ka ANISHA SUBBERWAL
Egyptians call one’s soul the “ka.” It is the spiritual part of an individual being or God. It is a detached part of the self which was sometimes said to guide the fortunes of the individual in life.
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CE The object I’ve chosen is nail polish. It seems like a small superficial way that people express their personality or individuality. There are so many options, so many different colors and finishes and designs one can make. We see scales of everything. Sometimes one can tell a lot about a person based off their color choice, do they wear bright colored nail polish or neutral colors or some people choose no color at all. Colors are simple but they convey their own meanings and feelings. Everyone wears it differently, carries it differently just like with any other clothing item or makeup product. It represents individuality. What drives a person? “Biology versus Behavior� is a big topic of discussion when it comes to personality and characteristic traits. Do our genes have a bigger influence over our personality or is it the experiences that shape us into the person we are? Are there some genes that we inherit from our parents that define us, similarities that define who we are and the decisions we make. What are the reasons we make certain decisions, from small things like what we wear, what music we like to our beliefs and our moral codes. What defines our identity? How do we define our identity? 5
“fuck that guys couldn’t paint their nails as kids.”
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AUSTEN RENZI FOLIO
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TABLE O CONTE
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OF ENTS 13
What Is Personality
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What Makes Us Who We Are
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Behavioral Inhibition
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The Role of Emotion in Decision-Making
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The Neuroscience in Decision-Making 11
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WHAT IS
PER SON ALI TY
What makes someone who they are? Each person has an idea of their own personality type — if they are bubbly or reserved, sensitive or thick-skinned. Psychologists who try to tease out the science of who we are define personality as individual differences in the way people tend to think, feel and behave. There are many ways to measure personality, but psychologists have mostly given up on trying to divide humanity neatly into types. Instead, they focus on personality traits. THE BIG FIVE Openness Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism Conveniently, you can remember these traits with the handy OCEAN mnemonic (or, if you prefer, CANOE works, too). The Big Five were developed in the 1970s by two research teams. These teams were led by Paul Costa and Robert R. McCrae of the National Institutes of Health and
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Warren Norman and Lewis Goldberg of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Oregon, according to Scientific American. The Big Five are the ingredients that make up each individual’s personality. A person might have a dash of openness, a lot of conscientiousness, an average amount of extraversion, plenty of agreeableness and almost no neuroticism at all. Or someone could be disagreeable, neurotic, introverted, conscientious and hardly open at all. Here’s what each trait entails: OPENNESS Openness is shorthand for “openness to experience.” People who are high in openness enjoy adventure. They’re curious and appreciate art, imagination and new things. The motto of the open individual might be “Variety is the spice of life.” People low in openness are just the opposite: They prefer to stick to their habits, avoid new experiences and probably aren’t the most adventurous eaters. Changing personality is usually considered a tough process, but openness is a personality trait that’s been shown to be subject to change in adulthood. In a 2011 study, people who took psilocybin, or hallucinogenic “magic mushrooms,” became more open after the experience. The effect lasted at least a year, suggesting that it might be permanent. Speaking of experimental drug use, California’s try-anything culture is no myth. A study of personality traits across the United States released in 2013 found that openness is most prevalent on the West Coast. CONSCIENTIOUSNESS People who are conscientious are organized and have a strong sense of duty. They’re dependable, disciplined and achievement-focused. You won’t find conscientious types jetting off on round-the-world journeys with only a backpack; they’re planners. People low in conscientiousness are more spontaneous and freewheeling. They may tend toward carelessness. Conscientiousness is a helpful trait to have, as it has been linked to achievement in school and on the job.
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EXTRAVERSION Extraversion versus introversion is possibly the most recognizable personality trait of the Big Five. The more of an extravert someone is, the more of a social butterfly they are. Extraverts are chatty, sociable and draw energy from crowds. They tend to be assertive and cheerful in their social interactions. Introverts, on the other hand, need plenty of alone time, perhaps because their brains process social interaction differently. Introversion is often confused with shyness, but the two aren’t the same. Shyness implies a fear of social interactions or an inability to function socially. Introverts can be perfectly charming at parties — they just prefer solo or smallgroup activities. AGREEABLENESS Agreeableness measures the extent of a person’s warmth and kindness. The more agreeable someone is, the more likely they are to be trusting, helpful and compassionate. Disagreeable people are cold and suspicious of others, and they’re less likely to cooperate. Men who are high in agreeableness are judged to be better dancers by women, suggesting that body movement can signal personality. (Conscientiousness also makes for good dancers, according to the same 2011 study.) But in the workplace, disagreeable men actually earn more than agreeable guys. Disagreeable women didn’t show the same salary advantage, suggesting that a no-nonsense demeanor is uniquely beneficial to men. Being envious, which can lead to people being perceived as not agreeable, was found to be the most common personality type out of the four studies by a report published in August 2016 in the journal Science Advances. Envious people feel threatened when someone else is more successful than they are. NEUROTICISM To understand neuroticism, look no further than George Costanza of the long-running sitcom “Seinfeld.” George is famous for his neuroses, which the show blames on his dysfunctional parents. He worries about everything, obsesses over germs and disease and once quits a job because his anxiety over not having access to a private bathroom is too
overwhelming. George may be high on the neuroticism scale, but the personality trait is real. People high in neuroticism worry frequently and easily slip into anxiety and depression. If all is going well, neurotic people tend to find things to worry about. One 2012 study found that when neurotic people with good salaries earned raises, the extra income actually made them less happy. In contrast, people who are low in neuroticism tend to be emotionally stable and even-keeled. Unsurprisingly, neuroticism is linked with plenty of bad health outcomes. Neurotic people die younger than the emotionally stable, possibly because they turn to tobacco and alcohol to ease their nerves. Possibly the creepiest fact about neuroticism, though, is that parasites can make you feel that way. And we’re not talking about the natural anxiety that might come with knowing that a tapeworm has made a home in your gut. Undetected infection by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii may make people more prone to neuroticism, a 2006 study found. Other personality measures through personality types have fallen out of favor in modern psychological research as too reductive, they’re still used by career counselors and in the corporate world to help crystallize people’s understanding of themselves. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. A questionnaire based on the work of early psychologist Carl Jung sorts people into categories based on four areas: sensation (S), intuition (N), feeling (F) and thinking (T), as well as extraversion (E) and introversion (I). Sensing and intuition refer to how people prefer to gather information about the world, whether through concrete information (sensing) or emotional feelings (intuition). Thinking and feeling refer to how people make decisions. Thinking types go with logic, while feeling types follow their hearts. The Myers-Briggs system is rounded out with the judging/perception dichotomy, which describes how people choose to interact with the world. Judging types like decisive action, while perceiving types prefer open options. The system further identifies 16 personality types based on a combination of four of
the categories, leading to descriptions such as ISTP, ENFP, ESFJ, etc. The use of the Myers-Briggs is controversial, as research suggests that types don’t correlate well with job satisfaction or abilities. Can personality change? Maybe. A study published in the January 2017 journal Psychological Bulletin synthesized 207 published research papers and found that personality may be altered through therapy. “For the people who want to change their spouse tomorrow, which a lot of people want to do, I don’t hold out much hope for them,” said study researcher Brent Roberts, a social and personality psychologist at the University of Illinois. However, he continued, “if you’re willing to focus on one aspect of yourself, and you’re willing to go at it systematically, there’s now increased optimism that you can affect change in that domain.”imperdiet aliquam commodo elit.
Pappas, Stephanie. “Personality Traits & Personality Types: What Is Personality?” LiveScience, Purch, 7 Sept. 2017, www.livescience.com/41313-personality-traits.html.
WHAT IS PERSONALITY
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With my music, you may not fully understand it yet but the more you understand me, the clearer it gets. Same with just me as a person. I think my music says a lot about me and the way I think and feel. Its a therapeutic form of expression, that I’ve developed a passion and love for.
ANURAG BIRLA
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My major is Design Management with a minor in Fine Arts. I’m really into body painting.I buy most of my clothes from thriftstores and I love painting them.
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It takes me about 30 minutes to get ready everyday. Some artists that inspire me are John Constables and Kerry James Marshalls. 20
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WHAT MAKES US
WHO WE ARE? ALFIE BLAGG
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This scary question may make our head hurt or make us panic. What actually makes a human person an individual and what changes through our lives effects who we are. Seven billion people live on Planet Earth today and every single one of them is different; by their facial features, skin colour, personal opinions, size, weight, height, DNA and many other differences. But we can’t deny the change our bodies and minds encounter through our lives. If one was to say that what defines us is our cells and how they are, that would be very incorrect because cells change every seven years. You look in the mirror at yourself at twenty years old; you are youthful and feel almost immortal. It is the peak time in your life where you are most fit and you are ready for almost anything. Jump ten years into the future, experiences have changed the way you think and look, your cells have changed completely and you are far closer to death. In this time as a person you will have matured greatly. Apart from your name, what makes you the same person you were then? In other words, if, when you were twenty years old, you saw the thirty or forty year old future you, what would make you think it was you? We need to take into consideration that although we may be the same mentally, we cannot deny the physical change which takes place through our bodies. Memories may be the thing that makes us feel individual, but we could be fooling ourselves and just telling a story. We are still very naive in this vast universe and are unsure of the events that take place through our lives. Philosophers are very unaware of the changes that happen over our life time, it could be developing to make the person you’re meant to be, then slowly slipping down to death, or everyday you could be a new different person to the one you were the evening before. This question is one of many fantastic questions in philosophy, it gets your brain into gear and helps us get step by step closer to finding out the answers of life and the universe.
“What Makes Us Who We Are?” Philosophyfoundation, 16 July 2012, philosophyfoundation.wordpress. com/2012/07/16/what-makes-us-who-we-are/.
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I’ve been exposed to a lot of different style influences since I have moved every five years of my life, so I think my style is a combination of different things that have influenced me while growing up. I think I have an unintentionally nostaligic way of dressing. I go for garments that remind me of my childhood, or simply fun pieces that I think are playful. I’m definitely a playful person and I think my personality comes across in the way I dress. I have been told my closet is eclectic. Kinda like me! There’s a million different weird vintage shirts and so many colorful things with different textures. There’s a lot going on and people are taken aback by it too. I guess that also applies to my personality. I don’t think I try too hard when it comes to the pressure of “being different” but I definitely do stay true to myself when it comes to how I dress, which does end up making my style different. I won’t wear anything that makes me uncomfortable even if its considered cool. I feel like my best seld when I wear clothes that feel like me.
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A TEMPERAMENT F TEMPERAA MENT 36
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BE HAV I ORAL INHIBITION
NATHAN FOX HEATHER HENDERSON PETER MARSHALL
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Abstract Behavioral inhibition refers to a temperament or style of reacting that some infants and young children exhibit when confronted with novel situations or unfamiliar adults or peers. Research on behavioral inhibition has examined the link between this set of behaviors to the neural systems involved in the experience and expression of fear. There are strong parallels between the physiology of behaviorally inhibited children and the activation of physiological systems associated with conditioned and unconditioned fear. Research has examined which caregiving behaviors support the frequency of behavioral inhibition across development, and work on the interface of cognitive processes and behavioral inhibition reveal both how certain cognitive processes moderate behavioral inhibition and how this temperament affects the development of cognition. This research has taken place within a context of the possibility that stable behavioral inhibition may be a risk factor for psychopathology, particularly anxiety disorders in older children. The current chapter reviews these areas of research and provides an integrative account of the broad impact of behavioral inhibition research. Behavioral inhibition to the unfamiliar refers to “the child’s initial behavioral reactions to unfamiliar people, objects, and contexts, or challenging situations� (Kagan et al. 1985, p. 53). The initial research reports on behavioral inhibition (Garcia-Coll et al. 1984, Kagan et al. 1988) described a group of toddlers who, by both parent report and observation in the laboratory, avoided unfamiliar events and people. When confronted with such challenges, these children ceased their play behavior and withdrew to the proximity of their caregivers. They remained vigilant of
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their surroundings during these situations and rarely approached novel objects or unfamiliar people. Our goal in this chapter is to provide a broad overview of the work on behavioral inhibition. After a brief introduction, we begin with a review of the research identifying the biological underpinnings of behavioral inhibition. We next review the longitudinal studies of behavioral inhibition outlining the findings on continuity and discontinuity and identifying factors both within the child and in the environment that may affect these different developmental trajectories. In the third section,we focus on the role of attentional processes as an example of a within-child factor that contributes to patterns of reactivity and regulation among behaviorally inhibited children. Our fourth section details the findings from the developmental psychopathology literature on relations between behavioral inhibition and the heightened risk for general and specific anxiety disorders and more global problems in adjustment. In the final section of this review, we suggest future directions for the study of behavioral inhibition. Research on behavioral inhibition has in many ways provided a model of interdisciplinary integration for other areas of developmental psychology that are now at the forefront of psychological science. Among these areas are the study of links between basic neuroscience and emotional development, examinations of the mutual influences of affect and cognition on behavior, and the identification of precursors to psychopathology in early childhood. There are a number of reasons why the work on behavioral inhibition has been successful in creating these links. First, unlike most previous research on temperament, this work has relied less on questionnaire data (e.g., parent report of temperament) and more on behavioral description. The focus on behavioral observation and clear descriptions allowed scientists to identify certain responses (e.g., freezing, avoidance) that are similar to those described in animal models of fear or anxiety. The ability to relate behavioral descriptions of humans to descriptions of other
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animals provided an important initial link between temperament and the neurosciences. A second reason why the work on behavioral inhibition has had such a broad impact in psychology is the emphasis placed on the categorical nature of extreme temperamental behavioral inhibition, particularly by Kagan and colleagues (e.g., Kagan et al. 1984). Kagan appealed to notions in biology and medicine where categories serve an important function in identifying a species or a specific disease state (Kagan 1994). Correct or not, the idea of a categorical trait with its own unique biology and behavioral constellation forged a link with biologists and neuroscientists. Kagan’s reading of the then current work in behavioral neuroscience, including the studies of LeDoux and Davis (e.g., Davis 1986, LeDoux et al. 1988) enhanced his interest in describing the underlying biology of behavioral inhibition. In separate research programs, LeDoux and Davis focused on the amygdala as the brain structure responsible for the enhancement of fear conditioning and the potentiation of fear behaviors (Davis 1992, LeDoux et al. 1988). Building on the psychophysiological data that he and his colleagues had collected, Kagan suggested that individual differences in behavioral inhibition were the result, in part, of an overactive amygdala, creating an enhanced fear response to novelty and unfamiliarity. This attempt to bridge the behavior-neuroscience gap came at a time when the work of Davis and LeDoux was receiving widespread attention, and it facilitated a broader discussion of the ways in which the interplay of biology and behavior could be understood over time and within the context of human development. The initial research on behavioral inhibition was also inherently developmental in approach and theory. Two key observations were highlighted in longitudinal studies of behavioral inhibition. First, across development, children developed a greater repertoire of behaviors in response to novel social situations. Second, while the behavioral manifestation changed somewhat over development, there was significant preservation of individual differences in inhibition. That is, behaviorally inhibited children displayed marked continuity in their
distinctive pattern of responding to unfamiliar social and nonsocial stimuli. At the same time, variations in the developmental trajectories of behaviorally inhibited children necessitated broadening the model to include both endogenous and exogenous factors that might influence these different developmental paths, and merited examination of the contextual factors and cognitive processes that may mediate the expression of behavioral inhibition as children get older. A primary source of hypotheses regarding factors influencing different developmental trajectories for behaviorally inhibited children is the model of temperament postulated by Rothbart and colleagues. challenging coping episode compared with children who were highly inhibited but securely attached. The cortisol increase for inhibited-insecure infants was greater than that for the uninhibited infants, whether securely or insecurely attached. In this sense, mothers in secure dyads who have inhibited children may support their children’s strategies for coping with an unfamiliar and/or stressful situation.
“Behavioral Inhibition: Linking Biology and Behavior within a Developmental Framework.� Behavioral Inhibition: Linking Biology and Behavior within a Developmental Framework | Annual Review of Psychology, www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev. psych.55.090902.141532.
BEHAVIORAL INHIBITION
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EVENOVAK I think that I try to dress how I feel and see myself on the inside in a sense. It’s a bit of a strange thing because theres a certain way in society that we dress and I am clearly an outlier because of the colors that I wear and express myself in. It’s just a physical extension of who I am. I just love color and light - it makes me feel something.
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THE ROLE OF EMOTION IN
DECISIONMAKING
LILY A. GUTNIK FOROGH HAKIMZADA NICOLE YOSKOWITZ VIMLA PATEL
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ABSTRACT Models of decision-making usually focus on cognitive, situational, and socio-cultural variables in accounting for human performance. However, the emotional component is rarely addressed within these models. This paper reviews evidence for the emotional aspect of decision-making and its role within a new framework of investigation, called neuroeconomics. The new approach aims to build a comprehensive theory of decision-making, through the unification of theories and methods from economics, psychology, and neuroscience. In this paper, we review these integrative research methods and their applications to issues of public health, with illustrative examples from our research on young adults’ safe sex practices. This approach promises to be valuable as a comprehensively descriptive and possibly, better predictive model for construction and customization of decision support tools for health professionals and consumers. INTRODUCTION Decision-making is a field of interest for philosophers, economists, psychologists, and neuroscientists, among others. A fundamental question that drives research in this area is why do people who are presented with the same options make different choices? What is it about the cognitive and neurological processes that lead people to different outcomes? Why do rational models such as those used in economics and the classical
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decision-making theory not always accurately predict an individual’s behavior? These questions and others are particularly true of decision-making under risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity. These questions are addressed by the emerging field of neuroeconomics which is the combination of the different perspectives and theories of psychology, economics, and neuroscience. Our objective in this paper is to explore the role of emotion in decision-making and to introduce theories and methods employed in the emerging field of neuroeconomics in this context. We first present a review of theories and research methods for studying decision-making, including classical decision theories, the cognitive naturalistic approach, and the neurological basis of behavior. We then present a summary of the role of emotion in decision-making, defining the dichotomy of emotional and rational systems, research on risk assessment, and findings from neuroscience. The following section introduces a new methodology for researching and explaining decision-making behavior, the neuroeconomic approach. Our discussion focuses on the integration of the separate disciplines of economics, psychology, and neuroscience in this new approach, and a summary of work already conducted in this vein. We then propose an extension to the neuroeconomic model, cognitive neuroeconomics, which highlights the primacy of both emotion and cognition in decision-making under risk and uncertainty. We illustrate how this approach can be applied to issues of public health, namely sexual decision-making, with an example from our research on young adults’ safer sex practices, which have implications for the spread of HIV. The apparent limitation of this review is that our study did not utilize neuroscience methods, which restricts our discussion to possible future research using these methods. In our conclusions, we discuss the relevance of this new approach to medical informatics, and the implications for the construction of decision support tools for health professionals and consumers. In our illustration, we focus on decision-making by the lay public, specifically to understand how and under what conditions the public makes “near misses” and risky
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decisions about their health. Despite public health campaigns, educational programs in schools, and other interventions, the rate of HIV infection among the younger “heterosexual” population is on the rise. According to the World Health Report 2004, the dominant mode of HIV transmission is unprotected sexual intercourse [1]. Young adults engage in unprotected intercourse even though they are aware that they risk HIV infection by doing so, and they recognize that condom use is an effective means of protection against infection. In light of this information, we need to address this public health issue and the promotion of safer sex practices, especially in young adults—individuals who are often high risk takers. We conducted a study of decision-making about risky sexual behavior, using a group of 60 heterosexual young urban men and women [2]. These young adults were recently sexually active, and had a moderate knowledge of HIV on a standard knowledge assessment. We collected daily journals chronicling each young adult’s sexual behavior, which were supplemented by in-depth interviews concerning sexual histories and attitudes towards a variety of related sexual-health topics. Cognitive analysis of the data led us to pay particular attention to condom use as a target decision point during the sexual encounter. In an immediate decision situation during a sexual encounter, there are only tw o options from which to proceed: (1) use condoms and thus greatly minimize the risk of contracting a STD or pregnancy, or (2) not use condoms and thus greatly increase the risk of pregnancy or contracting a STD. Classical decision theory and economic models of decision-making propose that the best option for the individual is to use condoms during sexual intercourse, but this is not usually the case in practice. In the cognitive naturalistic model, there are cognitive (memory, knowledge, inferences, strategies), socio-cultural (group norms), and situational (environmental) constraints on the decision-making process. The cognitive factors are past experiences, beliefs and assumptions, perceptions, and actions. These factors interact with socio-cultural standards and the environment, resulting
in some behavior. Using this framework, we identified four distinct patterns of lifetime condom use, an indicator of safe sex behavior: (1) mostly consistent condom use (35.0%), (2) mostly inconsistent condom use (16.7%), (3) shifting from consistent to inconsistent condom use (35.0%), and (4) shifting from inconsistent to consistent condom use (13.3%) [2]. However, we were not able to fully account for all behavior using the cognitive model alone. An analysis of the data using temporal and thematic coding, as well as semantic relations, strongly suggests that emotion is a key factor in understanding the variation in behavior. Extending our model to include the role of emotion, as well as its interaction with cognition, increases our ability to account for decision-making under risk. 2. PERSPECTIVES ON DECISION-MAKING 2.1. Classical decision theories in psychology and economics According to Classical Decision Theory (CDT), making decisions involve choosing a course of action among a fixed set of alternatives with a specific goal in mind. The three components of a decision are (1) options or courses of action, (2) beliefs and expectancies of the options in achieving the goal, and (3) outcome expectancies (negative or positive) [3]. CDT focuses on how and why decisions deviate from a certain standard of rationality, which is based on optimality. According to this theory, the aim in making a decision is to maximize the gains, or expected value of the outcome, and use information in a way that would accomplish this goal. The expected value is a linear model that expresses a multiplicative relationship between probability and utility. This assumes that individuals are aggregating and weighing information accurately and consistently and that they have the ability to make logical and empirically correct judgments [4]. However, CDT has failed to explain behavior and decision-making in practical, real world situations. This theory is limited in descriptive power because it treats all decisions as essentially the same, comparing them to a normative standard. However, individuals have not been found to make deci-
sions following a normative model [5]. The established paradigm for studying medical decision-making is the normative comparative approach, based on CDT [6]. Traditionally, research has been conducted in controlled laboratory settings and the focus is on the nature of the decision outcome and how it deviates from a normative standard. Under this model, experts are subject to the same standards as laypeople. There is also less emphasis on domain-specific knowledge. Decision researchers have also looked at judgment under uncertainty and its influences on decisions and behavior. According to the normative model, uncertainty reflects the judgment of the likelihood of an event in a particular situation (a probability). The theories that fall under this normative approach are the expected utility and subjective expected utility theories, which assert that decisions are made to maximize one’s gains (ratio of chance taken by amount of payoff), and the conditional probability theory, based on the Bayesian perspective (Laplace-Bayes theorem) [6]. The theories all suppose the optimal decision is chosen in situations of uncertainty. The strengths of these models are that they provide a standard from which to compare and find ways to improve human behavior, and well-defined mathematical models of rational decisions. However, these models usually perform better than humans do and humans do not usually reason in accord with the premises of these models [6]. For example, after assessing late adolescents’ and young adults’ (16–21 years) perceived personal risk of HIV, risk associated with six sexual activities, and perceived likelihood of and recent experience engaging in each type, strong representations of sexual risk were not found to be useful predictors of actual sexual behavior [7]. In another study, young adult men (21–33 years) were found to be only marginally guided by risks associated with unprotected sexual activity and by perceived prevalence of HIV [8]. Tversky and Kahneman [9] have defined the use of heuristics, biases, and framing effects in affecting the decision maker. They have been found to produce decisions that systematically deviate from the normative standard in an attempt to compensate for lack of knowl-
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edge. These heuristic strategies, although sometimes appropriate and efficient, often result in poor decisions. Heuristics, biases, and framing effects have been well documented in the context of health-related decisions. For example, researchers have studied confirmation bias and framing effects (survival vs. mortality rates) in the medical area [10]. It has been found that positive framing results in more risk-averse choices whereas negative framing increases risk-seeking choices. There are also studies that have examined the biases and heuristics used by young adults when reasoning about risky situations that are relevant to HIV. In a laboratory study involving male university students, judgments of STD risk potential were lowered significantly after viewing photographs of people rated high in sex appeal compared to initial estimates based on sexual histories alone [23]. Individuals consistently demonstrate an optimistic bias with regard to perceptions of their own HIV risk. Other researchers have also found false consensus biases whereby individuals rate their peers as similar to themselves in terms of risk, regardless of risk information. A limitation of the traditional laboratory-based “heuristics and biases” approach is that it is constrained by not having data on how people make mistakes at the point that the decision is made, only that they made a mistake [27]. Research using this approach makes the implicit assumption that the decision maker has identified a goal and the method of implementing the decision is not part of the decision-making problem. However, sometimes the use of heuristics is adaptive and facilitates a decision, but research has usually not viewed heuristics and biases from this perspective. 2.2. Cognitive naturalistic decision-making Naturalistic decision-making (NDM) has emerged mainly out of the frustration with the efforts to apply methods and findings from the classical decision research in these complex and multifaceted settings. Patel and colleagues [6] refer to this as an “emerging new paradigm” and suggest that this model
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of decision-making combines the traditional protocol analytic methods with innovative methods designed to investigate cognition and behavior in realistic settings. The naturalistic decision-making approach emphasizes descriptive adequacy of its models, which necessitates in-depth qualitative methodologies that complement quantitative ones [6]. Unlike CDT, NDM views expert performance as the gold standard and focuses on the role of expert knowledge organization in performance. The decision process from a problem-solving perspective is a search in the problem space (which is evolving and dynamic), in which the problem solver performs an operation (inference or action) from possible operations in moving toward a solution or goal. In medicine, this approach has been used to study clinical competency in novices and experts, where the goal is formulation of a diagnosis or treatment plan [28,29]. This research has had an impact on cognitive science and artificial intelligence-focused research, in studying humans and building computational models. This approach recognizes conceptual knowledge as a resource to aid decisions and a contributor to identifying patterns of misunderstanding, which lead to suboptimal decisions. Studies of decision-making in the lay public have also shown how the understanding of pediatric illnesses influenced mothers’ choices of treatment for their children [30]. The study, which was conducted in rural India, showed how mothers interpreted concepts related to biomedical theories of nutritional disorders. The authors found that traditional knowledge and beliefs played an important role in interpretation of these disorders, which led to decisions that were influenced by “non-scientific” traditional ideas. The layperson, who had no formal education, had a clear understanding of the traditional knowledge and described the concept in a connected piece of logic. The person with more formal education used the medical concepts, but the reasoning was still traditional with no change in the underlying thinking [31]. With more education, instead of rejecting traditional explanations, the mothers developed different conceptual structures, which they used in an opportunistic manner.
Furthermore, naturalistic decision-making as it applies to decisions in high stress situations necessitates immediate response behavior, and perceptual cues may play a more prominent role in the decision process. This was corroborated by the work of Klein and colleagues with regard to the decision process involving work with fire commanders and platoon leaders, employing various methods, such as field observations and retrospective accounts of actual emergency events. Commanders had to decide whether to employ a search and rescue, or initiate an offensive attack on the fire or whether to use a more precautionary defensive strategy. It was found that commanders acted on the basis of prior experience, immediate feedback and careful monitoring and assessment of the situation. This process involved a serial evaluation of options rather than systematic selection of pre-determined options. The results indicate that expert commanders relied more on strategies of situation recognition with minimal deliberation, whereas novices employed a more deliberative decision-making strategy. This kind of decision-making based on situation-recognition is the characteristic of naturalistic decision-making in dynamic environments. Leprohon and Patel studied the decision-making strategies used by nurses in emergency telephone triage settings. In this context, nurses are required to respond to public emergency calls for medical help (exemplified by 911 telephone service). The study analyzed transcripts of nurse–patient caller telephone conversations of different levels of urgency and complexity and interviewed nurses immediately following their conversations. In decision-making situations such as emergency telephone triage, there is a chronic sense of time urgency. This may involve the immediate mobilization and allocation of resources. Decisions are always made on the basis of partial and sometimes unreliable information. The results were consistent with three patterns of decision-making that reflect the perceived urgency of the situation. The first pattern corresponds to immediate response behavior as reflected in situations of high urgency. In these circumstances, decisions are
made with great rapidity. Actions are typically triggered by symptoms or the unknown urgency level in a forward-directed manner. The nurses in this study responded with perfect accuracy (i.e., allocating the proper resources to meet the demands) in these situations. The second pattern involves limited problem solving and typically corresponds to a situation of moderate urgency and to cases that are of some complexity. The behavior is characterized by information seeking and clarification exchanges over a more extended period of time. These circumstances resulted in the highest percentage of decision errors (mostly false positives). The third pattern involves deliberate problem solving and planning and typically corresponds to low urgency situations. These situations involved evaluating the whole situation and exploring options and alternative solutions, such as identifying the basic needs of a patient and referring the patient to an appropriate clinic. The nurses made fewer errors than in situations of moderate urgency and more errors than in situations requiring immediate response behavior. They could accurately perceive a situation as not being of high urgency. Decision-making accuracy was significantly higher in nurses with 10 years or more of experience than nurses with less experience, which is consistent with the acquisition of expertise in other domains. Most decisions in this study were based on symptoms rather than on diagnostic hypotheses, especially in urgent situations. These decisions rely on prior instances that facilitate rapid schema access, based on minimal information and enable them to represent the situation to gather information and make decisions. This finding is consistent with the research by Benner and Tanner [36] who found that nurses respond on the basis of prior experiences in memory and do not decompose decisions into sets of alternatives or attempt to understand the underlying pathophysiology of a patient problem. Nurses’ training, which focuses on observational skills and detection of abnormal and urgent symptoms, would contribute to the acquisition of this type of decision-making process. Benner also suggests that experience-based knowledge forms the basis of much of nurses’ intuitive clinical judgments.
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Crandall and Calderwood [37] studied nurses’ decision-making about patients with sepsis in a neonatal intensive care unit. They employed an interview methodology known as the critical decision method, which involves asking individuals about particularly challenging incidents and probing for cues that resulted in particular decisions. The findings indicated that experienced nurses rely heavily on perceptually based indicators and findings not documented in the medical literature. The nurses were very sensitive to subtle changes in an infant’s condition, were able to detect trends early on in the clinical course, and predicted potentially adverse outcomes (a worsening septic shock). The researchers elicited much of this information through probes, since nurses had difficulty in verbally explaining the perceptual cues. Specifically in the HIV area, Patel et al. [38] examined the relationships among knowledge, decision-making strategies, and risk assessment about HIV by youths, using semi-structured interviews, risk assessment questionnaires, and peer group focused discussions using real life HIV scenarios. It was found that youths have difficulty interpreting low-risk and negligible-risk probabilities appropriately, but are able to accurately interpret highrisk probabilities. Negotiations and conflict resolutions during peer group discussions appeared to shape youths’ understanding about HIV through clarification of risk factors and justification of the conditions under which risks were taken. 2.3. Neurological basis of decision-making Like other executive processes, decisionmaking involves a wide range of inputs such as multi-modal sensory inputs, conditioning based on past experience, sensory and emotional responses, and the anticipation of future goals. Furthermore, these inputs must be integrated and associated with uncertainties, expectations and outcomes and subsequently processed to make the most appropriate decisions. Investigators have looked at various aspects of decision-making, from the neurological basis of simple binary choice in non-human primates to highly complex analyses of human decision-making by individuals, as well as by groups in applied settings. As
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a result, a hiatus has developed between the neuropsychological studies of decision-making and other disciplines involved in the field. On the one hand, the neural basis of decision-making has been confined to an analysis of the simplest decision processes and has not been applied to complex processes involved in human judgment. On the other hand, theories about high-level decision-making have remained purely descriptive with very little neurological underpinnings [39]. With the advent of new technological advances in the field of neuroscience, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), it is now possible to attempt to find the neurological bases for psychological and economic theories of decision-making. However, despite the excitement that has been generated about investigation of this field, it is important to point out that the challenge is a daunting one. The study of the neural basis of decision-making involves a myriad of neural processes and sub-processes, with an equally complex set of regions and sub-regions in the brain. In spite of the leaps made in understanding these phenomena in the past decade, what we currently have are essentially bits and pieces of information about various regions and sub-regions involved in different functionalities. Moreover, these investigations have not always led to consistent results. Fellows [40] discusses that the lack of a systematic approach has led to difficulties in analyzing and interpreting the available data. It is also important to note that a considerable portion of our current knowledge in this field comes from lesion studies and patient with chronic drug abuse (for review, see Krawczyk [39]). This is a highly valuable source of information about the functionality of the specific brain regions. However, it is important to note that the complexity of the brain and numerous interconnections and innervations between different brain regions can, and often do, result in significant confounders that give a less than accurate picture of the processes and regions involved. One further point is that the concepts and tools of neuroscience are just one of the many useful but incomplete tools for the study
of decision-making. Neuroscience has served and continues to serve as a descriptive tool used to shed light on the parts of the brain involved in decision-making, but cannot be used as a full-fledged predictive tool. In other words, while neuroscience techniques can explain how various parts of the brain interact during decision-making, and what that means, it has little predictive power with regard to the course of action taken. 2.3.1. Neural architecture of decision-making The neural architecture of decision-making is comprised of a highly complex and interconnected circuitry. Table 1 presents some of these regions along with their functional classifications. However, it is important to note that all areas of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are heavily interconnected, emphasizing the primacy of the region in decision processes. Furthermore, the PFC is highly interconnected with several sub-cortical regions, which have also been implicated in various aspects of decision-making. Evidence has come from lesion studies in animals, studies of humans with PFC damage, and neuro-imaging studies. It should also be noted that this is not an exhaustive list, but rather a useful architectural tool for the present discussion. If you wish to read more, the article details are listed below.
“The Role of Emotion in Decision-Making: A Cognitive Neuroeconomic Approach towards Understanding Sexual Risk Behavior.� Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Academic Press, 7 Apr. 2006, www.sciencedirect.com/science/ article/pii/S1532046406000451.
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THE NEUROSCIENCE OF
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Imagine we could develop a precise drug that amplifies people’s aversion to harming others; on this drug you won’t hurt a fly, everyone taking it becomes like Buddhist monks. Who should take this drug? Only convicted criminals—people who have committed violent crimes? Should we put it in the water supply? These are normative questions. These are questions about what should be done. I feel grossly unprepared to answer these questions with the training that I have, but these are important conversations to have between disciplines. Psychologists and neuroscientists need to be talking to philosophers about this. These are conversations that we need to have because we don’t want to get to the point where we have the technology but haven’t had this conversation, because then terrible things could happen.
I’m a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford in the UK. I’m interested in decision making, specifically decisions that involve tradeoffs; for example, tradeoffs between my own self-interest and the interests of other people, or tradeoffs between my present desires and my future goals. One thing that’s always fascinated me, specifically about human decision making, is the fact that we have multiple conflicting motives in our decision process. And not only do we have these forces pulling us in different directions, but we can reflect on this fact. We can witness the tug of war that happens when we’re trying to make a difficult decision. One thing that is great about our ability to reflect on this process is that it suggests that we can intervene somehow in our decisions. We can make better decisions—more self-controlled decisions, or more moral decisions. The reason I’ve become interested in the neuroscience of decision making is because I have this sense that pulling apart the different moving parts of this process and looking under the hood will give us clues about where we might be able to intervene and shape our own decisions.
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One case study for this is moral decision making. When we can see that there’s a selfish option and we can see that there’s an altruistic or a cooperative option, we can reason our way through the decision, but there are also gut feelings about what’s right and what’s wrong. I’ve studied the neurobiology of moral decision making, specifically how different chemicals in our brains—neuromodulators—can shape the process of making moral decisions and push us one way or another when we’re reasoning and deciding. Neuromodulators are chemicals in the brain. There are a bunch of different neuromodulator systems that serve different functions. Events out in the world activate these systems and then they perfuse into different regions of the brain and influence the way that information is processed in those regions. All of you have experience with neuromodulators. Some of you are drinking cups of coffee right now. Many of you probably had wine with dinner last night. Maybe some of you have other experiences that are a little more interesting. But you don’t need to take drugs or alcohol to influence your neurochemistry. You can also influence your neurochemistry through natural events: Stress influences your neurochemistry, sex, exercise, changing your diet. There are all these things out in the world that feed into our brains through these chemical systems. I’ve become interested in studying if we change these chemicals in the lab, can we cause changes in people’s behavior and their decision making? One thing to keep in mind about the effects of these different chemicals on our behavior is that the effects here are subtle. The effect sizes are really small. This has two consequences for doing research in this area. The first is because the effect sizes are so small, the published literature on this is likely to be underpowered. There are probably a lot of false positives out there. We heard earlier that there is a lot of thought on this in science, not just in psychology but in all of science about how we can do better powered experiments, and how we can create a set of data that will tell us what’s going on.
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The other thing—and this is what I’ve been interested in—is because the effects of neuromodulators are so subtle, we need precise measures in the lab of the behaviors and decision processes that we’re interested in. It’s only with precise measures that we’re going to be able to pick up these subtle effects of brain chemistry, which maybe at the individual level aren’t going to make a dramatic difference in someone’s personality, but at the aggregate level, in collective behaviors like cooperation and public goods problems, these might become important on a global scale. How can we measure moral decision making in the lab in a precise way, and also in a way that we can agree is actually moral? This is an important point. One big challenge in this area is there’s a lot of disagreement about what constitutes a moral behavior. What is moral? We heard earlier about cooperation—maybe some people think that’s a moral decision but maybe other people don’t. That’s a real issue for getting people to cooperate. First we have to pick a behavior that we can all agree is moral, and secondly we need to measure it in a way that tells us something about the mechanism. We want to have these rich sets of data that tell us about these different moving parts—these different pieces of the puzzle—and then we can see how they map onto different parts of the brain and different chemical systems. What I’m going to do over the next 20 minutes is take you through my thought process over the past several years. I tried a bunch of different ways of measuring the effects of neurochemistry on what at one point I think is moral decision making, but then turns out maybe is not the best way to measure morality. And I’ll show you how I tried to zoom in on more advanced and sophisticated ways of measuring the cognitions and emotions that we care about in this context. When I started this work several years ago, I was interested in punishment and economic games that you can use to measure punishment—if someone treats you unfairly then
you can spend a bit of money to take money away from them. I was interested specifically in the effects of a brain chemical called serotonin on punishment. The issues that I’ll talk about here aren’t specific to serotonin but apply to this bigger question of how can we change moral decision making. When I started this work the prevailing view about punishment was that punishment was a moral behavior—a moralistic or altruistic punishment where you’re suffering a cost to enforce a social norm for the greater good. It turned out that serotonin was an interesting chemical to be studying in this context because serotonin has this long tradition of being associated with prosocial behavior. If you boost serotonin function, this makes people more prosocial. If you deplete or impair serotonin function, this makes people antisocial. If you go by the logic that punishment is a moral thing to do, then if you enhance serotonin, that should increase punishment. What we actually see in the lab is the opposite effect. If you increase serotonin people punish less, and if you decrease serotonin people punish more. That throws a bit of a spanner in the works of the idea that punishment is this exclusively prosocially minded act. And this makes sense if you just introspect into the kinds of motivations that you go through if someone treats you unfairly and you punish them. I don’t know about you, but when that happens to me I’m not thinking about enforcing a social norm or the greater good, I just want that guy to suffer; I just want him to feel bad because he made me feel bad. The neurochemistry adds an interesting layer to this bigger question of whether punishment is prosocially motivated, because in some ways it’s a more objective way to look at it. Serotonin doesn’t have a research agenda; it’s just a chemical. We had all this data and we started thinking differently about the motivations of so-called altruistic punishment. That inspired a purely behavioral study where we give people the opportunity to punish those who behave unfairly towards them, but we do it in two
conditions. One is a standard case where someone behaves unfairly to someone else and then that person can punish them. Everyone has full information, and the guy who’s unfair knows that he’s being punished. Then we added another condition, where we give people the opportunity to punish in secret— hidden punishment. You can punish someone without them knowing that they’ve been punished. They still suffer a loss financially, but because we obscure the size of the stake, the guy who’s being punished doesn’t know he’s being punished. The punisher gets the satisfaction of knowing that the bad guy is getting less money, but there’s no social norm being enforced. What we find is that people still punish a lot in the hidden punishment condition. Even though people will punish a little bit more when they know the guy who’s being punished will know that he’s being punished—people do care about norm enforcement—a lot of punishment behavior can be explained by a desire for the norm violator to have a lower payoff in the end. This suggests that punishment is potentially a bad way to study morality because the motivations behind punishment are, in large part, spiteful. Another set of methods that we’ve used to look at morality in the lab and how it’s shaped by neurochemistry is trolley problems—the bread and butter of moral psychology research. These are hypothetical scenarios where people are asked whether it’s morally acceptable to harm one person in order to save many others. We do find effects of neuromodulators on these scenarios and they’re very interesting in their own right. But I’ve found this tool unsatisfying for the question that I’m interested in, which is: How do people make moral decisions with real consequences in real time, rather than in some hypothetical situation? I’m equally unsatisfied with economic games as a tool for studying moral decision making because it’s not clear that there’s a salient moral norm in something like cooperation in a public goods game, or charitable giving
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in a dictator game. It’s not clear that people feel guilty if they choose the selfish option in these cases. After all this I’ve gone back to the drawing board and thought about what is the essence of morality? There’s been some work on this in recent years. One wonderful paper by Kurt Gray, Liane Young, and Adam Waytz argues that the essence of morality is harm, specifically intentional interpersonal harm—an agent harming a patient. Of course morality is more than this; absolutely morality is more than this. It will be hard to find a moral code that doesn’t include some prohibition against harming someone else unless you have a good reason. What I wanted to do was create a measure in the lab that can precisely quantify how much people dislike causing interpersonal harms. What we came up with was getting people to make tradeoffs between personal profits—money—and pain in the form of electric shocks that are given to another person. What we can do with this method is calculate, in monetary terms, how much people dislike harming others. And we can fit computational models to their decision process that give us a rich picture of how people make these decisions -- not just how much harm they’re willing to deliver or not -- but what is the precise value they place on the harm of others relative to, for example, harm to themselves? What is the relative certainty or uncertainty with which they’re making those decisions? How noisy are their choices? If we’re dealing with monetary gains or losses, how does loss aversion factor into this? We can get a more detailed picture of the data and of the decision process from using methods like these, which are largely inspired by work on non-social decision making and computational neuroscience where a lot of progress has been made in recent years. For example, in foraging environments how do people decide whether to go left or right when there are fluctuating reward contingencies in the environment?
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What we’re doing is importing those methods to the study of moral decision making and a lot of interesting stuff has come out of it. As you might expect there is individual variation in decision making in this setting. Some people care about avoiding harm to others and other people are like, “Just show me the money, I don’t care about the other person.” I even had one subject who was almost certainly on the psychopathy scale. When I explained to him what he had to do he said, “Wait, you’re going to pay me to shock people? This is the best experiment ever!” Whereas other people are uncomfortable and are even distressed by this. This is capturing something real about moral decision making. One thing that we’re seeing in the data is that people who seem to be more averse to harming others are slower when they’re making their decisions. This is an interesting contrast to Dave’s work where the more prosocial people are faster. Of course there are issues that we need to work out about correlation versus causation in response times and decision making, but there are some questions here in thinking about the differences between a harm context and helping context. It may be that the heuristics that play out in a helping context come from learning about what is good and latch onto neurobiological systems that approach rewards and get invigorated when there are awards around, in contrast to neurobiological systems that avoid punishments and slow down or freeze when there are punishments around. In the context of tradeoffs between profit for myself and pain for someone else, it makes sense that people who are maximizing the profit for themselves are going to be faster because if you’re considering the harm to someone else, that’s an extra computational step you have to take. If you’re going to factor in someone else’s suffering—the negative externality of your decisions—you have to do that computation and that’s going to take a little time. In this broader question of the time course of moral decision making, there might be a
sweet spot where on the one hand you have an established heuristic of helping that’s going to make you faster, but at the same time considering others is also a step that requires some extra processing. This makes sense. When I was developing this work in London I was walking down the street one day checking my phone, as we all do, and this kid on a bike in a hoodie came by and tried to steal my phone. He luckily didn’t get it, it just crashed to the floor -- he was an incompetent thief. In thinking about what his thought process was during that time, he wasn’t thinking about me at all. He had his eye on the prize. He had his eye on the phone, he was thinking about his reward. He wasn’t thinking about the suffering that I would feel if I lost my phone. That’s a broader question to think about in terms of the input of mentalizing to moral decision making. Another observation is that people who are nicer in this setting seem to be more uncertain in their decision making. If you look at the parameters that describe uncertainty, you can see that people who are nicer seem to be more noisy around their indifference point. They waver more in these difficult decisions. So I’ve been thinking about uncertainty and its relationship to altruism and social decision making, more generally. One potentially fruitful line of thought is that social decisions— decisions that affect other people—always have this inherent element of uncertainty. Even if we’re a good mentalizer, even if we’re the best possible mentalizer, we’re never going to fully know what it is like to be someone else and how another person is going to experience the effects of our actions on them. One thing that it might make sense to do if we want to co-exist peacefully with others is we simulate how our behavior is going to effect others, but we err on the side of caution. We don’t want to impose an unbearable cost on someone else so we think, “Well, I might dislike this outcome a certain amount but maybe my interaction partner is going to dislike it a little more so I’m just going to add a little extra safety—a margin of error—that’s going to move me in the prosocial direction.” We’re
seeing this in the context of pain but this could apply to any cost—risk or time cost. Imagine that you have a friend who is trying to decide between two medical procedures. One procedure produces the most desirable outcome, but it also has a high complication or a high mortality rate. Another procedure doesn’t achieve as good of an outcome but it’s much safer. Suppose your friend says to you, “I want you to choose which procedure I’m going to have. I want you to choose for me.” First of all, most of us would be very uncomfortable making that decision for someone else. Second, my intuition is that I would definitely go for the safer option because if something bad happened in the risky decision, I would feel terrible. This idea that we can’t access directly someone else’s utility function is a rather old idea and it goes back to the 1950s with the work of John Harsanyi, who did some work on what he called interpersonal utility comparisons. How do you compare one person’s utility to another person’s utility? This problem is important, particularly in utilitarian ethics, because if you want to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number, you have to have some way of measuring the greatest good for each of those numbers. The challenge of doing this was recognized by the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, who said, “’Tis vain to talk of adding quantities which after the addition will continue to be as distinct as they were before; one man’s happiness will never be another man’s happiness: a gain to one man is no gain to another: you might as well pretend to add 20 apples to 20 pears.” This problem has still not been solved. Harsanyi has done a lot of great work on this but what he ended up with—his final solution—was still an approximation that assumes that people have perfect empathy, which we know is not the case. There’s still room in this area for exploration. The other thing about uncertainty is that, on one hand it could lead us towards prosocial
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behavior, but on the other hand there’s evidence that uncertainty about outcomes and about how other people react to those outcomes can license selfish behavior. Uncertainty can also be exploited for personal gain for self-serving interests. Imagine you’re the CEO of a company. You’re trying to decide whether to lay off some workers in order to increase shareholder value. If you want to do the cost benefit analysis, you have to calculate what’s the negative utility for the workers of losing their jobs and how does that compare to the positive utility of the shareholders for getting these profits? Because you can’t directly access how the workers are going to feel, and how the shareholders are going to feel, there’s space for self-interest to creep in, particularly if there are personal incentives to push you one direction or the other. There’s some nice work that has been done on this by Roberto Weber and Jason Dana who have shown that if you put people in situations where outcomes are ambiguous, people will use this to their advantage to make the selfish decision but still preserve their self-image as being a moral person. This is going to be an important question to address. When does uncertainty lead to prosocial behavior because we don’t want to impose an unbearable cost on someone else? And when does it lead to selfish behavior because we can convince ourselves that it’s not going to be that bad? These are things we want to be able to measure in the lab and to map different brain processes—different neurochemical systems— onto these different parameters that all feed into decisions. We’re going to see progress over the next several years because in this non-social computational neuroscience there are smart people who are mapping how basic decisions work. All people like me have to do is import those methods to studying more complex social decisions. There’s going to be a lot of low-hanging fruit in this area over the next few years. Once we figure out how all this works—and I do think it’s going to be a while—I’ve been
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misquoted sometimes about saying morality pills are just around the corner, and I assure you that this is not the case. It’s going to be a very long time before we’re able to intervene in moral behavior and that day may never even come. The reason why this is such a complicated problem is because working out how the brain does this is the easy part. The hard part is what to do with that. This is a philosophical question. If we figure out how all the moving parts work, then the question is should we intervene and if so how should we intervene? Imagine we could develop a precise drug that amplifies people’s aversion to harming others; on this drug you won’t hurt a fly, everyone taking it becomes like Buddhist monks. Who should take this drug? Only convicted criminals—people who have committed violent crimes? Should we put it in the water supply? These are normative questions. These are questions about what should be done. I feel grossly unprepared to answer these questions with the training that I have, but these are important conversations to have between disciplines. Psychologists and neuroscientists need to be talking to philosophers about this. These are conversations that we need to have because we don’t want to get to the point where we have the technology but haven’t had this conversation, because then terrible things could happen. The last thing that I’ll say is it’s also interesting to think about the implications of this work, the fact that we can shift around people’s morals by giving them drugs. What are the implications of this data for our understanding of what morality is? There’s increasing evidence now that if you give people testosterone or influence their serotonin or oxytocin, this is going to shift the way they make moral decisions. Not in a dramatic way, but in a subtle yet significant way. And because the levels and function of our neuromodulators are changing all the time in response to events in our environment, that means that external circumstances can play a role in what you think is right and what you think is wrong.
Many people may find this to be deeply uncomfortable because we like to think of our morals as being core to who we are and one of the most stable things about us. We like to think of them as being written in stone. If this is not the case, then what are the implications for our understanding of who we are and what we should think about in terms of enforcing norms in society? Maybe you might think the solution is we should just try to make our moral judgments from a neutral stance, like the placebo condition of life. That doesn’t exist. Our brain chemistry is shifting all the time so it’s this very unsteady ground that we can’t find our footing on. At the end of the day that’s how I try to avoid being an arrogant scientist who’s like, “I can measure morality in the lab.” I have deep respect for the instability of these things and these are conversations that I find deeply fascinating.
Between, A Conversation, and A Conversation With. “Molly Crockett: ‘The Neuroscience of Moral Decision Making.’” Molly Crockett: “The Neuroscience of Moral Decision Making” | Edge.org, www.edge.org/conversation/molly_crockett-molly-crockett-the-neuroscience-of-moral-decision-making.
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“I definitely like to 84
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I feel like the culture behind a lot of what I do influences my style. May it be fashion, art, dance there’s a story behind it. Blending that culture with personal experiences make it a very unique way to express myself, which helps evolve and differentiate me in what I do. People are always a big influence, studying the way others react and behave in different situations has always been interesting to me. Like why or how I would react in a similar situation and would I do something differently helps push my school of thought further. I’m not scared 88
to ask questions so that’s a plus when it comes to gaining knowledge.
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This book was designed and styled by Anisha Subberwal. The photography is also done by Anisha Subberwal. This book was printed at The Village Copier. The font that is being used is Grotesque MT. All the credits for the article are stated at the end of each article.
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