Lest Ye Be Judged
It's Only a Matter of Time: Death, Legacies, and Intergenerational Decisions
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Intergenerational decisions affect other people in the future. The combination of intertemporal and interpersonal distance between decision makers in the present and other people in the future may lead one to expect little intergenerational generosity. In the experiments reported here, however, we posited that the negative effect of intertemporal distance on intergenerational beneficence would be reversed when people were primed with thoughts of death. This reversal would occur because death priming leads individuals to be concerned with having a lasting impact on other people in the future. Our experiments show that when individuals are exposed to death priming, the expected tendency to allocate fewer resources to others in the future, as compared with others in the present, is reversed. Our findings suggest that legacy motivations triggered by death priming can trump intergenerational discounting tendencies and promote intergenerational beneficence.
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Hate Speech, the Priority of Liberty, and the Temptations of Nonideal Theory
Robert Taylor
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, June 2012, Pages 353-368
Abstract:
Are government restrictions on hate speech consistent with the priority of liberty? This relatively narrow policy question will serve as the starting point for a wider discussion of the use and abuse of nonideal theory in contemporary political philosophy, especially as practiced on the academic left. I begin by showing that hate speech (understood as group libel) can undermine fair equality of opportunity for historically-oppressed groups but that the priority of liberty seems to forbid its restriction. This tension between free speech and equal opportunity creates a dilemma for liberal egalitarians. Nonideal theory apparently offers an escape from this dilemma, but after examining three versions of such an escape strategy, I conclude that none is possible: liberal egalitarians are indeed forced to choose between liberty and equality in this case and others. I finish the paper by examining its implications for other policy arenas, including markets in transplantable human organs and women's reproductive services.
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Estimating Preferences of Circuit Judges: A Model of Consensus Voting
Joshua Fischman
Journal of Law and Economics, November 2011, Pages 781-809
Abstract:
This paper develops a consensus voting model for estimating preferences of federal circuit court judges. Unlike standard ideal point models, which assume that judges vote sincerely for their preferred outcomes, the consensus model accounts for the norm of consensus in the courts of appeals by including a cost of dissent in the judicial utility function. A test of the consensus voting model on a data set of asylum appeals demonstrates that it provides a substantially better fit than a comparable sincere voting model and also generates more accurate predictions of voting probabilities. The model generates credible estimates of the impact of panel composition on case outcomes, which is surprisingly large in the asylum cases. Even though 95 percent of these decisions were unanimous, roughly half of the cases could have been decided differently if assigned to different panels.
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Moral Politics in the 2008 Presidential Convention Acceptance Speeches
Grace Deason & Marti Hope Gonzales
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, May/June 2012, Pages 254-268
Abstract:
This study examines the 2008 presidential party convention acceptance speeches from the perspective of George Lakoff's (1996, 2002) theory of moral politics, which argues that a metaphor of the nation as a family guides the adoption of a political ideology and facilitates persuasion. We coded speeches for instantiations of Strict Father and Nurturant Parent morality and for the social and political issues they contained. We found, as expected, that Democrats referenced more Nurturant Parent themes than Strict Father themes but that Republicans used instantiations from both moral worldviews at similar rates. Democrats, but not Republicans, framed party-owned issues in terms of their corresponding moral worldview. We discuss implications for Lakoff's theory and avenues for future research.
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"Sanctity-of-Life" - A Bioethical Principle for a Right to Life?
Heike Baranzke
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, June 2012, Pages 295-308
Abstract:
For about five decades the phrase "sanctity-of-life" has been part of the Anglo-American biomedical ethical discussion related to abortion and end-of-life questions. Nevertheless, the concept's origin and meaning are unclear. Much controversy is based on the mistaken assumption that the concept denotes the absolute value of human life and thus dictates a strict prohibition on euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. In this paper, I offer an analysis of the religious and philosophical history of the idea of "sanctity-of-life." Drawing on biblical texts and interpretation as well as Kant's secularization of the concept, I argue that "sanctity" has been misunderstood as an ontological feature of biological human life, and instead locate the idea within the historical virtue-ethical tradition, which understands sanctification as a personal achievement through one's own actions.
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Blood is thicker: Moral spillover effects based on kinship
Eric Luis Uhlmann et al.
Cognition, August 2012, Pages 239-243
Abstract:
Three empirical studies document the intuitive spillover of moral taint from a person who engages in immoral acts to another individual who is related by ties of blood kinship. In Study 1, participants were more likely to recommend that the biological grandchild of a wrongdoer, compared to a non-biological grandchild, help the descendants of his grandfather's victims. In Study 2, participants were more willing to hold two long-lost identical twins in custody for a crime committed by one twin than to hold two perfect look-alikes for a crime committed by one look-alike. Study 3 provides direct evidence that spillover effects based on blood kinship are manifested in an intuitive sense of moral taint.
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Jamie Luguri, Jaime Napier & John Dovidio
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Myrdal (1944) described the "American dilemma" as the conflict between abstract national values ("liberty and justice for all") and more concrete, everyday prejudices. We leveraged construal-level theory to empirically test Myrdal's proposition that construal level (abstract vs. concrete) can influence prejudice. We measured individual differences in construal level (Study 1) and manipulated construal level (Studies 2 and 3); across these three studies, we found that adopting an abstract mind-set heightened conservatives' tolerance for groups that are perceived as deviating from Judeo-Christian values (gay men, lesbians, Muslims, and atheists). Among participants who adopted a concrete mind-set, conservatives were less tolerant of these nonnormative groups than liberals were, but political orientation did not have a reliable effect on tolerance among participants who adopted an abstract mind-set. Attitudes toward racial out-groups and dominant groups (e.g., Whites, Christians) were unaffected by construal level. In Study 3, we found that the effect of abstract thinking on prejudice was mediated by an increase in concerns about fairness.
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An African Theory of Moral Status: A Relational Alternative to Individualism and Holism
Thaddeus Metz
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, June 2012, Pages 387-402
Abstract:
The dominant conceptions of moral status in the English-speaking literature are either holist or individualist, neither of which accounts well for widespread judgments that: animals and humans both have moral status that is of the same kind but different in degree; even a severely mentally incapacitated human being has a greater moral status than an animal with identical internal properties; and a newborn infant has a greater moral status than a mid-to-late stage foetus. Holists accord no moral status to any of these beings, assigning it only to groups to which they belong, while individualists such as welfarists grant an equal moral status to humans and many animals, and Kantians accord no moral status either to animals or severely mentally incapacitated humans. I argue that an underexplored, modal-relational perspective does a better job of accounting for degrees of moral status. According to modal-relationalism, something has moral status insofar as it capable of having a certain causal or intensional connection with another being. I articulate a novel instance of modal-relationalism grounded in salient sub-Saharan moral views, roughly according to which the greater a being's capacity to be part of a communal relationship with us, the greater its moral status. I then demonstrate that this new, African-based theory entails and plausibly explains the above judgments, among others, in a unified way.
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Motivated Reasoning, Political Sophistication, and Associations between President Obama and Islam
Todd Hartman & Adam Newmark
Political Science & Politics, July 2012, Pages 449-455
Abstract:
Recent polls reveal that between 20% and 25% of Americans erroneously indicate that President Obama is a Muslim. In this article, we compare individuals' explicit responses on a survey about religion and politics with reaction time data from an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to investigate whether individuals truly associate Obama with Islam or are motivated reasoners who simply express negativity about the president when given the opportunity. Our results suggest that predispositions such as ideology, partisanship, and race affect how citizens feel about Obama, which in turn motivates them to accept misinformation about the president. We also find that these implicit associations increase the probability of stating that Obama is likely a Muslim. Interestingly, political sophistication does not appear to inoculate citizens from exposure to misinformation, as they exhibit the same IAT effect as less knowledgeable individuals.
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Porismita Borah
Communication Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The political blogosphere is replete with uncivil discussions and is apt to examine the influence of incivility on news frames. The present study brings in literature from incivility and framing effects and uses two experiments to examine the influence of incivility on news frames for democratic outcomes such as willingness to participate, online participation, openmindedness, and attitude certainty. Primary findings indicate the detrimental effects of incivility causing less openmindedness and more attitude certainty. At the same time, incivility causes more willingness to participate and online participation. More importantly, the findings demonstrate how incivility interacts with news frames. Implications for news framing effects in the social media landscape are discussed.
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Evaluations of People Depicted With Facial Disfigurement Compared to Those With Mobility Impairment
Anna Stone & Toby Wright
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, May/June 2012, Pages 212-225
Abstract:
There are few extant studies of stereotyping of people with facial disfigurement. In the present study, two experiments (both within-participants) showed positive evaluations of people depicted as wheelchair users and, from the same participants, negative evaluations of people with facial disfigurements, compared to controls. The results of Experiment 2 suggested that implicit affective attitudes were more negative toward people with facial disfigurement than wheelchair users and were correlated with evaluation negativity. Social norms were perceived to permit more discrimination against people with facial disfigurement than against wheelchair users. These factors could help to explain the evaluative differences between the two disadvantaged groups.
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Mortality salience and morality: Thinking about death makes people less utilitarian
Bastien Trémolière, Wim De Neys & Jean-François Bonnefon
Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to the dual-process model of moral judgment, utilitarian responses to moral conflict draw on limited cognitive resources. Terror Management Theory, in parallel, postulates that mortality salience mobilizes these resources to suppress thoughts of death out of focal attention. Consequently, we predicted that individuals under mortality salience would be less likely to give utilitarian responses to moral conflicts. Two experiments corroborated this hypothesis. Experiment 1 showed that utilitarian responses to non-lethal harm conflicts were less frequent when participants were reminded of their mortality. Experiment 2 showed that the detrimental effect of mortality salience on utilitarian conflict judgments was comparable to that of an extreme concurrent cognitive load. These findings raise the question of whether private judgment and public debate about controversial moral issues might be shaped by mortality salience effects, since these issues (e.g., assisted suicide) often involve matters of life and death.
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The pervasive effects of argument length on inductive reasoning
Evan Heit & Caren Rotello
Thinking & Reasoning, Summer 2012, Pages 244-277
Abstract:
Three experiments examined the influence of argument length on plausibility judgements, in a category-based induction task. The general results were that when arguments were logically invalid they were considered stronger when they were longer, but for logically valid arguments longer arguments were considered weaker. In Experiments 1a and 1b when participants were forewarned to avoid using length as a cue to judging plausibility, they still did so. Indeed, participants given the opposite instructions did not follow those instructions either. In Experiment 2 arguments came from a reliable or unreliable speaker. This manipulation affected accuracy as well as response bias, but the effects of argument length for both reliable and unreliable speakers replicated Experiments 1a and 1b. The results were analysed using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and modelled using multidimensional signal detection theory (SDT). Implications for models of category-based inductive reasoning, and theories of reasoning more generally, are discussed.
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Are the unskilled doomed to remain unaware?
Dmitry Ryvkin, Marian Krajč & Andreas Ortmann
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The unskilled-and-unaware problem describes a negative relationship between one's skill level and self-assessment bias: the less skilled are, on average, more unaware of the absolute and relative quality of their performance. In this paper, we study whether, and to what extent, the miscalibration (largely, overconfidence) of the unskilled can be reduced by feedback. We report the results of two studies, one in a natural setting and one in a more controlled setting, where participants make incentivized judgments of their absolute and relative performance in various tasks and feedback conditions. In the first study, participants improve their calibration after being exposed to naturally available information in the form of environmental feedback (i.e., feedback about the nature of the task) and calibration feedback (i.e., feedback about one's absolute and relative performance), but it is impossible to separate the effects of the two types of feedback. In the more controlled setting of the second study, we identified a positive effect of calibration feedback alone. In both studies, it is the unskilled who improve their calibration most. Our results suggest that the unskilled may not be doomed to be especially unaware. We also identify an important difference between the effects of feedback on the calibration of absolute and relative performance judgments. While the calibration of absolute performance judgments is more uniformly amenable to feedback, there appears to be a residual miscalibration of relative performance judgments by the unskilled that we attribute to differences in information acquisition and self-image.
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Diminishing Adult Egocentrism When Estimating What Others Know
Ruthann & Larry Jacoby
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
People often use what they know as a basis to estimate what others know. This egocentrism can bias their estimates of others' knowledge. In 2 experiments, we examined whether people can diminish egocentrism when predicting for others. Participants answered general knowledge questions and then estimated how many of their peers would know the answers. Egocentrism was revealed in the relationship between participants' own accuracy and their estimates of peer accuracy for questions that were new to the experiment. However, when participants encountered the answer to a question asked earlier in the experiment, they showed reduced egocentrism for these old relative to new questions (Experiment 1). Participants were aware that recent experience with answers spoiled their knowledge as a basis for estimating what others know. Consequently, they relied on more objective bases for prediction, which enhanced their ability to discriminate between questions that are easy versus difficult for others (i.e., relative accuracy). In Experiment 2, the relative accuracy of estimates of others' knowledge was also enhanced when experience-based cues were blocked by presenting the answer with the question. Results are discussed in terms of a dual process theory of the bases (e.g., experience vs. theory) people use for predictions for others. Further, we discuss the effects of egocentrism in educational contexts, such as a professor estimating what students know. In sum, our findings show that people can shift away from their own knowledge to diminish egocentrism and to more accurately estimate what others know.
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Differential Neural Circuitry and Self-Interest in Real versus Hypothetical Moral Decisions
Oriel FeldmanHall et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Classic social psychology studies demonstrate that people can behave in ways that contradict their intentions - especially within the moral domain. We measured brain activity while subjects decided between financial self-benefit (earning money) and preventing physical harm (applying an electric shock) to a confederate under both real and hypothetical conditions. We found a shared neural network associated with empathic concern for both types of decisions. However, hypothetical and real moral decisions also recruited distinct neural circuitry: hypothetical moral decisions mapped closely onto the imagination network, while real moral decisions elicited activity in the bilateral amygdala and anterior cingulate - areas essential for social and affective processes. Moreover, during real moral decision-making, distinct regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) determined whether subjects make selfish or prosocial moral choices. Together, these results reveal not only differential neural mechanisms for real and hypothetical moral decisions, but that the nature of real moral decisions can be predicted by dissociable networks within the PFC.
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Christine Clavien et al.
PLoS ONE, June 2012
Abstract:
The punishment of social misconduct is a powerful mechanism for stabilizing high levels of cooperation among unrelated individuals. It is regularly assumed that humans have a universal disposition to punish social norm violators, which is sometimes labelled "universal structure of human morality" or "pure aversion to social betrayal". Here we present evidence that, contrary to this hypothesis, the propensity to punish a moral norm violator varies among participants with different career trajectories. In anonymous real-life conditions, future teachers punished a talented but immoral young violinist: they voted against her in an important music competition when they had been informed of her previous blatant misconduct toward fellow violin students. In contrast, future police officers and high school students did not punish. This variation among socio-professional categories indicates that the punishment of norm violators is not entirely explained by an aversion to social betrayal. We suggest that context specificity plays an important role in normative behaviour; people seem inclined to enforce social norms only in situations that are familiar, relevant for their social category, and possibly strategically advantageous.