M2B2
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The Albany Moral, Mind, Brain, and Behavior (M2B2) Speaker Series
The Albany Moral Mind, Brain, and Behavior (M2B2) speaker series is a new interdisciplinary speaker series supported by the Presidential Innovation Fund at the University at Albany, SUNY. Hosted by Brendan Gaesser, the speaker series consists of talks with emerging leaders in research on morality at the intersection of social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and moral philosophy.
The project is in collaboration with Anna Newheiser, Jason D'Cruz, and the Boston Area Moral Cognition Group.
Spring 2019 speaker Schedule
Talk Title: Moral Circles, Political Divides
Jesse Graham
The University of Utah
Abstract: The idea of the moral circle pictures the self in the center, surrounded by concentric circles encompassing increasingly distant possible targets of moral concern, including family, local community, nation, all humans, all mammals, all living things including plants, and all things including inanimate objects. I present the idea of two opposing sets of forces in people’s moral circles, with centripetal forces pulling inward, urging greater concern for close others than for distant others, and centrifugal forces pushing outward, resisting “drawing the line” anywhere as a form of prejudice and urging egalitarian concern for all regardless of social distance. This centripetal/centrifugal forces view is applied to current moral debates about empathy (e.g., parochialism vs. universalism) and about politics (e.g., nationalism vs. globalism). I argue that this view helps us see how intercultural and interpersonal disagreements about morality and prejudice are based in intrapersonal conflicts shared by all people.
Spring 2018 speaker Schedule
Moral Worth and Moral development
DATE: Friday, April 20, 2018 at 1:00 PM
Location: BB (Massry) 129
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Talk Title: Tree-huggers vs. Human-lovers: Predicting Differential Attributions of Moral Worth
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Josh Rottman
Franklin & Marshall College
Abstract: Moral worth is generally thought to be attributed along a single dimension stretching from humans to the natural world (Singer, 1981). My research challenges this assumption, showing instead that some people assign more moral worth to nature (e.g., dolphins, rainforests) than outgroup members (e.g., Arabs, homosexuals). This valuation of environmentalism over humanitarianism is predicted by greater tendencies to anthropomorphize (i.e., to attribute humanness to non-humans) and greater tendencies to dehumanize (i.e., to attribute less humanness to humans). These results show that moral concern is not extended unidimensionally, and additionally challenge theories of mind attribution that place anthropomorphism and dehumanization at opposite ends of a single continuum.
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Talk Title: Intuitive theories of the social world shape the development of moral cognition
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Lisa Chalik
Yale University
Abstract: Across human societies, people tend to view moral obligations as constrained by social groups: People react particularly negatively against harm committed among ingroup members, and often feel more compelled to offer help to ingroup members than to outgroup members. In this talk, I present work exploring the developmental origins and consequences of these beliefs. I will demonstrate that within the first few years of life, children view people as morally obligated to protect and avoid harm to ingroup members. I will then discuss some of the developmental processes that might give rise to these beliefs and cause them to change across childhood. Finally, I will discuss the consequences of these beliefs for how children predict other people's behaviors.
FALL 2017 speaker Schedule
Talk Title: Who Gets to be happy?
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Nina Strohminger
University of Pennsylvania
Abstract: Recent research suggests that subjective well-being is insufficient for people to ascribe happiness to others. Instead, the folk concept of happiness appears to be eudaimonic: happiness requires not only positive affective states but also being a good person. In adults, we find that people who lack moral virtues are deemed substantially less happy than those who lack other desirable traits, including those that are thought to give meaning to life, such as love, family, and cultivated talents. This thick conception of happiness appears to drive a bias wherein moral outgroups (such as those from opposition political parties) are deemed to be less capable of happiness than those from moral ingroups. In an adaptation of this paradigm for children, we find that the conflation of happiness with moral goodness appears in children as young as four. We conclude that the folk understanding of happiness is inextricably linked with everyday judgments of moral character.
Talk Title: How and why morality constrains our default view of what is possible
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Jonathan Phillips
Harvard University
Abstract: One of the most impressive aspects of human cognition is that we are able to reason quickly and efficiently about extremely large sets of potential options. For example, we can quickly and efficiently make good decisions about how to eat lunch despite there being a truly unreasonable number of possible things we could eat (and places we could eat it). Given that there are simply too many options to evaluate individually, how is it that we're able to do this so well? I'll provide evidence that we often use a two-stage decision making process in which we first sample potential options in proportion to how good they have tended to be in the past, and then evaluate that smaller subset of options more rigorously. An intriguing consequence of this kind of general decision making process is that we will often default to treating options that consistently bad as if they weren't even real possibilities. I'll present a fun and counterintuitive test this kind of proposal by considering how people represent the possibility of immoral actions (which are paradigmatically bad) and show that people default to representing immoral actions as impossible. I'll end by arguing that this kind of default representation of possibility, which tends to exclude low-value actions, plays a central role throughout high-level human cognition.
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Talk Title: Moral possibilities: Extraordinary altruism and a continuum of caring
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Kristin Brethel-HaurWitz
University of Pennsylvania
Abstract: Costly helping behavior, such as the altruistic donation of a kidney to a stranger, presents a challenge for theories of human self-interest. My research with such extraordinary altruists has found that key components of empathy, including sensitivity to distress in others and self-other mapping, are associated with altruism at the neural level. A model of caring as a continuum ranging from extreme selflessness to extreme selfishness suggests that similar empathic processes are important for explaining both extremes, and I will briefly discuss the implications of this conceptualization for my latest research on selfish decision-making.
Spring 2017 speaker Schedule
Talk Title: Morality In Language
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Laura Niemi
Harvard University
Abstract: When things go wrong, people ask, “Who made it happen?” “Who was responsible?” and often, “Who will pay?” That is, moral judgment engages causal cognition. How much of this process is influenced by higher-level factors such as people’s moral values and political ideology, and how much is influenced by stimulus-bound factors, such as the language used to describe the event? This talk will cover research combining individual differences measures with vignette-based and psycholinguistics tasks. Collectively, the research demonstrates: (1) moral values aimed at protecting group cohesiveness predict a shift in attributions of blame to victims; (2) altering the focus of language can reduce victim blame; and (3) values and ideology influence extraction of causal relationships from the most basic event descriptions. That participants’ behavior across these tasks systematically maps onto beliefs about the nature of right and wrong indicates that studying language can bring precision to our understanding of the unruly domain of morality, and also that our understanding of language is incomplete without consideration of moral psychology.
Talk Title: Groups and moral judgment
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Daniel Yudkin
New York University
Abstract: Social science has long known that groups form a basis of identity and self-esteem. But do they shape moral judgment? Here I present three lines of research examining how people judge and punish in-group and out-group transgressions. First, I show how people punish out-group members more harshly when punishing reflexively, suggesting that intergroup bias stems from basic cognitive processes. Next, I will present research replicating this result with children, and showing how parental conservatism heightens the effect. Finally, I will outline a possible psychological mechanism through which intergroup bias in moral judgment can be overcome: namely, through psychological distancing strategies, which entail taking a metaphorical “step back” from the situation. Overall, this research highlights the conditions under which we succumb to—and may surmount—inter-group bias in moral judgment.
Keywords: groups, bias, moral judgment, punishment
Talk Title: The Processes Underlying Punishment
Justin W. Martin
Harvard University
Abstract: Among moral judgments, punishment is unique. While judgments of wrongness and character, for example, depend mostly on information about others’ intentions, punishment is influenced to a large extent by the presence of bad outcomes (so-called moral luck). And whereas most moral judgments are an assessment internal to the one making them, punishment is external, in that it impacts the person punished. Potentially, these features are reflective of punishment’s adaptive function: To change others’ behavior. In this talk, I present a series of studies examining the cognitive and neural bases of punishment with this perspective in mind. In other words, we ask: How are the process supporting punishment shaped by punishment’s adaptive function? We find signatures of this influence (1) in which processes are more deliberative versus intuitive, (2) in which types of punishment are more intrinsically motivated and which require external motivation and (3) in the way in which the processes supporting punishment are represented neurally. In total, we demonstrate that the processes supporting punishment are shaped by punishment’s ultimate function of changing others’ behavior.
Keywords: Punishment, intention, causation, adaptation
Moral Perception, Economics, & Discrimination
Friday, May 5, 2017 at 1:00pm
Location: BB (Massry) 133
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Talk Title: What do Thomas Paine and Tony Soprano have in common? Process vs. content in moral psychology
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Ana gantman
princeton university
Abstract: What do the moral views of Tony Soprano and Thomas Paine have in common? While this is a tough question for a content-based approach to morality, a process-based approach highlights how morally relevant stimuli may be processed similarly regardless of specific content. For example, evidence suggests that visual perception can be tuned to morally relevant stimuli. Specifically, people detect moral words (e.g., kill, moral, should) with greater frequency than non-moral words (e.g., die, useful, could) when they are presented at the threshold for visual awareness (i.e., ambiguously). Attuning perception to moral content generalizes from lexical content to faces, and is sensitive to motivational relevance. For example, when justice needs are satiated, the detection of moral words is selectively diminished, emphasizing that perceptual processes for detecting moral content may be flexibly tuned by context. Future directions emphasize how engaging moral processing may change behavior. Taken together, this work highlights how malleable domain-general processes are tuned and utilized to create a cognitive signature for moral cognition.
Keywords: morality, perception, motivation
Talk Title: Economic scarcity alters social perception to promote discrimination:
Evidence from the brain and behavior
Amy Krosch
Cornell University
Abstract: When the economy declines, racial discrimination typically increases. Although this effect is often described as reflecting existing structural and institutional inequalities, here I will explore the psychological and perceptual processes through which scarcity exacerbates discrimination. Specifically, using tools from experimental social psychology, psychophysics, and neuroscience, I will present evidence that scarcity alters the extent to which decision makers perceive and represent Black Americans in a discrimination-promoting fashion. I will further explore the role of egalitarian motivation on discriminatory allocation of scarce resources between groups, as well as the learning mechanisms that give rise to such discrimination over time. Together, my findings support the notion that scarcity influences multiple levels of social perception—from category-level representations of Blackness to early face processing of Black individuals—to proliferate racial disparities during times of economic duress.
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Keywords: Economic scarcity, face perception, discrimination, intergroup decision making
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