Stewardship of global collective behavior

Bak-Colman, J.B., et al.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

Jul 2021, 118 (27) e2025764118

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2025764118

Abstract

Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.

Summary

Human collective dynamics are critical to the wellbeing of people and ecosystems in the present and will set the stage for how we face global challenges with impacts that will last centuries. There is no reason to suppose natural selection will have endowed us with dynamics that are intrinsically conducive to human wellbeing or sustainability. The same is true of communication technology, which has largely been developed to solve the needs of individuals or single organizations. Such technology, combined with human population growth, has created a global social network that is larger, denser, and able to transmit higher-fidelity information at greater speed. With the rise of the digital age, this social network is increasingly coupled to algorithms that create unprecedented feedback effects.

Insight from across academic disciplines demonstrates that past and present changes to our social networks will have functional consequences across scales of organization. Given that the impacts of communication technology will transcend disciplinary lines, the scientific response must do so as well. Unsafe adoption of technology has the potential to both threaten wellbeing in the present and have lasting consequences for sustainability. Mitigating risk to ourselves and posterity requires a consolidated, crisis-focused study of human collective behavior.

Such an approach can benefit from lessons learned in other fields, including climate change and conservation biology, which are likewise required to provide actionable insight without the benefit of a complete understanding of the underlying dynamics. Integrating theoretical, descriptive, and empirical approaches will be necessary to bridge the gap between individual and large-scale behavior. There is reason to be hopeful that well-designed systems can promote healthy collective action at scale, as has been demonstrated in numerous contexts including the development of open-sourced software, curating Wikipedia, and the production of crowd-sourced maps. These examples not only provide proof that online collaboration can be productive, but also highlight means of measuring and defining success. Research in political communications has shown that while online movements and coordination are often prone to failure, when they succeed, the results can be dramatic. Quantifying benefits of online interaction, and limitations to harnessing these benefits, is a necessary step toward revealing the conditions that promote or undermine the value of communication technology.

The research is here.

The Impact of Ignorance Beyond Causation: An Experimental Meta-Analysis

L. Kirfel & J. P. Phillips

Manuscript

Abstract

Norm violations have been demonstrated to impact a wide range of seemingly non-normative judgments. Among other things, when agents’ actions violate prescriptive norms they tend to be seen as having done those actions more freely, as having acted more intentionally, as being more of a cause of subsequent outcomes, and even as being less happy. The explanation of this effect continue to be debated, with some researchers appealing to features of actions that violate norms, and other researcher emphasizing the importance of agents’ mental states when acting. Here, we report the results of a large-scale experiment that replicates and extends twelve of the studies that originally demonstrated the pervasive impact of norm violations. In each case, we build on the pre-existing experimental paradigms to additionally manipulate whether the agents knew that they were violating a norm while holding fixed the action done. We find evidence for a pervasive impact of ignorance: the impact of norm violations on nonnormative judgments depends largely on the agent knowing that they were violating a norm when acting.

From the Discussion

Norm violations have been previously demonstrated to influence a wide range of intuitive judgments, including judgments of causation, freedom, happiness, doing vs. allowing, mental state ascriptions, and modal claims. A continuing debate centers on why normality has such a pervasive impact, and whether one should attempt to offer a unified explanation of these various effects (Hindriks, 2014).

At the broadest level, the current results demonstrate that the pervasive impact of normality likely warrants a unified explanation at some level. Across a wide range of intuitive judgments and highly different manipulations of an agents’ knowledge, we found that the impact of normality on nonnormative judgments was diminished when the agent did not know that they were violating a norm. That is, we found evidence for a correspondingly pervasive impact of ignorance.

The research is here.

Technology in the Age of Innovation: Responsible Innovation as a New Subdomain Within the Philosophy of Technology

von Schomberg, L., Blok, V. 

Philos. Technol. 34, 309–323 (2021). 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-019-00386-3

Abstract

Praised as a panacea for resolving all societal issues, and self-evidently presupposed as technological innovation, the concept of innovation has become the emblem of our age. This is especially reflected in the context of the European Union, where it is considered to play a central role in both strengthening the economy and confronting the current environmental crisis. The pressing question is how technological innovation can be steered into the right direction. To this end, recent frameworks of Responsible Innovation (RI) focus on how to enable outcomes of innovation processes to become societally desirable and ethically acceptable. However, questions with regard to the technological nature of these innovation processes are rarely raised. For this reason, this paper raises the following research question: To what extent is RI possible in the current age, where the concept of innovation is predominantly presupposed as technological innovation? On the one hand, we depart from a post-phenomenological perspective to evaluate the possibility of RI in relation to the particular technological innovations discussed in the RI literature. On the other hand, we emphasize the central role innovation plays in the current age, and suggest that the presupposed concept of innovation projects a techno-economic paradigm. In doing so, we ultimately argue that in the attempt to steer innovation, frameworks of RI are in fact steered by the techno-economic paradigm inherent in the presupposed concept of innovation. Finally, we account for what implications this has for the societal purpose of RI.

The Conclusion

Hence, even though RI provides a critical analysis of innovation at the ontic level (i.e., concerning the introduction and usage of particular innovations), it still lacks a critical analysis at the ontological level (i.e., concerning the techno-economic paradigm of innovation). Therefore, RI is in need of a fundamental reflection that not only exposes the techno-economic paradigm of innovation—which we did in this paper—but that also explores an alternative concept of innovation which addresses the public good beyond the current privatization wave. The political origins of innovation that we encountered in Section 2, along with the political ends that the RI literature explicitly prioritizes, suggest that we should inquire into a political orientation of innovation. A crucial task of this inquiry would be to account for what such a political orientation of innovation precisely entails at the ontic level, and how it relates to the current techno-economic paradigm of innovation at the ontological level.

The info is here.

Hostile and benevolent sexism: The differential roles of human supremacy beliefs, women’s connection to nature, and the dehumanization of women

Salmen, A., & Dhont, K. (2020). 

Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. 

https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430220920713

Abstract

Scholars have long argued that sexism is partly rooted in dominance motives over animals and nature, with women being perceived as more animal-like and more closely connected to nature than men. Yet systematic research investigating these associations is currently lacking. Five studies (N = 2,409) consistently show that stronger beliefs in human supremacy over animals and nature were related to heightened hostile and benevolent sexism. Furthermore, perceiving women as more closely connected to nature than men was particularly associated with higher benevolent sexism, whereas subtle dehumanization of women was uniquely associated with higher hostile sexism. Blatant dehumanization predicted both types of sexism. Studies 3 and 4 highlight the roles of social dominance orientation and benevolent beliefs about nature underpinning these associations, while Study 5 demonstrates the implications for individuals’ acceptance of rape myths and policies restricting pregnant women’s freedom. Taken together, our findings reveal the psychological connections between gender relations and human–animal relations.

Implications and Conclusions

Scholars have argued that in order to effectively combat oppression, different forms of prejudice cannot be seen in isolation, but their interdependency needs to be understood (Adams, 1990/2015; 1994/2018; Adams & Gruen, 2014; C. A. MacKinnon, 2004). Based on the present findings, it can be argued that the objectification of women in campaigns to promote animal rights not only expresses sexist messages, but may be ineffective in addressing animal suffering (see also Bongiorno et al., 2013). Indeed, it may reinforce superiority beliefs in both human intergroup and human–animal relations. Along similar lines, our findings raise important questions regarding the frequent use of media images depicting women in an animalistic way or together with images of nature (e.g., Adams, 1990/2015; Plous & Neptune, 1997; Reynolds & Haslam, 2011). Through strengthening the association of women with animals and nature, exposure to these images might increase and maintain benevolent and hostile sexism.

Taken together, by showing that the way people think about animals is associated with exploitative views about women, our findings move beyond traditional psychological theorizing on gender-based bias and provide empirical support for the ideas of feminist scholars that, on a psychological level, systems of oppression and exploitation of women and animals are closely connected.

The research is here.

Forms and Functions of the Social Emotions

Sznycer, D., Sell, A., & Lieberman, D. (2021). 

Current Directions in Psychological Science. 

https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214211007451

Abstract

In engineering, form follows function. It is therefore difficult to understand an engineered object if one does not examine it in light of its function. Just as understanding the structure of a lock requires understanding the desire to secure valuables, understanding structures engineered by natural selection, including emotion systems, requires hypotheses about adaptive function. Social emotions reliably solved adaptive problems of human sociality. A central function of these emotions appears to be the recalibration of social evaluations in the minds of self and others. For example, the anger system functions to incentivize another individual to value your welfare more highly when you deem the current valuation insufficient; gratitude functions to consolidate a cooperative relationship with another individual when there are indications that the other values your welfare; shame functions to minimize the spread of discrediting information about yourself and the threat of being devalued by others; and pride functions to capitalize on opportunities to become more highly valued by others. Using the lens of social valuation, researchers are now mapping these and other social emotions at a rapid pace, finding striking regularities across industrial and small-scale societies and throughout history.

From the Shame portion

The behavioral repertoire of shame is broad. From the perspective of the disgraced or to-be-disgraced individual, a trait (e.g., incompetence) or course of action (e.g., theft) that fellow group members view negatively can be shielded from others’ censure at each of various junctures: imagination, decision making, action, information diffusion within the community, and audience reaction. Shame appears to have authority over devaluation-minimizing responses relevant to each of these junctures. For example, shame can lead people to turn away from courses of actions that might lead others to devalue them, to interrupt their execution of discrediting actions, to conceal and destroy reputationally damaging information about themselves, and to hide. When an audience finds discrediting information about the focal individual and condemns or attacks that individual, the shamed individual may apologize, signal submission, appease, cooperate, obfuscate, lie, shift the blame to others, or react with aggression. These behaviors are heterogeneous from a tactical standpoint; some even work at cross-purposes if mobilized concurrently. But each of these behaviors appears to have the strategic potential to limit the threat of devaluation in certain contexts, combinations, or sequences.

Such shame-inspired behaviors as hiding, scapegoating, and aggressing are undesirable from the standpoint of victims and third parties. This has led to the view that shame is an ugly and maladaptive emotion (Tangney et al., 1996). However, note that those behaviors can enhance the welfare of the focal individual, who is pressed to escape detection and minimize or counteract devaluation by others. Whereas the consequences of social devaluation are certainly ugly for the individual being devalued, the form-function approach suggests instead that shame is an elegantly engineered system that transmits bad news of the potential for devaluation to the array of counter-devaluation responses available to the focal individual.

The info is here.

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Important data points to share with trainees.  A good refreshed for seasoned therapists.

Do doctors engaging in advocacy speak for themselves or their profession?

Elizabeth Lanphier

Journal of Medical Ethics Blog

Originally posted 17 June 21

Here is an excerpt:

My concern is not the claim that expertise should be shared. (It should!) Nor do I think there is any neat distinction between physician responsibilities for individual health and public health. But I worry that when Strous and Karni alternately frame physician duties to “speak out” as individual duties and collective ones, they collapse necessary distinctions between the risks, benefits, and demands of these two types of obligations.

Many of us have various role-based individual responsibilities. We can have obligations as a parent, as a citizen, or as a professional. Having an individual responsibility as a physician involves duties to your patients, but also general duties to care in the event you are in a situation in which your expertise is needed (the “is there a doctor on this flight?” scenario).

Collective responsibility, on the other hand, is when a group has a responsibility as a group. The philosophical literature debates hard to resolve questions about what it means to be a “group,” and how groups come to have or discharge responsibilities. Collective responsibility raises complicated questions like: If physicians have a collective responsibility to speak out during the COVID-19 pandemic, does every physician has such an obligation? Does any individual physician?

Because individual obligations attribute duties to specific persons responsible for carrying them out in ways collective duties tend not to, I why individual physician obligations are attractive. But this comes with risks. One risk is that a physician speaks out as an individual, appealing to the authority of their medical credentials, but not in alignment with their profession.

In my essay I describe a family physician inviting his extended family for a holiday meal during a peak period of SARS-CoV-2 transmission because he didn’t think COVID-19 was a “big deal.”

More infamously, Dr. Scott Atlas served as Donald J. Trump’s coronavirus advisor, and although he is a physician, he did not have experience in public health, infectious disease, or critical care medicine applicable to COVID-19. Atlas was a physician speaking as a physician, but he routinely promoted views starkly different than those of physicians with expertise relevant to the pandemic, and the guidance coming from scientific and medical communities.

The info is here.

Should we be concerned that the decisions of AIs are inscrutable?

John Zerilli

Psyche.co

Originally published 14 June 21

Here is an excerpt:

However, there’s a danger of carrying reliabilist thinking too far. Compare a simple digital calculator with an instrument designed to assess the risk that someone convicted of a crime will fall back into criminal behaviour (‘recidivism risk’ tools are being used all over the United States right now to help officials determine bail, sentencing and parole outcomes). The calculator’s outputs are so dependable that an explanation of them seems superfluous – even for the first-time homebuyer whose mortgage repayments are determined by it. One might take issue with other aspects of the process – the fairness of the loan terms, the intrusiveness of the credit rating agency – but you wouldn’t ordinarily question the engineering of the calculator itself.

That’s utterly unlike the recidivism risk tool. When it labels a prisoner as ‘high risk’, neither the prisoner nor the parole board can be truly satisfied until they have some grasp of the factors that led to it, and the relative weights of each factor. Why? Because the assessment is such that any answer will necessarily be imprecise. It involves the calculation of probabilities on the basis of limited and potentially poor-quality information whose very selection is value-laden.

But what if systems such as the recidivism tool were in fact more like the calculator? For argument’s sake, imagine a recidivism risk-assessment tool that was basically infallible, a kind of Casio-cum-Oracle-of-Delphi. Would we still expect it to ‘show its working’?

This requires us to think more deeply about what it means for an automated decision system to be ‘reliable’. It’s natural to think that such a system would make the ‘right’ recommendations, most of the time. But what if there were no such thing as a right recommendation? What if all we could hope for were only a right way of arriving at a recommendation – a right way of approaching a given set of circumstances? This is a familiar situation in law, politics and ethics. Here, competing values and ethical frameworks often produce very different conclusions about the proper course of action. There are rarely unambiguously correct outcomes; instead, there are only right ways of justifying them. This makes talk of ‘reliability’ suspect. For many of the most morally consequential and controversial applications of ML, to know that an automated system works properly just is to know and be satisfied with its reasons for deciding.

The info is here.

Freezing Eggs and Creating Patients: Moral Risks of Commercialized Fertility

E. Reis & S. Reis-Dennis

The Hastings Center Report

Originally published 24 Nov 17

Abstract

There's no doubt that reproductive technologies can transform lives for the better. Infertile couples and single, lesbian, gay, intersex, and transgender people have the potential to form families in ways that would have been inconceivable years ago. Yet we are concerned about the widespread commercialization of certain egg-freezing programs, the messages they propagate about motherhood, the way they blur the line between care and experimentation, and the manipulative and exaggerated marketing that stretches the truth and inspires false hope in women of various ages. We argue that although reproductive technology, and egg freezing in particular, promise to improve women's care by offering more choices to achieve pregnancy and childbearing, they actually have the potential to be disempowering. First, commercial motives in the fertility industry distort women's medical deliberations, thereby restricting their autonomy; second, having the option to freeze their eggs can change the meaning of women's reproductive choices in a way that is limiting rather than liberating.

Here is an excerpt:

Egg banks are offering presumably fertile women a solution for potential infertility that they may never face. These women might pay annual egg-freezing storage rates but never use their eggs. In fact, even if a woman who froze eggs in her early twenties waited until her late thirties to use them, there can be no guarantee that those eggs would produce a viable pregnancy. James A. Grifo, program director of NYU Langone Health Fertility Center, has speculated, “[T]here have been reports of embryos that have been frozen for over 15 years making babies, and we think the same thing is going to be true of eggs.” But the truth is that the technology is so new that neither he nor we know how frozen eggs will hold up over a long period of time.

Some women in their twenties might want to hedge their bets against future infertility by freezing their eggs as a part of an egg-sharing program; others might hope to learn from a simple home test of hormone levels whether their egg supply (ovarian reserve) is low—a relatively rare condition. However, these tests are not foolproof. The ASRM has cautioned against home tests of ovarian reserve for women in their twenties because it may lead to “false reassurance or unnecessary anxiety and concern.” This kind of medicalization of fertility may not be liberating; instead, it will exert undue pressure on women and encourage them to rely on egg freezing over other reproductive options when it is far from guaranteed that those frozen eggs (particularly if the women have the condition known as premature ovarian aging) will ultimately lead to successful pregnancies and births.

The info is here.

Women Carry An Undue Mental Health Burden. They Shouldn’t Have To

Rawan Hamadeh

Ms. Magazine

Originally posted 12 June 21

Here is an excerpt:

In developing countries, there is a huge gap in the availability and accessibility of specialized mental health services. Rather than visiting mental health specialists, women are more likely to seek mental health support in primary health care settings while accompanying their children or while attending consultations for other health issues. This leads to many mental health conditions going unidentified and therefore not treated. Often, women do not feel fully comfortable disclosing certain psychological and emotional distress because they fear stigmatization, confidentiality breaches or not being taken seriously.

COVID-19 has put the mental well-being of the entire world at risk. More adults are reporting struggles with mental health and substance use and are experiencing more symptoms of anxiety and depressive disorders. The stressors caused by the pandemic have affected the entire population; however, the effect on women and mothers specifically has been greater.

Women, the unsung heroes of the pandemic, face mounting pressures amid this global health crisis. Reports suggest that the long-term repercussions of COVID-19 could undo decades of progress for women and impose considerable additional burdens on them, threatening the difficult journey toward gender equality.

Unemployment, parenting responsibilities, homeschooling or caring for sick relatives are all additional burdens on women’s daily lives during the pandemic. It’s also important that we acknowledge the exponential need for mental health support for health care workers, and particularly health care mothers, who are juggling both their professional duties and their parenting responsibilities. They are the heroes on the front lines of the fight against the virus, and it’s crucial to prioritize their physical as well as their mental health.

The article is here.