,280 practising Christian believers were paired with either a coreligionist or an atheist and where time limits were used to increase reliance on either intuitive or deliberated decisions. We explored another dual-process account of cooperation, the self-control account (SCA), which suggests that visceral reactions tend to be selfish and that cooperation requires deliberation. We found evidence for religious parochialism but no support for SHH’s prediction of intuitive cooperation. Consistent with SCA but requiring confirmation in future studies, exploratory analyses showed that religious parochialism involves decision conflict and concern for strong reciprocity and that deliberation promotes cooperation independent of religious group identity.

The research is here.

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In essence, the research replicated the widespread tendency for group bias.  They found Christians were more likely to cooperate with other Christians and, similarly, atheists were more likely to cooperate with other atheists.

But they also found that the participants, particularly the Christians, were able to resist selfish impulses and cooperate more if given time to deliberate and think about their decisions.