Morality as Fuel for Violence? Disentangling the Role of Religion in Violent Conflict

Cousar, K.A., Carnes, N.C. & Kimel, S.Y.

Social Cognition 2021

Vol. 39 (1)

Abstract

Past research finds contradictory evidence suggesting that religion both reduces and increases violent conflict. We argue that morality is an important hub mechanism that can help us understand this disputed relationship. Moreover, to reconcile this, as well as the factors underlying religion's impact on increased violence (i.e., belief versus practice), we draw on Virtuous Violence Theory and newly synthesize it with research on both moral cognition and social identity. We suggest that the combined effect of moral cognition and social identity may substantially increase violence beyond what either facilitates alone. We test our claims using multilevel analysis of data from the World Values Survey and find a nuanced effect of religion on people's beliefs about violence. Specifically, religious individuals were less likely to condone violence while religious countries were more likely to. This combination of theoretical and empirical work helps disentangle the interwoven nature of morality, religion, and violence.

Conclusion

Past research on the relationship between religion and violence finds contradictory evidence suggesting that religion both reduces and increases violent conflict. However, here we explain how morality is an important hub mechanism that, when considered, clarifies the complicated relationship between morality, religion, and violence. Specifically, we have brought together independent theories on moral cognition and social identity that together provide the mechanisms that enable Virtuous Violence Theory to explain why morality motivates violence. Further, we take empirical data from the World Values Survey to further support our understanding of this relationship. More specifically, our analysis finds a nuanced effect of religion on people’s beliefs about violence, with an opposite pattern of results for both individuals and countries. In general, individuals were less likely to condone violence, which aligns with previous research on prosocial influence of religion (e.g., views about the importance of God), while countries were more likely to condone violence, which aligns with research on social components of religion (e.g., observant practice of attendance and prayer). This work emphasizes the importance of considering the influence of morality as a linchpin in intergroup relations, especially during relationships marked by violent conflict.

A pdf can be found here.

U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time

Jeffrey Jones

Gallup.com

Originally posted 29 March 21

Story Highlights

• In 2020, 47% of U.S. adults belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque
• Down more than 20 points from turn of the century
• Change primarily due to rise in Americans with no religious preference

Americans' membership in houses of worship continued to decline last year, dropping below 50% for the first time in Gallup's eight-decade trend. In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.

U.S. church membership was 73% when Gallup first measured it in 1937 and remained near 70% for the next six decades, before beginning a steady decline around the turn of the 21st century.

As many Americans celebrate Easter and Passover this week, Gallup updates a 2019 analysis that examined the decline in church membership over the past 20 years.

Gallup asks Americans a battery of questions on their religious attitudes and practices twice each year. The following analysis of declines in church membership relies on three-year aggregates from 1998-2000 (when church membership averaged 69%), 2008-2010 (62%), and 2018-2020 (49%). The aggregates allow for reliable estimates by subgroup, with each three-year period consisting of data from more than 6,000 U.S. adults.

The info is here.

Neuroscience shows how interconnected we are – even in a time of isolation

Lisa Feldman Barrett

The Guardian

Originally posted 10 Feb 21

Here is an excerpt:

Being the caretakers of each other’s body budgets is challenging when so many of us feel lonely or are physically alone. But social distancing doesn’t have to mean social isolation. Humans have a special power to connect with and regulate each other in another way, even at a distance: with words. If you’ve ever received a text message from a loved one and felt a rush of warmth, or been criticised by your boss and felt like you’d been punched in the gut, you know what I’m talking about. Words are tools for regulating bodies.

In my research lab, we run experiments to demonstrate this power of words. Our participants lie still in a brain scanner and listen to evocative descriptions of different situations. One is about walking into your childhood home and being smothered in hugs and smiles. Another is about awakening to your buzzing alarm clock and finding a sweet note from your significant other. As they listen, we see increased activity in brain regions that control heart rate, breathing, metabolism and the immune system. Yes, the same brain regions that process language also help to run your body budget. Words have power over your biology – your brain wiring guarantees it.

Our participants also had increased activity in brain regions involved in vision and movement, even though they were lying still with their eyes closed. Their brains were changing the firing of their own neurons to simulate sight and motion in their mind’s eye. This same ability can build a sense of connection, from a few seconds of poor-quality mobile phone audio, or from a rectangle of pixels in the shape of a friend’s face. Your brain fills in the gaps – the sense data that you don’t receive through these media – and can ease your body budget deficit in the moment.

In the midst of social distancing, my Zoom friend and I rediscovered the body-budgeting benefits of older means of communication, such as letter writing. The handwriting of someone we care about can have an unexpected emotional impact. A piece of paper becomes a wave of love, a flood of gratitude, a belly-aching laugh.

The info is here.

The Trouble With Moral Enhancement

De Melo-Martín, I. (2018). 

Royal Institute of 

Philosophy Supplement, 83, 19-33. 

doi:10.1017/S1358246118000279

Abstract

Proponents of moral enhancement believe that we should pursue and apply biotechnological means to morally enhance human beings, as failing to do so is likely to lead to humanity's demise. Unsurprisingly, these proposals have generated a substantial amount of debate about the moral permissibility of using such interventions. Here I put aside concerns about the permissibility of moral enhancement and focus on the conceptual and evidentiary grounds for the moral enhancement project. I argue that such grounds are quite precarious.

(cut)

So far, I have argued that conceptual problems lead the moral enhancement project to be nothing of the sort: insofar as the targets of biomedical interventions are particular dispositions, motivations, or behaviours, it is incorrect to talk about moral enhancement rather than dispositional, motivational, or behavioural enhancement. And insofar as these are understood as piecemeal characteristics or properties, it is mistaken to talk about enhancement rather than simply modifications or alterations.

But the moral enhancement project also rests on shaky scientific grounds. In fact, there are so many problems related to the misuse of scientific evidence that it would be difficult to even mention all of them here. I will thus focus on two of them that are particularly problematic:the use of scientific claims that proponents present as uncontroversial and the weakness of the scientific evidence purporting to show that moral enhancement is plausible.

Moral enhancement supporters attempt to buttress their proposals by appealing to various sources of scientific evidence.  In doing so, they not uncommonly present some such scientific evidence as uncontroversially accepted. In fact, however, many of the scientific claims they present are not only highly contentious but by many accounts simply false. This is the case, for instance, regarding many of the evolutionary psychology claims proponents use to support the moral enhancement project. Many of such claims have been discredited for multiple reasons, from problematic assumptions, to incorrect interpretations of the evidence, to inadequate conclusions.  Some of the claims proponents make in this regard are just plainly ridiculous. For instance, trying to argue that altruism and a sense of justice have a genetic basis, Persson and Savulescu offer the following evidence: It is plausible to think that in general women have a greater capacity for altruism than men. If this psychological difference tracks gender, this is surely good evidence that it is biologically based.

A pdf is here.

Psychedelic Moral Enhancement

Earp, B. (2018).

Royal Institute of 

Philosophy Supplement, 83, 415-439. 

doi:10.1017/S1358246118000474

Abstract

The moral enhancement (or bioenhancement) debate seems stuck in a dilemma. On the one hand, the more radical proposals, while certainly novel and interesting, seem unlikely to be feasible in practice, or if technically feasible then most likely imprudent. But on the other hand, the more sensible proposals – sensible in the sense of being both practically achievable and more plausibly ethically justifiable – can be rather hard to distinguish from both traditional forms of moral enhancement, such as non-drug-mediated social or moral education, and non-moral forms of bioenhancement, such as smart-drug style cognitive enhancement. In this essay, I argue that bioethicists have paid insufficient attention to an alternative form of moral bioenhancement – or at least a likely candidate – that falls somewhere between these two extremes, namely the (appropriately qualified) use of certain psychedelic drugs.

 Conclusion

I would like to conclude with a note of caution. Because I have been interested to explore the potentially positive role of psychedelics in moral self-development, I have primarily focused on “successful” anecdotes—that is, cases in which people seem genuinely to have benefitted, morally or otherwise, from their drug-enhanced experiences. But more negative experiences are certainly possible, as mentioned earlier. As the prominent drug researcher Ben Sessa argues, we are right to adopt a stance of healthy skepticism toward any proposal that, “in the eyes of the general public, is associated with recreational drug abuse.”

Indeed, psychedelic drugs—just like other drugs such as alcohol or prescription medication—can, when used irresponsibly, cause “physical, psychological and social harm, and even deaths.” So we must be cautious, and take seriously the concerns of those people who fear that the use of such drugs may cause “greater social and health problems than it may solve.” Even so, Sessa suggests that there is more than enough evidence already from recent, controlled studies to render plausible the folk knowledge—accumulated over centuries—that psychedelics can also be beneficial. At a minimum, he concludes, the “evidence against at least researching” psychedelics for therapeutic or enhancement purposes “appears to be very scant indeed.”

A pdf is here.

On Dual- and Single-Process Models of Thinking

De Neys W. On 

Perspectives on Psychological Science. 

February 2021. 

doi:10.1177/1745691620964172

Abstract

Popular dual-process models of thinking have long conceived intuition and deliberation as two qualitatively different processes. Single-process-model proponents claim that the difference is a matter of degree and not of kind. Psychologists have been debating the dual-process/single-process question for at least 30 years. In the present article, I argue that it is time to leave the debate behind. I present a critical evaluation of the key arguments and critiques and show that—contra both dual- and single-model proponents—there is currently no good evidence that allows one to decide the debate. Moreover, I clarify that even if the debate were to be solved, it would be irrelevant for psychologists because it does not advance the understanding of the processing mechanisms underlying human thinking.

Time to Move On

The dual vs single process model debate has not been resolved, it can be questioned whether the debate

can be resolved, and even if it were to be resolved, it will not inform our theory development about the critical processing mechanism underlying human thinking. This implies that the debate is irrelevant for the empirical study of thinking. In a sense the choice between a single and dual process model boils—quite literally—down to a choice between two different religions. Scholars can (and may) have different personal beliefs and preferences as to which model serves their conceptualizing and communicative goals best. However, what they cannot do is claim there are good empirical or theoretical scientific arguments to favor one over the other.

I do not contest that the single vs dual process model debate might have been useful in the past. For example, the relentless critique of single process proponents helped to discard the erroneous perfect feature alignment view. Likewise, the work of Evans and Stanovich in trying to pinpoint defining features was helpful to start sketching the descriptive building blocks of the mental simulation and cognitive decoupling process. Hence, I do believe that the debate has had some positive by-products. 

A pdf is here.

The problem with prediction

Joseph Fridman

aeon.com

Originally published 25 Jan 21

Here is an excerpt:

Today, many neuroscientists exploring the predictive brain deploy contemporary economics as a similar sort of explanatory heuristic. Scientists have come a long way in understanding how ‘spending metabolic money to build complex brains pays dividends in the search for adaptive success’, remarks the philosopher Andy Clark, in a notable review of the predictive brain. The idea of the predictive brain makes sense because it is profitable, metabolically speaking. Similarly, the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett describes the primary role of the predictive brain as managing a ‘body budget’. In this view, she says, ‘your brain is kind of like the financial sector of a company’, predictively allocating resources, spending energy, speculating, and seeking returns on its investments. For Barrett and her colleagues, stress is like a ‘deficit’ or ‘withdrawal’ from the body budget, while depression is bankruptcy. In Blackmore’s day, the brain was made up of sentries and soldiers, whose collective melancholy became the sadness of the human being they inhabited. Today, instead of soldiers, we imagine the brain as composed of predictive statisticians, whose errors become our neuroses. As the neuroscientist Karl Friston said: ‘[I]f the brain is an inference machine, an organ of statistics, then when it goes wrong, it’ll make the same sorts of mistakes a statistician will make.’

The strength of this association between predictive economics and brain sciences matters, because – if we aren’t careful – it can encourage us to reduce our fellow humans to mere pieces of machinery. Our brains were never computer processors, as useful as it might have been to imagine them that way every now and then. Nor are they literally prediction engines now and, should it come to pass, they will not be quantum computers. Our bodies aren’t empires that shuttle around sentrymen, nor are they corporations that need to make good on their investments. We aren’t fundamentally consumers to be tricked, enemies to be tracked, or subjects to be predicted and controlled. Whether the arena be scientific research or corporate intelligence, it becomes all too easy for us to slip into adversarial and exploitative framings of the human; as Galison wrote, ‘the associations of cybernetics (and the cyborg) with weapons, oppositional tactics, and the black-box conception of human nature do not so simply melt away.’

The info is here.

Negativity Spreads More than Positivity on Twitter after both Positive and Negative Political Situations

Schöne, J., Parkinson, B., & Goldenberg, A. 

(2021, January 2). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/x9e7u

Abstract

What type of emotional language spreads further in political discourses on social media? Previous research has focused on situations that primarily elicited negative emotions, showing that negative language tended to spread further. The current project addressed the gap introduced when looking only at negative situations by comparing the spread of emotional language in response to both predominantly positive and negative political situations. In Study 1, we examined the spread of emotional language among tweets related to the winning and losing parties in the 2016 US elections, finding that increased negativity (but not positivity) predicted content sharing in both situations. In Study 2, we compared the spread of emotional language in two separate situations: the celebration of the US Supreme Court approval of same-sex marriage (positive), and the Ferguson Unrest (negative), finding again that negativity spread further. These results shed light on the nature of political discourse and engagement.

General Discussion

The goal of the project was to investigate what types of emotional language spread further in response to negative and positive political situations. In Studies 1 (same situation) and 2 (separate situations),we examined the spread of emotional language in response to negative and positive situations. Results from both of our studies suggested that negative language tended to spread further both in negative and positive situations. Analysis of political affiliation in both studies indicated that the users that produced the negative language in the political celebrations were ingroup members (conservatives in Study 1 and liberals in Study 2). Analysis of negative content produced in celebrations shows that negative language was mainly used to describe hardships or past obstacles. Combined, these two studies shed light on the nature of political engagement online. 

The research is here.

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.