Todd Suomela's Library tagged judgment →  View Popular, Search in Google

"The problem, or difference, that everyone was trying to point to is that India has not developed the practices and philosophies of hiding to the extent that America, and in other ways Europe, has. America is so good at hiding that even the claims to acknowledge injustice are themselves a hiding of American injustice: not only is the noting of poverty, caste, and pollution a displacing of subjectivity, it is also a hiding of American poverty, class, and consumptive pollution. So the differential problem is not Indian injustice and violence, which exists in equal measure in America, but that India does not hide a human essence towards violence and injustice, it has not developed the practices or philosophies to withdraw our injustice and violent essence from public view. It is, in other words, not modern in a Weberian, Protestant-rationalized way. "

american culture modernity poverty visibility judgment humanity

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

psychology lying behavior morality ethics class income money socioeconomic status judgment self-interest

"Amanda Knox was convicted of murder and her reputation sullied around the world, in large part because of her facial expressions and demeanour. Her story reveals how our instincts about others can be dangerously superficial, writes Ian Leslie"

psychology demeanor appearance judgment attribution fundamental-attribution-error asymmetrical information mind mental projection crime

"Hawley-Dolan and Winner had asked the art students to compare paintings by abstract artists with paintings made by a child or by an animal. In 67% of the cases, art students said that the painting by a renowned artist is better. I compare this with the winning probability of the chessplayers of different ratings. I conclude that the great artists score on the level of class D amateurs. "

art amateur professional judgment abstract-art modern-art

Museumgoers often scoff that costly abstract expressionist paintings could have been made by a child and have mistaken paintings by chimpanzees for professional art. To test whether people really conflate paintings by professionals with paintings by children and animals, we showed art and nonart students paired images, one by an abstract expressionist and one by a child or animal, and asked which they liked more and which they judged as better. The first set of pairs was presented without labels; the second set had labels (e.g., “artist,” “child”) that were either correct or reversed. Participants preferred professional paintings and judged them as better than the nonprofessional paintings even when the labels were reversed. Art students preferred professional works more often than did nonart students, but the two groups’ judgments did not differ. Participants in both groups were more likely to justify their selections of professional than of nonprofessional works in terms of artists’ intentions. The world of abstract art is more accessible than people realize.

psychology experiments art modern-art abstract-art aesthetics judgment value visual perception

"Some of them add that they do not trust individuals to arrive at the same goals through repeated exercises in discretionary judgment. The system must do the work automatically, it must create a blanket of rules and laws, in order for projects like diversity or sustainability to avoid subversion and accident at the hands of individuals.

That push comes from a lot of places: an embedded haze of perpetual suspicion that suffuses academia, an inability or unwillingness to investigate whether some goals are hard to achieve whether or not anyone opposes or impedes them, and most of all, a touching but naive faith in the power of institutions to do anything if only we can find the correct systems to secure an objective. "

institutions dreams proceduralism action judgment

science communication weblog controversy scandal fraud judgment climate global-warming history anthropology

"Many philosophical problems are rooted in everyday thought, and experimental philosophy uses social scientific techniques to study the psychological underpinnings of such problems. In the case of free will, research suggests that people in a diverse range of cultures reject determinism, but people give conflicting responses on whether determinism would undermine moral responsibility. When presented with abstract questions, people tend to maintain that determinism would undermine responsibility, but when presented with concrete cases of wrongdoing, people tend to say that determinism is consistent with moral responsibility. It remains unclear why people reject determinism and what drives people’s conflicted attitudes about responsibility. Experimental philosophy aims to address these issues and thereby illuminate the philosophical problem of free will. "

philosophy experimental free-will freedom near-far construal-level-theory choice judgment morality ethics abstraction

"She said everyone can draw until we are told or convince ourselves that we cannot. We start out drawing everything we see until that day comes when it is pointed out that our drawing of a dog, for example, looks nothing like a dog. Then we begin to believe we cannot draw.


Some few people actually can draw very well, if by that you mean "realistically and accurately." They can draw a dog that looks exactly like a dog. I respect and envy them. It is worth saying however that from a philosophical viewpoint their dog looks no more like a dog than mine does, because their drawing is a two-dimensional representation of the real animal, rendered in either various color choices or some version of monotones. Nor does a photograph look like a dog. You see my point."

drawing art skill perception hobbies judgment realism children aesthetics

One of the weaknesses of left and liberal political theory over the past decades is the forfeiture of judgment. Politically correct theorists use the term 'judgmental' critically, as if making a judgment were a kind of failing.

political-correctness judgment ethics academia

Lists some of the virtues of music/art: innovation, craftsmanship, emotional truth, sensuousness, clarity, simplicity, intellectualism, memorability, physicality, theoretical rigor...

music experience philosophy aesthetics value judgment virtue elitism

When making decisions involving risky outcomes on the basis of verbal descriptions of the outcomes and their associated probabilities, people behave as if they overweight small probabilities. In contrast, when the same outcomes are instead experienced in a series of samples, people behave as if they underweight small probabilities. We present two experiments showing that the existing explanations of the underweighting observed in decisions from experience are not sufficient to account for the effect. Underweighting was observed when participants experienced representative samples of events, so it cannot be attributed to undersampling of the small probabilities. In addition, earlier samples predicted decisions just as well as later samples did, so underweighting cannot be attributed to recency weighting. Finally, frequency judgments were accurate, so underweighting cannot be attributed to judgment error. Furthermore, we show that the underweighting of small probabilities is also reflected in the best-fitting parameter values obtained when prospect theory, the dominant model of risky choice, is applied to the data.

probability risk perception behavior judgment journal research psychology bias

Reversing mass imprisonment

punishment prison america sociology race attribution judgment class

How do you distinguish the people who can and can't contribute to a specialized field?
The key to the whole thing is whether people have had access to the tacit knowledge of an esoteric area—tacit knowledge is know-how that you can't express in words.

science sts science-wars expertise experience evaluation judgment knowledge implicit specialization

philosophy aesthetics beauty judgment history

article by Claire Bishop on judging collaborative art

art collaboration performance criticism ethics aesthetics judgment