The psychology of zero-sum beliefs

Davidai, S., Tepper, S.J. 

Nat Rev Psychol (2023). 

https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00194-9

Abstract

People often hold zero-sum beliefs (subjective beliefs that, independent of the actual distribution of resources, one party’s gains are inevitably accrued at other parties’ expense) about interpersonal, intergroup and international relations. In this Review, we synthesize social, cognitive, evolutionary and organizational psychology research on zero-sum beliefs. In doing so, we examine when, why and how such beliefs emerge and what their consequences are for individuals, groups and society.  Although zero-sum beliefs have been mostly conceptualized as an individual difference and a generalized mindset, their emergence and expression are sensitive to cognitive, motivational and contextual forces. Specifically, we identify three broad psychological channels that elicit zero-sum beliefs: intrapersonal and situational forces that elicit threat, generate real or imagined resource scarcity, and inhibit deliberation. This systematic study of zero-sum beliefs advances our understanding of how these beliefs arise, how they influence people’s behaviour and, we hope, how they can be mitigated.

From the Summary and Future Directions section

We have suggested that zero-sum beliefs are influenced by threat, a sense of resource scarcity and lack of deliberation. Although each of these three channels can separately lead to zero-sum beliefs, simultaneously activating more than one channel might be especially potent. For instance, focusing on losses (versus gains) is both threatening and heightens a sense of resource scarcity. Consequently, focusing on losses might be especially likely to foster zero-sum beliefs. Similarly, insufficient deliberation on the long-term and dynamic effects of international trade might foster a view of domestic currency as scarce, prompting the belief that trade is zero-sum. Thus, any factor that simultaneously affects the threat that people experience, their perceptions of resource scarcity, and their level of deliberation is more likely to result in zero-sum beliefs, and attenuating zero-sum beliefs requires an exploration of all the different factors that lead to these experiences in the first place. For instance, increasing deliberation reduces zero-sum beliefs about negotiations by increasing people’s accountability, perspective taking or consideration of mutually beneficial issues. Future research could manipulate deliberation in other contexts to examine its causal effect on zero-sum beliefs. Indeed, because people express more moderate beliefs after deliberating policy details, prompting participants to deliberate about social issues (for example, asking them to explain the process by which one group’s outcomes influence another group’s outcomes) might reduce zero-sum beliefs. More generally, research could examine long-term and scalable solutions for reducing zero-sum beliefs, focusing on interventions that simultaneously reduce threat, mitigate views of resource scarcity and increase deliberation.  For instance, as formal training in economics is associated with lower zero-sum beliefs, researchers could examine whether teaching people basic economic principles reduces zero-sum beliefs across various domains. Similarly, because higher socioeconomic status is negatively associated with zero-sum beliefs, creating a sense of abundance might counter the belief that life is zero-sum.

Fairytales have always reflected the morals of the age. It’s not a sin to rewrite them

Martha Gill

The Guardian

Originally posted 4 June 23

Here are two excerpts:

General outrage greeted “woke” updates to Roald Dahl books this year, and still periodically erupts over Disney remakes, most recently a forthcoming film with a Latina actress as Snow White, and a new Peter Pan & Wendy with “lost girls”. The argument is that too much fashionable refurbishment tends to ruin a magical kingdom, and that cult classics could do with the sort of Grade I listing applied to heritage buildings. If you want to tell new stories, fine – but why not start from scratch?

But this point of view misses something, which is that updating classics is itself an ancient part of literary culture; in fact, it is a tradition, part of our heritage too. While the larger portion of the literary canon is carefully preserved, a slice of it has always been more flexible, to be retold and reshaped as times change.

Fairytales fit within this latter custom: they have been updated, periodically, for many hundreds of years. Cult figures such as Dracula, Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes fit there too, as do superheroes: each generation, you might say, gets the heroes it deserves. And so does Bond. Modernity is both a villain and a hero within the Bond franchise: the dramatic tension between James – a young cosmopolitan “dinosaur” – and the passing of time has always been part of the fun.

This tradition has a richness to it: it is a historical record of sorts. Look at the progress of the fairy story through the ages and you get a twisty tale of dubious progress, a moral journey through the woods. You could say fairytales have always been politically correct – that is, tweaked to reflect whatever morals a given cohort of parents most wanted to teach their children.

(cut)

The idea that we are pasting over history – censoring important artefacts – is wrongheaded too. It is not as if old films or books have been burned, wiped from the internet or removed from libraries. With today’s propensity for writing things down, common since the 1500s, there is no reason to fear losing the “original” stories.

As for the suggestion that minority groups should make their own stories instead – this is a sly form of exclusion. Ancient universities and gentlemen’s clubs once made similar arguments; why couldn’t exiled individuals simply set up their own versions? It is not so easy. Old stories weave themselves deep into the tapestry of a nation; newer ones will necessarily be confined to the margins.

The info is here.

My take: Updating classic stories can be beneficial and even necessary to promote inclusion, diversity, equity, and fairness. By not updating these stories, we risk perpetuating harmful stereotypes and narratives that reinforce the dominant culture. When we update classic stories, we can create new possibilities for representation and understanding that can help to build a more just and equitable world.  Dominant cultures need to cede power to promote more unity in a multicultural nation.

Forgetting is a Feature, not a Bug: Intentionally Forgetting Some Things Helps Us Remember Others by Freeing up Working Memory Resources

Popov, V., Marevic, I., Rummel, J., & Reder, L. M. (2019).

Psychological Science, 30(9), 1303–1317.

https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619859531

Abstract

We used an item-method directed forgetting paradigm to test whether instructions to forget or to remember one item in a list affects memory for the subsequent item in that list. In two experiments, we found that free and cued recall were higher when a word-pair was preceded during study by a to-be-forgotten (TBF) word pair. This effect was cumulative – performance was higher when more of the preceding items during study were TBF. It also interacted with lag between study items – the effect decreased as the lag between the current and a prior item increased.  Experiment 2 used a dual-task paradigm in which we suppressed either verbal rehearsal or attentional refreshing during encoding. We found that neither task removed the effect, thus the advantage from previous TBF items could not be due to rehearsal or attentional borrowing. We propose that storing items in long-term memory depletes a limited pool of resources that recovers over time, and that TBF items deplete fewer resources, leaving more available for storing subsequent items. A computational model implementing the theory provided excellent fits to the data.

General Discussion

We demonstrated a previously unknown DF (Directed Forgetting) after-effect of remember and forget instructions in an item method DF paradigm on memory for the items that follow a pair that was to be remembered versus forgotten: cued and free recall for word pairs was higher when people were instructed to forget the preceding word pair. This effect was cumulative, such that performance was even better when more of the preceding pairs had to be forgotten. The size of the DF after-effect depended on how many pairs ago the DF instruction appeared during study. Specifically, the immediately preceding word-pair provided a stronger DF aftereffect than when the DF instruction appeared several word-pairs ago. Finally, neither increased rehearsal nor attentional borrowing of TBR items could explain why memory for the subsequent item was worse in those cases – the DF after-effects remained stable, even when rehearsal was suppressed or attention divided in a dual-task paradigm.

The DF after-effects are replicable and are remarkably consistent across the two experiments – the odds

ratio associated with items preceded by TBR items rather than TBF items at lag one was 0.66 in the prior

study and 0.67 in the new experiment. Similarly, the odds ratio for the effect of cues at lag two were 0.77

and 0.76 in the two studies. Thus, this represents a robust and replicable phenomenon. Additionally, the

multinomial storage–retrieval model confirmed that DF after-effects are clearly a storage phenomenon.

The research is here.

Summary: forgetting is not always a bad thing. In fact, it can sometimes be helpful. For example, if we are trying to learn a new skill, it may be helpful to forget some of the old information that is no longer relevant. This will free up working memory resources, which can then be used to store the new information. It may be helpful to include instructions to forget some information in learning materials. This will help to ensure that the learners are able to focus on the most important information.

All human social groups are human, but some are more human than others

Morehouse, K. N., Maddox, K. B., & 

Banaji, M. R. (2023). PNAS.

120(22), e2300995120. 

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2300995120

Abstract

All human groups are equally human, but are they automatically represented as such? Harnessing data from 61,377 participants across 13 experiments (six primary and seven supplemental), a sharp dissociation between implicit and explicit measures emerged. Despite explicitly affirming the equal humanity of all racial/ethnic groups, White participants consistently associated Human (relative to Animal) more with White than Black, Hispanic, and Asian groups on Implicit Association Tests (IATs; experiments 1–4). This effect emerged across diverse representations of Animal that varied in valence (pets, farm animals, wild animals, and vermin; experiments 1–2). Non-White participants showed no such Human=Own Group bias (e.g., Black participants on a White–Black/Human–Animal IAT). However, when the test included two outgroups (e.g., Asian participants on a White–Black/Human–Animal IAT), non-White participants displayed Human=White associations. The overall effect was largely invariant across demographic variations in age, religion, and education but did vary by political ideology and gender, with self-identified conservatives and men displaying stronger Human=White associations (experiment 3). Using a variance decomposition method, experiment 4 showed that the Human=White effect cannot be attributed to valence alone; the semantic meaning of Human and Animal accounted for a unique proportion of variance. Similarly, the effect persisted even when Human was contrasted with positive attributes (e.g., God, Gods, and Dessert; experiment 5a). Experiments 5a-b clarified the primacy of Human=White rather than Animal=Black associations. Together, these experiments document a factually erroneous but robust Human=Own Group implicit stereotype among US White participants (and globally), with suggestive evidence of its presence in other socially dominant groups.

Significance

All humans belong to the species Homo sapiens. Yet, throughout history, humans have breathed life into the Orwellian adage that “All [humans] are equal, but some [humans] are more equal than others.” Here, participants staunchly rejected this adage, with the overwhelming majority of over 61,000 participants reporting that all humans are equally human. However, across 13 experiments, US White participants (and White participants abroad) showed robust evidence of an implicit Human=Own Group association. Conversely, Black, Latinx, and Asian participants in the United States did not demonstrate this bias. These results highlight the tendency among socially dominant groups to reserve the quality Human for their own kind, producing, even in the 21st century, the age-old error of pseudospeciation.

My summary:

These results suggest that US White participants implicitly view White people as more human than Black or Hispanic people.

The authors also found that these implicit associations were not simply a reflection of participants' explicit beliefs about race. In fact, when participants were asked to explicitly rate how human they believed different racial/ethnic groups were, they rated all groups as equally human. This suggests that implicit associations are not always accessible to conscious awareness, and that they can have a significant impact on our behavior even when we are unaware of them.

The authors conclude that their findings suggest that implicit bias against Black and Hispanic people is widespread in the United States. They argue that this bias can have a number of negative consequences, including discrimination in employment, housing, and education. They also suggest that interventions to reduce implicit bias are needed to create a more just and equitable society.

Said slightly differently, the Dominant Group's "myside bias" is implicit, autonomic, unconsious, and difficult to change.  White dominant culture needs to take extra steps to level the playing field of our society.

Characterizing empathy and compassion using computational linguistic analysis

Yaden, D. B., Giorgi, S., et al. (2023). 

Emotion. Advance online publication.

https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001205

Abstract

Many scholars have proposed that feeling what we believe others are feeling—often known as “empathy”—is essential for other-regarding sentiments and plays an important role in our moral lives. Caring for and about others (without necessarily sharing their feelings)—often known as “compassion”—is also frequently discussed as a relevant force for prosocial motivation and action. Here, we explore the relationship between empathy and compassion using the methods of computational linguistics. Analyses of 2,356,916 Facebook posts suggest that individuals (N = 2,781) high in empathy use different language than those high in compassion, after accounting for shared variance between these constructs. Empathic people, controlling for compassion, often use self-focused language and write about negative feelings, social isolation, and feeling overwhelmed. Compassionate people, controlling for empathy, often use other-focused language and write about positive feelings and social connections. In addition, high empathy without compassion is related to negative health outcomes, while high compassion without empathy is related to positive health outcomes, positive lifestyle choices, and charitable giving. Such findings favor an approach to moral motivation that is grounded in compassion rather than empathy.

From the General Discussion

Linguistic topics related to compassion (without empathy) and empathy (without compassion) show clear relationships with four of the five personality factors. Topics related to compassion without empathy are marked by higher conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. Empathy without compassion topics are more associated with introversion and are also moderately associated with neuroticism and lower conscientiousness.  The association of low emotional stability and conscientiousness is also in line with prior research that found “distress,”a construct with important parallels to empathy, being associated with fleeing from a helping situation (Batson et al., 1987) and with lower helping(Jordan et al., 2016;Schroeder et al., 1988; Twenge et al., 2007; and others).

In sum, it appears that compassion without empathy and empathy without compassion are at least somewhat distinct and have unique predictive validity in personality, health, and prosocial behavior.  While the mechanisms through which these different relationships occur remain unknown, some previous work bears on this issue.  As mentioned, other work has found that merely focusing on others resulted in more intentions to help others (Bloom, 2017;Davis,1983;Jordan et al., 2016), which helps to explain the relationship between the more other-focused compassion and donation behavior that we observed.

A pdf of the research is here.

In sum, high empathy without compassion is related to negative health outcomes, while high compassion without empathy is related to positive health outcomes. These findings suggest that compassion may be a more important factor for moral motivation than empathy.  Too much empathy may be overwhelming for high quality care.  Care about feelings, don't absorb the sharing of feelings.

Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino Accused of Committing Data Fraud

Rahem D. Hamid

Crimson Staff Writer

Originally published 24 June 23

Here is an excerpt:

But in a post on June 17, Data Colada wrote that they found evidence of additional data fabrication in that study in a separate experiment that Gino was responsible for.

Harvard has also been internally investigating “a series of papers” for more than a year, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Data Colada wrote last week that the University’s internal report may be around 1,200 pages.

The professors added that Harvard has requested that three other papers co-authored by Gino — which Data Colada flagged — also be retracted and that the 2012 paper’s retraction be amended to include Gino’s fabrications.

Last week, Bazerman told the Chronicle of Higher Education that he was informed by Harvard that the experiments he co-authored contained additional fraudulent data.

Bazerman called the evidence presented to him by the University “compelling,” but he denied to the Chronicle that he was at all involved with the data manipulation.

According to Data Colada, Gino was “the only author involved in the data collection and analysis” of the experiment in question.

“To the best of our knowledge, none of Gino’s co-authors carried out or assisted with the data collection for the studies in question,” the professors wrote.

In their second post on Tuesday, the investigators wrote that a 2015 study co-authored by Gino also contains manipulations to prove the paper’s hypothesis.

Observations in the paper, the three wrote, “were altered to produce the desired effect.”

“And if these observations were altered, then it is reasonable to suspect that other observations were altered as well,” they added.

The article is here.

Science is a part of a healthy society:

• Scientific research relies on the integrity of the researchers. When researchers fabricate or falsify data, they undermine the trust that is necessary for scientific progress.
• Data fraud can have serious consequences. It can lead to the publication of false or misleading findings, which can have a negative impact on public policy, business decisions, and other areas.

The Darwinian Argument for Worrying About AI

Dan Hendrycks

Time.com

Originally posted 31 May 23

Here is an excerpt:

In the biological realm, evolution is a slow process. For humans, it takes nine months to create the next generation and around 20 years of schooling and parenting to produce fully functional adults. But scientists have observed meaningful evolutionary changes in species with rapid reproduction rates, like fruit flies, in fewer than 10 generations. Unconstrained by biology, AIs could adapt—and therefore evolve—even faster than fruit flies do.

There are three reasons this should worry us. The first is that selection effects make AIs difficult to control. Whereas AI researchers once spoke of “designing” AIs, they now speak of “steering” them. And even our ability to steer is slipping out of our grasp as we let AIs teach themselves and increasingly act in ways that even their creators do not fully understand. In advanced artificial neural networks, we understand the inputs that go into the system, but the output emerges from a “black box” with a decision-making process largely indecipherable to humans.

Second, evolution tends to produce selfish behavior. Amoral competition among AIs may select for undesirable traits. AIs that successfully gain influence and provide economic value will predominate, replacing AIs that act in a more narrow and constrained manner, even if this comes at the cost of lowering guardrails and safety measures. As an example, most businesses follow laws, but in situations where stealing trade secrets or deceiving regulators is highly lucrative and difficult to detect, a business that engages in such selfish behavior will most likely outperform its more principled competitors.

Selfishness doesn’t require malice or even sentience. When an AI automates a task and leaves a human jobless, this is selfish behavior without any intent. If competitive pressures continue to drive AI development, we shouldn’t be surprised if they act selfishly too.

The third reason is that evolutionary pressure will likely ingrain AIs with behaviors that promote self-preservation. Skeptics of AI risks often ask, “Couldn’t we just turn the AI off?” There are a variety of practical challenges here. The AI could be under the control of a different nation or a bad actor. Or AIs could be integrated into vital infrastructure, like power grids or the internet. When embedded into these critical systems, the cost of disabling them may prove too high for us to accept since we would become dependent on them. AIs could become embedded in our world in ways that we can’t easily reverse. But natural selection poses a more fundamental barrier: we will select against AIs that are easy to turn off, and we will come to depend on AIs that we are less likely to turn off.

These strong economic and strategic pressures to adopt the systems that are most effective mean that humans are incentivized to cede more and more power to AI systems that cannot be reliably controlled, putting us on a pathway toward being supplanted as the earth’s dominant species. There are no easy, surefire solutions to our predicament.

The info is here.

In the US, patient data privacy is an illusion

Harlan M Krumholz

Opinion

BMJ 2023;381:p1225

Here is an excerpt:

The regulation allows anyone involved in a patient’s care to access health information about them. It is based on the paternalistic assumption that for any healthcare provider or related associate to be able to provide care for a patient, unfettered access to all of that individual’s health records is required, regardless of the patient’s preference. This provision removes control from the patient’s hands for choices that should be theirs alone to make. For example, the pop-up covid testing service you may have used can claim to be an entity involved in your care and gain access to your data. This access can be bought through many for-profit companies. The urgent care centre you visited for your bruised ankle can access all your data. The team conducting your prenatal testing is considered involved in your care and can access your records. Health insurance companies can obtain all the records. And these are just a few examples.

Moreover, health systems legally transmit sensitive information with partners, affiliates, and vendors through Business Associate Agreements. But patients may not want their sensitive information disseminated—they may not want all their identified data transmitted to a third party through contracts that enable those companies to sell their personal information if the data are de-identified. And importantly, with all the advances in data science, effectively de-identifying detailed health information is almost impossible.

HIPAA confers ample latitude to these third parties. As a result, companies make massive profits from the sale of data. Some companies claim to be able to provide comprehensive health information on more than 300 million Americans—most of the American public—for a price. These companies' business models are legal, yet most patients remain in the dark about what may be happening to their data.

However, massive accumulations of medical data do have the potential to produce insights into medical problems and accelerate progress towards better outcomes. And many uses of a patient’s data, despite moving throughout the healthcare ecosystem without their knowledge, may nevertheless help advance new diagnostics and therapeutics. The critical questions surround the assumptions people should have about their health data and the disclosures that should be made before a patient speaks with a health professional. Should each person be notified before interacting with a healthcare provider about what may happen with the information they share or the data their tests reveal? Are there new technologies that could help patients regain control over their data?

Although no one would relish a return to paper records, that cumbersome system at least made it difficult for patients’ data to be made into a commodity. The digital transformation of healthcare data has enabled wonderous breakthroughs—but at the cost of our privacy. And as computational power and more clever means of moving and organising data emerge, the likelihood of permission-based privacy will recede even further.

The info is here.

The psychology of asymmetric zero-sum beliefs

Roberts, R., & Davidai, S. (2022).

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 

123(3), 559–575.

Abstract

Zero-sum beliefs reflect the perception that one party’s gains are necessarily offset by another party’s losses. Although zero-sum relationships are, from a strictly theoretical perspective, symmetrical, we find evidence for asymmetrical zero-sum beliefs: The belief that others gain at one’s own expense, but not vice versa. Across various contexts (international relations, interpersonal negotiations, political partisanship, organizational hierarchies) and research designs (within- and between-participant), we find that people are more prone to believe that others’ success comes at their own expense than they are to believe that their own success comes at others’ expense. Moreover, we find that people exhibit asymmetric zero-sum beliefs only when thinking about how their own party relates to other parties but not when thinking about how other parties relate to each other. Finally, we find that this effect is moderated by how threatened people feel by others’ success and that reassuring people about their party’s strengths eliminates asymmetric zero-sum beliefs. We discuss the theoretical contributions of our findings to research on interpersonal and intergroup zero-sum beliefs and their implications for understanding when and why people view life as zero-sum.

From the Discussion Section

Beyond documenting a novel asymmetry in beliefs about one’s own and others’ gains and losses, our findings make several important theoretical contributions to the literature on zero-sum beliefs. First, research on zero-sum beliefs has mostly focused on what specific groups believe about others’ gains within threatening intergroup contexts (e.g., White Americans’ attitudes about Black Americans’ gains, men’s attitudes about women’s gains) or on what negotiators believe about their counterparts’ gains within the context of a negotiation (which is typically rife with threat; e.g., Sinaceur et al., 2011; White et al., 2004). In doing so, research has examined zero-sum beliefs from only one perspective: how threatened parties view outgroup gains. Yet, as shown, those who feel most threatened are also most likely to exhibit zero-sum beliefs. By only examining the beliefs of those who feel threatened by others within the specific contexts in which they feel most threatened, the literature may have painted an incomplete picture of zero-sum beliefs that overlooks the possibility of asymmetrical beliefs. Our research expands this work by examining zero-sum beliefs in both threatening and nonthreatening contexts and by examining beliefs about one’s own and others’ gains, revealing that feeling.

A PDF of the research is here.

I use the research on zero-sum thinking in couples counseling frequently, to help the couple to develop a more cooperative mindset. This means that they need to be willing to work together to find solutions that benefit both of them. When couples can learn to cooperate, they are more likely to resolve conflict in a healthy way.