What is 'purity'? Conceptual murkiness in moral psychology

Gray, K., DiMaggio, N., Schein, C., 

& Kachanoff, F. (2021, February 3). 

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

Abstract

Purity is an important topic in psychology. It has a long history in moral discourse, has helped catalyze paradigm shifts in moral psychology, and is thought to underlie political differences. But what exactly is “purity?” To answer this question, we review the history of purity and then systematically examine 158 psychology papers that define and operationalization (im)purity. In contrast to the many concepts defined by what they are, purity is often understood by what it isn’t—obvious dyadic harm. Because of this “contra”-harm understanding, definitions and operationalizations of purity are quite varied. Acts used to operationalize impurity include taking drugs, eating your sister’s scab, vandalizing a church, wearing unmatched clothes, buying music with sexually explicit lyrics, and having a messy house. This heterogeneity makes purity a “chimera”—an entity composed of various distinct elements. Our review reveals that the “contra-chimera” of purity has 9 different scientific understandings, and that most papers define purity differently from how they operationalize it. Although people clearly moralize diverse concerns—including those related to religion, sex, and food—such heterogeneity in conceptual definitions is problematic for theory development. Shifting definitions of purity provide “theoretical degrees of freedom” that make falsification extremely difficult. Doubts about the coherence and consistency of purity raise questions about key purity-related claims of modern moral psychology, including the nature of political differences and the cognitive foundations of moral judgment.

Conclusion

Purity is an ancient concept that has moved from historical religious rhetoric to modern moral psychology.  Many things have changed in this leap—Dr. Kellogg would never have imagined a scientific discipline catalyzed by loving incest—but purity still seems to be a heterogeneous concept with diverse understandings. This diversity makes purity an exciting topic to study, but our review suggests that purity lacks a common core, beyond involving acts that are less-than-obviously harmful.  Without a consistent and non-tautological understanding of purity, it is difficult to argue that purity is a unique and distinct construct, and it is impossible to argue for a mental mechanism dedicated to purity. It is clear, however, that purity is featured in moral rhetoric and can help shed light on cultural differences. Moving forward, we suggest that the field should unpack the richness of purity and individually explore its many understanding. When conducting this research, we should consider not only what purity isn’t, but what it really is.

The research is here.

The global belief that "life gets better and better"

Busseri M. A. (2022).

Journal of personality and social 

psychology, 123(1), 223–247.

https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000415

Abstract

National-level differences in individuals' ratings of their recollected past, current, and anticipated future life satisfaction (LS) were examined using results from two pioneering projects comprising national-level results for 14 countries (Cantril, 1965) and 15 regions of the world (Gallup International Research Institutes & Charles F. Kettering Foundation, 1976; Study 1), as well as sequential results from the Gallup World Poll based on 137 countries representing a broad range of nations from around the world surveyed from 2005 to 2018 (Study 2). Results from both studies revealed a robust belief that "life gets better" over time (i.e., recollected past < current < anticipated future LS) in nations around the world. Such beliefs were examined in relation to objective and subjective indicators of societal-level functioning. Results replicated across studies in showing that nations with less positive societal functioning and prosperity were characterized by less recollected past improvements in LS, and yet greater anticipated future improvements in LS. Results from Study 2 also revealed that such expectations were positively biased compared to changes over time in national levels of LS; further, greater bias was related to less positive societal-level functioning. In conclusion, examining national-level differences in LS from a subjective temporal perspective provides valuable new insights concerning human development and prosperity across countries, over time, and around the world. 

From the General Discussion

Together, such findings suggest that the belief that life gets increasingly satisfying over time, particularly into the future, is nearly universal at a national level. What might explain the widespread (but typically erroneous) conviction that life becomes increasingly satisfying over time? This belief may be a reflection,

in part, of the positive historical trajectory of human development and economic prosperity found around the world. Indeed, as suggested by the historical trends observed both in Study 1 across a 10-year period during the 1960s and 1970s, and in Study 2 across a 13-year period between 2005 and 2018, objective indicators of human development and socioeconomic prosperity generally increased consistently over time. The inclining subjective LS trajectories observed in nations around the world may thus reflect widespread awareness of such global improvements in societal functioning. Critically, however, in Study 2 very high levels of stability were found for each of the indicators of societal functioning and a high preponderance of variance in such indicators was observed between nations, rather than within countries over time.

Further, despite the general trend toward improvements in societal level functioning over time, many nations were not characterized by statistically reliable changes (decreases or increases) across the three

periods examined. Also noteworthy, results concerning unique associations between national-level differences in the subjective LS trajectories and societal-level functioning were inconsistent across periods and functioning indicators. Thus, it appears that the widespread belief that LS gets better and better is not merely a reflection of how life generally changes over time.

The research is here.

Thematic analysis and natural language processing of job-related problems prior to physician suicide in 2003-2018

Kim, K., et al. (2022). 

Suicide & life-threatening behavior

Advance online publication. 

https://doi.org/10.1111/sltb.12896

Abstract

Introduction: Although previous studies have consistently demonstrated that physicians are more likely than non-physicians to experience work-related stressors prior to suicide, the specific nature of these stressors remains unknown. The current study aimed to better characterize job-related problems prior to physician suicide.

Methods: The study utilized a mixed methods approach combining thematic analysis and natural language processing to develop themes representing death investigation narratives of 200 physician suicides with implicated job problems in the National Violent Death Reporting System database between 2003 and 2018.

Results: Through thematic analysis, six overarching themes were identified: incapacity to work due to deterioration of physical health, substance use jeopardizing employment, interaction between mental health and work-related issues, relationship conflict affecting work, legal problems leading to work-related stress, and increased financial stress. Natural language processing analysis confirmed five of these themes and elucidated important subthemes.

Conclusions: This is the first known study that integrated thematic analysis and natural language processing to characterize work-related stressors preceding physician suicide. The findings highlight the importance of bolstering systemic support for physicians experiencing job problems associated with their physical and mental health, substance use, relationships, legal matters, and finances in suicide prevention efforts.

The research is here.

These six themes are:

• an incapacity to work due to deterioration of physical health, 
• substance use that was jeopardizing employment, 
• the interaction between mental health and work-related issues, 
• relationship conflicts affecting work, 
• legal problems, and 
• increased financial stress.

Justice Alito's bad theology: Abortion foes don't have "morality" on their side

E. M. Freese & A. T. Taylor

Salon.com

Originally posted 26 JUL 22

Here is an excerpt:

Morality has thus become the reigning justification for the state to infringe upon the liberty of female Americans and to subjugate their reproductive labor to its power. An interrogation of this morality, however, reveals that it is underpinned by a theology that both erases and assumes the subjugation of female gestational labor in procreation to patriarchy. We must shatter this male-dominant moral logic and foreground female personhood and agency in order for every American to be equally free.

According to Alito, moral concern for "an unborn human being" apparently exempts pregnant people from the right to "liberty" otherwise guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. In other words, the supposed immorality of abortion is weighty enough to restrict bodily autonomy for all pregnant people in this country and to terrorize potentially pregnant females more broadly. This logic implies that pregnant people also lack 13th Amendment protection from "involuntary servitude," contrary to the strong argument made by legal scholar Michele Goodwin in a recent New York Times op-ed. Consequently, the court has now granted permission to states to force pregnant people to gestate against their will.

To be clear, the 13th and 14th Amendments are specifically about bodily autonomy and freedom from forced labor. They were created after the Civil War in an attempt to end slavery for good, and forced reproduction was correctly understood as a dimension of slavery. But Justice Alito asserts that abortion morality puts pregnant bodies in a "different" category with fewer rights. What, exactly, is the logic here?

At its heart, the theological premise of the anti-abortion argument is that male fertilization essentially equals procreation of a "life" that has equal moral and legal standing to a pregnant person, prior to any female gestation. In effect, this argument holds that the enormous female gestation labor over time, which is literally fundamental to the procreation of a viable "new life," can be ignored as a necessary precursor to the very existence of that life. On a practical level, this amounts to claiming that a habitable house exists at the stage of an architectural drawing, prior to any material labor by the general contractor and the construction workers who literally build it.

Abortion opponents draw upon the biblical story of creation found in the book of Genesis (chapters 1-3) to ostensibly ground their theology in tradition. But Genesis narrates that multiple participants labor at God's direction to create various forms of life through a material process over time, which actually contradicts a theology claiming that male fertilization equals instant-procreation. The real political value is the story's presumption of a male God's dominance and appropriation of others' labor for "His" ends. Using this frame, abortion opponents insert a "sovereign" God into the wombs of pregnant people — exactly at the moment of male fertilization. From that point, the colonization of the female body and female labor becomes not only morally acceptable, but necessary.

The info is here.

Blots on a Field? (A modern story of unethical research related to Alzheimer's)

Charles Pillar

Science Magazine

Originally posted 21 JUL 22

Here is an excerpt:

A 6-month investigation by Science provided strong support for Schrag’s suspicions and raised questions about Lesné’s research. A leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimer’s researchers—including George Perry of the University of Texas, San Antonio, and John Forsayeth of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—reviewed most of Schrag’s findings at Science’s request. They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.

The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”

Early this year, Schrag raised his doubts with NIH and journals including Nature; two, including Nature last week, have published expressions of concern about papers by Lesné. Schrag’s work, done independently of Vanderbilt and its medical center, implies millions of federal dollars may have been misspent on the research—and much more on related efforts. Some Alzheimer’s experts now suspect Lesné’s studies have misdirected Alzheimer’s research for 16 years.

“The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments,” says Stanford University neuroscientist Thomas Südhof, a Nobel laureate and expert on Alzheimer’s and related conditions.

Lesné did not respond to requests for comment. A UMN spokesperson says the university is reviewing complaints about his work.

To Schrag, the two disputed threads of Aβ research raise far-reaching questions about scientific integrity in the struggle to understand and cure Alzheimer’s. Some adherents of the amyloid hypothesis are too uncritical of work that seems to support it, he says. “Even if misconduct is rare, false ideas inserted into key nodes in our body of scientific knowledge can warp our understanding.”

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The paper provided an “important boost” to the amyloid and toxic oligomer hypotheses when they faced rising doubts, Südhof says. “Proponents loved it, because it seemed to be an independent validation of what they have been proposing for a long time.”

“That was a really big finding that kind of turned the field on its head,” partly because of Ashe’s impeccable imprimatur, Wilcock says. “It drove a lot of other investigators to … go looking for these [heavier] oligomer species.”

As Ashe’s star burned more brightly, Lesné’s rose. He joined UMN with his own NIH-funded lab in 2009. Aβ*56 remained a primary research focus. Megan Larson, who worked as a junior scientist for Lesné and is now a product manager at Bio-Techne, a biosciences supply company, calls him passionate, hardworking, and charismatic. She and others in the lab often ran experiments and produced Western blots, Larson says, but in their papers together, Lesné prepared all the images for publication.

The info is here.

U.S. drug overdose deaths reached all-time high in 2021, CDC says

Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

NBC.com

Originally posted 11 MAY 22

More than 107,600 Americans died from drug overdoses last year, the highest annual death toll on record, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.

Overdose deaths increased 15 percent in 2021, up from an estimated 93,655 fatalities the year prior, according to a report from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), which collects data on a range of health topics, including drug use.

While the total number of deaths reached record highs, the increase appeared to slow compared to the change seen from 2019 to 2020, when overdose deaths rose 30 percent, according to the report.

It's still too early to say whether that slowdown will hold, said Farida Ahmad, a scientist at the health statistics center. The agency's latest report is considered provisional, meaning the data is incomplete and subject to change.

Even if the increase in overdose deaths is smaller compared to last year, the 2021 total is still a huge number, Ahmad said.

The data helps illustrate one of the consequences of the pandemic, which has seen an uptick in substance abuse amid widespread unemployment and more Americans reporting mental health issues.

Overdose-related deaths were already increasing before the pandemic, but there was "clearly a very sharp uptick during the pandemic," said Joseph Friedman, an addiction researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. He published research in April that found drug overdose deaths among teenagers rose sharply over the last two years.

According to the NCHS report, fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, was involved in the most overdose deaths in 2021: 71,238.

The info is here.

Morally Exhausted: Why Russian Soldiers are Refusing to Fight in the Unprovoked War on Ukraine

Tіmofеі Rоzhаnskіy

Syndicated

Originally posted 23 July 22

Here is an excerpt:

I Had To Refuse So I Could Stay Alive

Russia’s troops in Ukraine are largely made up of contract soldiers: volunteer personnel who sign fixed-term contracts for service. The range of experience varies. Other units include troops from private military companies like Vagner, or specialized, semiautonomous units overseen by Chechnya’s strongman leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.

The discontent in Kaminsky’s 11th Brigade is not an isolated case, and there are indications that Russian commanders are trying different tactics to keep the problem from spiraling out of control: for example, publicly shaming soldiers who are refusing to fight.

In Buryatia, where the 11th Brigade is based, dozens of personnel have sought legal assistance from local activists, seeking to break their contracts and get out of service in Ukraine, for various reasons.

In the southern Russian town of Budyonnovsk, on the home base for the 205th Cossack Motorized Rifle Brigade, commanders have erected a “wall of shame” with the names, ranks, and photographs of some 300 soldiers who have disobeyed orders in the Ukraine war.

“They forgot their military oaths, the ceremonial promise, their vows of duty to their Fatherland,” the board reads.

In conversations via the Russian social media giant VK, several soldiers from the brigade disputed the circumstances behind their inclusion on the wall of shame. All asked that their names be withheld for fear of further punishment or retaliation by commanders.

“I understand everything, of course. I signed a contract. I’m supposed to be ready for any situation; this war, this special operation,” one soldier wrote. “But I was thinking, I’m still young; at any moment, a piece of shrapnel, a bullet could fly into my head.”

The soldier said he broke his contract and resigned from the brigade before the February 24 invasion, once he realized it was in fact going forward.

“I thought a long time about it and came to the decision. I understood that I had to refuse so I could stay alive,” he said. “I don’t regret it one bit.”

The article is here.

The Overblown Implications Effect

Moon, A., Gan, M., & Critcher, C. R. (2020). 

Journal of personality and social psychology,

118(4), 720–742.

https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000204

Abstract

People frequently engage in behaviors that put their competencies on display. However, do such actors understand how others view them in light of these performances? Eight studies support an overblown implications effect (OIE): Actors overestimate how much observers think an actor's one-off success or failure offers clear insight about a relevant competency (Study 1). Furthermore, actors overblow performances' implications even in prospect, before there are experienced successes or failures on which to ruminate (Studies 2 and 3). To explain the OIE, we introduce the construct of working trait definitions-accessible beliefs about what specific skills define a general trait or competency. When actors try to adopt observers' perspective, the narrow performance domain seems disproportionately important in defining the general trait (Study 4). By manipulating actors' working trait definitions to include other (unobserved) trait-relevant behaviors, we eliminated the OIE (Study 5). The final 3 studies (Studies 6a-6c) more precisely localized the error. Although actors and observers agreed on what a single success or failure (e.g., the quality of a single batch of cookies) could reveal about actors' narrow competence (e.g., skill at baking cookies), actors erred in thinking observers would feel this performance would reveal a considerable amount about the more general skill (e.g., cooking ability) and related specific competencies (e.g., skill at making omelets). Discussion centers on how the present theoretical account differs from previous explanations why metaperceptions err and identifies important open questions for future research.

From the General Discussion

People care how others view them. However, without direct access to others’ perceptions, understanding how we are perceived entails guesswork. Across eight studies, we provided evidence for an overblown implications effect. Actors see their own performance as having more evaluative impact on observers than it actually does. By introducing the construct of working trait definitions, we were able to localize this error to a difference in how metaperceivers and observers were defining the broader competencies (partially) on display.

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Conclusions

As people navigate through their personal and professional lives, they aim not merely to passively estimate but also to actively manage others’ impressions (e.g., Jones & Pittman, 1982; Leary & Kowalski, 1990; Schlenker & Weigold, 1992). Thus, metaperceptions are important barometers of whether people (think they) are doing so effectively. When people’s metaperceptions are inaccurate, they may make suboptimal decisions about how best to invest in further impression management. Those who make a single inane comment during a work meeting may go to unnecessary lengths to redeem themselves in the eyes of their colleagues, and those who offer a single stroke of genius may be mistaken about how much they can rest on these (thin) laurels (see Anderson, Ames, & Gosling, 2008; Elfenbein, Eisenkraft, & Ding, 2009). We may do well to keep in mind that although our specific competencies are sometimes on full display, our broader abilities almost never are.

A pdf of the research is here.

Concrete Over Abstract: Experimental Evidence of Reflective Equilibrium in Population Ethics

Schoenegger, P. & Grodeck, B. 

(forthcoming). In H. Viciana, F. Aguiar, 

& A. Gaitan (Eds.), Issues in Experimental Moral 

Philosophy. Routledge.

Abstract

One central method of ethics is narrow reflective equilibrium, relating to the conflict between intuitions about general moral principles and intuitions about concrete cases. In these conflicts, general principles are refined, or judgements in concrete chases change to accommodate the until no more conflicts exist. In this paper, we present empirical data on this method in the context of population ethics. We conduct an online experiment (n=543) on Prolific where participants endorse a number of moral principles related to population ethics. They also judge specific population ethical cases that may conflict with their endorsed principles. When conflicts arise, they can choose to revoke the principle, revise their intuition about a case, or continue without having resolved the conflict. We find that participants are significantly more likely to revoke their endorsements of general principles, than their judgements about concrete cases. This evidence suggests that for a lay population, case judgements play a central revisionary role in reflective equilibrium reasoning in the context of population ethics.

Discussion

Our main result is that when participants’ choices result in a conflict between their endorsed abstract principles and their judgements on concrete cases, they prefer to revoke their previously endorsed principle rather than changing or revoking their judgement regarding the concrete population ethical case. Our findings are relevant to theorizing of reflective equilibrium.  Specifically, we take these results to indicate that for lay moral reasoning, case judgements do play a major revisionary role. While we find that some participants want to maintain consistency with the abstract principles, the evidence shows that participants do put more weight on their concrete choices. 

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As a secondary interest, we also tested whether presenting participants with the abstract principles first and then the concrete cases or the reverse changes their endorsement rates of these principles. We found no statistically significant effects in the Control, Person Affectism, or Pareto, though for both versions of Utilitarianism we did find order effects. This drop in endorsement rates provides further evidence for the case above that once participants are presented with some concrete cases that they can form judgements on, they are less likely to endorse the principles (and if they already endorsed them, more likely to revoke their endorsement). This adds to both the literature on order effects in social psychology and experimental philosophy, as well as to our understanding of folk utilitarian morality.

The research can be downloaded here.