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markfrankel18

John Searle: The Philosopher in the World by Tim Crane | NYRblog | The New York Review ... - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...john-searle-philosopher-world

TOK ethics law rights philosophy

shared by markfrankel18 on 21 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • No, I’m not skeptical about the idea of universal human rights. I’m skeptical about what I call positive rights.
  • So I say that you can make a good case for universal human rights of a negative kind, but that you cannot make the comparable case for universal human rights of a positive kind.
  • As a professor in Berkeley I have certain rights, and certain obligations. But the idea of universal rights—that you have certain rights just in virtue of being a human being—is a fantastic idea. And I think, Why not extend the idea of universal rights to conscious animals? Just in virtue of being a conscious animal, you have certain rights. The fact that animals cannot undertake obligations does not imply that they cannot have rights against us who do have obligations. Babies have rights even before they are able to undertake obligations. Now I have to make a confession. I try not to think about animal rights because I fear I’d have to become a vegetarian if I worked it out consistently. But I think there is a very good case to be made for saying that if you grant the validity of universal human rights, then it looks like it would be some kind of special pleading if you said there’s no such thing as universal animal rights. I think there are animal rights.
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  • For every right there’s an obligation. We’re under an obligation to treat animals as we arrogantly say, “humanely.” And I think that’s right. I think we are under an obligation to treat animals humanely. The sort of obligation is the sort that typically goes with rights. Animals have a right against us to be treated humanely. Now whether or not this gives us a right to slaughter animals for the sake of eating them, well, I’ve been eating them for so long that I’ve come to take it for granted. But I’m not sure that I could justify it if I was forced to
markfrankel18

The Moral Instinct - New York Times - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...13Psychology-t.html

ethics TOK Pinker

shared by markfrankel18 on 31 Mar 13 - Cached
  • It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks. Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense.
  • The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished.
  • Until recently, it was understood that some people didn’t enjoy smoking or avoided it because it was hazardous to their health. But with the discovery of the harmful effects of secondhand smoke, smoking is now treated as immoral. Smokers are ostracized; images of people smoking are censored; and entities touched by smoke are felt to be contaminated (so hotels have not only nonsmoking rooms but nonsmoking floors). The desire for retribution has been visited on tobacco companies, who have been slapped with staggering “punitive damages.” At the same time, many behaviors have been amoralized, switched from moral failings to lifestyle choices.
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  • But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.
  • People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification.
  • Together, the findings corroborate Greene’s theory that our nonutilitarian intuitions come from the victory of an emotional impulse over a cost-benefit analysis.
  • The psychologist Philip Tetlock has shown that the mentality of taboo — a conviction that some thoughts are sinful to think — is not just a superstition of Polynesians but a mind-set that can easily be triggered in college-educated Americans. Just ask them to think about applying the sphere of reciprocity to relationships customarily governed by community or authority. When Tetlock asked subjects for their opinions on whether adoption agencies should place children with the couples willing to pay the most, whether people should have the right to sell their organs and whether they should be able to buy their way out of jury duty, the subjects not only disagreed but felt personally insulted and were outraged that anyone would raise the question.
  • The moral sense, then, may be rooted in the design of the normal human brain. Yet for all the awe that may fill our minds when we reflect on an innate moral law within, the idea is at best incomplete. Consider this moral dilemma: A runaway trolley is about to kill a schoolteacher. You can divert the trolley onto a sidetrack, but the trolley would trip a switch sending a signal to a class of 6-year-olds, giving them permission to name a teddy bear Muhammad. Is it permissible to pull the lever? This is no joke. Last month a British woman teaching in a private school in Sudan allowed her class to name a teddy bear after the most popular boy in the class, who bore the name of the founder of Islam. She was jailed for blasphemy and threatened with a public flogging, while a mob outside the prison demanded her death. To the protesters, the woman’s life clearly had less value than maximizing the dignity of their religion, and their judgment on whether it is right to divert the hypothetical trolley would have differed from ours. Whatever grammar guides people’s moral judgments can’t be all that universal. Anyone who stayed awake through Anthropology 101 can offer many other examples.
  • The impulse to avoid harm, which gives trolley ponderers the willies when they consider throwing a man off a bridge, can also be found in rhesus monkeys, who go hungry rather than pull a chain that delivers food to them and a shock to another monkey. Respect for authority is clearly related to the pecking orders of dominance and appeasement that are widespread in the animal kingdom. The purity-defilement contrast taps the emotion of disgust that is triggered by potential disease vectors like bodily effluvia, decaying flesh and unconventional forms of meat, and by risky sexual practices like incest.
  • All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture.
  • By analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar that forces us to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness. The idea that the moral sense is an innate part of human nature is not far-fetched. A list of human universals collected by the anthropologist Donald E. Brown includes many moral concepts and emotions, including a distinction between right and wrong; empathy; fairness; admiration of generosity; rights and obligations; proscription of murder, rape and other forms of violence; redress of wrongs; sanctions for wrongs against the community; shame; and taboos.
  • Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?
  • Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?
onlinejobstudy

http://onlinejobstudy.com/shekhawati-university-ma-final-result/ - 0 views

University Result 2017 -Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Shekhawati University (PDUSU), Sikar Post Graduate examination is over and students are searching BA, MA, MSC, MCOM BSC, BCom (Bachelor of Arts) A...

#online_colleges #online_college_degree #online_college_classes #online_degrees #online_degree_programs #college_online #associate_degree_online #online_college_courses

started by onlinejobstudy on 08 Jul 17 no follow-up yet
Lawrence Hrubes

In The Beginning There Was ... Nothing? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...e-capable-of-explaining-itself

TOK science cosmology universe

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Dec 13
     
    "If the origin of life is mysterious, the origin of the universe is much more. After all, the universe, by definition, includes all there is. How can everything come from nothing?"
markfrankel18

Why Are Certain Smells So Hard to Identify? - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...naming-scents-uneducated-nose

TOK perception

shared by markfrankel18 on 02 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A recent paper in the journal Cognition, for instance, quipped that if people were as bad at naming sights as they are at naming scents, “they would be diagnosed as aphasic and sent for medical help.” The paper quoted scattershot attempts by participants in a previous study to label the smell of lemon: “air freshener,” “bathroom freshener,” “magic marker,” “candy,” “lemon-fresh Pledge,” “some kind of fruit.” This sort of difficulty seems to have very little to do, however, with the nose’s actual capabilities. Last spring, an article in the journal Science reported that we are capable of discriminating more than a trillion different odors. (A biologist at Caltech subsequently disputed the finding, arguing that it contained mathematical errors, though he acknowledged the “richness of human olfactory experience.”) Whence, then, our bumbling translation of scent into speech?
  • That question was the subject, two weekends ago, of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium at the San Jose Convention Center (which smelled, pleasantly but nonspecifically, of clean carpet). The preëminence of eye over nose was apparent even in the symposium abstract, which touted data that “shed new light” and opened up “yet new vistas.” (Reading it over during a phone interview, Jonathan Reinarz, a professor at the University of Birmingham, in England, and the author of “Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell,” asked me, “What’s wrong with a little bit of inscent?”) Nevertheless, the people on the panel were decidedly pro-smell. “One thing that everyone at this symposium will agree on is that human olfactory discriminatory power is quite excellent, if you give it a chance,” Jay Gottfried, a Northwestern University neuroscientist, told me. Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, used a stark hypothetical to drive home the ways in which smell can shape behavior: “If I offer you a beautiful mate, of the gender of your choice, who smells of sewage, versus a less attractive mate who smells of sweet spice, with whom would you mate?”
  • But difficulty with talking about smell is not universal. Asifa Majid, a psycholinguist at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, and the organizer of the A.A.A.S. symposium, studies a group of around a thousand hunter-gatherers in northern Malaysia and southern Thailand who speak a language called Jahai. In one analysis, Majid and her colleague Niclas Burenhult found that speakers of Jahai were as good at classifying scratch-and-sniff cards as they were at classifying color chips; their English-speaking counterparts, meanwhile, tended to give meandering and disparate descriptions of scents. At the symposium, Majid presented new research involving around thirty Jahai and thirty Dutch people. In that study, the Jahai named smells in an average of two seconds, whereas the Dutch took thirteen—“and this is just to say, ‘Uh, I don’t know,’ ” Majid joked onstage.
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  • Olfaction experts each have their pet theories as to why our scent lexicon is so lacking. Jonathan Reinarz blames the lingering effects of the Enlightenment, which, he says, placed a special emphasis on vision. Jay Gottfried, who is something of a nasal prodigy—he once guessed, on the basis of perfume residue, that one of his grad students had gotten back together with an ex-girlfriend—blames physiology. Whereas visual information is subject to elaborate processing in many areas of the brain, his research suggests, odor information is parsed in a much less intricate way, notably by the limbic system, which is associated with emotion and memory formation. This area, Gottfried said, takes “a more crude and unpolished approach to the process of naming,” and the brain’s language centers can have trouble making use of such unrefined input. Meanwhile, Donald A. Wilson, a neuroscientist at New York University School of Medicine, blames biases acquired in childhood.
markfrankel18

Are Scientists on "Cusp of Knowing" How Weird We Are? | Cross-Check, Scientific America... - 1 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...of-knowing-how-probable-we-are

TOK science

shared by markfrankel18 on 24 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • “The Copernicus Complex addresses some of the deepest questions humans have ever asked. How weird are we? Was our existence highly probable, or improbable? Even miraculous? You can break this question down into more specific questions: How probable was our universe? Our galaxy? Solar system? Planet? How probable was life? And how probable were creatures like us, who can ponder their probability?
  • Scientists still don’t have a clue why our universe has the form we observe, or how life began on the Earth some 3.6 billion years ago, or whether life exists elsewhere. During his talk at Stevens, Scharf acknowledged that we may never observe exoplanets in sufficient detail to know, with certainty, that they harbor life.
  • “Unfortunately, you cannot determine the probability of the universe or of life on Earth when you have only one universe and one history of life to contemplate. Statistics require more than one data point.
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  • We may be on the cusp of knowing, and yet still infinitely far away.
Lawrence Hrubes

Is Atheism Irrational? - NYTimes.com - 3 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...is-atheism-irrational

TOK religion theism atheism science philosophy

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Feb 14
     
    AP: "I think there are a large number - maybe a couple of dozen - of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get. G.G.: Could you give an example of such an argument? AP: One presently rather popular argument: fine-tuning. Scientists tell us that there are many properties our universe displays such that if they were even slightly different from what they are in fact, life, or at least our kind of life, would not be possible. The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life."
Lawrence Hrubes

Fighting ISIS With an Algorithm, Physicists Try to Predict Attacks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ts-try-to-predict-attacks.html

science math human sciences SocialScience prediction terrorism social networks

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • And with the Islamic State’s prolific use of social media, terrorism experts and government agencies continually search for clues in posts and Twitter messages that appear to promote the militants’ cause.A physicist may not seem like an obvious person to study such activity. But for months, Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami, led a team that created a mathematical model to sift order from the chaotic pro-terrorism online universe.
  • The tracking of terrorists on social media should take a cue from nature, Dr. Johnson said, where “the way transitions happen is like a flock of birds, a school of fish.”
  • The researchers also said there might be a spike in the formation of small online groups just before an attack takes place.
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  • Both Mr. Berger and Ms. Patel noted a tricky question raised by the research: When is it best to try to suppress small groups so they do not mushroom into bigger groups, and when should they be left to percolate? Letting them exist for a while might be a way to gather intelligence, Ms. Patel said.
Lawrence Hrubes

University tells students Britain 'invaded' Australia - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-australia-35922858

language history indigenous knowledge systems

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 30 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • A top Australian university has rejected claims it is trying to rewrite the nation's colonial history.Students are being encouraged to use the term "invaded" rather than "settled" or "discovered", and avoid the word "Aborigines".The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Indigenous Terminology guide states that Australia was "invaded, occupied and colonised".But UNSW says it does not mandate what language can and cannot be used.
Lawrence Hrubes

Scientists Unveil New 'Tree of Life' - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-unveil-new-tree-of-life.html

science biology models DNA

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 13 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • A team of scientists unveiled a new tree of life on Monday, a diagram outlining the evolution of all living things. The researchers found that bacteria make up most of life’s branches.
  • In his 1859 book “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin envisioned evolution like a branching tree.
  • In the 1970s, Carl Woese of the University of Illinois and his colleagues published the first “universal tree of life” based on this approach. They presented the tree as three great trunks.
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  • Patrick Forterre, an evolutionary biologist at the Pasteur Institute in France, agreed that bacteria probably make up much of life’s diversity. But he had concerns about how Dr. Banfield and her colleague built their tree. He argued that genomes assembled from DNA fragments could actually be chimeras, made up of genes from different species. “It’s a real problem,” he said.
eviemcconkie

Dehumanisation is a human universal - David Livingstone Smith - Aeon - 3 views

aeon.co/...how-does-dehumanisation-work

human universal history psychology

shared by eviemcconkie on 01 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • phenomenon of dehumanisation.
  • We dehumanise other people when we conceive of them as subhuman creatures
  • psychological essentialism’ to denote our pervasive and seemingly irrepressible tendency to essentialise categories of things.
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  • People the world over segment the animal kingdom into species.
  • When we dehumanise others, we do not simply regard them as non-human. We regard them as less than human. Where does that come from?
  • Attributions of intrinsic value are intimately bound up with beliefs about moral obligation
  • we have developed methods to circumvent and neutralise our own horror at the prospect of spilling human blood.
  • You don’t have to be a monster or a madman to dehumanise others. You just have to be an ordinary human being.
  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream had no trouble understanding that though Bottom’s head looked like that of a donkey, he was really a human being ‘on the inside’, the donkeyish appearance concealing the human essence.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - More or Less, The death toll in Syria - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/p01fyvkc

TOK maths statistics SocialScience BBCRadioMoreOrLess podcast

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Sep 13
     
    As global leaders remain divided on whether to carry out a military strike against Syria in response to the apparent use of chemical weapons against its people, Tim Harford looks at the different claims made about how many people have been killed. The United States, the UK and France are sharing intelligence, but all quote different estimates of how many people they think died in the attack by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces. Tim speaks to Kelly Greenhill, a professor of political science at Tufts University in the US, and co-author of Sex, Drugs and Body Counts about why the numbers vary so widely. And he speaks to Megan Price from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, who has been trying to keep a tally of the deaths in Syria since the conflict began.
Lawrence Hrubes

Pulchrinomics: Handsome C.E.O.s, Handsome Returns : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ome-ceos-handsome-returns.html

TOK economics human sciences SocialScience beauty perception

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 21 Dec 13
     
    "Researchers today are no less interested in how physical appearance shapes political and economic outcomes. Half a century after Kennedy debated Nixon, the economist Daniel Hamermesh, from the University of Texas, coined the portmanteau pulchrinomics, the economic study of beauty. Hamermesh and his colleagues have produced a large body of research that is fascinating, if disconcerting: the basic principle of pulchrinomics is that beauty drives economic success."
markfrankel18

The Syllable Everyone Recognizes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lable-everyone-recognizes.html

language TOK

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Are there words that are universally understood, across all countries and cultures? A team of linguists has proposed one: “huh.”
  • Huh? In a paper published on Friday in the journal PLOS One, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands announced that they had found strikingly similar versions in languages scattered across five continents, suggesting that “Huh?” is a universal word.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Capital - Trusting your gut: Smart management or a fool's errand? - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...0923-should-you-trust-your-gut

TOK intuition hunch business management photography arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 24 Sep 13
     
    ""A lot of people think intuition is general purpose, but intuition is actually domain specific," said Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at City University of New York, and author of Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to A More Meaningful Life. "Intuition is the result of your subconscious brain picking up on clues and hints and calculating the situation for you, and that's based solely on experience.""
Lawrence Hrubes

Malcolm Gladwell - Zeitgeist Americas 2013 - YouTube - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

TOK SocialScience education assumptions psychology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 29 Nov 13
     
    Using statistics from high and low ranked universities, Gladwell argues that what really matters is how well we do relative to our peer group, not how elite our school is globally. Better to be a top student in a mediocre school than an average student in Harvard.
Lawrence Hrubes

Student Course Evaluations Get An 'F' : NPR Ed : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...nt-course-evaluations-get-an-f

TOK SocialScience human sciences statistics education measurement

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 26 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • In universities around the world, semesters end with students filling out similar surveys about their experience in the class and the quality of the teacher. Student ratings are high-stakes. They come up when faculty are being considered for tenure or promotions. In fact, they're often the only method a university uses to monitor the quality of teaching. Recently, a number of faculty members have been publishing research showing that the comment-card approach may not be the best way to measure the central function of higher education.
markfrankel18

Why We Keep Playing the Lottery - Issue 4: The Unlikely - Nautilus - 1 views

nautil.us/...hy-we-keep-playing-the-lottery

ToK Lottery math psychology emotion

shared by markfrankel18 on 23 Nov 13 - Cached
  • Blind to the mathematical odds, we fall to the marketing gods.
  • “People just aren’t able to grasp 1 in 175 million,” Williams says. “It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.” And so we continue to play. And play.
  • It may seem easy to understand why we keep playing. As one trademarked lottery slogan goes, “Hey, you never know.” Somebody has to win. But to really understand why hundreds of millions of people play a game they will never win, a game with serious social consequences, you have to suspend logic and consider it through an alternate set of rules—rules written by neuroscientists, social psychologists, and economists. When the odds are so small that they are difficult to conceptualize, the risk we perceive has less to do with outcomes than with how much fear or hope we are feeling when we make a decision, how we “frame” and organize sets of logical facts, and even how we perceive ourselves in relation to others. Once you know the alternate set of rules, plumb the literature, and speak to the experts, the popularity of the lottery suddenly makes a lot more sense. It’s a game where reason and logic are rendered obsolete, and hope and dreams are on sale.
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  • Selling the lottery dream is possible because, paradoxically, the probabilities of winning are so infinitesimal they become irrelevant. Our brains didn’t evolve to calculate complex odds. In our evolutionary past, the ability to distinguish between a region with a 1 percent or 10 percent chance of being attacked by a predator wouldn’t have offered much of an advantage. An intuitive and coarse method of categorization, such as “doesn’t happen,” “happen sometimes,” “happens most of time,” “always happens,” would have sufficed, explains Jane L. Risen, an associate professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, who studies decision-making. Despite our advances in reason and mathematics, she says, we still often rely on crude calculations to make decisions, especially quick decisions like buying a lottery ticket.
  • In the conceptual vacuum created by incomprehensible odds, people are likely to experience magical thinking or superstition, play a hunch, or simply throw reason out the window all together, says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon. “Most of the weird stuff that you see with decision-making and risk happens with small probabilities,” he says.
  • But even fantasy will drop its hold on us if we always lose—a point Hargrove grasped from the start. Research has shown that positive reinforcement is a key in virtually all of the successful lotteries, notes the University of Lethbridge’s Williams. Lotteries that allow players to choose combinations of four or five numbers from a total of 60 numbers are popular, he says, because many players experience “the near miss,” which creates the illusion that they came close to winning the multi-million dollar jackpot. Most players don’t realize, however, that “near-miss” is an illusion. The odds of winning get worse with each successive match.
markfrankel18

Language and Morality: How Foreign Speech Influences Choice - 4 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...n-speech-influences-choice.htm

TOK ethics language

shared by markfrankel18 on 30 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • A recent study shows that using a foreign language can help many take a more utilitarian approach to moral dilemmas
  • According to research conducted by psychologists at the University of Chicago and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, they discovered that many who regularly use a foreign language also take a relatively utilitarian approach to moral dilemmas. Even more interesting, researchers discovered that this same response held true when an emotionally difficult outcome was involved--one that could even involve the sacrifice of another life or the person making the decision.
  • "People are less afraid of losses, more willing to take risks and much less emotionally-connected when thinking in a foreign language," said co-author Sayuri Hayakawa, a UChicago doctoral student in psychology, via the release. She concludes the study by stressing on the importance of language. "You learn your native language as a child and it is part of your family and your culture," she said. "You probably learn foreign languages in less emotional settings like a classroom and it takes extra effort. The emotional content of the language is often lost in translation."
Lawrence Hrubes

Imagining the Lives of Others - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...imagining-the-lives-of-others

imagination psychology politics literature

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 09 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • What could be more exhilarating than experiencing the world through the perspective of another person? In “Remembrance of Things Past,” Marcel Proust’s narrator says that the only true voyage of discovery is not to visit other lands but “to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds.” This is one of the central projects of the humanities; it’s certainly part of the pleasure we get from art and literature.
  • People are often highly confident in their ability to see things as others do, but their attempts are typically barely better than chance. Other studies find that people who are instructed to take the perspectives of others tend to do worse, not better, at judging their thoughts and emotions.
  • There are certain limits, however, to how far we can go. The philosopher Laurie Paul, in her book “Transformative Experience,” argues that it’s impossible to actually imagine what it would be like to have certain deeply significant experiences, such as becoming a parent, changing your religion or fighting a war. The same lack of access applies to our understanding of others. If I can’t know what it would be like for me to fight in a war, how can I expect to understand what it was like for someone else to have fought in a war? If I can’t understand what it would be like to become poor, how can I know what it’s like for someone else to be poor?
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