Jan 26, 2017 02:27 AM
Even Scientists Act Superstitious at Sea
http://m.nautil.us/blog/even-scientists-...ous-at-sea
EXCERPT: [...] Yet, even today, when the risks are greatly diminished by modern technology and so many of the sea’s mysteries have been revealed, sailing superstitions persist. On my 23-day voyage aboard the S/Y Christianshavn, a 54-foot Danish sloop, the specter of luck was our constant companion and a feature of many mealtime conversations. [...] Our crew was comprised of four scientists, a seasoned captain and first mate, and three other sailors. It was jarring to hear so much talk of luck in the midst of hard-nosed scientists.
It turns out that if what you do is really risky and dangerous, or involves lots of uncertainty, then you’re more likely to hold and practice superstitions. It’s not just sailing. Gambling, Wall Street trading, and baseball are just a few more examples. [...] Enacting a superstition is a means of asserting that control. “Superstitions create a form of structure in an unstructured world,” says Jennifer Whitson [...] a researcher who studies human behavior. Whitson calls the human inclination to seek and identify patterns between random or unrelated things or events, especially during times of uncertainty, “illusory pattern perception.” She’s found it’s this urge to connect disparate factors that appears to give rise to belief in superstitions. Whitson began studying this phenomenon in the mid-2000s. She initially ran six different experiments....
How Considering False Histories Changes Our Moral Judgments
http://m.nautil.us/blog/how-considering-...-judgments
EXCERPT: [...] The tendency to blame people for bad outcomes might have led to an overgeneralization, so that when somebody gets hurt, but it’s nobody’s fault, we blame somebody anyway: If Shep was supervising the kid when he got hurt, we might blame Shep even if the injury was a complete accident. This would suggest, however, that thinking about how things might have turned out differently—that is, thinking that Shep might have acted identically with nobody getting hurt—might change how much we’d blame him.
Turns out that thinking about different outcomes does affect our moral judgment. In the 2014 study, Lench and her colleagues asked people to consider a man on a bridge throwing a brick onto a freeway below without being able to see where the brick might land. People recommended harsher punishments for the man if someone got hurt, but they suggested more lenient punishments for the man after being asked to imagine how someone might not have gotten hurt.
Outcome, though, is not the only parameter you can adjust to vary these scenarios. In 2010, MIT cognitive scientist Liane Young and her colleagues noticed that many previous studies of moral luck had a confounding effect. They were, in theory, testing moral scenarios (like the drunk-driving and brick-throwing examples) in which the outcome mattered, but they didn’t control for what the agent in these scenarios believed. Could it be that it wasn’t just the outcome of your action that determined your moral blame, but also having a false belief about what was going to happen? To test this...
http://m.nautil.us/blog/even-scientists-...ous-at-sea
EXCERPT: [...] Yet, even today, when the risks are greatly diminished by modern technology and so many of the sea’s mysteries have been revealed, sailing superstitions persist. On my 23-day voyage aboard the S/Y Christianshavn, a 54-foot Danish sloop, the specter of luck was our constant companion and a feature of many mealtime conversations. [...] Our crew was comprised of four scientists, a seasoned captain and first mate, and three other sailors. It was jarring to hear so much talk of luck in the midst of hard-nosed scientists.
It turns out that if what you do is really risky and dangerous, or involves lots of uncertainty, then you’re more likely to hold and practice superstitions. It’s not just sailing. Gambling, Wall Street trading, and baseball are just a few more examples. [...] Enacting a superstition is a means of asserting that control. “Superstitions create a form of structure in an unstructured world,” says Jennifer Whitson [...] a researcher who studies human behavior. Whitson calls the human inclination to seek and identify patterns between random or unrelated things or events, especially during times of uncertainty, “illusory pattern perception.” She’s found it’s this urge to connect disparate factors that appears to give rise to belief in superstitions. Whitson began studying this phenomenon in the mid-2000s. She initially ran six different experiments....
How Considering False Histories Changes Our Moral Judgments
http://m.nautil.us/blog/how-considering-...-judgments
EXCERPT: [...] The tendency to blame people for bad outcomes might have led to an overgeneralization, so that when somebody gets hurt, but it’s nobody’s fault, we blame somebody anyway: If Shep was supervising the kid when he got hurt, we might blame Shep even if the injury was a complete accident. This would suggest, however, that thinking about how things might have turned out differently—that is, thinking that Shep might have acted identically with nobody getting hurt—might change how much we’d blame him.
Turns out that thinking about different outcomes does affect our moral judgment. In the 2014 study, Lench and her colleagues asked people to consider a man on a bridge throwing a brick onto a freeway below without being able to see where the brick might land. People recommended harsher punishments for the man if someone got hurt, but they suggested more lenient punishments for the man after being asked to imagine how someone might not have gotten hurt.
Outcome, though, is not the only parameter you can adjust to vary these scenarios. In 2010, MIT cognitive scientist Liane Young and her colleagues noticed that many previous studies of moral luck had a confounding effect. They were, in theory, testing moral scenarios (like the drunk-driving and brick-throwing examples) in which the outcome mattered, but they didn’t control for what the agent in these scenarios believed. Could it be that it wasn’t just the outcome of your action that determined your moral blame, but also having a false belief about what was going to happen? To test this...
