Before You Answer, Consider the Opposite Possibility—How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes

Ian Leslie

The Atlantic

Originally published 25 Apr 21

Here is an excerpt:

This raises the question of how a wise inner crowd can be cultivated. Psychologists have investigated various methods. One, following Stroop, is to harness the power of forgetting. Reassuringly for those of us who are prone to forgetting, people with poor working memories have been shown to have a wiser inner crowd; their guesses are more independent of one another, so they end up with a more diverse set of estimates and a more accurate average. The same effect has been achieved by spacing the guesses out in time.

More sophisticated methods harness the mind’s ability to inhabit different perspectives and look at a problem from more than one angle. People generate more diverse estimates when prompted to base their second or third guess on alternative assumptions; one effective technique is simply asking people to “consider the opposite” before giving a new answer. A fascinating recent study in this vein harnesses the power of disagreement itself. A pair of Dutch psychologists, Philippe Van de Calseyde and Emir Efendić, asked people a series of questions with numerical answers, such as the percentage of the world’s airports located in the U.S.. Then they asked participants to think of someone in their life with whom they often disagreed—that uncle with whom they always argue about politics—and to imagine what that person would guess.

The respondents came up with second estimates that were strikingly different from their first estimate, producing a much more accurate inner crowd. The same didn’t apply when they were asked to imagine how someone they usually agree with would answer the question, which suggests that the secret is to incorporate the perspectives of people who think differently from us. That the respondents hadn’t discussed that particular question with their disagreeable uncle did not matter. Just the act of thinking about someone with whom they argued a lot was enough to jog them out of habitual assumptions.

The info is here.

Thought experiments and experimental ethics

Thomas Pölzler & Norbert Paulo (2021)

Inquiry, 

DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2021.1916218

Abstract

Experimental ethicists investigate traditional ethical questions with nontraditional means, namely with the methods of the empirical sciences. Studies in this area have made heavy use of philosophical thought

experiments such as the well-known trolley cases. Yet, the specific function of these thought experiments within experimental ethics has received little consideration. In this paper we attempt to fill this gap. We begin by describing the function of ethical thought experiments, and show that these thought experiments should not only be classified according to their function but also according to their scope. On this basis we highlight several ways in which the use of thought experiments in experimental ethics can be philosophically relevant. We conclude by arguing that experimental philosophy currently only focuses on a small subcategory of ethical thought experiments and suggest a broadening of its research agenda.

Conclusion

Experimental ethicists investigate traditional ethical questions with nontraditional means, namely with the methods of the empirical sciences. Studies in this area have made heavy use of philosophical thought experiments such as the well-known trolley cases. Yet, for some reason, the specific function of these thought experiments within experimental ethics has received little consideration. In this paper we attempted to fill this gap. First, we described the function of ethical thought experiments, distinguishing between an epistemic, an illustrative and a heuristic function. We also showed that ethical thought experiments should not only be classified according to their function but also according to their scope. Some ethical thought experiments (such as the veil) can be applied to a variety of moral issues. On the basis of this understanding of thought experiments we highlighted several ways in which the use of thought experiments in experimental ethics can be philosophically relevant. Such studies can in particular inform us about the content of the intuitions that people have about ethical thought experiments, these intuitions’ sensitivity to irrelevant factors, and their diversity. Finally, we suggested that experimental ethics broadens its research agenda to include investigations into illustrative and heuristic thought experiments, wide-scope thought experiments, de-biasing strategies, atypical thought experiments, and philosophers’ intuitions about thought experiments. In any case, since experimental ethics heavily relies on thought experiments, an increased theoretical engagement with their function and implications is likely to benefit the field. It is our hope that this paper contributes to promoting such an engagement.

The research is here.

Southern Baptists are forcing out followers who don’t pledge allegiance to Trump

John Gallagher

www.lgbtqnation.com

Originally published 23 May 2021

White evangelicals have always been the core of Donald Trump’s support. Once they got over their unease with his fungible approach to morality, conservative Christians found in Trump the political warrior — or mega-bully — that they have long been seeking. The only thing they disliked about him was that he curses.

After acting like a political party through the Trump presidency, it’s no surprise that evangelicals are now following the GOP’s template of purging their ranks of anyone who does not worship at Trump’s altar. The latest case in point: the departure of Russell Moore from the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

Moore held one of the top positions in evangelical Christianity. As head of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, he has been a fervent advocate for the denomination’s right-wing positions. He has been a staunch opponent of LGBTQ rights, especially marriage equality, and has pushed hard for religious liberty exemptions that would gut existing protections.

However, Moore has never been a fan of Donald Trump. Unlike other prominent evangelicals, like Franklin Graham and Tony Perkins, Moore was unwilling to trade his religious beliefs for access to power and Supreme Court appointments.

When Trump was running for president in 2016, Moore accurately described him as “someone who not only characterizes sexual decadence and misogyny, brokers in cruelty and nativism, and displays a crazed public and private temperament — but who glories in these things.”

For his honesty, Moore very nearly lost his job in 2017. Now he’s leaving, apparently voluntarily, as the SBC makes adherence to Trumpism a higher priority than adherence to articles of faith.

The info is here.

The evolutionary origin of human hyper-cooperation

Burkart, J., Allon, O., Amici, F. et al. 

Nat Commun 5, 4747 (2014). 

https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms5747

Abstract

Proactive, that is, unsolicited, prosociality is a key component of our hyper-cooperation, which in turn has enabled the emergence of various uniquely human traits, including complex cognition, morality and cumulative culture and technology. However, the evolutionary foundation of the human prosocial sentiment remains poorly understood, largely because primate data from numerous, often incommensurable testing paradigms do not provide an adequate basis for formal tests of the various functional hypotheses. We therefore present the results of standardized prosociality experiments in 24 groups of 15 primate species, including humans. Extensive allomaternal care is by far the best predictor of interspecific variation in proactive prosociality. Proactive prosocial motivations therefore systematically arise whenever selection favours the evolution of cooperative breeding. Because the human data fit this general primate pattern, the adoption of cooperative breeding by our hominin ancestors also provides the most parsimonious explanation for the origin of human hyper-cooperation.

(cut)

Our results demonstrate that the extent of allomaternal care provides the best explanation for the distribution of proactive prosociality among primate species, including humans. This conclusion is not affected when using different ways of quantifying allomaternal care. Importantly, we find no support for any of the other hypotheses, even when more refined analyses of within-species, dyad-level variation are conducted. The adoption of extensive allomaternal care by our hominin ancestors thus provides the most parsimonious explanation for the origin of human hyper-cooperation.

The research is here.

Moral concerns are differentially observable in language

Kennedy, B., et al. (2020, May 7). 

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

Abstract

Language is a psychologically rich medium for human expression and communication. While language usage has been shown to be a window into various aspects of people's social worlds, including their personality traits and everyday environment, its correspondence to people's moral concerns has yet to be considered. Here, we examine the relationship between language usage and the moral concerns of Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity as conceptualized by Moral Foundations Theory. We collected Facebook status updates (N = 107,798) from English-speaking participants (n = 2,691) along with their responses on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. Overall, results suggested that self-reported moral concerns may be traced in language usage, though the magnitude of this effect varied considerably among moral concerns. Across a diverse selection of Natural Language Processing methods, Fairness concerns were consistently least correlated with language usage whereas Purity concerns were found to be the most traceable. In exploratory follow-up analyses, each moral concern was found to be differentially related to distinct patterns of relational, emotional, and social language. Our results are the first to relate individual differences in moral concerns to language usage, and to uncover the signatures of moral concerns in language.

Conclusion

Among the five moral foundations (Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity),Purity concerns are most traceable in social media language. Fairness concerns, on the other hand, are least traceable. Individuals who highly endorsed Purity shared religious and spiritual content on Facebook, whereas people who scored higher on Fairness were slightly more likely to share content related to social justice and equality. High levels of Care, Loyalty, and Authority were found to motivate a mixed collection of socially-oriented language categories. The link between moral concerns and language was found to extend beyond exclusively moral language. Overall, this research establishes a missing link in moral psychology by providing evidence that individual-level moral concerns are differentially associated with language data collected from individuals’ Facebook accounts.

The research is here.

1. Moral concerns are observable in language.

2. This signal is differential: each moral domain maps onto a distinct linguistic signature.

3. Exclusive moral language is not a great predictor of individuals' moral concerns.

A normative account of self-deception, overconfidence, and paranoia

Rossi-Goldthorpe, R., Leong, et al.

(2021, April 12).

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/9fkb5

Abstract

Self-deception, paranoia, and overconfidence involve misbeliefs about self, others, and world. They are often considered mistaken. Here we explore whether they might be adaptive, and further, whether they might be explicable in normative Bayesian terms. We administered a difficult perceptual judgment task with and without social influence (suggestions from a cooperating or competing partner). Crucially, the social influence was uninformative. We found that participants heeded the suggestions most under the most uncertain conditions and that they did so with high confidence, particularly if they were more paranoid. Model fitting to participant behavior revealed that their prior beliefs changed depending on whether the partner was a collaborator or competitor, however, those beliefs did not differ as a function of paranoia. Instead, paranoia, self-deception, and overconfidence were associated with participants’ perceived instability of their own performance. These data are consistent with the idea that self-deception, paranoia, and overconfidence flourish under uncertainty, and have their roots in low self-esteem, rather than excessive social concern. The normative model suggests that spurious beliefs can have value – self-deception is irrational yet can facilitate optimal behavior. This occurs even at the expense of monetary rewards, perhaps explaining why self-deception and paranoia contribute to costly decisions which can spark financial crashes and costly wars.

The research is here.

In search of the moral status of AI: why sentience is a strong argument

Gibert, M., Martin, D. 

AI & Soc (2021). 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01179-z

Abstract

Is it OK to lie to Siri? Is it bad to mistreat a robot for our own pleasure? Under what condition should we grant a moral status to an artificial intelligence (AI) system? This paper looks at different arguments for granting moral status to an AI system: the idea of indirect duties, the relational argument, the argument from intelligence, the arguments from life and information, and the argument from sentience. In each but the last case, we find unresolved issues with the particular argument, which leads us to move to a different one. We leave the idea of indirect duties aside since these duties do not imply considering an AI system for its own sake. The paper rejects the relational argument and the argument from intelligence. The argument from life may lead us to grant a moral status to an AI system, but only in a weak sense. Sentience, by contrast, is a strong argument for the moral status of an AI system—based, among other things, on the Aristotelian principle of equality: that same cases should be treated in the same way. The paper points out, however, that no AI system is sentient given the current level of technological development.

The info is here.

Behavioral and Neural Representations en route to Intuitive Action Understanding

L. Tarhan, J. De Freitas, & T. Konkle

BioRxiv

doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.08.438996

Abstract

When we observe another person’s actions, we process many kinds of information – from how their body moves to the intention behind their movements. What kinds of information underlie our intuitive understanding about how similar actions are to each other? To address this question, we measured the intuitive similarities among a large set of everyday action videos using multi-arrangement experiments, then used a modeling approach to predict this intuitive similarity space along three hypothesized properties. We found that similarity in the actors’ inferred goals predicted the intuitive similarity judgments the best, followed by similarity in the actors’ movements, with little contribution from the videos’ visual appearance. In opportunistic fMRI analyses assessing brain-behavior correlations, we found evidence for an action processing hierarchy, in which these three kinds of action similarities are reflected in the structure of brain responses along a posterior-to-anterior gradient on the lateral surface of the visual cortex. Altogether, this work joins existing literature suggesting that humans are naturally tuned to process others’ intentions, and that the visuo-motor cortex computes the perceptual precursors of the higher-level representations over which intuitive action perception operates.

From the Discussion

Intuitive Action Representations in the Mind

Our primary finding was that judgments about the similarity of actors’ goals was the best predictor of intuitive action similarity judgments. In addition, these goals accounted for the most unique variance in the intuitive similarity data. We interpret this to mean that humans naturally and intuitively process other actors’ internal motivations and thoughts, even in the absence of an explicitly social task. This conclusion adds to a rich literature showing that humans automatically represent others in terms of their mental states, even from a very young age (Gergely and Csibra, 2003; Jara-Ettinger et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2017; Reid et al., 2007; Thornton et al., 2019a,b). In addition, we found that similarity in the actors’ movements also predicted intuitive judgments moderately well and accounted for a smaller amount of unique variance in the data. This finding goes beyond our current understanding of the factors driving natural action processing, to suggest that kinematic information also contributes to intuitive action perception. In contrast, similarity in the videos’ visual appearance did not account for any unique variance in the data, suggesting that lower-level visual properties such as color, form, and motion direction do not have much influence on natural action perception.

A natural extension of these findings is to investigate the specific features that we use to calculate actors’ goals and movements. For example, how important are speed, trajectory, and movement quality (e.g., shaky or smooth) for our assessment of the similarity among actions’ movements? And, do we consider physical variables – such as facial expression – when inferring actors’ goals? Digging into these specific feature dimensions will bring further clarity to the cognitive processes driving intuitive action perception.

The research is here.

Population ethical intuitions

Caviola, L., Althaus, D., Mogensen, A., 

& Goodwin, G. (2021, April 1). 

A pdf is here.

Abstract

We investigated lay people’s population ethical intuitions (N = 4,374), i.e., their moral evaluations of populations that differ in size and composition. First, we found that people place greater relative weight on, and are more sensitive to, suffering compared to happiness. Participants, on average, believed that more happy people are needed to outweigh a given amount of unhappy people in a population (Studies 1a-c). Second, we found that—in contrast to so-called person-affecting views—people do not consider the creation of new people as morally neutral. Participants considered it good to create a new happy person and bad to create a new unhappy person (Study 2). Third, we found that people take into account both the average level (averagism) and the total level (totalism) of happiness when evaluating populations. Participants preferred populations with greater total happiness levels when the average level remained constant (Study 3) and populations with greater average happiness levels when the total level remained constant (Study 4). When the two principles were in conflict, participants’ preferences lay in between the recommendations of the two principles, suggesting that both are applied simultaneously (Study 5). In certain cases, participants even showed averagist preferences when averagism disfavors adding more happy people and favors adding more unhappy people to a population (Study 6). However, when participants were prompted to reflect as opposed to rely on their intuitions, their preferences became more totalist (Studies 5-6). Our findings have implications for moral psychology, philosophy and policy making.

From the Discussion

Suffering is more bad than than happiness is good

We found that people weigh suffering more than happiness when they evaluate the goodness of populations consisting of both happy and unhappy people. Thus, people are neither following strict negative utilitarianism (minimizing suffering, giving no weight to maximizing happiness at all) nor strict classical utilitarianism (minimizing suffering and maximizing happiness, weighing both equally). Instead, the average person’s intuitions seem to track a mixture of these two theories. In Studies 1a-c, participants on average believed that approximately 1.5-3 times more happy people are required to outweigh a given amount of unhappy people. The precise trade ratio between happiness and suffering depended on the intensity levels of happiness and suffering. (In additional preliminary studies, we found that the trade ratio can also heavily depend on the framing of the question.) Study 1c clarified that, on average, participants continued to believe that more happiness was needed to outweigh suffering even when the happiness and suffering units were exactly equally intense. This suggests that people generally weigh suffering more than happiness in their moral assessments above and beyond perceiving suffering to be more intense than happiness. However, our studies also made clear that there are individual differences and that a substantial proportion of participants weighed happiness and suffering equally strongly, in line with classical utilitarianism.