This is #2 in my Best of Neuron Culture Moving Party — a run of 10 of my favorite posts from the blog’s tenure at WIRED, as I move the blog here. In this one, “Kill Whitey,” I look at a playful but ingeniously fresh look at a popular social science approach to studying decision-making and ethics, […]
Continue reading →My post yesterday on morality and evolution drew a useful heads-up from the writer and entrepreneur Jag Bhalla: a review he wrote for The Wilson Quarterly of a recent book on the same subject, evolutionary biologist Christopher Boehm’s Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. This book, published last month, slipped under my […]
Continue reading →Morality, even when it doesn’t involve slick trolley problems like killing Whitey, poses a perennial puzzle, particularly in light of evolution. Does human morality rise innately, from culture, or both? Did we evolve merely a capacity to think morally, or a compulsion to do so? What do the evolutionary roots of morality, complex as they might […]
Continue reading →A couple years ago, David Pizarro, a young research psychologist at Cornell, brewed up a devious variation on the classic trolley problem. The trolley problem is that staple of moral psychology studies at dinner parties in which you ask someone to decide under what conditions it’s morally permissible to kill one person to save others. […]
Continue reading →In a passage highlighted by Flip Chart Fairy Tales, Stephen Pinker, in an interview in The Observer last week, argues that statistical ignorance is our intellectual culture’s great failure. I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. Cognitive psychology tells us that the […]
Continue reading →A couple years ago, David Pizarro, a young research psychologist at Cornell, brewed up a devious variation on the classic trolley problem. The trolley problem is that staple of moral psychology studies at dinner parties in which you ask someone to decide under what conditions it’s morally permissible to kill one person to save others. […]
Continue reading →Where’d Marc Hauser go? He was here a few days ago. Roy Baumeister, Paul Bloom, Joshua D. Greene, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Joshua Knobe, Elizabeth Phelps, David Pizarro The Mayflower Inn Washington, CT & Eastover Farm Bethlehem, CT Tuesday July 20 – Thursday, July 22, 2010 Edge’s Morality show lineup, cleansed of Hauser. Hm. […]
Continue reading →As many know, Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser was placed on a year’s leave yesterday after an internal Harvard investigation found problems in some of the data supporting a 2002 paper on monkey cognition, and, according to coverage at the Globe and elsewhere, perhaps some others as well. … The longer source is Horace Freeland Judson’s “The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science” , a splendid account of not only how outright fraud occurs, but how pressure to produce, which is intense in most research universities, can lead to the sort of atmosphere DrugMonkey alludes to.
Continue reading →