morality » The Thinking Meat Project

Thinking Meat roundup

Animal behavior, Brain and mind, Psychology Comments Off

Oct 252008

While I’ve been busy editing and writing and getting the yard ready for next spring, a number of good Thinking-Meat type stories have appeared in the media. So without further ado, here’s a selection of links to articles for your weekend reading pleasure.

Slate examines the moral and social dimensions of the evolutionary psychology behind why people get huffy, with the obligatory tie-in to the presidential campaign.

In an opinion piece in the New York Times, a neuroscientist and a science writer note some of the ways our brains mislead us, describing several studies that illustrate how the line between misinformation and truth becomes blurred in the brain (again with a campaign tie-in).

Scientific American has published this article by Carl Zimmer about the search for links between genes and intelligence. (Note: Lest you think you’re going crazy, I’ll reassure you now by telling you that yes, the even-numbered pages do seem to be duplicates of their respective preceding odd-numbered pages. I don’t know why, but it’s free current content from Scientific American, so I won’t complain.)

Zimmer is evidently a busy man; here’s another article from him in Discover Magazine about the emotional importance of human facial expressions.

This next article, from the Telegraph, is about a month old, but somehow it slipped past my radar at the time. It describes experiments in which crows outperformed great apes in transferring a learned skill from one situation to another.

And finally, something a bit more speculative but certainly intriguing, another article from the Telegraph discusses some new research into whether television and movies affect whether we dream in color. There’s some evidence that people who grew up with black-and-white media may be more inclined to dream in black and white than those who grew up with color TV and movies.

Religion and altruism

Psychology 2 Responses »

Aug 292007

A recent experiment at the University of British Columbia looked at what happens when you prime people with concepts related to either religion or civic responsibility and then have them take part in a game where they have the power to keep or share some money that they are given. Priming involves presenting subjects with a stimulus–in this case, words–that subconsciously influences the direction of their thoughts. The people who were primed with words having to do with religion or with the responsibilities related to our legal system were more generous than those in a control group who were not similarly primed. The effect of the religious priming was the same for those who said they believed in God and those who did not.

The article about this from EurekAlert seems to be saying that thoughts of religion make people behave more generously, but it’s worth noting that evidently thinking about the legal system has the same effect (the prime words for the “civic responsibility” experiment were civic, jury, court, police, and contract). I can understand the need to test the connection between religion and behavior in a lab setting where you can measure and control the variables, but on the other hand this seems so artificial that it’s hard to know what to make of it. It would be interesting to see if people who were primed with the appropriate words would be more generous in a real-life situation requiring donations of their own money or of time, for example. (Isn’t this sort of priming something that people who are trying to raise money for a good cause often try to do? How well does it work for them?) And I wonder about things like whether people drive any more thoughtfully and cooperatively when they are leaving church than they do when leaving the grocery store or their jobs.

The article also mentions a lack of hard data about the relationship between religious belief and moral behavior. Does anyone know of any studies that look at whether the religiously observant behave any better as measured by crime statistics or other measures? I think there was a rather controversial study in 2005 that looked for relationships between various social indicators and rates of religious observance and concluded that people behave better in more secular parts of the US, but I don’t know anything about the quality of that work, and anyway I think it was a statistical analysis of populations, not of individuals.

The meaning of morality

Being human, Psychology Comments Off

May 202007

The May 18 issue of Science has an article by Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia that looks at the foundations of morality in light of our knowledge of neuroscience, social psychology, and evolution. (Looks like there are a couple of other articles about behavioral science in there too.) I haven’t read the article yet, but this press release from EurekAlert gives a brief overview of what it covers. It looks like it should be very interesting.

The press release links to YourMorals.Org, a web site run by a small group of social psychologists (including Haidt) who are interested in morality and politics. You can participate in several research studies there, completing online questionnaires and learning a bit about the psychologists’ framework for understanding morality as well as your own moral sense. The site describes five different facets of moral thinking: “1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity”. The first two areas, which have to do with how we treat other people, are of prime importance to liberals; for conservatives, those two are important, but not generally as important as they are to liberals, and conservatives tend to place more weight on the other three factors, which have to do with being a good member of whatever social groups you belong to. The site says that one of the goals for this research is increased understanding of others who occupy other niches on the political spectrum, which strikes me as highly useful.

One of the online questionnaires tells you how you score in each of the five areas. I scored at the top of the scale on the “harm/care” scale and came close to maxing out on “fairness” (no surprise there; those are the two “liberal” scales) but I also scored higher than average on two of the other three (the average being that of other visitors to the site). Make of it what you will.

Another questionnaire rates you on ten basic values that have been observed across cultures (e.g., benevolence, security, power, achievement, conformity). The values are shown grouped in a circle, with similar or related values adjacent to each other and opposing values across from each other. This questionnaire is on the site to see how the ten values are related to the five facets of morality. There’s a link to a paper that explains the values and their relationships; I’ll have to go back and look at that. Right now I’m still trying to puzzle out my own results. My highest score was for self-direction, which I’m sure is no surprise to those close to me. (My mother used to say that when I was a very little girl and trying to do something, even if it looked like I needed help, I would insist “I do it by self!”) My lowest score (an absolute zero, in fact) is for the adjacent value of stimulation (“Excitement, novelty, and challenge in life”). Hmmmm. I wonder why those two are adjacent. At any rate, if you have some time, you might enjoy visiting the YourMorals.org site and contributing your data points to the research.

Of men, apes, and morals

Animal behavior, Human origins and evolution Comments Off

May 022007

This article from the Times Literary Supplement discusses three recent books on morality: specificially, how it might have evolved, and whether and to what degree it’s present in other great apes. One of the books is by Frans de Waal (Primates and philosophers: How morality evolved), and as always when I read either something he’s written or stories about chimps or bonobos taken from things he’s written, I learned something new about their behavior. In this case what struck me was the story of a bonobo who tried to help a stunned bird. There’s plenty of other good food for thought in the article as well.

Zimbardo on heroism

Being human, Psychology Comments Off

Apr 172007

A couple of weeks ago I posted an entry about Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford. In 1971 Zimbardo ran the famous (or infamous) Stanford Prison Experiment, in which normal healthy young men were randomly chosen to be either prisoners or guards in a simulated prison. The experiment, which was meant to run for two weeks, was cut short after only six days because of the terrible effects on the subjects. The moral of the story seems to be that even normal decent people can be overcome by bad situations and do inhumane things. In this piece from Edge, Zimbardo talks about the other side of the coin: the ability of some people to resist a bad situation and do the right thing even under pressure, and how we can cultivate that kind of heroism.

Human evil

Psychology Comments Off

Apr 032007

In 1971 at Stanford, Philip Zimbardo launched what became known as the Stanford prison experiment, one of the most disturbing psychological experiments ever run. Zimbardo was trying to set up a situation that combined a number of factors that can contribute to bad behavior (e.g., group dynamics, boredom, and anonymity) and then place intelligent, decent young people in that situation and see what happened: would their decency win out, or the circumstances? In the experiment, a group of physically and mentally healthy young men was arbitrarily divided into prisoners and guards and then settled for a planned two weeks into a mock prison in the basement of a Stanford building. The police in Palo Alto “arrested” the subjects who had the role of prisoner, and they were stripped, deloused, and given prison clothes to wear. On the second day of the experiment, the prisoners attempted a rebellion (barricading themselves in their cells and taunting the guards) and the guards began to assert their power through harsh treatment that escalated into humiliation and abuse. They were limited in the physical punishments they could use, but they devised various types of psychological abuse. (Anyone reading about the experiment today will likely be reminded of Abu Ghraib.) After only six days, conditions had deteriorated to the point that Zimbardo ended the study early. The circumstances won out over the decency of the men’s characters.

Zimbardo recently wrote this essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education about the relevance of his work for real-life situations. If circumstances have such power, it’s the responsibility of those who create the circumstances to take precautions against the sort of abuse that happened in his prison experiment (and at Abu Ghraib). In particular he discusses the conflict he himself felt between two roles: the researcher responsible for the ethical treatment of his subjects, and the prison superintendent wanting to keep the prison stable. He feels now that he let the experiment run too long. The triggering factor that forced him to realize that it was time to end the experiment (in effect, to let the role of ethical researcher predominate) was a visitor to the prison who was upset at what she saw going on there. This type of conflict between two roles is one of the variables that powerfully influences inhumane behavior; he says in that case it could have been countered by having someone above him (who had no such conflict) making the decisions about continuing the experiment.

There’s also an interview with Zimbardo in the New York Times in which he talks specifically about Abu Ghraib. He argues against the idea that what happened there could be chalked up to the presence of a few “bad apples”, saying that even good people can turn bad in bad circumstances. He says the thing to do is try to control the circumstances so that the capacity for inhumane behavior isn’t tapped. (In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”) But still I’m troubled by the thought that external factors can overwhelm what’s inside a person and turn a basically decent person into one who does evil things. This is distressing because it calls into question the idea of responsibility and my belief that a person’s character can always triumph over bad circumstances. On the other hand, there is evidence that it happens sometimes as he says it does, and at least if we know understand the powerful external factors that influence behavior, maybe we can figure out how to control them and thus reduce the likelihood for abuse of power.

Lest this is all too much of a downer, here’s an article on Edge by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker about how the amount of violence in the world is decreasing. He counters the romantic concept of the noble savage, inherently peaceful until corrupted by contact with civilization, with information about how numerous types of violence are becoming less common. The trend began in Western societies and is global but not equally evident in all parts of the world. It’s a really interesting piece, especially his list of possible explanations. It strikes me as basically an examination of how as a species we have been learning how to control whatever violent tendencies human nature is prone to. We’ve still got a long way to go, but it’s encouraging to look at the progress that we’ve made.

Roots of human morality in other primates

Animal behavior Comments Off

Mar 242007

Nicholas Wade of the New York Times has written another interesting article, this time about the seeds of human moral behavior that can be observed in other primates. He discusses the social order that are established among other kinds of primates and the social rules and behaviors that help keep groups functioning, and how humans might have elaborated on these to derive our own complicated moral systems. He includes some interesting quotes from primatologist Frans de Waal and covers some of the debate between moral philosophers and biologists on where morals come from.

Moral decisions and emotions

Being human, Psychology Comments Off

Mar 222007

If you’ve read any of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s books (e.g., Descartes’ Error), you’re familiar with his descriptions of the ways in which reason and emotion are not diametrically opposed but rather intertwined processes in the brain. Damasio and others have recently looked at how an emotion-regulating area of the brain affects the kind of moral decisions people make. The researchers presented people with various scenarios where they had to make a decision; some of them were non-moral decisions (e.g., whether to invest in a particular mutual fund), while others involved those often agonizing choices about whether you’d allow (or cause) one person to die to save the lives of others in a variety of circumstances. Some of the test subjects had damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (the VMPC, which regulates emotion) and some had damage to other parts of the brain, while others had normal brain functioning. The first group, with VMPC damage, were more likely to make decisions that conformed to the idea of providing the greatest good for the greatest number without much regard for individual needs, actually taking this utilitarian approach too far compared to the way most people tend to judge similar situations. This article from New Scientist gives the details. The article points out that this casts an interesting light on two philosophical ideas about moral judgements: that sympathy for other people could move us to better judgements (Hume) or that emotion could cloud our sense of right and wrong (Kant).

Going back to the story earlier this week about how people are more likely to donate money to help an individual rather than to help a group, even a group as small as two people, I wonder how VMPC damage would affect that bias.

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