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Scientific Encounters
According to various brain imaging studies, mindfulness meditation can change the brain in ways consistent with observed or self-reported improvements in concentration, memory, and mood. The same has been found with prayer, cognitive behavioral therapy and psychodynamic therapy.
According to one study, being around the rich makes us want to buy status-enhancing "visible goods", like fancy cars or clothes. And that might reduce household savings by about 3% a year for the non-rich folks.
I'll be brief: no self-respecting liberal would use the following terminology or concepts without wink wink irony: purity, decency, conformity, tradition, God as source of authority, pride of country, the rightness of gender roles, something being unnatural, chastity as virtue.
The big picture is not only about what really matters but also about how things work. People change political beliefs in part because they've come to a different understanding of how the world works. These changes in understanding often come about gradually in response to life experience and whatever narratives are available that help make sense of these experiences.
...people often change their political philosophies as they get older - and not just in lock-step with changes in their moral intuitions. Experience matters. Arguments and evidence matter. Reflection matters. Our ideas about how to make the world a better place aren't frozen in time and temperament. Of course we can't escape our psychology - but our psychology is not the absolute ruler of our politics.
...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?
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.