Special Issue on Automated Perception of Human Affect from Longitudinal Behavioral Data

This article traces the rise of “predictive” attitudes to crime prevention. After a brief summary of the current spread of predictive policing based on person-centered and place-centered mathematical models, an episode in the scientific study of future crime is examined. At UCLA between 1969 and 1973, a well-funded “violence center” occasioned great hopes that the quotient of human “dangerousness”—potential violence against other humans—could be quantified and thereby controlled. At the core of the center, under the direction of interrogation expert and psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, was a project to gather unprecedented amounts of behavioral data and centrally store it to identify emergent crime. Protesters correctly seized on the violence center as a potential site of racially targeted experimentation in psychosurgery and an example of iatrogenic science. Yet the eventual spectacular failure of the center belies an ultimate success: its data-driven vision itself predicted the Philip K. Dick–style PreCrime policing now emerging. The UCLA violence center thus offers an alternative genealogy to predictive policing. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Histories of Data and the Database edited by Soraya de Chadarevian and Theodore M. Porter.

Download Full-text

The Normative Significance of Empirical Moral Psychology

Diametros ◽

10.33392/diam.1626 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 17 (64) ◽

pp. 1-5

Author(s):

Tomasz Żuradzki

Keyword(s):

Brain Imaging ◽

Moral Psychology ◽

Statistical Significance ◽

Moral Judgments ◽

Behavioral Data ◽

Psychological Processes ◽

Empirical Methods ◽

Special Issue ◽

Normative Significance

Many psychologists have tried to reveal the formation and processing of moral judgments by using a variety of empirical methods: behavioral data, tests of statistical significance, and brain imaging. Meanwhile, some scholars maintain that the new empirical findings of the ways we make moral judgments question the trustworthiness and authority of many intuitive ethical responses. The aim of this special issue is to encourage scholars to rethink how, if at all, it is possible to draw any normative conclusions by discovering the psychological processes underlying moral judgments.

Download Full-text