As a doctor in a COVID unit, I’m running out of compassion for the unvaccinated. Get the shot

Anita Sircar

The Los Angeles Times

Originally published 17 Aug 21

Here is an excerpt:

The burden of this pandemic now rests on the shoulders of the unvaccinated. On those who are eligible to get vaccinated but choose not to, a decision they defend by declaring, “Vaccination is a deeply personal choice.” But perhaps never in history has anyone’s personal choice affected the world as a whole as it does right now. When hundreds and thousands of people continue to die — when the most vulnerable members of society, our children, cannot be vaccinated — the luxury of choice ceases to exist.

If you believe the pandemic is almost over and I can ride it out, without getting vaccinated, you could not be more wrong. This virus will find you.

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If you believe if I get infected I’ll just go to the hospital and get treated, there is no guarantee we can save your life, nor even a promise we’ll have a bed for you.

If you believe I’m pregnant and I don’t want the vaccine to affect me, my baby or my future fertility, it matters little if you’re not alive to see your newborn.

If you believe I won’t get my children vaccinated because I don’t know what the long-term effects will be, it matters little if they don’t live long enough for you to find out.

If you believe I’ll just let everyone else get vaccinated around me so I don’t have to, there are 93 million eligible, unvaccinated people in the “herd” who think the same way you do and are getting in the way of ending this pandemic.

If you believe vaccinated people are getting infected anyway, so what’s the point?, the vaccine was built to prevent hospitalizations and deaths from severe illness. Instead of fatal pneumonia, those with breakthrough infections have a short, bad cold, so the vaccine has already proved itself. The vaccinated are not dying of COVID-19.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has mutated countless times during this pandemic, adapting to survive. Stacked up against a human race that has resisted change every step of the way — including wearing masks, social distancing, quarantining and now refusing lifesaving vaccines — it is easy to see who will win this war if human behavior fails to change quickly.

The info is here.

Reducing the uncanny valley by dehumanizing humanoid robots

Yam, K.C., Bigman, Y., & Gray, K.

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 125, December 2021, 106945

Abstract

Humanoid robots are often experienced as unnerving, a psychological phenomenon called the “uncanny valley.” Past work reveals that humanlike robots are unnerving in part because they are ascribed humanlike feelings. We leverage this past work to provide a potential solution to the uncanny valley. Three studies reveal that “dehumanizing” humanoid robots—stripping robots of their apparent capacity for feelings—can significantly reduce the uncanny valley. Participants high on trait dehumanization (Study 1) or experimentally instructed to dehumanize (Study 2) reported lower feelings of uncanniness when viewing a humanoid robot, an effect mediated by reduced perceptions of feelings. We replicate these effects in an experimental field study where hotel guests interacted with real humanoid robots in Japan, and reveal that dehumanization reduces the uncanny valley without decreasing customers’ satisfaction (Study 3).

Highlights

• The uncanny valley can be mitigated by a dehumanization manipulation.

• This effect is mediated by reduced experience perceptions.

• This simple manipulation can improve user experience of humanoid robots.

The research is here.

Deconstructing Moral Character Judgments

Hartman, R., Blakey, W., & Gray, K.

Current Opinions in Psychology

Abstract

People often make judgments of others' moral character-an inferred moral essence that presumably predicts moral behavior. We first define moral character and explore why people make character judgments before outlining three key elements that drive character judgments: behavior (good vs. bad, norm violations, and deliberation), mind (intentions, explanations, capacities), and identity (appearance, social groups, and warmth). We also provide a taxonomy of moral character that goes beyond simply good vs. evil. Drawing from the Theory of Dyadic Morality, we outline a two-dimensional triangular space of character judgments (valence and strength/agency), with three key corners-heroes, villains, and victims. Varieties of perceived moral character include saints and demons, strivers/sinners and opportunists, the non-moral, virtuous and culpable victims, and pure victims.

Conclusion 

It seems obvious that people make summary judgments of others’ moral character, but less obvious is how exactly that make those judgments. We suggest that people rely upon behavior, identity, and perceived mind when inferring the moral essence of others. We acknowledge that this list is certainly incomplete and will be expanded with future research. One key area of expansion explored here is the importance of perceived strength/agency in character judgments, which helps provide a taxonomy of character types. Whatever the exact varieties and drivers of moral character judgments, these judgments are clearly an important foundation of social life.

A pdf is here.

America’s long history of anti-science has dangerously undermined the COVID vaccine

Peter Hotez

The Dallas Morning News

Originally published 15 Aug 21

Here is an excerpt:

America’s full-throated enthusiasm for vaccines lasted until the early 2000s. The 1998 Lancet publication of a paper from Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues, which wrongly asserted that the measles virus in the MMR vaccine replicated in the colons of children to cause pervasive developmental disorder (autism), ushered in a new era of distrust for vaccine.

It also resulted in distrust for the U.S. Health and Human Services agencies promoting vaccinations. The early response from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was to dismiss growing American discontent for vaccines as a fringe element, until eventually in the 2010s anti-vaccine sentiment spread across the internet.

The anti-vaccine movement eventually adopted medical freedom and used it to gain strength and accelerate in size, internet presence and external funding. Rising out of the American West, anti-vaccine proponents insisted that only parents could make vaccine choices and they were prepared to resist government requirements for school entry or attendance.

In California, the notion of vaccine choice gained strength in the 2010s, leading to widespread philosophical exemptions to childhood MMR vaccines and other immunizations. Vaccine exemptions reached critical mass, ultimately culminating in a 2014–2015 measles epidemic in Orange County.

The outbreak prompted state government intervention through the introduction of California Senate Bill 277 that eliminated these exemptions and prevented further epidemics, but it also triggered aggressive opposition. Anti-vaccine health freedom groups harassed members of the Legislature and labeled prominent scientists as pharma shills. They touted pseudoscience, claiming that vaccines were toxic, or that natural immunity acquired from the illness was superior and more durable than vaccine-induced immunity.

Health freedom then expanded through newly established anti-vaccine political action committees in Texas and Oklahoma in the Southwest, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest, and Michigan and Ohio in the Midwest, while additional anti-vaccine organizations formed in almost every state.

These groups lobbied state legislatures to promote or protect vaccine exemptions, while working to cloak or obscure classroom or schoolwide disclosures of vaccine exemptions. They also introduced menacing consent forms to portray vaccines as harmful or toxic.

The Texans for Vaccine Choice PAC formed in 2015, helping to accelerate personal belief immunization exemptions to a point where today approximately 72,000 Texas schoolchildren miss vaccines required for school entry and attendance.

The info is here.

The relational logic of moral inference

Crockett, M., Everett, J. A. C., Gill, M., & Siegel, J. 

(2021, July 9). https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/82c6y

Abstract

How do we make inferences about the moral character of others? Here we review recent work on the cognitive mechanisms of moral inference and impression updating. We show that moral inference follows basic principles of Bayesian inference, but also departs from the standard Bayesian model in ways that may facilitate the maintenance of social relationships. Moral inference is not only sensitive to whether people make moral decisions, but also to features of decisions that reveal their suitability as a relational partner. Together these findings suggest that moral inference follows a relational logic: people form and update moral impressions in ways that are responsive to the demands of ongoing social relationships and particular social roles. We discuss implications of these findings for theories of moral cognition and identify new directions for research on human morality and person perception.

Summary

There is growing evidence that people infer moral character from behaviors that are not explicitly moral. The data so far suggest that people who are patient, hard-working, tolerant of ambiguity, risk-averse, and actively open-minded are seen as more moral and trustworthy. While at first blush this collection of preferences may seem arbitrary, considering moral inference from a relational perspective reveals a coherent logic. All of these preferences are correlated with cooperative behavior, and comprise traits that are desirable for long-term relationship partners. Reaping the benefits of long-term relationships requires patience and a tolerance for ambiguity: sometime people make mistakes despite good intentions. Erring on the side of caution and actively seeking evidence to inform decision-making in social situations not only helps prevent harmful outcomes (Kappes et al., 2019), but also signals respect: social life is fraught with uncertainty (FeldmanHall & Shenhav, 2019; Kappes et al., 2019), and assuming we know what’s best for another person can have bad consequences, even when our intentions are good.  If evidence continues to suggest that certain types of non-moral preferences are preferred in social partners, partner choice mechanisms may explain the prevalence of those preferences in the broader population.

The research is here.

Would I Give Aducanumab to My Mother?

Dena S. Davis

The Hastings Center

Originally published 11 June 21

Here is an excerpt:

First, it is not at all clear that the drug works, in terms of affecting cognition and slowing decline. As Jason Karlawish explains in an incisive piece in STAT, crucial scientific steps were missed, and the current data are inconclusive and contradictory. 

Side effects include possible brain swelling and bleeds (which appear to be severe in about 6% of patients), headache, falls, diarrhea, and what Biogen describes as “confusion/delirium/altered mental status/disorientation.”  Wait a minute!  I thought the reason to take this drug was that one already had altered mental status and confusion.

Before someone is even considered eligible for aducanumab, they must take a PET scan to ascertain that they have elevated levels of amyloid and then an MRI to make sure they don’t already have brain swelling. MRIs have to be repeated regularly while people are on the drug. I know perfectly competent adults who are freaked out by MRI’s.  How do you explain this to someone with dementia?  Or do you sedate them, thus adding to the risk? Furthermore, the drug itself is not a pill, but a monthly infusion. 

Put that all together, and it just doesn’t add up. How would my mother’s life change for the better? There is little evidence of the drug’s efficacy. Meanwhile, her peaceful life in her rural home with her dedicated caregiver would now be punctuated by trips to the hospital for MRI’s, and monthly struggles to start infusions in her 90-year-old body, with its tiny veins and paper-thin skin. Aducanumab is apparently best suited to people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but even in the earliest stage my mother refused to accept that she had a problem. I cannot imagine successfully explaining that we were taking these measures in the faint hope of combatting a problem she insisted she didn’t have. And in the absence of an explanation she could understand, surely the frequent hospital trips would feel to her like unpleasant, even scary, invasions.

The entire info is here.

A simple definition of ‘intentionally’

Quillien, T., & German, T. C.

Cognition

Volume 214, September 2021, 104806

Abstract

Cognitive scientists have been debating how the folk concept of intentional action works. We suggest a simple account: people consider that an agent did X intentionally to the extent that X was causally dependent on how much the agent wanted X to happen (or not to happen). Combined with recent models of human causal cognition, this definition provides a good account of the way people use the concept of intentional action, and offers natural explanations for puzzling phenomena such as the side-effect effect. We provide empirical support for our theory, in studies where we show that people's causation and intentionality judgments track each other closely, in everyday situations as well as in scenarios with unusual causal structures. Study 5 additionally shows that the effect of norm violations on intentionality judgments depends on the causal structure of the situation, in a way uniquely predicted by our theory. Taken together, these results suggest that the folk concept of intentional action has been difficult to define because it is made of cognitive building blocks, such as our intuitive concept of causation, whose logic cognitive scientists are just starting to understand.

From the end

People can use the word “intentionally” in very strange ways. Our intuitions about whether something is intentional are swayed by moral considerations, are pulled one way or another depending on the amount

of control an agent exerts, and are influenced by how circuitous the causal chain between the agent and the outcome is. Intentionality requires a relevant belief, but the latter can be present in very small doses.

Norm-violating actions are judged as more intentional than norm-conforming actions – except when they are judged as less intentional.

These seemingly erratic intuitions can be anxiety-inducing. One might conclude that our commonsense psychology is fundamentally moralistic; that linguistic meaning is hopelessly entangled in its context;

or that motivational and pragmatic factors constantly warp our intuitions about the proper extension of words.

We think such anxiety might be misplaced. Instead, we view the strangeness of “intentionally” as emerging naturally from the core structure of the concept. The way people use the concept of intentional

action offers a fascinating window on some of the building blocks that make up human thought: it lets us glimpse into our implicit causal model of the mind, and the algorithms with which we assign causes to events.

A pdf is here.

The Shape of Blame: How statistical norms impact judgments of blame and praise

Bostyn, D. H., & Knobe, J. (2020, April 24). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/2hca8

Abstract

For many types of behaviors, whether a specific instance of that behavior is either blame or praiseworthy depends on how much of the behavior is done or how people go about doing it. For instance, for a behavior such as “replying quickly to emails”, whether a specific reply is blame or praiseworthy will depend on the timeliness of that reply. Such behaviors lie on a continuum in which part of the continuum is praiseworthy (replying quickly) and another part of the continuum is blameworthy (replying late). As praise shifts towards blame along such behavioral continua, the resulting blame-praise curve must have a specific shape. A number of questions therefore arise. What determines the shape of that curve? And what determines “the neutral point”, i.e., the point along a behavioral continuum at which people neither blame nor praise? Seven studies explore these issues, focusing specifically on the impact of statistical information, and provide evidence for a hypothesis we call the “asymmetric frequency hypothesis.”

From the Discussion

Asymmetric frequency and moral cognition

The results obtained here appear to support the asymmetric frequency hypothesis. So far, we have summarized this hypothesis as “People tend perceive frequent behaviors as not blameworthy.” But how exactly is this hypothesis best understood?Importantly, the asymmetric frequency effect does not imply that whenever a behavior becomes more frequent, the associated moral judgment will shift towards the neutral. Behaviors that are considered to be praiseworthy do not appear to become more neutral simply because they become more frequent. The effect of frequency only appears to occur when a behavior is blameworthy, which is why we dubbed it an asymmetric effect.An enlightening historical example in this regard is perhaps the “gay revolution” (Faderman, 2015). As knowledge of the rate of homosexuality has spread across society and people have become more familiar with homosexuality within their own communities, moral norms surrounding homosexuality have shifted from hostility to increasing acceptance (Gallup 2019). Crucially, however, those who already lauded others for having a loving homosexual relation did not shift their judgment towards neutral indifference over the same time period. While frequency mitigates blameworthiness, it does not cause a general shift towards neutrality. Even when everyone does the right thing, it does not lose its moral shine.

A pdf is here.

One -- but Not the Same

Schwenkler, J. Byrd, N. Lambert, E., & Taylor, M.

Philosophical Studies

Abstract

Ordinary judgments about personal identity are complicated by the fact that phrases like “same person” and “different person” have multiple uses in ordinary English. This complication calls into question the significance of recent experimental work on this topic. For example, Tobia (2015) found that judgments of personal identity were significantly affected by whether the moral change described in a vignette was for the better or for the worse, while Strohminger and Nichols (2014) found that loss of moral conscience had more of an effect on identity judgments than loss of biographical memory. In each case, however, there are grounds for questioning whether the judgments elicited in these experiments engaged a concept of numerical personal identity at all (cf. Berniūnas and Dranseika 2016; Dranseika 2017; Starmans and Bloom 2018). In two pre-registered studies we validate this criticism while also showing a way to address it: instead of attempting to engage the concept of numerical identity through specialized language or the terms of an imaginary philosophical debate, we should consider instead how the identity of a person is described through the connected use of proper names, definite descriptions, and the personal pronouns “I”, “you”, “he”, and “she”. When the experiments above are revisited in this way, there is no evidence that the differences in question had an effect on ordinary identity judgments.

From the Discussion

Our findings do, however, suggest a promising strategy for the experimental study of how philosophically important concepts are employed by people without formal philosophical training. As we noted above, in philosophy we use phrases like “numerical identity” and “qualitative identity” in a somewhat artificial way, in order thereby to disambiguate between the different meanings a phrase like “same person” can have in ordinary language. But we cannot easily disambiguate things in this way when we wish to investigate how these concepts are understood by non-philosophers: for a question like “Is the man after the accident numerically the same as the man before?” cannot be posed to such a person without first explicating the meaning of the italicized phrase.

A pdf can be downloaded here.