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"But this does not mean that it is wrong to push the question even further, asking how we can be encouraged to care more about the well-being and suffering of those who happened not to be born within the same borders as us. Haidt thinks liberals ignore concepts like authority and the sacred. But really, liberalism’s power consists in challenging the moral relevance of such concepts. Since liberals dispute that authority really is of fundamental moral importance, it is circular reasoning to argue that this is a form of “moral blindness.”"

book review morality politics liberal conservative moral-language cognition emotion ethics liberalism

"So, is the future post-liberal? The WEIRD liberalism of the baby boomer generation was perhaps condemned to a dogmatic universalism as a result of emerging in the shadow of two world wars, the Holocaust and the anti-colonial and civil rights struggles. There was a lot to react against and it is perhaps understandable that in eagerly embracing the moral equality of all humans, some boomers slipped into a carelessness towards national borders and identities and a rigidity towards many forms of equality. The next generation of politics need not make the same mistake."

book review morality politics liberal conservative moral-language cognition emotion

Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions.

science religion psychology cognition mental-process analytic thinking style

The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants' endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

political-science psychology cognition style bias effort conservative

“People endorse conservative ideology more when they have to give a first or fast response,” Eidelman said. “This low-effort thinking seems to favor political conservatism, suggesting that it may be our default ideology. To be clear, we are not saying that conservatives think lightly.”

political-science psychology cognition style bias effort conservative

intelligence cognition memory learning

Donner: Quantified Mind is a web application that allows users to track the variation in their cognitive functions under different conditions, using cognitive tests that are based on long-standing principles from psychology, but adapted to be repeatable, short, engaging, automatic and adaptive.

The goal is to make cognitive optimization an exact science instead of relying on subjective feelings, which can be deceiving or so subtle that they are hard to interpret. Quantified Mind allows fun and easy self-experimentation and data analysis that can lead to actionable conclusions.

quantified-self cognition psychology metrics measurement self-improvement

book interview conservatism republicans motivated-cognition cognition psychology social-psychology denial

"So how quickly can a crowd be put into action.?That's the question tackled today by Michael Bernstein at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a few pals.

In the past, these guys have found ways to bring a crowd to bear in about two seconds. That's quick. But the reaction time is limited to how quickly a worker responds to an alert.

Now these guys say they've find a way to reduce the reaction time to 500 milliseconds--that's effectively realtime. A system with a half second latency could turn crowdsourcing into a very different kind of resource.

The idea that Bernstein and co have come up with is straightforward. These guys simply "precruit" a crowd and keep them on standby until a task becomes available. Effectively, they're paying workers a retainer so that they are available immediately when needed"

real-time crowdsourcing computer-science distributed cognition

"My guest was Yale’s Dan Kahan, who was also on the show a year earlier, discussing his cultural cognition model. This is a very powerful and increasingly influential account of how different ideological groups–hierarchs, individualists, egalitarians, communitarians–are biased towards rejecting science on particular topics that are, shall we say, in their emotionally defensive “zones.”

Kahan ascribes this to motivated reasoning--e.g., our preexisting emotional commitments, or group commitments, skew our reading of evidence (scientific or otherwise) and lead us to elaborately defend our prior commitments. And because hierarchical-individualists have a very different vision of the “good” society and how it is organized than do egalitarian-communitarians, they accordingly reason very differently about scientific issues that threaten their values (like global warming) than do those on the other side."

politics psychology motivated-cognition reasoning group cognition bias

"We report evidence that individual-level variation in people's physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations. These findings are consistent with recent evidence that political views are connected to physiological predispositions but are unique in incorporating findings on variation in directed attention that make it possible to understand additional aspects of the link between the physiological and the political. "

politics psychology liberal conservative cognition

While there is an extensive literature on the potential wisdom of human emotion – David Hume was a prescient guy – it’s only in the last few years that researchers have demonstrated that the emotional system (aka Type 1 thinking) might excel at complex decisions, or those involving lots of variables. If true, this would suggest that the unconscious is better suited for difficult cognitive tasks than the conscious brain, that the very thought process we’ve long disregarded as irrational and impulsive might actually be more intelligent, at least in some conditions.

emotion psychology cognition thinking decision-making complexity

bias psychology confidence intelligence risk mental cognition fallacy expertise

Concepts seem to consist of both an associative component based on tabulations of feature typicality and similarity judgments and an explanatory component based on rules and causal principles. However, there is much controversy about how each component functions in concept acquisition and use. Here we consider two assumptions, or dogmas, that embody this controversy and underlie much of the current cognitive science research on concepts. Dogma 1: Novel information is first processed via similarity judgments and only later is influenced by explanatory components. Dogma 2: Children initially have only a similarity-based component for learning concepts; the explanatory component develops on the foundation of this earlier component. We present both empirical and theoretical arguments that these dogmas are unfounded, particularly with respect to real world concepts; we contend that the dogmasarise from a particular species of empiricism that inhibits progress in the study of conceptual structure; and finally, we advocate the retention of a hybrid model of the structure of knowledge despite our rejection of these dogmas.

cognition concepts knowledge philosophy psychology explanation

"R. W. White (1959) proposed that certain motives, such as curiosity, autonomy, and play (called intrinsic motives, or IMs), have common characteristics that distinguish them from drives. The evidence that mastery is common to IMs is anecdotal, not scientific. The assertion that "intrinsic enjoyment" is common to IMs exaggerates the significance of pleasure in human motivation and expresses the hedonistic fallacy of confusing consequence for cause. Nothing has been shown scientifically to be common to IMs that differentiates them from drives. An empirically testable theory of 16 basic desires is put forth based on psychometric research and subsequent behavior validation. The desires are largely unrelated to each other and may have different evolutionary histories. "

psychology motivation theory intrinsic cognition desire

"We must therefore find another criterion, which I think is the motivated crowds. People who work on Wikipedia … are not the indiscriminate crowd [but] are the part of the crowd who feels motivated to work with Wikipedia. Here it is: I’d replace the theory of the “wisdom of the crowd” with the theory of the “wisdom of the motivated crowds.” The general crowd says we should not pay taxes; the motivated crowd says that it’s fair to pay them. In fact, it’s not the ditch diggers or illiterates who contribute to Wikipedia, but people who already belong to a cultural crowd for the very fact they’re using a computer."

crowds crowdsourcing motivation wisdom distributed cognition psychology

information-overload history information-science books publishing cognition limits

science beauty psychology cognition emotion affect experience brain-imaging biology evolutionary-psychology evolution

Dan Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In addition to risk perception, his areas of research include criminal law and evidence.

people academic law school(Yale) risk perception culture cognition

The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars interested in studying how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities.

academic-center law school(Yale) cognition culture motivated-cognition science perception bias psychology