...check out those libertarians: like liberals, they don't care much about Ingroup Loyalty, Respect for Authority, or Sanctity/Purity. Unlike liberals, Harm does not figure prominently in their moral universe. So what matters to libertarians?
Viewing entries in
Scientific Encounters
The theory was never intended to be limited to five moral intuitions and researchers have continued to consider additional intuition candidates. Liberty is gaining acceptance as a sixth moral intuition. Conceived both as a freedom from (interference) and a freedom to (pursue happiness), Liberty is especially meaningful to libertarians. (Duh).
...pundits and partisans have embraced the idea that conservatives have one moral profile, liberals another. To simplify: conservatives are heavy on Loyalty, Sanctity, and Authority and liberals are big time in the Care department. I know many people who are quite taken with this apparent division of moral labor.
According to personality psychologist Robert McCrae, openness to experience is a broad personality construct that “implies both receptivity to many varieties of experience and a fluid and permeable structure of consciousness”
So it's more accurate to say humans are prediction machines: "devices that constantly try to stay one step ahead of the breaking waves of sensory stimulation, by actively predicting the incoming flow." (Clark, 2016)
The study authors speculated that these characteristics may foster “Openness to Experience” (OE), which has been positively correlated to paranormal beliefs in other research.
Those who are truly stuck in poverty need different kinds of government help than those who are suffering brief periods of hardship.
...research on treatment effectiveness should include a comparison condition that controls for personal factors: how the researchers interact with subjects. That means the same amount of compassion, touching, attention, encouragement, and all-around support given to subjects across groups.
Activated brain areas included the insula and amygdala, which are associated with subjective “gut feelings”, disgust, reaction to norm violations, threat detection, and evaluation of trustworthiness.
The trolley problem is a favorite of researchers studying moral decision-making. Many consider it a good test of individual differences in approaches to moral dilemmas, basically variations on Hot versus Cold decision-making: emotional versus cognitive, empathetic versus detached, aversion to directly causing personal harm versus impartial concern for the greater good.
Whenever we seek goals under conditions of uncertainty – not knowing the best way forward, perhaps not being sure what success even looks like – we are faced with explore/exploit trade-offs as we guess our way to what we think we want.
They all agree that some people are insufficiently skeptical, fail to appreciate their own fallibility, and/or are way too swayed by some version of authority (e.g., the consensus, unorthodox thinkers of one’s own choosing, this particular subset of research, gut feeling…).
In none of these articles were there specific references or links to academic papers. Rather, the authors use markers of scientific authority to present their claims as “facts”.
Harming others directly through hands-on action is harder on our psyches than causing harm indirectly, either through inaction or action at a remove (e.g., pulling a switch, pressing a button).
Optimism undermines success when it’s based on magical thinking. We engage in magical thinking when we believe happy endings are the result of a will-to-success. Voila! It will happen because I Can Do It.
Using practice tests as a teaching tool has been criticized for emphasizing memorization over reasoning and for being narrowly focused on knowledge goals rather than the learning process. No doubt practice tests can be misused, overused, or poorly designed. But they are also one of the most effective ways to reinforce knowledge and improve our ability to think about that knowledge.
In a variation on the “Wason selection task”, students in a research study were asked to test the rule “if a card has D on one side, it has a 3 on the other”. They were then shown four cards, which had either a letter (D or F) or a number (3 or 7) on them, and were asked which cards they would turn over to validate the rule. The correct answer was ...
In their analysis of survey responses regarding proposed federal policies, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page compare the policy preferences of “average citizens” versus “economic elites.
In their paper Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014), Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analyze survey data on public support for proposed federal policies.
“Good research is cautious about drawing conclusions, careful to identify uncertainties and avoids exaggerated claims. It demands multiple types of evidence to reach a conclusion. It does not assume that association (things occur together) proves causation (one thing causes another). Bad research often contains jumps in logic, spurious arguments, and non-sequiturs (‘it does not follow’).” Todd Litman