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Perspectives on Psychological Science :... Mar 2024Successful cooperation is tightly linked to individuals' beliefs about their interaction partners, the decision setting, and existing norms, perceptions, and values.... (Review)
Review
Successful cooperation is tightly linked to individuals' beliefs about their interaction partners, the decision setting, and existing norms, perceptions, and values. This article reviews and integrates findings from judgment and decision-making, social and cognitive psychology, political science, and economics, developing a systematic overview of the mechanisms underlying motivated cognition in cooperation. We elaborate on how theories and concepts related to motivated cognition developed in various disciplines define the concept and describe its functionality. We explain why beliefs play such an essential role in cooperation, how they can be distorted, and how this fosters or harms cooperation. We also highlight how individual differences and situational factors change the propensity to engage in motivated cognition. In the form of a construct map, we provide a visualization of the theoretical and empirical knowledge structure regarding the role of motivated cognition, including its many interdependencies, feedback loops, and moderating influences. We conclude with a brief suggestion for a future research agenda based on this compiled evidence.
Topics: Humans; Cognition; Judgment; Motivation; Cooperative Behavior
PubMed: 37883800
DOI: 10.1177/17456916231193990 -
Cognition Aug 2023The basis of property rights is a central problem in political philosophy. The core philosophical dispute concerns whether property rights are natural facts, independent...
The basis of property rights is a central problem in political philosophy. The core philosophical dispute concerns whether property rights are natural facts, independent of human conventions. In this article, we examine adult judgments on this issue. We find evidence that familiar property norms regarding external objects (e.g., fish and strawberries) are treated as conventional on standard measures of authority dependence and context relativism. Previous work on the moral/conventional distinction indicates that people treat property rights as moral rather than conventional (e.g., Dahl & Waltzer, 2020; Nucci & Turiel, 1993; Tisak & Turiel, 1984). However, these studies explicitly assume that one person owns property that another steals. Study 1 explores judgments of authority dependence regarding ownership in cases that explicitly appeal to stealing and prior ownership as compared to cases that omit such explicit appeals. We find that participants tend to treat ownership as authority dependent when explicit appeals to stealing are absent, but not when the explicit appeals are present. Study 2 examines intuitions about authority dependence of ownership violations as compared to canonical conventional and harm-based moral violations. We find that ownership violations are treated as more authority dependent than harm-based moral violations. This all suggests that some central property norms are treated as conventional. However, we also find that the conventionality of property norms is restricted in several ways. In study 3, we find that people do not treat norms of self-ownership as conventional. Other people cannot take your hair or skin cells even if the teacher says it's okay. Study 4 uses a measure of context relativism to examine the conventionality of ownership norms, comparing different possible norms of ownership. We find that participants regard takings that are violations in their own culture as permissible in other cultures; however, only some foreign norms are deemed acceptable. In study 5 we find another limitation - participants think it's impermissible to take resources from someone based on a new property norm that is retrospectively imposed. Finally, in study 6 we explore whether some takings might be judged to be morally (non-conventionally) wrong as a function of scarcity. We find that when asked about another culture that allows taking, participants tend to say that taking a food item from the person who caught it is permissible when the food is plentiful, but not when the food is scarce.
Topics: Adult; Humans; Ownership; Retrospective Studies; Morals; Group Processes; Judgment
PubMed: 37040670
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105454 -
Trends in Cognitive Sciences Feb 2024We examine the opportunities and challenges of expert judgment in the social sciences, scrutinizing the way social scientists make predictions. While social scientists... (Review)
Review
We examine the opportunities and challenges of expert judgment in the social sciences, scrutinizing the way social scientists make predictions. While social scientists show above-chance accuracy in predicting laboratory-based phenomena, they often struggle to predict real-world societal changes. We argue that most causal models used in social sciences are oversimplified, confuse levels of analysis to which a model applies, misalign the nature of the model with the nature of the phenomena, and fail to consider factors beyond the scientist's pet theory. Taking cues from physical sciences and meteorology, we advocate an approach that integrates broad foundational models with context-specific time series data. We call for a shift in the social sciences towards more precise, daring predictions and greater intellectual humility.
Topics: Humans; Models, Theoretical; Social Sciences; Judgment; Time Factors
PubMed: 37949791
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2023.10.005 -
BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.) Aug 2023
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Educational Measurement; School Admission Criteria
PubMed: 37532268
DOI: 10.1136/bmj.p1409 -
Current Opinion in Psychology Feb 2024A better understanding of age-related differences in judgment and decision making is important from both theoretical and applied perspectives. In this review, we focus... (Review)
Review
A better understanding of age-related differences in judgment and decision making is important from both theoretical and applied perspectives. In this review, we focus on value-based decisions across adulthood and specifically on how loss aversion (a relatively stronger weight of losses than gains on decisions) and the relative motivational impact of gains and losses may change with aging. In doing so, we will also cover recent findings about the effects of gain or loss incentives on performance in cognitive tasks that involve attention, learning, and remembering. We point out open questions and critical moderating variables for future theorizing and research.
Topics: Adult; Humans; Decision Making; Judgment; Motivation; Learning; Aging
PubMed: 38103277
DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101765 -
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews Nov 2023A central question in understanding cognition and pathology-related cognitive changes is how we process time. However, time processing difficulties across several... (Review)
Review
A central question in understanding cognition and pathology-related cognitive changes is how we process time. However, time processing difficulties across several neurological and psychiatric conditions remain seldom investigated. The aim of this review is to develop a unifying taxonomy of time processing, and a neuropsychological perspective on temporal difficulties. Four main temporal judgments are discussed: duration processing, simultaneity and synchrony, passage of time, and mental time travel. We present an integrated theoretical framework of timing difficulties across psychiatric and neurological conditions based on selected patient populations. This framework provides new mechanistic insights on both (a) the processes involved in each temporal judgement, and (b) temporal difficulties across pathologies. By identifying underlying transdiagnostic time-processing mechanisms, this framework opens fruitful avenues for future research.
Topics: Humans; Time Perception; Mental Disorders; Cognition; Judgment; Auditory Perception
PubMed: 37871780
DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105430 -
Personality and Social Psychology... Aug 2023The idea of "purity" transformed moral psychology. Here, we provide the first systematic review of this concept. Although often discussed as one construct, we reveal ~9... (Review)
Review
ACADEMIC ABSTRACT
The idea of "purity" transformed moral psychology. Here, we provide the first systematic review of this concept. Although often discussed as one construct, we reveal ~9 understandings of purity, ranging from respecting God to not eating gross things. This striking heterogeneity arises because purity-unlike other moral constructs-is not understood by what it but what it : obvious interpersonal harm. This poses many problems for moral psychology and explains why purity lacks convergent and divergent validity and why purity is confounded with politics, religion, weirdness, and perceived harm. Because purity is not a coherent construct, it cannot be a distinct basis of moral judgment or specially tied to disgust. Rather than a specific moral domain, purity is best understood as a loose set of themes in moral rhetoric. These themes are scaffolded on cultural understandings of harm-the broad, pluralistic harm outlined by the Theory of Dyadic Morality.
PUBLIC ABSTRACT
People are fascinated by morality-how do people make moral judgments and why do liberals and conservatives seem to frequently disagree? "Purity" is one moral concept often discussed when talking about morality-it has been suggested to capture moral differences across politics and to demonstrate the evolutionary roots of morality, especially the role of disgust in moral judgment. However, despite the many books and articles that mention purity, there is no systematic analysis of purity. Here, we review all existing academic articles focused on purity in morality. We find that purity is an especially messy concept that lacks scientific validity. Because it is so poorly defined and inconsistently measured, it should not be invoked to explain our moral minds or political differences.
Topics: Humans; Morals; Judgment; Disgust; Politics; Religion
PubMed: 36314693
DOI: 10.1177/10888683221124741 -
Cognition Aug 2024The social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls has been widely influential in moral philosophy but has until recently received relatively little...
The social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls has been widely influential in moral philosophy but has until recently received relatively little attention in moral psychology. For contractualist moral theories, ethics is a matter of forming, adhering to, and enforcing (hypothetical) agreements, and morality is fundamentally about acting according to what would be agreed by rational agents. A recent psychological theory, virtual bargaining, models social interactions in contractualist terms, suggesting that we often act as we would agree to do if we were to negotiate explicitly. However, whether such contractualist tendencies (a propensity to make typically contractualist choices) and forms of reasoning (agreement-based cognitive processes) play a role in moral cognition is still unclear. Drawing upon virtual bargaining, we develop two novel experimental paradigms designed to elicit incentivized decisions and moral judgments. We then test the descriptive relevance of contractualism in moral judgment and decision making in five preregistered online experiments (n = 4103; English-speaking Prolific participants). In the first task, we find evidence that many participants show contractualist tendencies: their choices are "characteristically" contractualist. In the second task, we find evidence consistent with contractualist reasoning influencing some participants' judgments and incentivized decisions. Our findings suggest that a propensity to act as prescribed by tacit agreements may be particularly important in understanding the moral psychology of fleeting social interactions and coordination problems. By complementing the rich literature on deontology and consequentialism in moral psychology, empirical approaches inspired by contractualism may prove fruitful to better understand moral cognition.
Topics: Humans; Morals; Judgment; Adult; Female; Male; Young Adult; Decision Making; Middle Aged; Adolescent; Thinking; Aged
PubMed: 38824696
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105838 -
Annual Review of Psychology Jan 2024Determining the psychological, computational, and neural bases of confidence and uncertainty holds promise for understanding foundational aspects of human metacognition.... (Review)
Review
Determining the psychological, computational, and neural bases of confidence and uncertainty holds promise for understanding foundational aspects of human metacognition. While a neuroscience of confidence has focused on the mechanisms underpinning subpersonal phenomena such as representations of uncertainty in the visual or motor system, metacognition research has been concerned with personal-level beliefs and knowledge about self-performance. I provide a road map for bridging this divide by focusing on a particular class of confidence computation: propositional confidence in one's own (hypothetical) decisions or actions. Propositional confidence is informed by the observer's models of the world and their cognitive system, which may be more or less accurate-thus explaining why metacognitive judgments are inferential and sometimes diverge from task performance. Disparate findings on the neural basis of uncertainty and performance monitoring are integrated into a common framework, and a new understanding of the locus of action of metacognitive interventions is developed.
Topics: Humans; Metacognition; Judgment
PubMed: 37722748
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-022423-032425 -
Journal of Personality Jun 2024People vary in how they perceive, think about, and respond to moral issues. Clearly, we cannot fully understand the psychology of morality without accounting for...
People vary in how they perceive, think about, and respond to moral issues. Clearly, we cannot fully understand the psychology of morality without accounting for individual differences in moral functioning. But decades of neglect of and explicit skepticism toward such individual differences has resulted in a lack of integration between moral psychology and personality psychology-the study of psychological differences between people. In recent years, these barriers to progress have started to break down. This special issue aims to celebrate and further increase the visibility of the personality psychology of morality. Here, we introduce the articles in this special issue by highlighting some important contributions a personality-based perspective has to offer moral psychology-particularly in comparison to the currently prominent social psychological approach. We show that personality psychology is well-placed to (a) contribute toward a rigorous empirical foundation for moral psychology, (b) tackle the conceptualization and assessment of stable moral tendencies, (c) assess the predictive validity of moral traits in relation to consequential outcomes, (d) uncover the mechanisms underlying individual differences in moral judgments and behavior, and (e) provide insights into moral development. For these reasons, we believe that moral psychology needs personality psychology to reach its full scholarly potential.
Topics: Humans; Morals; Personality; Individuality; Judgment
PubMed: 38450583
DOI: 10.1111/jopy.12919