scholarly journals Suspicious Minds: The Link Between Stress and Perceptions of Agency

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jeremy Meier
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Effects Of Stress ◽  
Human Faces

<p>How do we perceive other minds? Research shows that people intuitively think about other minds in terms of two dimensions: agency (the capacity to think and act) and experience (the capacity to sense and feel). Perceiving a mind in another entity can alter how people interact it because mind perception implies moral status. There is evidence that stress alters the treatment of others, including contributing to dehumanization (the failure to perceive a humanlike mind in another person), but the effect of stress on mind perception is unknown. Based on previous research about the effects of stress on psychological phenomena related to the dimensions of agency and experience, I hypothesized that stress increases perceptions of agency and reduces perceptions of experience. To test these hypotheses, I conducted four studies combining two different measures of mind perception and two different methodological approaches. The results were inconsistent from one study to the next, but a tentative pattern emerged when taking all studies together. Participants who reported high levels of pre-existing stress tended to perceive more agency across a range of different entities, while inducing stress in the laboratory caused participants to attribute agency more readily to inanimate human faces. These results were weak and inconsistent, but they suggest that stress might increase perceptions of agency. The results for experience were inconclusive. I discuss some possible implications of my findings for mind perception and morality.</p>

scholarly journals Suspicious Minds: The Link Between Stress and Perceptions of Agency

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jeremy Meier
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Effects Of Stress ◽  
Human Faces

<p>How do we perceive other minds? Research shows that people intuitively think about other minds in terms of two dimensions: agency (the capacity to think and act) and experience (the capacity to sense and feel). Perceiving a mind in another entity can alter how people interact it because mind perception implies moral status. There is evidence that stress alters the treatment of others, including contributing to dehumanization (the failure to perceive a humanlike mind in another person), but the effect of stress on mind perception is unknown. Based on previous research about the effects of stress on psychological phenomena related to the dimensions of agency and experience, I hypothesized that stress increases perceptions of agency and reduces perceptions of experience. To test these hypotheses, I conducted four studies combining two different measures of mind perception and two different methodological approaches. The results were inconsistent from one study to the next, but a tentative pattern emerged when taking all studies together. Participants who reported high levels of pre-existing stress tended to perceive more agency across a range of different entities, while inducing stress in the laboratory caused participants to attribute agency more readily to inanimate human faces. These results were weak and inconsistent, but they suggest that stress might increase perceptions of agency. The results for experience were inconclusive. I discuss some possible implications of my findings for mind perception and morality.</p>

scholarly journals Comparing mind perception in strategic exchanges: human-agent negotiation, dictator and ultimatum games

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minha Lee ◽  
Gale Lucas ◽  
Jonathan Gratch
Keyword(s):  
Ultimatum Game ◽  
Dictator Game ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Ultimatum Games ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
Cognitive Aptitude ◽  
Negotiation Agents ◽  
Emotional Capacity

AbstractRecent research shows that how we respond to other social actors depends on what sort of mind we ascribe to them. In a comparative manner, we observed how perceived minds of agents shape people’s behavior in the dictator game, ultimatum game, and negotiation against artificial agents. To do so, we varied agents’ minds on two dimensions of the mind perception theory: agency (cognitive aptitude) and patiency (affective aptitude) via descriptions and dialogs. In our first study, agents with emotional capacity garnered more allocations in the dictator game, but in the ultimatum game, agents’ described agency and affective capacity, both led to greater offers. In the second study on negotiation, agents ascribed with low-agency traits earned more points than those with high-agency traits, though the negotiation tactic was the same for all agents. Although patiency did not impact game points, participants sent more happy and surprise emojis and emotionally valenced messages to agents that demonstrated emotional capacity during negotiations. Further, our exploratory analyses indicate that people related only to agents with perceived affective aptitude across all games. Both perceived agency and affective capacity contributed to moral standing after dictator and ultimatum games. But after negotiations, only agents with perceived affective capacity were granted moral standing. Manipulating mind dimensions of machines has differing effects on how people react to them in dictator and ultimatum games, compared to a more complex economic exchange like negotiation. We discuss these results, which show that agents are perceived not only as social actors, but as intentional actors through negotiations, in contrast with simple economic games.

Voices in the Context of Human Faces and Bodies

2018 ◽  
pp. 644-666
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kreifelts ◽  
Thomas Ethofer
Keyword(s):  
Autism Spectrum ◽  
Psychiatric Disease ◽  
Healthy Population ◽  
Multimodal Integration ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Crossmodal Integration ◽  
Emotional Cues ◽  
Spectrum Disorders ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Human Faces

More often than not, emotion perception is a process guided by several sensory channels, accompanied by multimodal integration of emotional information. This process appears vital for effective social communication. This chapter provides an overview of recent studies describing the crossmodal integration of non-verbal emotional cues communicated via voices, faces, and bodies. The first parts of the chapter deal with the behavioural and neural correlates of multimodal integration in the healthy population using psychophysiological, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging measures, highlighting a network of brain areas involved in this process and discussing different methodological approaches. The final parts of the chapter, in contrast, are dedicated to the alterations of the multisensory integration of non-verbal emotional signals in states of psychiatric disease, with the main focus on schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders.

scholarly journals Reproducibility, Diversity, and the Crisis of Inference in Psychology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moin Syed
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Differences ◽  
Measurement Theory ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Major Barrier ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
Group Variation ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Racial Ethnic

Psychological researchers have long sought to make universal claims about behavior and mental processes. The various crises in psychology—reproducibility, replication, measurement, theory, generalizability—have all demonstrated that such claims are premature, and perhaps impossible using mainstream theoretical and methodological approaches. Both the lack of diversity of samples and simplistic conceptualizations of diversity (e.g., WEIRD, individualism/collectivism) have contributed to an “inference crisis,” in which researchers are ill equipped to make sense of group variation in psychological phenomena, particularly with respect to race/ethnicity. This talk will highlight how the lack of sophisticated frameworks for understanding racial/ethnic differences is a major barrier to developing a reproducible, cumulative psychology.

scholarly journals Callous-Unemotional Traits Moderate the Relationship Between Irritability and Threatening Responding

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ru Zhang ◽  
Johannah Bashford-Largo ◽  
Jennie Lukoff ◽  
Jaimie Elowsky ◽  
Erin Carollo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Bold Response ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Cu Traits ◽  
Callous Unemotional ◽  
Lingual Gyrus ◽  
Callous Unemotional Traits ◽  
Threat Processing ◽  
Human Faces ◽  
The Relationship

Background: Irritability and callous-unemotional (CU; reduced guilt/empathy) traits vary dimensionally in the typically developing population but may be particularly marked in youth with conduct disorder (CD). While these dimensional traits are positively correlated, they have been associated with divergent forms of dysfunction, particularly with respect to threat processing (i.e., irritability with increased, and CU traits with decreased, threat responsiveness). This suggests that interactions between these two dimensions may be complex at the neurobiological level. However, this issue has received minimal empirical attention.Methods: The study included 105 adolescents (typically developing and cases with CD; N = 59). They were scanned with fMRI during a looming threat task that involved images of threatening and neutral human faces or animals that appeared to be either looming or receding.Results: Significant irritability-by-CU traits-by-Direction-by-Emotion interactions were seen within right thalamus/PAG, left lingual gyrus and right fusiform gyrus; irritability was positively associated with the BOLD response for Looming Threatening vs. Receding Threatening trials, particularly for youth with low CU traits. In contrast, CU traits were negatively associated with the same differential BOLD response but particularly for youth showing higher levels of irritability. Similar findings were seen within left ventral anterior and posterior cingulate cortices, though the addition of the interaction with CU traits was only seen at slightly more lenient thresholds.Conclusions: The results support previous work linking irritability to increased, and CU traits to reduced, threat responsiveness. However, for adolescents with high irritability, if CU traits are also high, the underlying neuropathology appears to relate to reduced, rather than increased, threat responsiveness.

The Moral Problem of Other Minds

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 51-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Sebo ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Precautionary Principle ◽  
Subjective Probability ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Expected Value ◽  
Moral Problem ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Problem Of Other Minds

In this paper I ask how we should treat other beings in cases of uncertainty about sentience. I evaluate three options: (1) an incautionary principle that permits us to treat other beings as non-sentient, (2) a precautionary principle that requires us to treat other beings as sentient, and (3) an expected value principle that requires us to multiply our subjective probability that other beings are sentient by the amount of moral value they would have if they were. I then draw three conclusions. First, the precautionary and expected value principles are more plausible than the incautionary principle. Second, if we accept a precautionary or expected value principle, then we morally ought to treat many beings as having at least partial moral status. Third, if we morally ought to treat many beings as having at least partial moral status, then morality involves more cluelessness and demandingness than we might have thought.

scholarly journals From Warranty Voids to Uprising Advocacy: Human Action and the Perceived Moral Patiency of Social Robots

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Banks
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Bodily Integrity ◽  
Moral Patiency ◽  
The Matrix

Moral status can be understood along two dimensions: moral agency [capacities to be and do good (or bad)] and moral patiency (extents to which entities are objects of moral concern), where the latter especially has implications for how humans accept or reject machine agents into human social spheres. As there is currently limited understanding of how people innately understand and imagine the moral patiency of social robots, this study inductively explores key themes in how robots may be subject to humans’ (im)moral action across 12 valenced foundations in the moral matrix: care/harm, fairness/unfairness, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, purity/degradation, liberty/oppression. Findings indicate that people can imagine clear dynamics by which anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and mechanomorphic robots may benefit and suffer at the hands of humans (e.g., affirmations of personhood, compromising bodily integrity, veneration as gods, corruption by physical or information interventions). Patterns across the matrix are interpreted to suggest that moral patiency may be a function of whether people diminish or uphold the ontological boundary between humans and machines, though even moral upholdings bare notes of utilitarianism.

The tangled web of agency

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Pe-Curto ◽  
Julien A. Deonna ◽  
David Sander
Keyword(s):  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Bad Company

AbstractWe characterize Doris's anti-reflectivist, collaborativist, valuational theory along two dimensions. The first dimension is socialentanglement, according to which cognition, agency, and selves are socially embedded. The second dimension isdisentanglement, the valuational element of the theory that licenses the anchoring of agency and responsibility in distinct actors. We then present an issue for the account: theproblem of bad company.

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