Automated Pilot Advisory System

An Automated Pilot Advisory System (APAS) was developed and operationally tested to demonstrate the concept that low cost automated systems can provide air traffic and aviation weather advisory information at high density uncontrolled airports. The system was designed to enhance the see and be seen rule of flight, and pilots who used the system preferred it over the self announcement system presently used at uncontrolled airports

Sexual Objectification Increases Rape Victim Blame and Decreases Perceived Suffering

Sexual objectification changes the way people view women by reducing them to sexual objects—denied humanity and an internal mental life, as well as deemed unworthy of moral concern. However, the subsequent consequences of sexually objectifying others remain underresearched. In the current study, we examined the impact of objectification in the domain of sexual assault. Sixty British undergraduate students were recruited to complete an impression formation task. We manipulated objectification by presenting participants with either a sexualized or nonsexualized woman. Participants rated the woman’s mind and the extent to which they felt moral concern for her. They then learned that she was the victim of an acquaintance rape and reported victim blame and both blatant and subtle perceptions of her suffering. Consistent with prior research, sexualized women were objectified through a denial of mental states and moral concern. Further, compared with nonobjectified women, the objectified were perceived to be more responsible for being raped. Interestingly, although no difference emerged for blatant measures of suffering, participants tacitly denied the victims’ suffering by exhibiting changes in moral concern for the victim. We conclude that objectification has important consequences for how people view victims of sexual assault. Our findings reveal that sexual objectification can have serious consequences and we discuss how these might influence how victims cope and recover from sexual assault

Disgusting but harmless moral violations are perceived as harmful due to the negative emotions they elicit

Harmless but disgusting moral violations can be justified as harmful to others due to the negative emotions they elicit. The relationship between the emotions of anger and disgust and the harm associated to these emotions as a result of a moral violation was investigated. Results showed that a disgusting moral violation (taboo violation) described as harmless to others is more related to disgust than to anger. Such violation created a presumption of harm of three different types: to the community, nature, and the individual. Disgust was a mediator between the taboo violation and the presumption of harm to nature, whereas anger was a mediator between the taboo violation and the presumption of harm to the individual. In general, results also showed that in moral violations that are harmless to others, the emotions of anger and disgust allow people to presume harm to symbolic entities such as nature and the community as a result of such violations

Are All Types of Morality Compromised in Psychopathy

A long-standing puzzle for moral philosophers and psychologists alike is the concept of psychopathy, a personality disorder marked by tendencies to defy moral norms despite cognitive knowledge about right and wrong. Previously, discussions of the moral deficits of psychopathy have focused on willingness to harm and cheat others as well as reasoning about rule-based transgressions. Yet recent research in moral psychology has begun to more clearly define the domains of morality, en- compassing issues of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and spiritual purity. Clinical descriptions and theories of psychopathy suggest that deficits may exist primarily in the areas of harm and fairness, although quantitative evidence is scarce. Within a broad sample of participants, we found that scores on a measure of psychopathy predicted sharply lower scores on the harm and fairness subscales of a measure of moral concern, but showed no relationship with authority, and very small relationships with ingroup and purity. On a measure of willingness to violate moral standards for money, psychopathy scores predicted greater willingness to violate moral concerns of any type. Results are further explored via potential mediators and analyses of the two factors of psychopathy

Analytical reasoning task reveals limits of social learning in networks

Social learning -by observing and copying others- is a highly successful cultural mechanism for adaptation, outperforming individual information acquisition and experience. Here, we investigate social learning in the context of the uniquely human capacity for reflective, analytical reasoning. A hallmark of the human mind is our ability to engage analytical reasoning, and suppress false associative intuitions. Through a set of lab-based network experiments, we find that social learning fails to propagate this cognitive strategy. When people make false intuitive conclusions, and are exposed to the analytic output of their peers, they recognize and adopt this correct output. But they fail to engage analytical reasoning in similar subsequent tasks. Thus, humans exhibit an 'unreflective copying bias,' which limits their social learning to the output, rather than the process, of their peers' reasoning -even when doing so requires minimal effort and no technical skill. In contrast to much recent work on observation-based social learning, which emphasizes the propagation of successful behavior through copying, our findings identify a limit on the power of social networks in situations that require analytical reasoning

Agent-based Social Psychology: from Neurocognitive Processes to Social Data

Moral Foundation Theory states that groups of different observers may rely on partially dissimilar sets of moral foundations, thereby reaching different moral valuations. The use of functional imaging techniques has revealed a spectrum of cognitive styles with respect to the differential handling of novel or corroborating information that is correlated to political affiliation. Here we characterize the collective behavior of an agent-based model whose inter individual interactions due to information exchange in the form of opinions are in qualitative agreement with experimental neuroscience data. The main conclusion derived connects the existence of diversity in the cognitive strategies and statistics of the sets of moral foundations and suggests that this connection arises from interactions between agents. Thus a simple interacting agent model, whose interactions are in accord with empirical data on conformity and learning processes, presents statistical signatures consistent with moral judgment patterns of conservatives and liberals as obtained by survey studies of social psychology.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 2 C codes, to appear in Advances in Complex System

Neural evidence for "intuitive prosecution": The use of mental state information for negative moral verdicts

Moral judgment depends critically on theory of mind (ToM), reasoning about mental states such as beliefs and intentions. People assign blame for failed attempts to harm and offer forgiveness in the case of accidents. Here we use fMRI to investigate the role of ToM in moral judgment of harmful vs. helpful actions. Is ToM deployed differently for judgments of blame vs. praise? Participants evaluated agents who produced a harmful, helpful, or neutral outcome, based on a harmful, helpful, or neutral intention; participants made blame and praise judgments. In the right temporo-parietal junction (right TPJ), and, to a lesser extent, the left TPJ and medial prefrontal cortex, the neural response reflected an interaction between belief and outcome factors, for both blame and praise judgments: The response in these regions was highest when participants delivered a negative moral judgment, i.e., assigned blame or withheld praise, based solely on the agent's intent (attempted harm, accidental help). These results show enhanced attention to mental states for negative moral verdicts based exclusively on mental state information.Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical ImagingSimons FoundationNational Science Foundation (U.S.)John Merck Scholars Progra

Neural Basis of Moral Elevation Demonstrated through Inter-Subject Synchronization of Cortical Activity during Free-Viewing

Most research investigating the neural basis of social emotions has examined emotions that give rise to negative evaluations of others (e.g. anger, disgust). Emotions triggered by the virtues and excellences of others have been largely ignored. Using fMRI, we investigated the neural basis of two "other-praising" emotions--Moral Elevation (a response to witnessing acts of moral beauty), and Admiration (which we restricted to admiration for physical skill).Ten participants viewed the same nine video clips. Three clips elicited moral elevation, three elicited admiration, and three were emotionally neutral. We then performed pair-wise voxel-by-voxel correlations of the BOLD signal between individuals for each video clip and a separate resting-state run. We observed a high degree of inter-subject synchronization, regardless of stimulus type, across several brain regions during free-viewing of videos. Videos in the elevation condition evoked significant inter-subject synchronization in brain regions previously implicated in self-referential and interoceptive processes, including the medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and insula. The degree of synchronization was highly variable over the course of the videos, with the strongest synchrony occurring during portions of the videos that were independently rated as most emotionally arousing. Synchrony in these same brain regions was not consistently observed during the admiration videos, and was absent for the neutral videos.Results suggest that the neural systems supporting moral elevation are remarkably consistent across subjects viewing the same emotional content. We demonstrate that model-free techniques such as inter-subject synchronization may be a useful tool for studying complex, context dependent emotions such as self-transcendent emotion

Consumer responses to corporate social irresponsibility: The role of moral emotions, evaluations, and social cognitions

We investigate the mediating roles of moral emotions and attitudes between perceptions of corporate irresponsible actions, on the one hand, and consumer responses, on the other hand, and further examine their contingencies based on consumer social cognitions. Our findings show that, for corporate transgressions, multiple social cognitions (moral identity, relational and collective self‐concepts, and affective empathy) moderate the elicitation of negative moral emotions (contempt and anger) and overall evaluations (attitudes), which, in turn, lead to negative responses toward the company (negative word of mouth, complaint behaviors, and boycotting). Our study adds to extant research on corporate social irresponsibility by examining three generic reactions people have toward corporate social irresponsibility and demonstrating important boundary conditions. In addition, hypotheses are tested on a sample of adult consumers. Implications for communication by firms are considered.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149212/1/mar21197.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149212/2/mar21197_am.pd

Design of a videogame to explore morality

A number of video games involve moral narratives or require the player to make moral decisions and research from psychologists has helped to understand the effects video game content can have on how individuals behave. Recent research has started to examine the role of morality in video games: however, there are many inconsistencies in the findings. We propose that some of these inconsistencies could be due to using commercial video games for research purposes, which contain biases such as familiarity with the game and favourite characters. The process of playing video games requires consideration of Human Computer Interaction (HCI); i.e., how the game is designed and then how it is received by the player. The aim of this poster is to highlight the work being conducted to design a game in order to investigate how moral decisions are made in video games. The design of video games usually draws on an understanding of HCI to produce play that is entertaining and engaging for the player. The game development process in this research draws on a fusion of psychology and HCI, and by drawing on theories of morality the design of the game will be grounded in psychology, as well as entertainment. Through fusing video game design principles, HCI and psychology, this work is novel in terms of a methodological as well as theoretical contribution to the area