Does Incidental Disgust Amplify Moral Judgment? A Meta-Analytic Review of Experimental Evidence

The role of emotion in moral judgment is currently a topic of much debate in moral psychology. One specific claim made by many researchers is that irrelevant feelings of disgust can amplify the severity of moral condemnation. Numerous studies have found this effect, but there have also been several published failures to replicate this effect. Clarifying this issue would inform important theoretical debates between rival accounts of moral judgment. We meta-analyzed all available studies, published and unpublished, that experimentally manipulated incidental disgust prior to or concurrent with a moral judgment task (k = 50). We found that there is evidence for a small amplification effect of disgust (d = .11), which is strongest for gustatory/olfactory modes of disgust induction. However, there is also some suggestion of publication bias in this literature, and when this is accounted for, the effect disappears entirely (d = -.01). Moreover, prevalent confounds mean that the effect size that we estimate is best interpreted as an upper bound on the size of the amplification effect. The results of this meta-analysis argue against strong claims about the causal role of affect in moral judgment and suggest a need for new, more rigorous research on this topic

The Perceived Objectivity of Ethical Beliefs: Psychological Findings and Implications for Public Policy

Ethical disputes arise over differences in the content of the ethical beliefs people hold on either side of an issue. One person may believe that it is wrong to have an abortion for financial reasons, whereas another may believe it to be permissible. But, the magnitude and difficulty of such disputes may also depend on other properties of the ethical beliefs in question-in particular, how objective they are perceived to be. As a psychological property of moral belief, objectivity is relatively unexplored, and we argue that it merits more attention. We review recent psychological evidence which demonstrates that individuals differ in the extent to which they perceive ethical beliefs to be objective, that some ethical beliefs are perceived to be more objective than others, and that both these sources of variance are somewhat systematic. This evidence also shows that differences in perceptions of objectivity underpin quite different psychological reactions to ethical disagreement. Apart from reviewing this evidence, our aim in this paper is to draw attention to unanswered psychological questions about moral objectivity, and to discuss the relevance of moral objectivity to two issues of public policy

The Disutility of Injustice

For more than half a century, the retributivists and the crime-control instrumentalists have seen themselves as being in an irresolvable conflict. Social science increasingly suggests, however, that this need not be so. Doing justice may be the most effective means of controlling crime. Perhaps partially in recognition of these developments, the American Law Institute\u27s recent amendment to the Model Penal Code\u27s purposes provision – the only amendment to the Model Code in the 47 years since its promulgation – adopts desert as the primary distributive principle for criminal liability and punishment. That shift to desert has prompted concerns by two groups – ironically, two groups traditionally opposed to one another. The first group – those concerned with what they see as the over-punitiveness of current criminal law – worries that setting desert as the dominant distributive principle means continuing the punitive doctrines they find so objectionable, and perhaps will make things worse. The second group – those concerned with ensuring effective crime control – worries that a shift to desert will create many missed crime-control opportunities; it will increase avoidable crime. The first group\u27s concern about over-punitiveness rests upon an assumption that the current punitive crime-control doctrines of which they disapprove are a reflection of the community\u27s naturally punitive intuitions of justice. However, as Study 1 makes clear, today\u27s popular crime-control doctrines in fact seriously conflict with people\u27s intuitions of justice by exaggerating the punishment deserved. The second group\u27s concern that a desert principle will increase avoidable crime exemplifies the common wisdom of the past half century that ignoring justice in pursuit of crime-control through deterrence, incapacitation of the dangerous, and other such coercive crime-control programs is cost free. However, Studies 2 and 3 suggest that doing injustice has real crime control costs. Deviating from the community\u27s shared principles of justice undermines the system\u27s moral credibility and thereby undermines its ability to gain cooperation and compliance and to harness the powerful forces of social influence and internalized norms. The studies reported here give assurance to both groups. A shift to desert is not likely to either undermine the criminal justice system\u27s crime-control effectiveness, and indeed it may enhance it, nor is it likely to increase the system\u27s punitiveness, and indeed it may reduce it

The Mind, the Brain, and the Law

In this chapter, we explore the potential influence that advances in neuroscience may have on legal decision makers and present the findings from some recent studies that probe folk intuitions concerning the relationships among neuroscience, agency, responsibility, and mental illness. We first familiarize the reader with some of the early research in experimental philosophy on people\u27s intuitions about agency and responsibility. Then, we focus on a more specific issue—namely, whether people respond to explanations of human behavior framed in neuroscientific terms differently than they respond to explanations framed in more traditional folk psychological terms. Next, we discuss some new findings which suggest that explanations of criminal behavior that are couched in neural terms appear to make people less punitive than explanations couched in mental terms, especially in the context of mental illness. Finally, we offer what we take to be the best explanation of these differences in people\u27s intuitions—namely, when people are presented with neural explanations of human behavior, they tend to think that the agent\u27s “deep self” (the values and beliefs the agent identifies with) is somehow left out of the causal loop or bypassed, which in turn mitigates the agent\u27s responsibility

Are good reasoners more incest-friendly? Trait cognitive reflection predicts selective moralization in a sample of American adults

Two studies examined the relationship between individual differences in cognitive reflection (CRT) and the tendency to accord genuinely moral (non-conventional) status to a range of counter-normative acts — that is, to treat such acts as wrong regardless of existing social opinion or norms. We contrasted social violations that are intrinsically harmful to others (e.g., fraud, thievery) with those that are not (e.g., wearing pajamas to work and engaging in consensual acts of sexual intimacy with an adult sibling). Our key hypothesis was that more reflective (higher CRT) individuals would tend to moralize selectively — treating only intrinsically harmful acts as genuinely morally wrong — whereas less reflective (lower CRT) individuals would moralize more indiscriminately. We found clear support for this hypothesis in a large and ideologically diverse sample of American adults. The predicted associations were not fully accounted for by the subjects’ political orientation, sensitivity to gut feelings, gender, age, educational attainment, or their placement on a sexual morals-specific measure of social conservatism. Our studies are the first to demonstrate that, in addition to modulating the intensity of moral condemnation, reflection may also play a key role in setting the boundaries of the moral domain as such

An Idealized Pulsar Magnetosphere: the Relativistic Force-Free Approximation

The non-dissipative relativistic force-free condition should be a good approximation to describe the electromagnetic field in much of the pulsar magnetosphere, but we may plausibly expect it to break down in singular domains. Self-consistent magnetospheric solutions are found with field lines closing both at and within the light-cylinder. In general, the detailed properties of the solutions may be affected critically by the physics determining the appropriate choice of equatorial boundary condition beyond the light-cylinder.Comment: 31 pages, 3 figure

Training compliance control yields improvements in drawing as a function of beery scores

Many children have difficulty producing movements well enough to improve in sensori-motor learning. Previously, we developed a training method that supports active movement generation to allow improvement at a 3D tracing task requiring good compliance control. Here, we tested 7–8 year old children from several 2nd grade classrooms to determine whether 3D tracing performance could be predicted using the Beery VMI. We also examined whether 3D tracing training lead to improvements in drawing. Baseline testing included Beery, a drawing task on a tablet computer, and 3D tracing. We found that baseline performance in 3D tracing and drawing co-varied with the visual perception (VP) component of the Beery. Differences in 3D tracing between children scoring low versus high on the Beery VP replicated differences previously found between children with and without motor impairments, as did post-training performance that eliminated these differences. Drawing improved as a result of training in the 3D tracing task. The training method improved drawing and reduced differences predicted by Beery scores

Monitoring quality of care in hepatocellular carcinoma: A modified delphi consensus

Although there are several established international guidelines on the management of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), there is limited information detailing specific indicators of good quality care. The aim of this study was to develop a core set of quality indicators (QIs) to underpin the management of HCC. We undertook a modified, two-round, Delphi consensus study comprising a working group and experts involved in the management of HCC as well as consumer representatives. QIs were derived from an extensive review of the literature. The role of the participants was to identify the most important and measurable QIs for inclusion in an HCC clinical quality registry. From an initial 94 QIs, 40 were proposed to the participants. Of these, 23 QIs ultimately met the inclusion criteria and were included in the final set. This included (a) nine related to the initial diagnosis and staging, including timing to diagnosis, required baseline clinical and laboratory assessments, prior surveillance for HCC, diagnostic imaging and pathology, tumor staging, and multidisciplinary care; (b) thirteen related to treatment and management, including role of antiviral therapy, timing to treatment, localized ablation and locoregional therapy, surgery, transplantation, systemic therapy, method of response assessment, and supportive care; and (c) one outcome assessment related to surgical mortality. Conclusion: We identified a core set of nationally agreed measurable QIs for the diagnosis, staging, and management of HCC. The adherence to these best practice QIs may lead to system-level improvement in quality of care and, ultimately, improvement in patient outcomes, including survival

The first myriapod genome sequence reveals conservative arthropod gene content and genome organisation in the centipede Strigamia maritima.

Myriapods (e.g., centipedes and millipedes) display a simple homonomous body plan relative to other arthropods. All members of the class are terrestrial, but they attained terrestriality independently of insects. Myriapoda is the only arthropod class not represented by a sequenced genome. We present an analysis of the genome of the centipede Strigamia maritima. It retains a compact genome that has undergone less gene loss and shuffling than previously sequenced arthropods, and many orthologues of genes conserved from the bilaterian ancestor that have been lost in insects. Our analysis locates many genes in conserved macro-synteny contexts, and many small-scale examples of gene clustering. We describe several examples where S. maritima shows different solutions from insects to similar problems. The insect olfactory receptor gene family is absent from S. maritima, and olfaction in air is likely effected by expansion of other receptor gene families. For some genes S. maritima has evolved paralogues to generate coding sequence diversity, where insects use alternate splicing. This is most striking for the Dscam gene, which in Drosophila generates more than 100,000 alternate splice forms, but in S. maritima is encoded by over 100 paralogues. We see an intriguing linkage between the absence of any known photosensory proteins in a blind organism and the additional absence of canonical circadian clock genes. The phylogenetic position of myriapods allows us to identify where in arthropod phylogeny several particular molecular mechanisms and traits emerged. For example, we conclude that juvenile hormone signalling evolved with the emergence of the exoskeleton in the arthropods and that RR-1 containing cuticle proteins evolved in the lineage leading to Mandibulata. We also identify when various gene expansions and losses occurred. The genome of S. maritima offers us a unique glimpse into the ancestral arthropod genome, while also displaying many adaptations to its specific life history.This work was supported by the following grants: NHGRIU54HG003273 to R.A.G; EU Marie Curie ITN #215781 “Evonet” to M.A.; a Wellcome Trust Value in People (VIP) award to C.B. and Wellcome Trust graduate studentship WT089615MA to J.E.G; Marine rhythms of Life” of the University of Vienna, an FWF (http://www.fwf.ac.at/) START award (#AY0041321) and HFSP (http://www.hfsp.org/) research grant (#RGY0082/2010) to KT-­‐R; MFPL Vienna International PostDoctoral Program for Molecular Life Sciences (funded by Austrian Ministry of Science and Research and City of Vienna, Cultural Department -­‐Science and Research to T.K; Direct Grant (4053034) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong to J.H.L.H.; NHGRI HG004164 to G.M.; Danish Research Agency (FNU), Carlsberg Foundation, and Lundbeck Foundation to C.J.P.G.; U.S. National Institutes of Health R01AI55624 to J.H.W.; Royal Society University Research fellowship to F.M.J.; P.D.E. was supported by the BBSRC via the Babraham Institute;This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from PLOS via http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.100200