Category: Morality

Cognition, Morality October 30, 2019

We’re Not Great At Thinking About The Long-Term Consequences Of Catastrophes That Threaten Our Existence

Imagine that tomorrow a catastrophe wipes out 99% of the world’s population. That’s clearly not a desirable scenario — we would all agree that a peaceful, continued existence is preferable. Now imagine that the disaster kills everyone, wiping out the human race. Most of us would rate that as an even worse occurrence.

But how do we see the relative severity of these different possibilities? Is there a bigger difference between nothing happening and 99% of people dying, or between 99% and 100% of people being wiped out?

This thought-experiment was first posed by the philosopher Derek Parfit, who thought most people would believe the first difference is greater — after all, going from business-as-usual to almost total annihilation is a big step. He, on the other hand, felt the second difference was greater by far: even if just a tiny fraction of humans survive, civilisation could continue for millions of years, but if humanity is wiped from the face of the Earth, then it’s all over.

Now a new study in Scientific Reports has found that, like Parfit predicted, most people don’t seem to share his view of human extinction as a “uniquely bad” catastrophe — until they are forced to go beyond their gut feeling and reflect on what extinction really means in the long term.

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guest blogger, Morality February 19, 2019

What Counts As Altruism? People Judge Good Acts Harshly When They Are Performed For Selfish Ends

People judge an ostensibly prosocial act, like raising money in a charity run, as less altruistic than neutral acts, if it’s done to feel good or impress others (or for other selfish motives)

By guest blogger Rhiannon Willmot

Philosophers have long debated what constitutes genuine altruism. Some have argued that any acts, no matter however charitable, that benefit both the actor as well as the recipient, are altruistically “impure”, and thus can’t qualify as genuinely selfless. For example, volunteering at a soup kitchen would no longer be considered altruistic if we received a hot meal in return for our efforts.

However, other scholars have argued that the act remains altruistic if the benefits of prosocial behaviour are an unintended consequence. From this perspective, if the meal is unexpected, our actions are still deemed selfless.

For their recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology Ryan Carlson and Jamil Zaki have shed light on these questions by investigating what the general population thinks of different prosocial acts, depending on their motives and consequences.

Understanding popular perceptions of prosocial behavior can not only help resolve the altruism debate, but also provide information about how our behaviour might be viewed by others, and whether our personal opinions on selflessness match up with the general belief. For example, why might we perceive the supposedly altruistic behaviour of a public figure differently to our friends, and is social media really the right place to publicise prosocial acts?

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guest blogger, Morality, Replications, Social November 16, 2018November 26, 2018

Another social psychology classic bites the dust – meta-analysis finds little evidence for the Macbeth effect

Screenshot 2018-11-12 12.31.01.png — Figure from Siev et al, 2018. The effect of unethical primes on cleansing preference – positive effect sizes denote greater cleansing preference for the unethical condition than the ethical condition.

By guest blogger Jesse Singal

Perhaps no concept has been more important to social psychology in recent years — for good and ill — than “social priming”, or the idea, as the science writer Neuroskeptic once put it, that “subtle cues can exert large, unconscious influences on human behaviour.” This subgenre of research has produced a steady drumbeat of interesting findings, but unfortunately, an increasing number of them are failing to replicate – including modern classics, like the idea that exposure to ageing-related words makes you walk more slowly, or that thinking about money increases your selfishness.

The so-called “Macbeth effect” is another classic example of social priming that gained mainstream recognition and acceptance from psychologists and laypeople alike. The term was first introduced by the psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist, who reported in a 2006 paper in Science that “a threat to one’s moral purity induces the need to cleanse oneself”.

This claim is such an interesting, provocative example of the connection between body and mind that it’s little wonder it has spread far and wide — there aren’t a lot of social-priming findings with their own Wikipedia page (it was also covered here at the Research Digest). But is it as strong as everyone thinks? For a recent paper in Social Psychology the psychologists Jedediah Siev, Shelby Zuckerman, and Joseph Siev decided to find out by conducting a meta-analysis of the available papers on the Macbeth effect to date.

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guest blogger, Media, Morality, Technology November 9, 2018November 21, 2018

Psychologists claim outrage is getting a bad rap

By guest blogger Jesse Singal

Outrage: It’s absolutely everywhere. Today’s world, particularly the version of it blasted into our brains by social media, offers endless fodder, from big, simmering outrages (climate change and many powerful institutions’ refusal to do anything about it) to smaller quotidian ones (every day, someone, somewhere does something offensive that comes to Twitter’s attention, leading to a gleeful pile-on).

In part because of rising awareness of the adverse consequences of unfettered digital-age outrage, and of journalistic treatments like So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson (which I interviewed him about here), outrage has become a particularly potent dirty word in recent years. Outrage, the thinking goes, is an overly emotional response to a confusing world, and drives people to nasty excesses, from simple online shaming to death threats or actual violence.

But a new paper argues that the concept of outrage has gotten too bad a rap and that its upsides, especially as a motivator of collective action and costly helping, have been overlooked. Writing in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the psychologists Victoria Spring, Daryl Cameron and Mina Cikara detail important questions about outrage that have yet to be answered, and they highlight how certain findings – especially from the “intergroup relations” literature, in contrast to the mostly negative findings from moral psychology – suggest it can serve a useful purpose.

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Morality, Replications August 20, 2018August 20, 2018

Contrary to popular psychological theory, believers in free will were no more generous or honest

By Christian Jarrett

There’s a popular idea in psychology that among the important factors shaping our honesty and generosity is our belief in the concept of free will. Believe more strongly in free will, so the theory goes, and you will be more inclined to prosocial behavior. Supporting this, studies that have momentarily undermined people’s belief in free will – for instance, by giving them a text to read about genetic determinism, or about how neuroscience shows our decisions are out of conscious control – have found that this increases people’s propensity for cheating and selfishness.

Such an effect seems understandable – after all, the notion that humans can choose whether to behave well or badly is fundamental to how we think about moral responsibility. It’s plausible that if you portray free will as an illusion then you provide people with a ready-made excuse for bad, selfish behavior, thus increasing the temptation for them to act that way.

As ever, however, reality is refusing to conform to a simple, intuitively appealing story. Recent attempts to replicate the influence of changing people’s free will beliefs on their subsequent moral behavior have failed, or have applied only to specific groups of people, but not others.

Now a series of four large studies conducted on Amazon’s survey website, each involving hundreds of people, has failed to find a correlation between people’s beliefs about free will and either their generosity toward charities or their inclination to cheat. Writing up their findings in Social Psychological and Personality Science, Damien Crone and Neil Levy at the University of Melbourne and Macquarie University said “… we believe there is good reason to doubt that free will beliefs have any substantial implications for everyday moral behaviors.”

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leadership, Morality July 31, 2018July 31, 2018

Political and business leaders who change their moral stance are perceived not as brave, but hypocritical and ineffective

By Alex Fradera

Many commentators considered President Obama’s reversal on same-sex marriage an act of courage. But this isn’t how the public usually perceives moral mind-changers, according to a team led by Tamar Kreps at the University of Utah. Their findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggest that leaders who shift from a moral stance don’t appear brave – they just look like hypocrites.

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Methods, Morality June 21, 2018July 2, 2018

Psychology’s favourite moral thought experiment doesn’t predict real-world behaviour

By Christian Jarrett

Would you wilfully hurt or kill one person so as to save multiple others? That’s the dilemma at the heart of moral psychology’s favourite thought experiment and its derivatives. In the classic case, you must decide whether or not to pull a lever to divert a runaway mining trolley so that it avoids killing five people and instead kills a single individual on another line. A popular theory in the field states that, to many of us, so abhorrent is the notion of deliberately harming someone that our “deontological” instincts deter us from pulling the lever; on the other hand, the more we intellectualise the problem with cool detachment, the more likely we will make a utilitarian or consequentialist judgment and divert the trolley.

Armed with thought experiments of this kind, psychologists have examined all manner of individual and circumstantial factors that influence the likelihood of people making deontological vs. utilitarian moral decisions. However, there’s a fatal (excuse the pun) problem. A striking new paper in Psychological Science finds that our answers to the thought experiments don’t match up with our real-world moral decisions.

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