1
According to Glaucon, what is the most important principle
for designing an ethical society?
2
Erika
Ana
Jessica
What is Tetlock’s point about accountability?
Chi-Yun
GoEun
Vikki
3
What is the difference between exploratory thought and
confirmatory thought? What are scientists supposed to
follow? How successful do you think they are they in general?
Noralie
Erin
Andy
4
What is confirmation bias? How can science possibly work if
scientists are ruled by their elephants and inevitably prone to
confirmation bias?
ThanhThao
Patricia
Juliann
5
What is Leary’s point about self-esteem and mavrickness?
Charles
Yasmine
6
What does Airely have to say about lying?
Megan
Maleny
7
Google about ‘global warming’ and find us two good examples
of opposing beliefs about its causes.
Nguyen
Clemente
8
Why, says Haidt, are people who lack health insurance no
more likely to support government-issued health insurance
than people covered by insurance?
InKee
AnneLise
9
What is the point of the Westen et al (2006] study?
[Adele & Kevin seminar]
ADELLE
KEVIN
10
What is the rationalist delusion? Do you think that perhaps
Haidt himself suffers from this delusion?
Matt
Tatiana
C.J.
Adam
Chapt 4: We are all intuitive politicians
Glaucon: most important principle for designing an ethical society is
to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so
that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.
“When you see 100 insects working together toward a common
goal, it’s a sure bet they’re siblings. But when you see 100 people
working on a construction site or marching off to war, you’d be
astonished if they all turned out to be members of one large family.
Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond
kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of formal and
informal accountability”.
Accountability: (Tetlock] Explicit expectation that one will be called
upon to justify one‘s beliefs, feeling or actions to others, coupled
with an expectation that people will reward or punish us based on
how well we justify ourselves. When nobody in answerable to
anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpublished, everything
falls apart”.
Chapt 4: We are all intuitive politicians
Tetlock’s view (we are all intuitive politicians striving to maintain
appealing moral identities in front of our multiple constituencies] vs.
view Kohlberg , Turiel, rationalists (children are little scientists who
use logic and experimentation to figure out the truth for themselves]
• In physical world, we are rationalist, do converge on the truth.
• But social world is different, Glauconian: appearance is usually far
more important than reality.
• Exploratory thought: an evenhanded consideration of alternative
points of view
• Confirmatory thought: a one-side attempt to rationalize a
particular point of view
• Most of our thinking is confirmatory!
Chapt 4: We are all intuitive politicians
Tetlock:
“A central function of thought is make sure that one
acts in ways that can be persuasively justified or
excused to others. Indeed, the process of considering
the justifiability of one’s choices may be so prevalent
that decision makers not only search for convincing
reasons to make a choice when they must explain that
choice to others, they search for reasons to convince
themselves that they have made the ‘right’ choice”.
According to Leary:
• It makes no evolutionary sense for there to be a deep need for
self-esteem. For millions of years, our ancestors’ survival
depended upon their ability to get small groups to include
them and trust them, so if there is any innate drive here, it
should be a drive to get others to think well of us.
• Self-esteem is more like an internal gauge, a “sociometer” that
continuously measures your value as a relationship partner.
Whenever the sociometer needle drops, it triggers an alarm
and changes our behavior.
• Experiments – would be interesting to read these!
• Conclusion: “the sociometer operates at a nonconscious and
preattentive level to scan the social environment for any and all
indications that one’s relational value is low or declining.”
Confirmation bias (Wason 1960): challenged participants to identify
a rule applying to triples of numbers. At outset, Ss told that [2,4,6]
fits the rule. Participants could generate their own triples and the
experimenter told them whether or not each triple conformed to
the rule. People did terrible. While the actual rule was simply "any
ascending sequence", the participants had a great deal of difficulty
in finding it, often announcing rules that were far more specific, such
as “successive even numbers” or “successive numbers differing by 2”
or “the middle number is the average of the first and last”. The
participants generally tested only positive examples—triples that
obeyed their hypothesized rule, for example [11,13,15] rather than a
triple that violates it, such as (11,12,19).
Falsification = testing a scientific hypothesis by a serious attempt to
falsify it. Wason: humans naturally prefer a preference for
confirmation over falsification, hence the term "confirmation bias“.
Wason also used confirmation bias to explain the results of his
Wason selection task experiment.
Confirmation Bias in Action?
Wason Selection Task: Subject is asked to look for violations of a
conditional rule of the form If P then Q.
Rule: "If a card has an even number on one face, then its opposite
face is red”.
Which card(s] must be turned over to see if this rule has been violated.
‘8’ and brown cards would falsify, but – only ~25% of Ss get this right!
‘8’ and ‘red’ = most common answer
We lie, cheat, and justify so well that
we honestly believe we are honest
Ariely (2008]:
When given the opportunity, many honest people will
cheat. In fact, rather than finding a few bad apples
weight the averages, we discovered that the majority of
people cheated, and that they cheated just a little bit.
We can believe almost anything that
supports our team
Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional
Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S.
Presidential Election
Drew Westen, Pavel S. Blagov, Keith Harenski, Clint Kilts & Stephan Hamann
Research on political judgment and decision-making has converged
with decades of research in clinical and social psychology suggesting
the ubiquity of emotion-biased motivated reasoning. Motivated
reasoning is a form of implicit emotion regulation in which the brain
converges on judgments that minimize negative and maximize
positive affect states associated with threat to or attainment of
motives. To what extent motivated reasoning engages neural circuits
involved in ‘‘cold’’ reasoning and conscious emotion regulation (e.g.,
suppression] is, however, unknown. We used functional
neuroimaging to study the neural responses of 30 committed
partisans during the U.S. Presidential election of 2004.
Westen et al: Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning
Ss rated the extent to
which they agreed that
the target’s words and
deeds were contradictory
from 1 (strongly disagree)
to 4 (strongly agree)
Westen et al: Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning
We presented subjects with reasoning tasks involving judgments
about information threatening to their own candidate, the
opposing candidate, or neutral control targets. Motivated
reasoning was associated with activations of the ventromedial
prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate
cortex, insular cortex, and lateral orbital cortex. As predicted,
motivated reasoning was not associated with neural activity in
regions previously linked to cold reasoning tasks and conscious
(explicit] emotion regulation.
These findings provide the first neuroimaging evidence for
phenomena variously described as motivated reasoning, implicit
emotion regulation, and psychological defense. They suggest that
motivated reasoning is qualitatively distinct from reasoning when
people do not have a strong emotional stake in the conclusions
reached.
In Sum
First principle of moral psychology: Intuitions come first, strategic
reasoning second.
• We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us,
although much of the concern in unconscious and invisible to us.
• Conscious reasoning function like a press secretary who
automatically justifies any position taken by the president.
• With the help of our press secretary, we are able to lie and cheat
often, and then cover it up so effectively that we convince even
ourselves.
• Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach,
because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe
something, but “Must I believe it” when we don’t want to.
• In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than
selfish. We can believe almost anything that supports our team.