…Put another way: emotions and values are part of a cognitive team that includes appraisal of the situation at hand, embedded in a wider understanding of how the world works in general.
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Scientific Encounters
In other words, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) does a poor job of predicting behavior and is no better at predicting behavior than self-report measures. Nor does the IAT appear to provide a window to unconscious bias, given that research participants have been highly accurate in predicting their own IAT scores (Hahn eta l, 2014). Nor does the IAT capture stable, context-free racial attitudes that are resistant to change (James, 2018; Gawronski & Hahn, 2019). Rather, implicit bias is less (not more) stable over time than self-reported bias (Gawronski, 2019).
Keep in mind that intellectual humility is central to the scientific mindset. That’s why scientists often hedge their claims with disclaimers to the effect that “the evidence suggests that such-and-such is the case but more research is needed.” If scientists allow themselves the possibility of being wrong, why should we banish all doubt about their guidance?
According to John Zaller and Stanley Feldman in A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences, people normally don’t have a “single, fixed, and firm attitude on issues but instead have many, potentially opposing considerations”. That is, most people have mixed feelings about policies and political issues - not counting ideologues and political activists, who tend to view ambivalence as a weakness easily exploited by one’s adversaries.
Affordances are properties of an environment that encourage particular behaviors. Affordances range from simple objects (e.g., glass of water) to complex social cues (e.g., come-hither look). They invite action (drink me! come over here!) but the invitation may be turned down or not even noticed. No surprise there: people enter situations with certain inclinations, desires, and expectations, which sensitizes them to some affordances and not others. Not everyone acts on a help-wanted sign, unguarded purse, or unfriendly comment. And those inclined to act may not behave the same way to the same affordance. A glass of water is generally for drinking but sometimes it’s for throwing in anger. An unguarded purse may be an invitation to grab some cash or turn it in to the lost-and-found office.
A skeptical attitude subjects truth claims to standards of evidence and scientific process: What is the evidence? How was it measured? Are there alternative interpretations of the evidence? Is the claim falsifiable? And so on.
Per the above table, states that prohibited vaccination mandates had a much higher Covid mortality rate from July 2021 to March 2022 than states without bans. The difference in mortality rates doesn’t appear linked to state-level prevalence of obesity or diabetes. Adult vaccination rates were somewhat higher in states without mandate bans, but the vaccination differences aren’t that great. Plus, it’s hard to disentangle the effects of mandate bans and popular resistance to getting vaccinated. One thing is clear, however…
Ok, the Covid mortality rate for states without a mask mandate was almost twice as high as for states with a mandate. Simple cause-and-effect? Unlikely, although mask mandates probably played a role. But that’s just my opinion, not a result of hard-core research and not taking into account possible confounders, like the people’s compliance with state mandates and social distancing recommendations.
Experts are fallible. Experts often disagree with each other. How, then, does one go about trusting experts? And how do we figure out which experts to trust, or not? Take, for instance, medical doctors…
Which got me to thinking…If all households were provided free home test-kits, without having to request them, and were advised to test themselves whenever they had symptoms or had been exposed to infected individuals…wouldn’t that alone slash Covid case rates? Add in better treatments, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Covid case and mortality rates quickly dropped to flu-like levels. My reasoning is as follows…
Social scientists are people too, with their own intuitions about human nature, happiness, inequality and ideal societies. I'm talking economists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists (etc). I'm talking about the people who made up the theory of inequality-aversion.
The research social scientists conduct and the conclusions they reach are not independent of their intuitions about what is and ought to be. That's no reason to dismiss their work, only a plea to be alert to possible lapses of scientific rigor in what they do and say.
Any way you look at it, the US spends way more on healthcare than other developed countries, both as a share of GDP and on a per capita basis. So why are these other countries’ health outcomes so much better than ours?
Ingroup favoritism—the tendency to favor members of one’s own group over those in other groups - has been well-documented in social groups across time and place. However, real-world studies are often descriptive, making it difficult to infer underlying process or generalize from specific groups delineated by nationality, race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, etc. to other intergroup contexts. The “minimal group paradigm” overcomes the limitations of descriptive studies by using an experimental research design in which participants are given artificial group identities.
Unanticipated events, insufficient time, lack of requisite skills and a multitude of other factors may prevent one from acting as intended. Actual control over a behavior depends on the ability to overcome barriers of this kind, as well as the presence of facilitating factors.
These days I often come across the idea that the brain is some kind of machine, e.g., prediction machine, simulation machine, meaning-making machine, decision-making machine, computation machine. And there’s still a lot of push-back against the idea of being a machine.
Countries that have way more excess deaths than Covid-19 deaths are almost assuredly undercounting Covid deaths. For example, the excess death rates in Russia and Serbia are more than three times their official Covid death rates over roughly the same period. Some countries, such as Russia, have been seriously undercounting Covid deaths for a long time and appear uninterested in correcting their records. Others may be motivated to correct their records but the task is just too daunting to undertake, or at least complete.
One-sided books and opinion pieces do not meet this standard. Yet the Lancet’s editors are looking the other way. Why? Probably because the journal’s mission is not just to publish some of the best science in the world but also to “transform society” and be “a platform to advance the global impact” of the research it publishes. Unfortunately, pursuing the truth and advancing a cause require different mindsets. As Dhruv Khullar put it in The New Yorker…
It’s not exactly surprising that unarmed police are less likely to kill than armed police. But that’s not what the authors are saying. They’re saying that police killings inevitably happen more in countries with armed police, simply because the police are armed. They do not acknowledge that police killings are also rare in several countries that do arm their police. For instance…
The authors of the above study define police violence as “police-related altercations leading to death or bodily harm”. Of the three non-governmental databases they use to estimate the true extent of police violence in the USA, Fatal Encounters (FE) is by far the biggest. Here is more on the FE data, provided by the authors in their Supplementary Material…
Spin misleads readers to impress or persuade them, often with the aid of buzz-words like “innovative”, “promising”, “unique”, “robust”, and “novel”. But spin is not just a matter of self-promoting hype – it’s a form of dishonest scholarship that undermines the scientific enterprise. Here are some examples…