Revisiting Daubert: Judicial Gatekeeping and Expert Ethics in Court

Young, G., Goodman-Delahunty, J.

Psychol. Inj. and Law (2021). 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12207-021-09428-8

Abstract

This article calls for pragmatic modifications to legal practices for the admissibility of scientific evidence, including forensic psychological science. We submit that Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993) and the other two cases in the U.S. Supreme Court trilogy on expert evidence have largely failed to accomplish their gatekeeping goals to assure the reliability of scientific evidence admitted in court. Reliability refers to validity in psychological terms. Part of the problem with Daubert’s application in court is the gatekeeping function that it ascribes to judges. Most Daubert admissibility challenges are rejected by judges, who might lack the requisite scientific expertise to make informed decisions; educating judges on science might not be an adequate solution. Like others who have put forth the idea, pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence (FRE) 706, we suggest that court-appointed impartial experts can help judges to adjudicate competing claims on admissibility. We further recommend that an expert witness ethics code sworn to in legal proceedings should be mandatory in all jurisdictions. The journal Psychological Injury and Law calls for comments and further recommendations on modifying Daubert admissibility challenges and procedures in civil and criminal cases to develop best practices to mitigate adversarial allegiance and other unconscious biases in expert decision-making.

Advantages of an Expert Witness Ethics Code Sworn to in Legal Proceedings

We suggest that in the field of psychological injury, jurisdictions in which courts reinforce expert obligations via an ethics code for expert witnesses will lead to more balanced and impartial testimony. The essential principle guiding a science-based expert witness ethics code sworn to in legal proceedings is that the process of forensic assessment, as well as the subsequent proffer of testimony in court based on those assessments, should account for all the reliable evidence gathered in a particular case as determined by methodologies informed by scientific research in the relevant field.  This recommendation is in line with psychological research showing that expert bias is reduced when experts do not focus on a single question or hypothesis, but address a “line up” of competing and alternative conclusions and hypotheses (Dror, 2020). The components of the expert witness oath, like the appointment of a court-appointed expert, encourage experts to adopt a differential diagnosis approach, in which all different conclusions and their probability are presented, rather than one conclusion (Dror, 2020). Opinions, interpretations, and conclusions based on the data, information, and evidence will more likely be impartial, fully scientifically informed, and just.

The full article is here, behind a paywall.

Moral labels increase cooperation and costly punishment in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game with punishment option

Mieth, L., Buchner, A. & Bell, R.

Sci Rep 11, 10221 (2021). 

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89675-6

Abstract

To determine the role of moral norms in cooperation and punishment, we examined the effects of a moral-framing manipulation in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game with a costly punishment option. In each round of the game, participants decided whether to cooperate or to defect. The Prisoner’s Dilemma game was identical for all participants with the exception that the behavioral options were paired with moral labels (“I cooperate” and “I cheat”) in the moral-framing condition and with neutral labels (“A” and “B”) in the neutral-framing condition. After each round of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, participants had the opportunity to invest some of their money to punish their partners. In two experiments, moral framing increased moral and hypocritical punishment: participants were more likely to punish partners for defection when moral labels were used than when neutral labels were used. When the participants’ cooperation was enforced by their partners’ moral punishment, moral framing did not only increase moral and hypocritical punishment but also cooperation. The results suggest that moral framing activates a cooperative norm that specifically increases moral and hypocritical punishment. Furthermore, the experience of moral punishment by the partners may increase the importance of social norms for cooperation, which may explain why moral framing effects on cooperation were found only when participants were subject to moral punishment.

General discussion

In human social life, a large variety of behaviors are regulated by social norms that set standards on how individuals should behave. One of these norms is the norm of cooperation. In many situations, people are expected to set aside their egoistic interests to achieve the collective best outcome. Within economic research, cooperation is often studied in social dilemma games. In these games, the complexities of human social interactions are reduced to their incentive structures. However, human behavior is not only determined by monetary incentives. There are many other important determinants of behavior among which social norms are especially powerful. The participants’ decisions in social dilemma situations are thus affected by their interpretation of whether a certain behavior is socially appropriate or inappropriate. Moral labels can help to reduce the ambiguity of the social dilemma game by creating associations to real-life cooperation norms. Thereby, the moral framing may support a moral interpretation of the social dilemma situation, resulting in the moral rejection of egoistic behaviors. Often, social norms are enforced by punishment. It has been argued “that the maintenance of social norms typically requires a punishment threat, as there are almost always some individuals whose self-interest tempts them to violate the norm” [p. 185]. 

The research is here.

Narrative media’s emphasis on distinct moral intuitions alters early adolescents’ judgments

Hahn, L., et al. (2021).

Journal of Media Psychology: 

Theories, Methods, and Applications. 

Advance online publication.

Abstract

Logic from the model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME) suggests that narrative media emphasizing moral intuitions can increase the salience of those intuitions in audiences. To date, support for this logic has been limited to adults. Across two studies, the present research tested MIME predictions in early adolescents (ages 10–14). The salience of care, fairness, loyalty, and authority intuitions was manipulated in a pilot study with verbal prompts (N = 87) and in the main study with a comic book (N = 107). In both studies, intuition salience was measured after induction. The pilot study demonstrated that exposure to verbal prompts emphasizing care, fairness, and loyalty increased the salience of their respective intuitions. The main study showed that exposure to comic books emphasizing all four separate intuitions increased salience of their respective intuitions in early adolescents. Results are discussed in terms of relevance for the MIME and understanding narrative media’s influence on children’s moral judgments. 

Conclusion

Moral education is often at the forefront of parents’ concern for their children’s well-being. Although there is value in directly teaching children moral principles through instruction about what to do or not do, our results support an indirect approach to socializing children’s morality (Haidt & Bjorklund, 2008). This first step at exploring narrative media’s ability to activate moral intuitions in young audiences should be accompanied by additional work examining how “direct route” lessons, such as those contained in the

Ten Commandments, may complement narrative media’s impact on children’s morality.

Our studies provide evidence supporting the MIME’s predictions about narrative content’s influence on moral intuition salience. Future research should build on these findings to examine whether this elevated intuition salience can influence broader values, judgments, and behaviors in children. Such examinations should be especially important for researchers interested in both the mechanism responsible for media’s influence and the extent of media’s impact on malleable, developing children, who may be socialized

by media content.

The research is here, behind a paywall.

A ScienceDirect summary is here.

Biological Essentialism Correlates with (But Doesn’t Cause?) Intergroup Bias

Bailey, A., & Knobe, J. 

(2021, September 17).

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/rx8jc

Abstract

People with biological essentialist beliefs about social groups also tend to endorse biased beliefs about individuals in those groups, including stereotypes, prejudices, and intensified emphasis on the group. These correlations could be due to biological essentialism causing bias, and some experimental studies support this causal direction. Given this prior work, we expected to find that biological essentialism would lead to increased bias compared to a control condition and set out to extend this prior work in a new direction (regarding “value-based” essentialism). But although the manipulation affected essentialist beliefs and essentialist beliefs were correlated with stereotyping (Studies 1, 2a, and 2b), prejudice (Studies 2a), and group emphasis (Study 3), there was no evidence that biological essentialism caused these outcomes. Given these findings, our initial research question became moot, and the present work focuses on reexamining the relationship between essentialism and bias. We discuss possible moderators, reverse causation, and third variables.

General Discussion

The present studies examined the relationship between biological essentialism and intergroup bias. As in prior work, we found that essentialist beliefs were correlated positively with stereotyping, including negative stereotyping, as well as group boundary intensification.  This positive relationship was found for essentialist thinking more generally (Studies 1, 2a, 2b, and 3) as well as specific beliefs in a biological essence (Studies 1, 2a, and 3). (New to this research, we also found similar positive correlations with beliefs in a value-based essence.) The internal meta-analysis for stereotyping confirmed a small but consistent positive relationship. Findings for prejudice were more mixed across studies consistent with more mixed findings in the prior literature even for correlational effects, but the internal meta-analysis indicated a small relationship between greater biological essentialism and less negative feelings toward the group(as in, e.g., Haslam & Levy, 2006, but see, Chen & Ratliff, 2018). 

Before conducting this research and based on the previous literature, we assumed that these correlational relationships would be due to essentialism causing intergroup bias. But although our experimental manipulations worked as designed to shift essentialist beliefs, there was no evidence that biological essentialism caused stereotyping, prejudice, or group boundary intensification.  The present studies thus suggest that a straightforward causal effect of essentialism on intergroup bias may be weaker or more complex than often described.

The research is here.

Ethics Pays: Summary for Businesses

Ethicalsystems.org

September 2021

Is good ethics good for business? Crime and sleazy behavior sometimes pay off handsomely. People would not do such things if they didn’t think they were more profitable than the alternatives.

But let us make two distinctions right up front. First, let us contrast individual employees with companies. Of course, it can benefit individual employees to lie, cheat, and steal when they can get away with it. But these benefits usually come at the expense of the firm and its shareholders, so leaders and managers should work very hard to design ethical systems that will discourage such self-serving behavior (known as the “principal-agent problem”).

The harder question is whether ethical violations committed by the firm or for the firm’s benefit are profitable. Cheating customers, avoiding taxes, circumventing costly regulations, and undermining competitors can all directly increase shareholder value.

And here we must make the second distinction: short-term vs. long-term. Of course, bad ethics can be extremely profitable in the short run. Business is a complex web of relationships, and it is easy to increase revenues or decrease costs by exploiting some of those relationships. But what happens in the long run?

Customers are happy and confident in knowing they’re dealing with an honest company. Ethical companies retain the bulk of their employees for the long-term, which reduces costs associated with turnover. Investors have peace of mind when they invest in companies that display good ethics because they feel assured that their funds are protected. Good ethics keep share prices high and protect businesses from takeovers.

Culture has a tremendous influence on ethics and its application in a business setting. A corporation’s ability to deliver ethical value is dependent on the state of its culture. The culture of a company influences the moral judgment of employees and stakeholders. Companies that work to create a strong ethical culture motivate everyone to speak and act with honesty and integrity. Companies that portray strong ethics attract customers to their products and services, and are far more likely to manage their negative environmental and social externalities well.

The information and research citations are here.

False Polarization: Cognitive Mechanisms and Potential Solutions

Fernbach PM, Van Boven L

Current Opinion in Psychology

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.06.005

Abstract

While political polarization in the United States is real, intense and increasing, partisans consistently overestimate its magnitude. This “false polarization” is insidious because it reinforces actual polarization and inhibits compromise. We review empirical research on false polarization and the related phenomenon of negative meta-perceptions, and we propose three cognitive and affective processes that likely contribute to these phenomena: categorical thinking, oversimplification and emotional amplification. Finally, we review several interventions that have shown promise in mitigating these biases. 

From the Solutions Section

Another idea is to encourage citizens to engage in deeper discourse about the issues than is the norm. One way to do this is through a “consensus conference,” where people on opposing sides of issues are brought together along with topic experts to learn and discuss over the course of hours or days, with the goal of coming to an agreement. The depth of analysis cuts against the tendency to oversimplify, and the face-to-face nature diminishes categorical thinking by highlighting individuality. The challenge of consensus conferences is scalability. They are resource intensive. However, a recent study showed that simply telling people about the outcome of a consensus conference can yield some of the beneficial effects.

The amplifying effects of anger can be targeted by emotional reappraisal through the lens of sadness; People who were induced to states of sadness rather than anger exhibited lower polarization and false polarization in the context of Hurricane Katrina and a mass shooting. In another study, induced sadness increased people’s willingness to negotiate and their openness to opponents’ perspectives. Sadness reappraisals are feasible in many challenging contexts involving threat to health and security, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, that are readily interpreted as saddening or angering.

The info is here.

Decision Prioritization and Causal Reasoning in Decision Hierarchies

Zylberberg, A. (2021, September 6). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/agt5s

Abstract

From cooking a meal to finding a route to a destination, many real life decisions can be decomposed into a hierarchy of sub-decisions. In a hierarchy, choosing which decision to think about requires planning over a potentially vast space of possible decision sequences. To gain insight into how people decide what to decide on, we studied a novel task that combines perceptual decision making, active sensing and hierarchical and counterfactual reasoning. Human participants had to find a target hidden at the lowest level of a decision tree. They could solicit information from the different nodes of the decision tree to gather noisy evidence about the target's location. Feedback was given only after errors at the leaf nodes and provided ambiguous evidence about the cause of the error. Despite the complexity of task (with 10 to 7th power latent states) participants were able to plan efficiently in the task. A computational model of this process identified a small number of heuristics of low computational complexity that accounted for human behavior. These heuristics include making categorical decisions at the branching points of the decision tree rather than carrying forward entire probability distributions, discarding sensory evidence deemed unreliable to make a choice, and using choice confidence to infer the cause of the error after an initial plan failed. Plans based on probabilistic inference or myopic sampling norms could not capture participants' behavior. Our results show that it is possible to identify hallmarks of heuristic planning with sensing in human behavior and that the use of tasks of intermediate complexity helps identify the rules underlying human ability to reason over decision hierarchies.

Discussion

Adaptive behavior requires making accurate decisions, but also knowing what decisions are worth making. To study how people decide what to decide on, we investigated a novel task in which people had to find a target, hidden at the lowest level of a decision tree, by gathering stochastic information from the internal nodes of the decision tree. Our central finding is that a small number of heuristic rules explain the participant’s behavior in this complex decision-making task. The study extends the perceptual decision framework to more complex decisions that comprise a hierarchy of sub-decisions of varying levels of difficulty, and where the decision maker has to actively decide which decision to address at any given time.  

Our task can be conceived as a sequence of binary decisions, or as one decision with eight alternatives.  Participants’ behavior supports the former interpretation.  Participants often performed multiple queries on the same node before descending levels, and they rarely made a transition from an internal node to a higher-level one before reaching a leaf node.  This indicates that participants made categorical decisions about the direction of motion at the visited nodes before they decided to descend levels. This bias toward resolving uncertainty locally was not observed in an approximately optimal policy (Fig. 8), and thus may reflect more general cognitive constraints that limit participants’ performance in our task (Markant et al., 2016). A strong candidate is the limited capacity of working memory (Miller, 1956). By reaching a categorical decision at each internal node, participants avoid the need to operate with full probability distributions over all task-relevant variables, favoring instead a strategy in which only the confidence about the motion choices is carried forward to inform future choices (Zylberberg et al., 2011).

A pdf of the research is here.

On Defining Moral Enhancement: A Clarificatory Taxonomy

Carl Jago

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Volume 95, July 2021, 104145

Abstract

In a series of studies, we ask whether and to what extent the base rate of a behavior influences associated moral judgment. Previous research aimed at answering different but related questions are suggestive of such an effect. However, these other investigations involve injunctive norms and special reference groups which are inappropriate for an examination of the effects of base rates per se. Across five studies, we find that, when properly isolated, base rates do indeed influence moral judgment, but they do so with only very small effect sizes. In another study, we test the possibility that the very limited influence of base rates on moral judgment could be a result of a general phenomenon such as the fundamental attribution error, which is not specific to moral judgment. The results suggest that moral judgment may be uniquely resilient to the influence of base rates. In a final pair of studies, we test secondary hypotheses that injunctive norms and special reference groups would inflate any influence on moral judgments relative to base rates alone. The results supported those hypotheses.

From the General Discussion

In multiple experiments aimed at examining the influence of base rates per se, we found that base rates do indeed influence judgments, but the size of the effect we observed was very small. We considered that, in

discovering moral judgments’ resilience to influence from base rates, we may have only rediscovered a general tendency, such as the fundamental attribution error, whereby people discount situational factors. If

so, this tendency would then also apply broadly to non-moral scenarios. We therefore conducted another study in which our experimental materials were modified so as to remove the moral components. We found a substantial base-rate effect on participants’ judgments of performance regarding non-moral behavior. This finding suggests that the resilience to base rates observed in the preceding studies is unlikely the result of amore general tendency, and may instead be unique to moral judgment.

The main reasons why we concluded that the results from the most closely related extant research could not answer the present research question were the involvement in those studies of injunctive norms and

special reference groups. To confirm that these factors could inflate any influence of base rates on moral judgment, in the final pair of studies, we modified our experiments so as to include them. Specifically, in one study, we crossed prescriptive and proscriptive injunctive norms with high and low base rates and found that the impact of an injunctive norm outweighs any impact of the base rate. In the other study, we found that simply mentioning, for example, that there were some good people among those who engaged in a high base-rate behavior resulted in a large effect on moral judgment; not only on judgments of the target’s character, but also on judgments of blame and wrongness. 

The research is here.

A brain implant that zaps away negative thoughts

Nicole Karlis

Salon.com

Originally published 14 OCT 21

Here is an excerpt:

Still, the prospect of clinicians manipulating and redirecting one's thoughts, using electricity, raises potential ethical conundrums for researchers — and philosophical conundrums for patients. 

"A person implanted with a closed-loop system to target their depressive episodes could find themselves unable to experience some depressive phenomenology when it is perfectly normal to experience this outcome, such as a funeral," said Frederic Gilbert Ph.D. Senior Lecturer in Ethics at the University of Tasmania, in an email to Salon. "A system program to administer a therapeutic response when detecting a specific biomarker will not capture faithfully the appropriateness of some context; automated invasive systems implanted in the brain might constantly step up in your decision-making . . . as a result, it might compromise you as a freely thinking agent."

Gilbert added there is the potential for misuse — and that raises novel moral questions. 

"There are potential degrees of misuse of some of the neuro-data pumping out of the brain (some believe these neuro-data may be our hidden and secretive thoughts)," Gilbert said. "The possibility of biomarking neuronal activities with AI introduces the plausibility to identify a large range of future applications (e.g. predicting aggressive outburst, addictive impulse, etc). It raises questions about the moral, legal and medical obligations to prevent foreseeable and harmful behaviour."

For these reasons, Gilbert added, it's important "at all costs" to "keep human control in the loop," in both activation and control of one's own neuro-data. 

The info is here.