Natural Rationality

2/20/08

NaturalRationality - a round-up

A round-up of the most popular posts on NaturalRationality:

enjoy !

The Psychology of Moral Reasoning

In the last issue of Judgment and Decision-Making (Volume 3, Number 2, February 2008),

Monica Bucciarelli, Sangeet Khemlani, and P. N. Johnson-Laird (well-known for his research on mental models in reasoning) present an account of the psychology of moral reasoning (pdf - html). It is based on many experiments and gives a large place to deontic reasoning (often neglected in current moral psychology) and constrasts sharply with many sentimentalist accounts of morality (according to which moral judgment is mainly emotional). Their main findings are :

Indefinability of moral propositions: No simple criterion exists to tell from a proposition alone whether or not it concerns morals as opposed to some other deontic matter, such as a convention, a game, or good manners.
Independent systems: Emotions and deontic evaluations are based on independent systems operating in parallel.
Deontic reasoning: all deontic evaluations, including those concerning morality, depend on inferences, either unconscious intuitions or conscious reasoning.
Moral inconsistency: the beliefs that are the basis of moral intuitions and conscious moral reasoning are neither complete nor consistent.

2/7/08

All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from ?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong ?

- (The Beatles, Eleanor Rigby)

In a fascinating study (well, I find it fascinating), Epley et al., showed that lonely people or people induced to feel lonely are more prone to anthropomorphize nonhuman animals and gadgets and have stronger belief in supernatural agents. Social disconnection creates not only pain (as other research in neuroscience showed), but also over-attribution of intentionality.

Epley, N., Akalis, S., Waytz, A., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2008). Creating social connection through inferential reproduction: loneliness and perceived agency in gadgets, gods, and greyhounds. Psychological Science 19 (2), 114–120.

2/6/08

The Philosophy of Social Cognition - IV - Embodied Phenomenology and Narratives

Here is the fourth chapter of "The Philosophy of Social Cognition", the free-e-book-in-progress:Embodied Phenomenology and Narratives

A few papers on decision, the brain, and morality

A few papers worth reading:

A study on meta-ethics beleifs (how people see ethical claims):

Goodwin, G. P., & Darley, J. M. (2008). The psychology of meta-ethics: exploring objectivism,Cognition, 106(3), 1339-1366.

Important for anyone interested in neuroscience: to a non-expert public, seeing a picture of a brain biases people to give more credibility to a piece of information:

Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Frank C. Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson, & Jeremy R. Gray. (2008, February 5). The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations.

Social cognition: it begins with goal recognition