Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Louisiana woman learns WWII vet husband’s cadaver dissected at pay-per-view event

Peter Aitken
YahooNews.com
Originally published 7 NOV 21

The family of a deceased Louisiana man found out that his body ended up in a ticketed live human dissection as part of a traveling expo.

David Saunders, a World War II and Korean War veteran who lived in Baker, died at the age of 98 from COVID-19 complications in August. His family donated his remains to science – or so they thought: Instead, his wife, Elsie Saunders, discovered that his body had ended up in an "Oddities and Curiosities Expo" in Oregon.

The expo, organized by DeathScience.org, was set up at the Portland Marriot Downtown Waterfront. People could watch a live human dissection on Oct. 17 for the cost of up to $500 a seat, KING-TV reported.

"From the external body exam to the removal of vital organs including the brain, we will find new perspectives on how the human body can tell a story," an online event description says. "There will be several opportunities for attendees to get an up-close and personal look at the cadaver."

The Seattle-based station sent an undercover reporter to the expo and noted David Saunders’ name on a bracelet he was wearing. The reporter was able to contact Elsie Saunders and let her know what had happened.

She was, understandably, horrified.

"It’s horrible what has happened to my husband," Elsie Saunders told NBC News. "I didn’t know he was going to be … put on display like a performing bear or something. I only consented to body donation or scientific purposes."

"That’s the way my husband wanted it," she explained. "To say the least, I’m upset."

Monday, November 8, 2021

What the mind is

B. F. Malle
Nature - Human Behaviour
Originally published 26 Aug 21

Humans have a conception of what the mind is. This conception takes mind to be a set of capacities, such as the ability to be proud or feel sad, to remember or to plan. Such a multifaceted conception allows people to ascribe mind in varying degrees to humans, animals, robots or any other entity1,2. However, systematic research on this conception of mind has so far been limited to Western populations. A study by Weisman and colleagues3 published in Nature Human Behaviour now provides compelling evidence for some cross-cultural universals in the human understanding of what the mind is, as well as revealing intercultural variation.

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As with all new findings, readers must be alert and cautious in the conclusions they draw. We may not conclude with certainty that these are the three definitive dimensions of human mind perception, because the 23 mental capacities featured in the study were not exhaustive; in particular, they did not encompass two important domains — morality and social cognition. Moral capacities are central to social relations, person perception and identity; likewise, people care deeply about the capacity to empathize and understand others’ thoughts and feelings. Yet the present study lacked items to capture these domains. When items for moral and social–cognitive capacities have been included in past US studies, they formed a strong separate dimension, while emotions shifted toward the Experience dimension. 

Incorporating moral–social capacities in future studies may strengthen the authors’ findings. Morality and social cognition are credible candidates for cultural universals, so their inclusion could make cross-cultural stability of mind perception even more decisive. Moreover, inclusion of these important mental capacities might clarify one noteworthy cultural divergence in the data: the fact that adults in Ghana and Vanuatu combined the emotional and perceptual-cognitive dimensions. Without the contrast to social–moral capacities, emotion and cognition might have been similar enough to move toward each other. Including social–moral capacities in future studies could provide a contrasting and dividing line, which would pull emotion and cognition apart. The results might, potentially, be even more consistent across cultures.

Sunday, November 7, 2021

Moral Judgment as Categorization

McHugh, C., McGann, M., Igou, E. R., & 
Kinsella, E. L. (2021). 
Perspectives on Psychological Science 
https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691621990636

Abstract

Observed variability and complexity of judgments of "right" and "wrong" cannot be readily accounted for within extant approaches to understanding moral judgment. In response to this challenge, we present a novel perspective on categorization in moral judgment. Moral judgment as categorization (MJAC) incorporates principles of category formation research while addressing key challenges of existing approaches to moral judgment. People develop skills in making context-relevant categorizations. They learn that various objects (events, behaviors, people, etc.) can be categorized as morally right or wrong. Repetition and rehearsal result in reliable, habitualized categorizations. According to this skill-formation account of moral categorization, the learning and the habitualization of the forming of moral categories occur within goal-directed activity that is sensitive to various contextual influences. By allowing for the complexity of moral judgments, MJAC offers greater explanatory power than existing approaches while also providing opportunities for a diverse range of new research questions.

Summarizing the Differences 

Between MJAC and Existing Approaches Above, we have outlined how MJAC differs from existing theories in terms of assumptions and explanation. These theories make assumptions based on content, and this results in essentialist theorizing, either implicit or explicit attempts to define an “essence” of morality. In contrast, MJAC rejects essentialism, instead assuming moral categorizations are dynamical, context-dependent, and occurring as part of goal-directed activity. Each of the theories discussed is explicitly or implicitly (e.g., Schein & Gray, 2018, p. 41) based on dual-process assumptions, with related dichotomous assumptions regarding the cognitive mechanisms (where these mechanisms are specified). MJAC does not assume distinct, separable processes, adopting type-token interpretation, occurring as part of goal-directed activity (Barsalou, 2003, 2017), as the mechanism that underlies moral categorization. These differences in assumptions underlie the differences in the explanation discussed above.

Saturday, November 6, 2021

Generating Options and Choosing Between Them Depend on Distinct Forms of Value Representation

Morris, A., Phillips, J., Huang, K., & 
Cushman, F. (2021). 
Psychological Science. 
https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211005702

Abstract

Humans have a remarkable capacity for flexible decision-making, deliberating among actions by modeling their likely outcomes. This capacity allows us to adapt to the specific features of diverse circumstances. In real-world decision-making, however, people face an important challenge: There are often an enormous number of possibilities to choose among, far too many for exhaustive consideration. There is a crucial, understudied prechoice step in which, among myriad possibilities, a few good candidates come quickly to mind. How do people accomplish this? We show across nine experiments (N = 3,972 U.S. residents) that people use computationally frugal cached value estimates to propose a few candidate actions on the basis of their success in past contexts (even when irrelevant for the current context). Deliberative planning is then deployed just within this set, allowing people to compute more accurate values on the basis of context-specific criteria. This hybrid architecture illuminates how typically valuable thoughts come quickly to mind during decision-making.

From the General Discussion

Salience effects, such as recency, frequency of consideration, and extremity, likely also contribute to consideration (Kahneman, 2003; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Our results supported at least one salience effect: In Studies 4 through 6, in addition to our primary effect of high cached value, options with more extreme cached values relative to the mean also tended to come to mind (see the checkmark shape in Fig. 3d). Salience effects such as this may have a functional basis, such as conserving scarce cognitive resources (Lieder et al., 2018). An ideal general theory would specify how these diverse factors—including many others, such as personality traits, social roles, and cultural norms (Smaldino & Richerson, 2012)—form a coherent, adaptive design for option generation.

A growing body of work suggests that value influences what comes to mind not only during decision-making but also in many other contexts, such as causal reasoning, moral judgment, and memory recall (Bear & Knobe, 2017; Braun et al., 2018; Hitchcock & Knobe, 2009; Mattar & Daw, 2018; Phillips et al., 2019). A key inquiry going forward will be the role of cached versus context-specific value estimation in these cases.

Friday, November 5, 2021

Invisible gorillas in the mind: Internal inattentional blindness and the prospect of introspection training

Morris, A. (2021, September 26).

Abstract

Much of high-level cognition appears inaccessible to consciousness. Countless studies have revealed mental processes -- like those underlying our choices, beliefs, judgments, intuitions, etc. -- which people do not notice or report, and these findings have had a widespread influence on the theory and application of psychological science. However, the interpretation of these findings is uncertain. Making an analogy to perceptual consciousness research, I argue that much of the unconsciousness of high-level cognition is plausibly due to internal inattentional blindness: missing an otherwise consciously-accessible internal event because your attention was elsewhere. In other words, rather than being structurally unconscious, many higher mental processes might instead be "preconscious", and would become conscious if a person attended to them. I synthesize existing indirect evidence for this claim, argue that it is a foundational and largely untested assumption in many applied interventions (such as therapy and mindfulness practices), and suggest that, with careful experimentation, it could form the basis for a long-sought-after science of introspection training.

Conclusion

Just as people can miss perceptual events due to external inattention, so may they be blind to internal events – like those constituting high-level mental processes – due to internal inattention. The existence of internal inattentional blindness, and the possibility of overcoming it through training, are widely assumed in successful applied psychological practices and widely reported by practitioners; yet these possibilities have rarely been explored experimentally, or taken seriously by basic theorists. Rigorously demonstrating the existence of IIB could open a new chapter both in the development of psychological interventions, and in our understanding of the scope of conscious awareness.


Attention Therapists: Some very relevant information here.

Thursday, November 4, 2021

The AMA needs to declare a national mental health emergency

Susan Hata and Thalia Krakower
STAT News
Originally published 6 OCT 21

As the pandemic continues to disrupt life across the U.S., a staggering number of Americans are reaching out to their primary care doctors for help with sometimes overwhelming mental health struggles. Yet primary care doctors like us have nowhere to turn when it comes to finding mental health providers for them, and our patients often suffer without the specialty care they need.

It’s time for the American Medical Association to take decisive action and declare a national mental health emergency.

More than 40% of Americans report symptoms of anxiety or depression, and emergency rooms are flooded with patients in psychiatric crises. Untreated, these issues can have devastating consequences. In 2020, an estimated 44,800 Americans lost their lives to suicide; among children ages 10 to 14, suicide is the second leading cause of death.

Finding mental health providers for patients is an uphill climb, in part because there is no centralized process for it. Timely mental health services are astonishingly difficult to obtain even in Massachusetts, where we live and work, which has the most psychologists per capita. Waitlists for therapists can be longer than six months for adults, and even longer for children.

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By declaring a mental health emergency, the AMA could galvanize health administrators and drive the innovation needed to improve the existing mental health system. When Covid-19 was named a pandemic, the U.S. health care infrastructure adapted quickly to manage the deluge of infections. Leaders nimbly and creatively mobilized resources. They redeployed staff, built field hospitals and overflow ICUs, and deferred surgeries and routine care to preserve resources and minimize hospital-based transmission of Covid-19. With proper framing and a sense of urgency, similar things can happen for the mental health care system.

To be clear, all of this is the AMA’s lane: In addition to the devastating toll of suicides and overdoses, untreated mental illness worsens cardiac outcomes, increases mortality from Covid-19, and shortens life spans. Adult mental illness also directly affects the health of children, leading to poor health outcomes across generations.

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

Maybe a free thinker but not a critical one: High conspiracy belief is associated with low critical thinking ability

Lantian, A., Bagneux, V., Delouvée, S., 
& Gauvrit, N. (2020, February 7). 
Applied Cognitive Psychology
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8qhx4

Abstract

Critical thinking is of paramount importance in our society. People regularly assume that critical thinking is a way to reduce conspiracy belief, although the relationship between critical thinking and conspiracy belief has never been tested. We conducted two studies (Study 1, N = 86; Study 2, N = 252), in which we found that critical thinking ability—measured by an open-ended test emphasizing several areas of critical thinking ability in the context of argumentation—is negatively associated with belief in conspiracy theories. Additionally, we did not find a significant relationship between self-reported (subjective) critical thinking ability and conspiracy belief. Our results support the idea that conspiracy believers have less developed critical thinking ability and stimulate discussion about the possibility of reducing conspiracy beliefs via the development of critical thinking.

From the General Discussion

The presumed role of critical thinking in belief in conspiracy theories is continuously discussed by researchers, journalists, and by lay people on social networks. One example is the capacity to exercise critical thinking ability to distinguish bogus conspiracy theories from genuine conspiracy theories (Bale, 2007), leading us to question when critical thinking ability could be used to support this adaptive function. Sometimes, it is not unreasonable to think that a form of rationality would help to facilitate the detection of dangerous coalitions (van Prooijen & Van Vugt, 2018). In that respect, Stojanov and Halberstadt (2019) recently introduced a distinction between irrational versus rational suspicion. Although the former focuses on the general tendency to believe in any conspiracy theories, the later focus on higher sensitivity to deception or corruption, which is defined as“healthy skepticism.” These two aspects of suspicion can now be handled simultaneously thanks to a new scale developed by Stojanov and Halberstadt (2019). In our study, we found that critical thinking ability was associated with lower unfounded belief in conspiracy theories, but this does not answer the question as to whether critical thinking ability can be helpful for the detection of true conspiracies. Future studies could use this new measurement to address this specific question.

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Our evolved intuitions about privacy aren’t made for this era

Joe Green & Azim Shariff
psyche.co
Originally published September 16, 2021

Here is an excerpt:

Our concern for privacy has its evolutionary roots in the need to maintain boundaries between the self and others, for safety and security. The motivation for personal space and territoriality is a common phenomenon within the animal kingdom. Among humans, this concern about regulating physical access is complemented by one about regulating informational access. The language abilities, complex social lives and long memories of human beings made protecting our social reputations almost as important as protecting our physical bodies. Norms about sexual privacy, for instance, are common across cultures and time periods. Establishing basic seclusion for secret trysts would have allowed for all the carnal benefits without the unwelcome reputational scrutiny.

Since protection and seclusion must be balanced with interaction, our privacy concern is tuned to flexibly respond to cues in our environment, helping to determine when and what and with whom we share our physical space and personal information. We reflexively lower our voices when strange or hostile interlopers come within earshot. We experience an uneasy creepiness when someone peers over our shoulder. We viscerally feel the presence of a crowd and the public scrutiny that comes with it.

However, just as the turtles’ light-orienting reflex was confounded by the glow of urban settlements, so too have our privacy reactions been confounded by technology. Cameras and microphones – with their superhuman sensory abilities – were challenging enough. But the migration of so much of our lives online is arguably the largest environmental shift in our species’ history with regard to privacy. And our evolved privacy psychology has not caught up. Consider how most people respond to the presence of others when they are in a crowd. Humans use a host of social cues to regulate how much distance they keep between themselves and others. These include facial expression, gaze, vocal quality, posture and hand gestures. In a crowd, such cues can produce an anxiety-inducing cacophony. Moreover, our hair-trigger reputation-management system – critical to keeping us in good moral standing within our group – can drive us into a delirium of self-consciousness.

However, there is some wisdom in this anxiety. Looking into the whites of another’s eyes anchors us within the social milieu, along with all of its attendant norms and expectations. As a result, we tread carefully. Our private thoughts generally remain just that – private, conveyed only to small, trusted groups or confined to our own minds. But as ‘social networks’ suddenly switched from being small, familiar, in-person groupings to online social media platforms connecting millions of users, things changed. Untethered from recognisable social cues such as crowding and proximity, thoughts better left for a select few found their way in front of a much wider array of people, many of whom do not have our best interests at heart. Online we can feel alone and untouchable when we are neither.

Consider, too, our intuitions about what belongs to whom. Ownership can be complicated from a legal perspective but, psychologically, it is readily inferred from an early age (as anyone with young children will have realised). This is achieved through a set of heuristics that provide an intuitive ‘folk psychology’ of ownership. First possession (who first possessed an object), labour investment (who made or modified an object), and object history (information about past transfer of ownership) are all cues that people reflexively use in attributing the ownership of physical things – and consequently, the right to open, inspect or enter them.

Monday, November 1, 2021

Social Media and Mental Health

Luca Braghieri, Ro’ee Levy, and Alexey Makarin
Independent Research
August 21

Abstract 

The diffusion of social media coincided with a worsening of mental health conditions among adolescents and young adults in the United States, giving rise to speculation that social media might be detrimental to mental health. In this paper, we provide the first quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of social media on mental health by leveraging a unique natural experiment: the staggered introduction of Facebook across U.S. colleges. Our analysis couples data on student mental health around the years of Facebook’s expansion with a generalized difference-in-differences empirical strategy. We find that the roll-out of Facebook at a college increased symptoms of poor mental health, especially depression, and led to increased utilization of mental healthcare services. We also find that, according to the students’ reports, the decline in mental health translated into worse academic performance. Additional evidence on mechanisms suggests the results are due to Facebook fostering unfavorable social comparisons. 

Discussion 

Implications for social media today 

Our estimates of the effects of social media on mental health rely on quasi-experimental variation in Facebook access among college students around the years 2004 to 2006. Such population and time window are directly relevant to the discussion about the severe worsening of mental health conditions among adolescents and young adults over the last two decades. In this section, we elaborate on the extent to which our findings have the potential to inform our understanding of the effects of social media on mental health today. 

Over the last two decades, Facebook underwent a host of important changes. Such changes include: i) the introduction of a personalized feed where posts are ranked by an algorithm; ii) the growth of Facebook’s user base from U.S. college students to almost three billion active users around the globe (Facebook, 2021); iii) video often replacing images and text; iv) increased usage of Facebook on mobile phones instead of computers; and v) the introduction of Facebook pages for brands, businesses, and organizations. 

The nature of the variation we are exploiting in this paper does not allow us to identify the impact of these features of social media. For example, the introduction of pages, along with other changes, made news consumption on Facebook more common over the last decade than it was at inception. Our estimates cannot shed light on whether the increased reliance on Facebook for news consumption has exacerbated or mitigated the effects of Facebook on mental health. 

Despite these caveats, we believe the estimates presented in this paper are still highly relevant today for two main reasons: first, the mechanisms whereby social media use might affect mental health arguably relate to core features of social media platforms that have been present since inception and that remain integral parts of those platforms today; second, the technological changes undergone by Facebook and related platforms might have amplified rather than mitigated the effect of those mechanisms.