‘They’re Not True Humans’: Beliefs About Moral Character Drive Categorical Denials of Humanity

Phillips, B. (2021, May 29). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5bgxy

Abstract

In examining the cognitive processes that drive dehumanization, laboratory-based research has focused on non-categorical denials of humanity. Here, we examine the conditions under which people are willing to categorically deny that someone else is human. In doing so, we argue that people harbor a dual character concept of humanity. Research has found that dual character concepts have two independent sets of criteria for their application, one of which is normative. Across four experiments, we found evidence that people deploy one criterion according to which being human is a matter of being a Homo sapiens; as well as a normative criterion according to which being human is a matter of possessing a deep-seated commitment to do the morally right thing. Importantly, we found that people are willing to affirm that someone is human in the species sense, but deny that they are human in the normative sense, and vice versa. These findings suggest that categorical denials of humanity are not confined to extreme cases outside the laboratory. They also suggest a solution to “the paradox of dehumanization.”

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6.2.The paradox of dehumanization 

The findings reported here also suggest a solution to the paradox of dehumanization. Recall that in paradigmatic cases of dehumanization, such as the Holocaust, the perpetrators tend to attribute certain uniquely human traits to their victims. For example, the Nazis frequently characterized Jewish people as criminals and traitors. They also treated them as moral agents, and subjected them to severe forms of punishment and humiliation (see Gutman and Berenbaum, 1998). Criminality, treachery, and moral agency are not capacities that we tend to attribute to nonhuman animals.  Thus, can we really say that the Nazis thought of their victims as nonhuman? In responding to this paradox, some theorists have suggested that the perpetrators in these paradigmatic cases do not, in fact, think of their victims as nonhuman(see Appiah, 2008; Bloom, 2017; Manne, 2016, 2018, chapter 5; Over, 2020; Rai et al., 2017).Other theorists have suggested that the perpetrators harbor inconsistent representations of their victims, simultaneously thinking of them as both human and subhuman (Smith, 2016, 2020).Our findings suggest a third possibility: namely, that the perpetrators harbor a dual character concept of humanity, categorizing their victims as human in one sense, but denying that they are human in another sense. For example, it is true that theNazis attributed certain uniquely human traits to their victims, such as criminality. However, when categorizing their victims as evil criminals, the Nazis may have been thinking of them as nonhuman in the normative sense, while recognizing them as human in the species sense (for a relevant discussion, see Steizinger, 2018). This squares away with the fact that when the Nazis likened Jewish people to certain animals, such as rats, this often took on a moralizing tone. For example, in an antisemitic book entitled The Eternal Jew (Nachfolger, 1937), Jewish neighborhoods in Berlin were described as “breeding grounds of criminal and political vermin.” Similarly, when the Nazis referred toJews as “subhumans,” they often characterized them as bad moral agents. For example, as was mentioned above, Goebbels described Bolshevism as “the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself.”Similarly, in one 1943 Nazi pamphlet, Marxist values are described as appealing to subhumans, while liberalist values are described as “allowing the triumph of subhumans” (Anonymous, 1943, chapter 1).

Bad machines corrupt good morals

Köbis, N., Bonnefon, J F. & Rahwan, I. 

Nat Hum Behav 5, 679–685 (2021). 

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01128-2

Abstract

As machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI) influence humans’ behaviour in ways that are both like and unlike the ways humans influence each other, worry emerges about the corrupting power of AI agents. To estimate the empirical validity of these fears, we review the available evidence from behavioural science, human–computer interaction and AI research. We propose four main social roles through which both humans and machines can influence ethical behaviour. These are: role model, advisor, partner and delegate. When AI agents become influencers (role models or advisors), their corrupting power may not exceed the corrupting power of humans (yet). However, AI agents acting as enablers of unethical behaviour (partners or delegates) have many characteristics that may let people reap unethical benefits while feeling good about themselves, a potentially perilous interaction. On the basis of these insights, we outline a research agenda to gain behavioural insights for better AI oversight.

From the end of the article

Another policy-relevant research question is how to integrate awareness for the corrupting force of AI tools into the innovation process. New AI tools hit the market on a daily basis. The current approach of ‘innovate first, ask for forgiveness later’ has caused considerable backlash and even demands for banning AI technology such as facial recognition. As a consequence, ethical considerations must enter the innovation and publication process of AI developments. Current efforts to develop ethical labels for responsible and crowdsourcing citizens’ preferences about ethical are mostly concerned about the direct unethical consequences of AI behaviour and not its influence on the ethical conduct of the humans who interact with and through it. A thorough experimental approach to responsible AI will need to expand concerns about direct AI-induced harm to concerns about how bad machines can corrupt good morals.

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“False positive” emotions, responsibility, and moral character

Anderson, R.A., et al.

Cognition

Volume 214, September 2021, 104770

Abstract

People often feel guilt for accidents—negative events that they did not intend or have any control over. Why might this be the case? Are there reputational benefits to doing so? Across six studies, we find support for the hypothesis that observers expect “false positive” emotions from agents during a moral encounter – emotions that are not normatively appropriate for the situation but still trigger in response to that situation. For example, if a person accidentally spills coffee on someone, most normative accounts of blame would hold that the person is not blameworthy, as the spill was accidental. Self-blame (and the guilt that accompanies it) would thus be an inappropriate response. However, in Studies 1–2 we find that observers rate an agent who feels guilt, compared to an agent who feels no guilt, as a better person, as less blameworthy for the accident, and as less likely to commit moral offenses. These attributions of moral character extend to other moral emotions like gratitude, but not to nonmoral emotions like fear, and are not driven by perceived differences in overall emotionality (Study 3). In Study 4, we demonstrate that agents who feel extremely high levels of inappropriate (false positive) guilt (e.g., agents who experience guilt but are not at all causally linked to the accident) are not perceived as having a better moral character, suggesting that merely feeling guilty is not sufficient to receive a boost in judgments of character. In Study 5, using a trust game design, we find that observers are more willing to trust others who experience false positive guilt compared to those who do not. In Study 6, we find that false positive experiences of guilt may actually be a reliable predictor of underlying moral character: self-reported predicted guilt in response to accidents negatively correlates with higher scores on a psychopathy scale.

From the General Discussion

It seems reasonable to think that there would be some benefit to communicating these moral emotions as a signal of character, and to being able to glean information about the character of others from observations of their emotional responses. If a propensity to feel guilt makes it more likely that a person is cooperative and trustworthy, observers would need to discriminate between people who are and are not prone to guilt. Guilt could therefore serve as an effective regulator of moral behavior in others in its role as a reliable signal of good character.  This account is consistent with theoretical accounts of emotional expressions more generally, either in the face, voice, or body, as a route by which observers make inferences about a person’s underlying dispositions (Frank, 1988). Our results suggest that false positive emotional responses specifically may provide an additional, and apparently informative, source of evidence for one’s propensity toward moral emotions and moral behavior.

The research is here.

Overconfidence in news judgments is associated with false news susceptibility

B. A. Lyons, et al.

PNAS, Jun 2021, 118 (23) e2019527118

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2019527118

Abstract

We examine the role of overconfidence in news judgment using two large nationally representative survey samples. First, we show that three in four Americans overestimate their relative ability to distinguish between legitimate and false news headlines; respondents place themselves 22 percentiles higher than warranted on average. This overconfidence is, in turn, correlated with consequential differences in real-world beliefs and behavior. We show that overconfident individuals are more likely to visit untrustworthy websites in behavioral data; to fail to successfully distinguish between true and false claims about current events in survey questions; and to report greater willingness to like or share false content on social media, especially when it is politically congenial. In all, these results paint a worrying picture: The individuals who are least equipped to identify false news content are also the least aware of their own limitations and, therefore, more susceptible to believing it and spreading it further.

Significance

Although Americans believe the confusion caused by false news is extensive, relatively few indicate having seen or shared it—a discrepancy suggesting that members of the public may not only have a hard time identifying false news but fail to recognize their own deficiencies at doing so. If people incorrectly see themselves as highly skilled at identifying false news, they may unwittingly participate in its circulation. In this large-scale study, we show that not only is overconfidence extensive, but it is also linked to both self-reported and behavioral measures of false news website visits, engagement, and belief. Our results suggest that overconfidence may be a crucial factor for explaining how false and low-quality information spreads via social media.

The research is here.

Popularity is linked to neural coordination: Neural evidence for an Anna Karenina principle in social networks

Baek, E. C.,  et al. (2021)

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6fj2p

Abstract

People differ in how they attend to, interpret, and respond to their surroundings. Convergent processing of the world may be one factor that contributes to social connections between individuals. We used neuroimaging and network analysis to investigate whether the most central individuals in their communities (as measured by in-degree centrality, a notion of popularity) process the world in a particularly normative way. More central individuals had exceptionally similar neural responses to their peers and especially to each other in brain regions associated with high-level interpretations and social cognition (e.g., in the default-mode network), whereas less-central individuals exhibited more idiosyncratic responses. Self-reported enjoyment of and interest in stimuli followed a similar pattern, but accounting for these data did not change our main results. These findings suggest an “Anna Karenina principle” in social networks: Highly-central individuals process the world in exceptionally similar ways, whereas less-central individuals process the world in idiosyncratic ways.

Discussion

What factors distinguish highly-central individuals in social networks? Our results are consistent with the notion that popular individuals (who are central in their social networks) process the world around them in normative ways, whereas unpopular individuals process the world around them idiosyncratically. Popular individuals exhibited greater mean neural similarity with their peers than unpopular individuals in several regions of the brain, including ones in which similar neural responding has been associated with shared higher-level interpretations of events and social cognition (e.g., regions of the default mode network) while viewing dynamic, naturalistic stimuli. Our results indicate that the relationship between popularity and neural similarity follows anAnna Karenina principle. Specifically, we observed that popular individuals were very similar to each other in their neural responses, whereas unpopular individuals were dissimilar both to each other and to their peers’ normative way of processing the world.  Our findings suggest that highly-central people process and respond to the world around them in a manner that allows them to relate to and connect with many of their peers and that less-central people exhibit idiosyncrasies that may result in greater difficulty in relating to others.

The research is here.

Valence framing effects on moral judgments: A meta-analysis

McDonald, K., et al.

Cognition

Volume 212, July 2021, 104703

Abstract

Valence framing effects occur when participants make different choices or judgments depending on whether the options are described in terms of their positive outcomes (e.g. lives saved) or their negative outcomes (e.g. lives lost). When such framing effects occur in the domain of moral judgments, they have been taken to cast doubt on the reliability of moral judgments and raise questions about the extent to which these moral judgments are self-evident or justified in themselves. One important factor in this debate is the magnitude and variability of the extent to which differences in framing presentation impact moral judgments. Although moral framing effects have been studied by psychologists, the overall strength of these effects pooled across published studies is not yet known. Here we conducted a meta-analysis of 109 published articles (contributing a total of 146 unique experiments with 49,564 participants) involving valence framing effects on moral judgments and found a moderate effect (d = 0.50) among between-subjects designs as well as several moderator variables. While we find evidence for publication bias, statistically accounting for publication bias attenuates, but does not eliminate, this effect (d = 0.22). This suggests that the magnitude of valence framing effects on moral decisions is small, yet significant when accounting for publication bias.

The research is here.

Workplace automation without achievement gaps: a reply to Danaher and Nyholm

Tigard, D.W. 

AI Ethics (2021). 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-021-00064-1

Abstract

In a recent article in this journal, John Danaher and Sven Nyholm raise well-founded concerns that the advances in AI-based automation will threaten the values of meaningful work. In particular, they present a strong case for thinking that automation will undermine our achievements, thereby rendering our work less meaningful. It is also claimed that the threat to achievements in the workplace will open up ‘achievement gaps’—the flipside of the ‘responsibility gaps’ now commonly discussed in technology ethics. This claim, however, is far less worrisome than the general concerns for widespread automation, namely because it rests on several conceptual ambiguities. With this paper, I argue that although the threat to achievements in the workplace is problematic and calls for policy responses of the sort Danaher and Nyholm outline, when framed in terms of responsibility, there are no ‘achievement gaps’.

From the Conclusion

In closing, it is worth stopping to ask: Who exactly is the primary subject of “harm” (broadly speaking) in the supposed gap scenarios? Typically, in cases of responsibility gaps, the harm is seen as falling upon the person inclined to respond (usually with blame) and finding no one to respond to. This is often because they seek apologies or some sort of remuneration, and as we can imagine, it sets back their interests when such demands remain unfulfilled. But what about cases of achievement gaps? If we want to draw truly close analogies between the two scenarios, we would consider the subject of harm to be the person inclined to respond with praise and finding no one to praise. And perhaps there is some degree of disappointment here, but it hardly seems to be a worrisome kind of experience for that person. With this in mind, we might say there is yet another mismatch between responsibility gaps and achievement gaps. Nevertheless, on the account of Danaher and Nyholm, the harm is seen as falling upon the humans who miss out on achieving something in the workplace. But on that picture, we run into a sort of non-identity problem—for as soon as we identify the subjects of this kind of harm, we thereby affirm that it is not fitting to praise them for the workplace achievement, and so they cannot really be harmed in this way.

The reply is here.

It just feels right: an account of expert intuition

Fridland, E., & Stichter, M. 

Synthese (2020). 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02796-9

Abstract

One of the hallmarks of virtue is reliably acting well. Such reliable success presupposes that an agent (1) is able to recognize the morally salient features of a situation, and the appropriate response to those features and (2) is motivated to act on this knowledge without internal conflict. Furthermore, it is often claimed that the virtuous person can do this (3) in a spontaneous or intuitive manner. While these claims represent an ideal of what it is to have a virtue, it is less clear how to make good on them. That is, how is it actually possible to spontaneously and reliably act well? In this paper, we will lay out a framework for understanding how it is that one could reliably act well in an intuitive manner. We will do this by developing the concept of an action schema, which draws on the philosophical and psychological literature on skill acquisition and self-regulation. In short, we will give an account of how self-regulation, grounded in skillful structures, can allow for the accurate intuitions and flexible expertise required for virtue. While our primary goal in this paper is to provide a positive theory of how virtuous intuitions might be accounted for, we also take ourselves to be raising the bar for what counts as an explanation of reliable and intuitive action in general.

Conclusion

By thinking of skill and expertise as sophisticated forms of self-regulation, we are able to get a handle on intuition, generally, and on the ways in which reliably accurate intuition may develop in virtue, specifically. This gives us a way of explaining both the accuracy and immediacy of the virtuous person’s perception and intuitive responsiveness to a situation and it also gives us further reason to prefer a virtue as skill account of virtue. Moreover, such an approach gives us the resources to explain with some rigor and precision, the ways in which expert intuition can be accounted for, by appeal to action schemas. Lastly, our approach provides reason to think that expert intuition in the realm of virtue can indeed develop over time and with practice in a way that is flexible, controlled and intelligent. It lends credence to the view that virtue is learned and that we can act reliably and well by grounding our actions in expert intuition.

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Is Burnout Depression by Another Name?

Bianchi R, Verkuilen J, Schonfeld IS, et al. 

Clinical Psychological Science. March 2021. 

doi:10.1177/2167702620979597

Abstract

There is no consensus on whether burnout constitutes a depressive condition or an original entity requiring specific medical and legal recognition. In this study, we examined burnout–depression overlap using 14 samples of individuals from various countries and occupational domains (N = 12,417). Meta-analytically pooled disattenuated correlations indicated (a) that exhaustion—burnout’s core—is more closely associated with depressive symptoms than with the other putative dimensions of burnout (detachment and efficacy) and (b) that the exhaustion–depression association is problematically strong from a discriminant validity standpoint (r = .80). The overlap of burnout’s core dimension with depression was further illuminated in 14 exploratory structural equation modeling bifactor analyses. Given their consistency across countries, languages, occupations, measures, and methods, our results offer a solid base of evidence in support of the view that burnout problematically overlaps with depression. We conclude by outlining avenues of research that depart from the use of the burnout construct.

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In essence, the core feature of burnout is depression.  However, burnout is not as debilitating as depression.

The research is here.