Hate and meaning in life: How collective, but not personal, hate quells threat and spurs meaning in life

A. Elnakouri, C. Hubley, & I. McGregor

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Volume 98, January 2022,

Abstract

Classic and contemporary perspectives link meaning in life to the pursuit of a significant purpose, free from incoherence. The typical assumption is that these meaningful purposes are prosocial, or at least benign. Here, we tested whether hate might also bolster meaning in life, via motivational states underlying significant purpose and coherence. In two studies (N = 847; Study 2 pre-registered), describing hatred (vs. mere dislike) towards collective entities (societal phenomena, institutions, groups), but not individuals, heightened feelings linked to the behavioral approach system (BAS; eagerness, determination, enthusiasm), which underlies a sense of significant purpose, and muted feelings linked to threat and the behavioral inhibition system (BIS; confused, uncertain, conflicted), which underlies a sense of incoherence. This high BAS and low BIS, in turn, predicted meaning in life beyond pre-manipulation levels. Exploratory analyses suggested that personal hatreds did not have the meaning-bolstering effects that collective hatreds had due to meaning-dampening negative feelings. Discussion focuses on motivation for collective and ideological hatreds in threatening circumstances.

Conclusion 

Classic and contemporary  theories in psychology  and beyond pro-pose that various threats can cause zealous responses linked to collective hate  (Arendt,  1951;  Freud,  1937;  Jonas  et  al.,  2014).  The  present research offers one reason behind the appeal of collective hate in such circumstances: it’s ability to spur meaning in life. Shielded from the negativity of personal hate, collective forms of hate can mute threat and BIS-related  feelings,  boost  BAS-related  feelings,  thereby  fostering meaning in life. This research therefore helps us better understand the motivational drivers of hate and why it is an ever-present feature of the human condition.

A pdf of the research is here.

Paranoia, self-deception and overconfidence

Rossi-Goldthorpe RA, et al (2021) 

PLoS Comput Biol 17(10): e1009453. 

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009453

Abstract

Self-deception, paranoia, and overconfidence involve misbeliefs about the self, others, and world. They are often considered mistaken. Here we explore whether they might be adaptive, and further, whether they might be explicable in Bayesian terms. We administered a difficult perceptual judgment task with and without social influence (suggestions from a cooperating or competing partner). Crucially, the social influence was uninformative. We found that participants heeded the suggestions most under the most uncertain conditions and that they did so with high confidence, particularly if they were more paranoid. Model fitting to participant behavior revealed that their prior beliefs changed depending on whether the partner was a collaborator or competitor, however, those beliefs did not differ as a function of paranoia. Instead, paranoia, self-deception, and overconfidence were associated with participants’ perceived instability of their own performance. These data are consistent with the idea that self-deception, paranoia, and overconfidence flourish under uncertainty, and have their roots in low self-esteem, rather than excessive social concern. The model suggests that spurious beliefs can have value–self-deception is irrational yet can facilitate optimal behavior. This occurs even at the expense of monetary rewards, perhaps explaining why self-deception and paranoia contribute to costly decisions which can spark financial crashes and devastating wars.

Author summary

Paranoia is the belief that others intend to harm you. Some people think that paranoia evolved to serve a collational function and should thus be related to the mechanisms of group membership and reputation management. Others have argued that its roots are much more basic, being based instead in how the individual models and anticipates their world–even non-social things. To adjudicate we gave participants a difficult perceptual decision-making task, during which they received advice on what to decide from a partner, who was either a collaborator (in their group) or a competitor (outside of their group). Using computational modeling of participant choices which allowed us to estimate the role of social and non-social processes in the decision, we found that the manipulation worked: people placed a stronger prior weight on the advice from a collaborator compared to a competitor. However, paranoia did not interact with this effect. Instead, paranoia was associated with participants’ beliefs about their own performance. When those beliefs were poor, paranoid participants relied heavily on the advice, even when it contradicted the evidence. Thus, we find a mechanistic link between paranoia, self-deception, and over confidence.

The research is here.

APF Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Practice of Psychology: Samuel Knapp

American Psychologist, 76(5), 812–814. 

https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000894

This award recognizes a distinguished career and enduring contribution to the practice of psychology. Samuel Knapp’s long, distinguished career has resulted in demonstrable effects and significant contributions to best practices in professionalism, ethics education, positive ethics, and legislative advocacy as Director of Professional Affairs for the Pennsylvania Psychological Association and as an ethics educator extraordinaire. Dr. Knapp’s work has modified the way psychologists think about professional ethics through education, from avoiding disciplinary consequences to promoting overarching ethical principles to achieve the highest standards of ethical behavior. His focus on respectful collaboration among psychologists promotes honesty through nonjudgmental conversations. His Ethics Educators Workshop and other continuing education programs have brought together psychology practitioners and faculty to focus deeply on ethics and resulted in the development of the APA Ethics Educators Award.

From the Biography section

Ethics education became especially important in Pennsylvania when the Pennsylvania State Board of Psychology mandated ethics as part of its continuing education requirement. But even before that, members of the PPA Ethics Committee and Board of Directors, saw ethics education as a vehicle to help psychologists to improve the quality of their services to their patients. Also, to the extent that ethics education can help promote good decision-making, it could also reduce the emotional burden that professional psychologists often feel when faced with difficult ethical situations. Often the continuing education programs were interactive with the secondary goals of helping psychologists to build contacts with each other and an opportunity for the presenters to promote authentic and compassion-driven approaches to teaching ethics. Yes, Sam and the other PPA Ethics educators, such as the PPA attorney Rachael Baturin, also taught the laws, ethics codes, and the risk management strategies. facts.  But these were only one component of PPA’s ethics education program. More important was the development of a cadre of psychologists/ethicists who taught most of these continuing education programs.

The full award is here.

Moral masters or moral apprentices? A connectionist account of sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants

Benton, D. T., & Lapan, C. 

(2021, February 21). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/mnh35

Abstract

Numerous studies suggest that preverbal infants possess the ability to make sociomoral judgements and demonstrate a preference for prosocial agents. Some theorists argue that infants possess an “innate moral core” that guides their sociomoral reasoning. However, we propose that infants’ capacity for putative sociomoral evaluation and reasoning can just as likely be driven by a domain-general associative-learning mechanism that is sensitive to agent action. We implement this theoretical account in a connectionist computational model and show that it can account for the pattern of results in Hamlin et al. (2007), Hamlin and Wynn (2011), Hamlin (2013), and Hamlin, Wynn, Bloom, and Mahajan (2011). These are pioneering studies in this area and were among the first to examine sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants. Based on the results of 5 computer simulations, we suggest that an associative-learning mechanism—instantiated as a computational (connectionist) model—can account for previous findings on preverbal infants’ capacity for sociomoral evaluation. These results suggest that an innate moral core may not be necessary to account for sociomoral evaluation in infants.

From the General Discussion

The simulations suggest the preverbal infants’ reliable choice of helpers over hinderers inHamlin et al. (2007), Hamlin and Wynn (2011), Hamlin (2013), and Hamlin et al. (2011) could have been based on extensive real-world experience with various kinds of actions (e.g., concordant action and discordant action) and an expectation—based on a learned second-order correlation—that agents that engage in certain kinds of actions (e.g., concordant action) have the capacity for interaction, whereas agents that engage in certain kinds of other actions (e.g., discordant action) either do not have the capacity for interaction or have less of a capacity for it. 

Broadly, these results are consistent with work by Powell and Spelke (2018). They found that 4- to 5½-month-old infants looked longer at characters that engaged in concordant (i.e., imitative) action with other characters than characters that engaged in discordant (i.e., non-imitative) action with other characters (Exps. 1 and 2). Specifically, infants looked longer at characters that engaged in the same jumping motion and made the same sound as a target character than those characters that engaged in the same jumping motion but made a different sound than the target character. Our results are also consistent with their finding—which was based on a conceptual replication of Hamlin et al. (2007)—that 12-month-olds reliably reached for a character that engaged in concordant (i.e., imitative) action with the climber than a character that engaged in discordant (i.e., non-imitative) action with it (Exp. 4), even when those actions were non-social. 

The research is here.

The Moral Identity Picture Scale (MIPS): Measuring the Full Scope of Moral Identity

Amelia Goranson, Connor O’Fallon, & Kurt Gray

Research Paper, in press

Abstract

Morality is core to people’s identity. Existing moral identity scales measure good/moral vs. bad/immoral, but the Theory of Dyadic Morality highlights two-dimensions of morality: valence (good/moral vs. bad/immoral) and agency (high/agent vs. low/recipient). The Moral Identity Picture Scale (MIPS) measures this full space through 16 vivid pictures. Participants receive scores for each of four moral roles: hero, villain, victim, and beneficiary. The MIPS can also provide summary scores for good, evil, agent, and patient, and possesses test-retest reliability and convergent/divergent validity. Self-identified heroes are more empathic and higher in locus of control, villains are less agreeable and higher in narcissism, victims are higher in depression and lower in self-efficacy, and beneficiaries are lower in Machiavellianism. Although people generally see themselves as heroes, comparisons across known-groups reveals relative differences: Duke MBA students self-identify more as villains, UNC social work students self identify more as heroes, and workplace bullying victims self-identify more as victims. Data also reveals that the beneficiary role is ill-defined, collapsing the two-dimensional space of moral identity into a triangle anchored by hero, villain, and victim.

From the Discussion

We hope that, in providing this new measure of moral identity, future work can examine a broader sense of the moral world—beyond simple identifications of good vs. evil—using our expanded measure that captures not only valence but also role as a moral agent or patient. This measure expands upon previous measures related to moral identity (e.g., Aquino & Reed, 2002; Barriga et al., 2001; Reimer & Wade-Stein, 2004), replicating prior work that we divide the moral world up into good and evil, but demonstrating that the moral identification space includes another component as well: moral agency and moral patiency. Most past work has examined this “agent” side of moral identity—heroes and villains—but we can gain a fuller and more nuanced view of the moral world if we also examine their counterparts—moral patients/recipients. The MIPS provides us with the ability to examine moral identity across these 2 dimensions of valence (positive vs. negative) and agency (agent vs. patient). 

The research is here.

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.