What to Do If Your Job Compromises Your Morals

R. Carucci and L. N. Praslova

Harvard Business Review

Originally posted 29 APR 22

Here are two excerpts:

The emerging scholarship on reconciling the various terms used to describe responses to moral events points toward a continuum of moral harm. Of course, the complexity and variety of moral situations make any classification imperfect. Situations involving committing moral transgressions are more likely to lead to shame and guilt, while being a victim of betrayal is more likely to result in anger or sadness. In addition, there are also individual differences in sensitivity to morally distressing events, which can be determined by both biology and experience. Nevertheless, here is a useful summary:

• Moral challenges are isolated incidents of relatively low-stakes transgressions. For example, workers might be instructed to use lower-quality materials in creating a product (e.g., substituting a non-organic product when running out of organic). A manager may require an employee to stay late, as a rare exception. This may result in a somewhat distressing but transitory “moral frustration,” with moderate levels of anger or guilt.
• Moral stressors can lead to more significant moral distress. This may involve more substantial and/or regular moral transgressions — for example, a manager pushing employees to stay late several times every month, or an HR professional administering a morale survey knowing that the results will never be used, just like all the previous surveys. A dental practice may upsell patients on unnecessary, but not harmful treatments. This may result in negative moral emotions that are bothersome and might be lasting, but do not interfere with daily functioning. (However, in some nursing research, the experience referred to as “moral distress” is seen as very intense, possibly meeting the criteria for moral injury).
• Injurious events are the most egregious. Executives could pressure a manager into manipulating burned-out employees to regularly sacrifice their time off and well being, while the organization intentionally keeps positions open for months. A health care worker might be required to provide medical treatments that are likely to lead to more treatments even though a cure is available. Situations like these could result in a highly distressing moral injury in which negative moral emotions are sufficiently intense and frequent to interfere with daily functioning. In particular, a person may experience intense shame leading to self-isolation or self-harm, or may quit their job in disgust. This level of moral stress response is similar to and at least partially overlaps with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

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Moral injuries can leave lasting impacts on our psyche, but they don’t have to remain debilitating. Like other trauma and hurt, we can grow from them. We can find the resilience we need to rise above the injury and restore our moral centers. Sometimes we’re able to take the environments along on that journey, and sometimes we have to leave them. Either way, if you’re carrying the weight of moral injury, don’t wait until it overtakes your whole outlook on life, and yourself. Find the courage to face what you’ve experienced and done, and with it, reclaim the values you hold most dear.

The info is here.

Do You Still Believe in the “Chemical Imbalance Theory of Mental Illness”?

Bruce Levine

counterpunch.org

Originally published 29 APR 22

Here are two excerpts:

If you knew that psychiatric drugs—similar to other psychotropic substances such as marijuana and alcohol—merely “take the edge off” rather than correct a chemical imbalances, would you be more hesitant about using them, and more reluctant to give them to your children? Drug companies certainly believe you would be less inclined if you knew the truth, and that is why we were early on flooded with commercials about how antidepressants “work to correct this imbalance.”

So, when exactly did psychiatry discard its chemical imbalance theory? While researchers began jettisoning it by the 1990s, one of psychiatry’s first loud rejections was in 2011, when psychiatrist Ronald Pies, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, stated: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” Pies is not the highest-ranking psychiatrist to acknowledge the invalidity of the chemical imbalance theory.

Thomas Insel was the NIMH director from 2002 to 2015, and in his recently published book, Healing (2022), he notes, “The idea of mental illness as a ‘chemical imbalance’ has now given way to mental illnesses as ‘connectional’ or brain circuit disorders.” While this latest “brain circuit disorder” theory remains controversial, it is now consensus at the highest levels of psychiatry that the chemical imbalance theory is invalid.

The jettisoning of the chemical imbalance theory should have been uncontroversial twenty-five years ago, when it became clear to research scientists that it was a disproved hypothesis. In Blaming the Brain (1998), Elliot Valenstein, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, detailed research showing that it is just as likely for people with normal serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormal serotonin levels, and that it is just as likely for people with abnormally high serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormally low serotonin levels. Valenstein concluded, “Furthermore, there is no convincing evidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency.” But how many Americans heard about this?

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Apparently, authorities at the highest levels have long known that the chemical imbalance theory was a disproven hypothesis, but they have viewed it as a useful “noble lie” to encourage medication use.

If you took SSRI antidepressants believing that these drugs helped correct a chemical imbalance, how does it feel to learn that this theory has long been disproven? Will this affect your trust of current and future claims by psychiatry? Were you prescribed an antidepressant not from a psychiatrist but from your primary care physician, and will this make you anxious about trusting all healthcare authorities?

The info is here.

Illusory Feelings, Elusive Habits: People Overlook Habits in Explanations of Behavior

Mazar, A., & Wood, W. (2022).

Psychological science, 33(4), 563–578

https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211045345

Abstract

Habits underlie much of human behavior. However, people may prefer agentic accounts that overlook habits in favor of inner states, such as mood. We tested this misattribution hypothesis in an online experiment of helping behavior (N = 809 adults) as well as in an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study of U.S. college students' everyday coffee drinking (N = 112). Both studies revealed a substantial gap between perceived and actual drivers of behavior: Habit strength outperformed or matched inner states in predicting behavior, but participants' explanations of their behavior emphasized inner states. Participants continued to misattribute habits to inner states when incentivized for accuracy and when explaining other people's behavior. We discuss how this misperception could adversely influence self-regulation.

General Discussion

In two studies, participants’ attributions overemphasized inner states and underemphasized habit. Participants’ actual willingness to donate time in a laboratory task as well as their everyday coffee drinking were determined as much or more by habits than by inner states (mood and fatigue, respectively). However, participants’ attributions for why they acted the way they did emphasized inner states more than habit. Thus, participants appear to be both undervaluing habit compared with its actual influence on behavior and overvaluing inner states such as mood and fatigue. This pattern is understandable given the  disproportionate value people place on personal introspections (Pronin, 2009) as well as general information- and motivation-based tendencies to interpret actions as goal-directed (Rosset, 2008). Through these forces, people may form socially-shared lay theories about behavior that inform their attributions. This lure of phenomenology not only biases lay theories but also may have oriented psychological theories to overvalue salient, motivational determinants of behavior (Duckworth et al., 2016).

The combination of experimental manipulation in Study 1 and naturalistic observation in Study 2 provides evidence for the causal role of habits as well as the relevance of this attribution bias in everyday settings. Furthermore, the results replicated across the different measures of habit strength appropriate in these different tasks: Study 1’s manipulation of practice along with a reaction time measure; Study 2’s self-report measures of behavioral repetition in a given context (a determinant of habit formation) and experienced automaticity (a consequence of habit formation); and Study 2’s exploratory within-person, context-specific habit measure tapping participants’ history of repetition in specific situations.  

The research is here.

Editor's note: Important data with direct implications for psychotherapy.

Bombshell 400-page report finds Southern Baptist leaders routinely silenced sexual abuse survivors

Robert Downen and John Tedesco

Houston Chronicle

Originally posted 22 MAY 22

For 20 years, leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention — including a former president now accused of sexual assault — routinely silenced and disparaged sexual abuse survivors, ignored calls for policies to stop predators, and dismissed reforms that they privately said could protect children but might cost the SBC money if abuse victims later sued.

Those are just a few findings of a bombshell, third-party investigation into decades of alleged misconduct by Southern Baptist leaders that was released Sunday, nearly a year after 15,000 SBC church delegates demanded their executive committee turn over confidential documents and communications as part of an independent review of abuse reports that were purportedly mishandled or concealed since 2000.

The historic, nearly 400-page report details how a small, insular and influential group of leaders “singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations” to prevent abuse. The report was published by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm that conducted 330 interviews and reviewed two decades of internal SBC files in the seven-month investigation.

“Survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its (structure) — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation,” Guidepost’s report concluded.

Guidepost investigated the SBC’s 86-member executive committee, the convention’s highest governing entity. The firm’s investigators had unprecedented access to the SBC’s leadership and reviewed thousands of internal documents — including previously confidential communications between SBC lawyers.

The investigation sheds new and unprecedented light on the backroom politicking and deceit that has stymied attempts at reforms and allowed for widespread mistreatment of child sexual abuse victims. And it exhaustively corroborates what many survivors have said for decades: that Southern Baptist leaders downplayed their own abuse crisis and instead prioritized shielding the SBC – and its hundreds of millions of dollars in annual donations — from lawsuits by abuse victims.

Among the findings:

A small group of SBC leaders routinely misled other members of the SBC’s executive committee on abuse issues, and rarely mentioned the frequent and persistent warnings and pleas for help from survivors.

• Fearing lawsuits, leaders similarly failed to inform the SBC’s 15 million members that predators and pedophiles were targeting churches.
• Longtime SBC leaders kept a private list of abusive pastors and ministers despite claiming for years that such an idea was impractical for stopping predators and impossible to adopt because of the SBC’s decentralized structure. Compiled since 2007, the roster contained the names of 703 offenders, most with an SBC connection. A few still work at churches in the SBC or other denominations.
• Former SBC President Johnny Hunt is accused of sexually assaulting a woman weeks after his presidential tenure ended in 2010. The woman said Hunt manipulated her into silence by saying a disclosure of the incident would harm the SBC’s churches. Four other people corroborated much of the woman’s allegations to Guidepost. Hunt denied the allegations, but resigned from the SBC’s North American Mission Board days before the report was published.

The article is here.

The report is here.

Recognizing and Dismantling Raciolinguistic Hierarchies in Latinx Health

Ortega, P., et al.

AMA J Ethics. 2022;24(4):E296-304.

doi: 10.1001/amajethics.2022.296.

Abstract

Latinx individuals represent a linguistically and racially diverse, growing US patient population. Raciolinguistics considers intersections of language and race, prioritizes lived experiences of non-English speakers, and can help clinicians more deftly conceptualize heterogeneity and complexity in Latinx health experiences. This article discusses how raciolinguistic hierarchies (ie, practices of attaching social value to some languages but not others) can undermine the quality of Latinx patients’ health experiences. This article also offers language-appropriate clinical and educational strategies for promoting health equity.

Raciolinguistics

Hispanic/Latinx (hereafter, Latinx) individuals in the United States represent a culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse and rapidly growing population. Attempting to categorize all Latinx individuals in a single homogeneous group may result in inappropriate stereotyping,1 inaccurate counting,2, 3 ineffective health interventions that insufficiently target at-risk subgroups,4 and suboptimal health communication.5 A more helpful approach is to use raciolinguistics to conceptualize the heterogeneous, complex Latinx experience as it relates to health. Raciolinguistics is the study of the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of race and language and their intertwining in the identities of individuals and communities. As an emerging field that grapples with the intersectionality of language and race, raciolinguistics provides a unique perspective on the lived experiences of people who speak non-English languages and people of color.6 As such, understanding raciolinguistics is relevant to providing language-concordant care7 to patients with limited English proficiency (LEP), who have been historically marginalized by structural barriers, racism, and other forms of discrimination in health care.

In this manuscript, we explore how raciolinguistics can help clinicians to appropriately conceptualize the heterogeneous, complex Latinx experience as it relates to health care. We then use the raciolinguistic perspective to inform strategies to dismantle structural barriers to health equity for Latinx patients pertaining to (1) Latinx patients’ health care experiences and (2) medical education.

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Conclusions

A raciolinguistic perspective can inform how health care practices and medical education should be critically examined to support Latinx populations comprising heterogeneous communities and complex individuals with varying and intersecting cultural, social, linguistic, racial, ancestral, spiritual, and other characteristics. Future studies should explore the outcomes of raciolinguistic reforms of health services and educational interventions across the health professions to ensure effectiveness in improving health care for Latinx patients.

The info is here.

Is there a relationship between spirituality/religiosity and resilience? A systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies

Schwalm, S.D., Zandavalli, R. B., et al.

J Health Psychol. 2022 

Apr;27(5):1218-1232.

doi: 10.1177/1359105320984537.

Abstract

Resilience is the ability to recover or cope with adverse situations. Spiritual and religious beliefs may be associated with important "resilience resources." To investigate whether there is a relationship between spirituality/religiosity (S/R) and resilience. This is a systematic review (observational studies) with meta-analysis following the PRISMA guidelines. From a total of 2468 articles, 34 observational studies were included. We identified a moderate positive correlation between S/R and resilience (r = 0.40 (95% CI, 0.32-0.48], p < 0.01). When only high-quality articles were included, the results were maintained. Conclusion: A moderate positive correlation was found between S/R and resilience.

Discussion

The results presented in this review showed a moderate correlation between S/R and resilience, and these findings were maintained even when only high-quality studies were included in the meta-analysis. In addition, subgroup analyses revealed that spirituality measures seem to be strongly correlated with resilience as compared to religiosity measures. Understanding this association can help researchers, health professionals, and administrators to develop preventive strategies to stimulate resilience in their patients and to design future studies in this area.

Many studies have evaluated the association between S/R and resilience presenting similar results. Fangauf (2014), evaluated 343 persons from three different ethnicities and found a correlation of 0.53; Han et al. (2016) measured this association in 898 Chinese volunteers after the 2008 Qiang earthquake and found a correlation of 0.40, and Howel and Miller-Graff (2014) assessed 321 American students who were victims of childhood violence, finding a correlation of 0.38. Despite the fact that there is a wide array of evidence linking S/R and resilience, so far we have not identified systematic reviews on the topic. These previous studies corroborate our meta-analysis, which found a moderate correlation between S/R and resilience, even when including only high-quality studies.

A pdf is here.

Cross-Cultural Variation in Cooperation: A Meta-Analysis

Spadaro, G., Graf, C., et al. (2022). 

Journal of personality and social psychology.

Advance online publication. 

https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000389

Abstract

Impersonal cooperation among strangers enables societies to create valuable public goods, such as infrastructure, public services, and democracy. Several factors have been proposed to explain variation in impersonal cooperation across societies, referring to institutions (e.g., rule of law), religion (e.g., belief in God as a third-party punisher), cultural beliefs (e.g., trust) and values (e.g., collectivism), and ecology (e.g., relational mobility). We tested 17 pre-registered hypotheses in a meta-analysis of 1,506 studies of impersonal cooperation in social dilemmas (e.g., the Public Goods Game) conducted across 70 societies (k = 2,271), where people make costly decisions to cooperate among strangers. After controlling for 10 study characteristics that can affect the outcome of studies, we found very little cross-societal variation in impersonal cooperation. Categorizing societies into cultural groups explained no variance in cooperation. Similarly, cultural, ancestral, and linguistic distance between societies explained little variance in cooperation. None of the cross-societal factors hypothesized to relate to impersonal cooperation explained variance in cooperation across societies. We replicated these conclusions when meta-analyzing 514 studies across 41 states and nine regions in the United States (k = 783). Thus, we observed that impersonal cooperation occurred in all societies – and to a similar degree across societies – suggesting that prior research may have overemphasized the magnitude of differences between modern societies in impersonal cooperation. We discuss the discrepancy between theory, past empirical research and the meta-analysis, address a limitation of experimental research on cooperation to study culture, and raise possible directions for future research.

From the Discussion

In the present meta-analysis, we found little variation in impersonal cooperation across 70 societies and 8 cultural groups. In fact, we found no significant differences in cooperation between cultural groups, which suggests there is little variation both within and between cultures. Moreover, linguistic and cultural distance between each pair of societies were only weakly related to differences in cooperation between societies, and genetic distance was not significantly associated with cooperation. If there existed substantial, systematic differences between societies in impersonal cooperation, we would expect a strong association between cultural distance and cooperation. Furthermore, we gathered all the societal indicators that have been hypothesized to explain cross-societal variation in impersonal cooperation and found that none of these were associated with cooperation. We also analyzed variation in cooperation across U.S. states and regions and found mixed evidence for variation in cooperation across the US. Contrary to what we observed within the global data, we found some variation in cooperation across U.S. regions, but only in one out of eight comparisons (i.e., South Atlantic region vs. East North Central region). That said, we did not find evidence for any between-state variation in cooperation.

The research is here.

Copy the In-group: Group Membership Trumps Perceived Reliability, Warmth, and Competence in a Social-Learning Task

Montrey, M., & Shultz, T. R. (2022). 

Psychological Science, 33(1), 165–174.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211032224

Abstract

Surprisingly little is known about how social groups influence social learning. Although several studies have shown that people prefer to copy in-group members, these studies have failed to resolve whether group membership genuinely affects who is copied or whether group membership merely correlates with other known factors, such as similarity and familiarity. Using the minimal-group paradigm, we disentangled these effects in an online social-learning game. In a sample of 540 adults, we found a robust in-group-copying bias that (a) was bolstered by a preference for observing in-group members; (b) overrode perceived reliability, warmth, and competence; (c) grew stronger when social information was scarce; and (d) even caused cultural divergence between intermixed groups. These results suggest that people genuinely employ a copy-the-in-group social-learning strategy, which could help explain how inefficient behaviors spread through social learning and how humans maintain the cultural diversity needed for cumulative cultural evolution.

Discussion

Although previous studies have found an apparent in-group bias in social learning, they have failed to resolve whether this constitutes a genuine social-learning strategy or a mere confluence of other factors (Buttelmann et al., 2013; Howard et al., 2015). Our study disentangled group membership from similarity and familiarity by assigning group membership at random. We found that rather than eliminating the preference for in-group members, this approach resulted in a robust in-group-copying bias, which (a) was bolstered by a tendency to observe in-group members, (b) overrode participants’ stated beliefs, (c) grew stronger when social information was scarce, and (d) even caused cultural divergence between intermixed groups. Taken together, our findings suggest that people genuinely employ a copy-the-in-group strategy and that group membership has both a direct and indirect effect on copying.

Why might a copy-the-in-group strategy have evolved in the first place? One reason could be that it allowed humans to rapidly adopt and vigorously maintain group norms that enhance coordination (McElreath et al., 2003) or promote cooperation (Boyd & Richerson, 2009). Another reason could be that social learning is useful only to the extent that adopting other people’s behavior yields similar payoffs (Laland, 2004). For example, copying out-group members could be less efficient or even counterproductive if groups differ in terms of what behavior is punished or rewarded. Finally, such a strategy could also have evolved because it minimized the risk of deception. Because social learning is essentially information scrounging (Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002), in which the copier benefits from other people’s knowledge without incurring the same costs, knowledgeable individuals have an incentive to mislead others. However, this incentive is minimized when observed individuals have a vested interest in the copier’s success. This holds true in kin relationships (Laland, 2004) and likely generalizes to other settings, such as intergroup competition.

The research is here.

“Google Told Me So!” On the Bent Testimony of Search Engine Algorithms.

Narayanan, D., De Cremer, D.

Philos. Technol. 35, 22 (2022).

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00521-7

Abstract

Search engines are important contemporary sources of information and contribute to shaping our beliefs about the world. Each time they are consulted, various algorithms filter and order content to show us relevant results for the inputted search query. Because these search engines are frequently and widely consulted, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of the distinctively epistemic role that these algorithms play in the background of our online experiences. To aid in such understanding, this paper argues that search engine algorithms are providers of “bent testimony”—that, within certain contexts of interactions, users act as if these algorithms provide us with testimony—and acquire or alter beliefs on that basis. Specifically, we treat search engine algorithms as if they were asserting as true the content ordered at the top of a search results page—which has interesting parallels with how we might treat an ordinary testifier. As such, existing discussions in the philosophy of testimony can help us better understand and, in turn, improve our interactions with search engines. By explicating the mechanisms by which we come to accept this “bent testimony,” our paper discusses methods to help us control our epistemic reliance on search engine algorithms and clarifies the normative expectations one ought to place on the search engines that deploy these algorithms.

Conclusion 

We have argued here that search engine algorithms provide us with a kind of testimony when they bring to fore some pieces of content for us to engage with and push behind others. This testimony is “bent,” because: 

(1) We treat these algorithms as if they are recommending to us the content that they feature at the top of a search results list, trusting that this content is more likely to contain true claims.

(2) There are disputed norms of communication about whether the recommendation of a piece of content counts as an assertion of its claims.

An understanding of this mechanism of bent testimony shows us how to control our reliance on it, if we so desired. Decreasing our reliance on this bent testimony entails decreasing our credence in the belief that the content ordered at the top of a search engine is any likelier to contain true claims. Further, we have argued that we ought to treat search engines as if they were testifiers. By having comparable expectations between search engines and ordinary testifiers, we would be able to pursue policy and legal interventions that befit the outsized role that these search engines seem to play when we acquire beliefs online.

A pdf is here.