Türk üniversite öğrencileri arasında evrim teorisini anlama ve kabul etme

Acceptance level of evolutionary theory and factors predicting it were examined among Psychology majors from Doğuş University and Bahçeşehir University (N=99). About half of the students accepted evolutionary theory, which is a higher percentage than in previous reports. Positive attitudes towards science and parents’ education were positively correlated with acceptance whereas religiosity was negatively correlated. Understanding of evolutionary theory was surprisingly low. Understanding the theory and understanding the nature of science were unrelated to acceptance. Recommendations are made to improve the teaching of evolutionary theory.Doğuş Üniversitesi ve Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi Psikoloji Bölümü öğrencileri (N=99) arasında evrim teorisini kabul etme düzeyi ve bunu belirleyen faktörler incelendi. Öğrencilerin yaklaşık yarısının evrim teorisini kabul ettiği bulundu. Bu oran önceki bulgulardan daha yüksektir. Bilime karşı olumlu tutuma sahip olmak ve anne-baba eğitim düzeyi kabul düzeyiyle pozitif korelasyon gösterirken dindarlık negatif korelasyon gösterdi. Evrim teorisini anlama düzeyi şaşırtıcı derecede düşüktü. Teoriyi anlama ve bilimin doğasını anlamayla teoriyi kabul düzeyi korelasyon göstermedi. Bulgulardan hareketle evrim teorisi eğitiminde nasıl daha ileri gidilebileceği tartışıldı

The influence of cooperative environment and gender on economic decisions in a third party punishment game

WCPCG-2010The influence of social context on men's and women's cooperative behaviour was investigated in a third party punishment game. The results of the analyses showed that, in general, people significantly deviated from rational norms since their decisions were not fit to maximization of their economic benefits. Female participants' behaviour was more cooperative in terms of first offer rates than male participants when they were dictators. On the other hand, male participants were more willing to pay money to punish unfair allocations and to reward fair offers when they played the role of third party. Taken together these results imply that explaining the behaviour of people in economic exchange situations require going beyond classical definitions of rationality based on profit maximization and embracing social considerations to account for the influence of the situation and for gender differences

Is negativity bias intuitive for liberals and conservatives?

Previous research suggests that conservatives (right-wingers) tend to show more negativity bias than liberals (left-wingers) in several tasks. However, the majority of these studies are based on correlational findings and do not provide information on the cognitive underpinnings of this tendency. The current research investigated whether intuition promotes negativity bias and mitigates the ideological asymmetry in this domain in three underrepresented, non-western samples (Turkey). In line with the previous literature, we defined negativity bias as the tendency to interpret ambiguous faces as threatening. The results of the lab experiment revealed that negativity bias increases under high-cognitive load overall. In addition, this effect was moderated by the participants’ political orientation (Experiment 1). In other words, when their cognitive resources were depleted, liberals became more like conservatives in terms of negativity bias. However, we failed to conceptually replicate this effect using time-limit manipulations in two online preregistered experiments during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the baseline negativity bias is thought to be already at peak. Thus, the findings provide no strong evidence for the idea that intuition promotes negativity bias and that liberals use cognitive effort to avoid this perceptual bias

Supernatural and secular monitors promote human cooperation only if they remind of punishment

Yılmaz, Onurcan (Dogus Author) -- Bahçekapılı, Hasan Galip (Dogus Author)People’s large-scale cooperation with genetically unrelated people is widely assumed to lie beyond the scope of standard evolutionary mechanisms like kin selection and reciprocal altruismand to require mechanisms specific to human sociality. The emergence of the idea of being monitored by supernatural agents who can punish social norm violations has been proposed as one solution to this problem. In parallel, secular authorities can have similar functions with those of religious authority based on supernatural agents in today’s secularized world. However, it is not clear whether it is the idea of religious or secular authority in general or the punishing aspects of both institutions in particular that leads to increased cooperation and prosociality. Study 1 showed that people reported more prosocial intentions after being implicitly primed with punishing religious and secular authorities (versus non-punishing ones or a neutral one) in a scrambled sentence task. Study 2 showed that explicitly priming the punishing aspects of God (versus the non-punishing aspects or a neutral prime) led to an increase in the level of prosocial intentions. The findings support the supernatural punishment hypothesis and suggest a similar mechanismfor the influence of secular authority on prosociality.More generally, the findings are consistentwith views that punishment,whether real or imagined, played an important role in the evolution of large-scale cooperation in the human species

Psychological and neural bases of altruistic cooperation in humans

İnsanlarda görülen işbirliği klasik evrimsel modeller açısından da, klasik ekonomik modeller açısından da açıklanması güç bir bilmece olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Son yıllarda ekonomik oyunların deneysel prosedür olarak kullanıldığı çalışmalarda insanların akrabaları olmayan kişilerle, anonim ve tek seferlik etkileşimlerinde özgeci işbirliğine (altruistic cooperation) giriştikleri, yani kişisel çıkar peşinde koşma dürtüsüyle açıklanamayacak davranışlar sergiledikleri gösterilmiştir. Burada açıklanması gereken insana özgü olduğu düşünülen özgeci işbirliğini ortaya çıkaran psikolojik, beyinsel ve evrimsel mekanizmaların ne olduğudur. Özgeci işbirliğinin altında yatan iki önemli psikolojik mekanizmanın "adalet duygusu" {sense of fairness) ve "güven" (trust) olduğu düşünülmektedir. Adalet duygusunun incelenmesinde genellikle Ültimatom oyunu kullanılmaktadır. Ültimatom oyunundaki davranışsal bulgulara bakıldığında insanların adil davranışları ödüllendirdiği ve adil olmayan davranışları cezalandırdığı görülürken, beyinsel düzeydeki bulgular insanların bu tür ödüllendirmeden ve cezalandırmadan haz aldığını göstermektedir. Güven duygusunun incelendiği ekonomik oyun ise Güven oyunudur. Sosyal yakınlaşmayı arttıran bir nöropeptidin kullanılmasıyla güvenme davranışının artması ve insanların güvenlerini suistimal edenlerin cezalandırılmasından haz aldığının görülmesi ise Güven oyununun oynatıldığı durumlarda elde edilen beyinsel bulgulardır. Bu bulgular insanların ekonomik işbirliği içeren ortamlarda ekonomik tercihler yanında sosyal tercihleri de göz önüne aldıkları ve bu davranışlarının arkasında adalet duygusu ve güven duygusu diyebileceğimiz özel psikolojik mekanizmalar olduğu fikrini destekler niteliktedir. Literatürde özgeci işbirliğini ortaya çıkaran evrimsel mekanizmanın ne olduğu konusunda grup seçilimi ve bireysel seçilim savunucuları arasındaki tartışmalar sürmektedir.Cooperation in humans is a puzzle from the perspective of classical economic and evolutionary models. In recent years, laboratory experiments using economic games have revealed that humans show altruistic cooperation towards non-kin in anonymous one-shot encounters. What needs to be explained are the psychological, neural and evolutionary mechanisms that give rise to altruistic cooperation that is thought to be uniquely human. Two psychological mechanisms proposed to explain altruistic behaviour are sense of fairness and trust. Sense of fairness is usually investigated by using the Ultimatum game. Behavioural findings in the Ultimatum game show that humans reward behaviours that conform to fairness norms and that they punish behaviours that violate fairness norms, even it is not in their self-interest to do so. Activation of reward centres in the brain during such behaviour suggests that they get pleasure from doing so. Trust is investigated by using the Trust game. Behavioural findings in the Trust game show that humans make generous offers at first and they punish their partner if their trust is violated. At the neural level, it has been shown that administration of a neuropeptide that promotes social attachment increases trusting behaviour and that punishing violations of trust activates reward centres in the brain. These findings suggest that in economic exchange situations, humans take into account social, as well as economic, preferences, and that such behaviour is underpinned by special psychological mechanisms. Debate continues between proponents of individual selection and group selection as to how best to explain the evolutionary basis of altruistic cooperation

The relation between different types of religiosity and analytic cognitive style

Bahçekapılı, Hasan Galip (Dogus Author) -- Yılmaz, Onurcan (Dogus Author)Analytic cognitive style (ACS) has usually been found to be negatively correlated with religiosity. Several recent studies, however, challenged this finding claiming, for example, that the presumed association is an artifact of the order of presentation of the ACS and religiosity measures or that ACS might be differently related to different types of religiosity. Furthermore, almost all data in this field of research come from Western Christian samples. We, therefore, investigated whether ACS is related to four types of religiosity (intrinsic, extrinsic, quest, and general religious belief) and whether this relation stems from an order effect in three different studies with four different non-western samples (total n = 1329). The results reveal that there is no order effect and that ACS is negatively correlated to intrinsic/extrinsic religiosity and general religious belief, corroborating initial findings. Additionally, we found a positive correlation between ACS and quest religiosity. The results point to the importance of distinguishing different types of religiosity in religiosity-cognitive style studies

Meta-ethics and the mortality: Mortality salience leads people to adopt a less subjectivist morality

Yılmaz, Onurcan (Dogus Author) -- Bahçekapılı, Hasan Galip (Dogus Author)Although lay notions in normative ethics have previously been investigated within the framework of the dual-process interpretation of the terror management theory (TMT), meta-ethical beliefs (subjective vs. objective morality) have not been previously investigated within the same framework. In the present research, we primed mortality salience, shown to impair reasoning performance in previous studies, to see whether it inhibits subjectivist moral judgments in three separate experiments. In Experiment 3, we also investigated whether impaired reasoning performance indeed mediates the effect of mortality salience on subjectivism. The results of the three experiments consistently showed that people in the mortality salience group reported significantly less subjectivist responses than the control group, and impaired reasoning performance partially mediates it. Overall, the results are consistent with the dual-process interpretation of TMT and suggest that not only normative but also meta-ethical judgments can be explained by this model

The Turkish adaptation of the Oxford utilitarianism scale

Utilitarianism and deontology are the two major normative ethics in moral philosophy extensively used to explain the source of moral judgments in moral psychology. Since 2000, scholars used classical moral dilemmas nearly exclusively to differentiate utilitarian and deontological decision-making tendencies. However, results from a series of studies indicated that these dilemmas tend to elicit utilitarian responses from people with antisocial personality features. The efficiency of these moral dilemmas was the subject of debates in the last 10 years eiven that antisocial tendencies are the direct opposite of a utilitarian outlook. One of the criticisms was that these dilemmas were limited to the measurement of the instrumental hann dimension of utilitarianism and entirely overlooked the impartial beneficence outlook. The Oxford Utilitarian Scale (OUS) (Kahane et al., 2018) was developed to measure both dimensions of utilitarianism. To lit the context. the study developed the Turkish adaptation of the OUS. The study recruited 983 participants aged 18-65 years and 82.5% living in Istanbul. The respondents were randomly assigned to two sub-groups for principal and confirmatory factor analyses (PFA and CFA). respectively. The PFA results revealed a two-factor structure, which is similar to that of the original study, with an explained total variance of 52.5%. Moreover, the CFA results indicated that the adaptation study is compatible with the original two-factor model. Convergent validity analysis revealed positive correlations of instrumental hann to psychopathy and Machiavellianism as expected. Similarly, the impartial beneficence factor displayed positive relationships with empathic concern, perspective-taking, and altruistic utilitarianism. Moreover, the results demonstrated that impartial beneficence is negatively correlated with psychopathy and Machiavellianism. In line with the original study, participants with high scores in instrumental harm and impartial beneficence endorsed the utilitarian option in response to these dilemmas. In summary, the mutts confirmed that the Turkish version of the OUS is substantially concordant with the original inventory. Therefore, the authors suggest that the proposed version is advisable for use in future empirical and correlational studies on moral psychology

Without God, everything is permitted? The reciprocal influence of religious and meta-ethical beliefs

Yılmaz, Onurcan (Dogus Author) -- Bahçekapılı, Hasan Galip (Dogus Author)The relation between religious and moral thought has been difficult to unravel because of the multifaceted nature of both religion and morality. We chose to study the belief dimension of religion and the meta-ethics dimension of morality and investigated the relation between God-related thoughts and objectivist/subjectivist morality in three studies. We expected a reciprocal relation between the idea of God and objective morality since God is one prominent way through which objective moral truths could be grounded and thus the lack of such objective truths might imply the absence of God who could set such truths. Study 1 revealed negative correlations between moral subjectivism and several measures of religious belief. Study 2 showed that people adopt moral objectivism more and moral subjectivism less after being implicitly primed with religious words in a sentence unscrambling task Study 3 showed that people express less confidence about the existence of God after reading a persuasive text about the subjective nature of moral truths. Taken together, the results demonstrate that religious and meta-ethical beliefs are indeed related and can reciprocally influence each other

Is religion necessary for morality?

Bahçekapılı, Hasan Galip (Dogus Author)As a possible Hilbert question in the scientific study of religion, this article tries to explicate one specific relation between religion and morality: whether religion is necessary for morality. More specifically, how does the introduction of religion transform morality? The article operationalizes morality as normative and meta-ethical judgments and tries to specify ways to answer the question at three different levels: phylogenetic, historical, and ontogenetic. At the phylogenetic level, the possibility of moral judgments in non-human (and non-religious) primates is explored. At the historical level, a way to explore the question of how the rise of religions with Big Gods transformed morality is proposed. At the ontogenetic level, the effect of religious training in childhood and a shift to non-belief in adulthood on morality is explored. Finally, investigating the reverse causal influence (i.e., moral beliefs transforming religiosity) and the role of religious rituals (rather than religious beliefs) on morality are proposed as future directions