Over at Daylight Atheism, Ebonmuse discusses the "just world" hypothesis: [P]eople are uncomfortable believing that suffering is random, that sometimes bad things happen for no reason at all. Instead, we prefer to believe that people must have done something to deserve what they get. This is obviously a reassuring and…
During a recent conversation with a friend, I found myself wondering whether I had sufficient evidence for my claim. My claim was that most corporate newspapers and electronic media are reluctant publish stories that make big corporations look bad, the motivation being that big corporations by expensive ads. Don't bite the hand that feeds you. My friend reminded me that her husband works for a newspaper and he's never seen the "smoking gun memo" that substantiates the that corporations are telling the news media what stories to avoid covering. She says that the problem is that the media is understaffed and lazy, not that they are biased. I responded that I don't think that there actually NEEDS to be a memo. As long as the media picks on little targets and celebrity news, there isn't much blow-back. But if they were to take on a big target in a big way, the reporters and editors already KNOW that the switchboard would light up and email will come pouring in from big shots affiliated with corporations, making them wish they they had just stuck with the tried and true (e.g., celebrity news, sports, shootings and accidents). There is a substitute for a smoking gun memo, and it's the overall lack of reporting critical of corporations that is not simply reporting on an ongoing legal dispute or where one corporation criticizes another. Many people think that circumstantial cases are necessarily weak, but this is not true. Criminals are sent to prison based on circumstantial evidence. I'll be on the lookout for a good study that demonstrates the problem, and I'm certainly open to evidence to the contrary. In the meantime, I've just noticed two recent stories that exemplify the political power of money. Example 1: The New Yorker has just published a detailed article explaining how concentrated money is buying elections in North Carolina. Example 2: Contrary to strong studies to the contrary, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure organization is claiming that the common chemical bisphenol A (BPA) presents no risk of cancer. Here's an excerpt from a recent Mother Jones article, "Is Susan G. Komen Denying the BPA-Breast Cancer Link?":
In April 2010 Komen posted an online statement saying that BPA had been "deemed safe." And a more recent statement on Komen's website about BPA, from February 2011, begins, "Links between plastics and cancer are often reported by the media and in email hoaxes." Komen acknowledges in its older statement that the Food and Drug Administration is doing more studies on BPA, but also says that there is currently "no evidence to suggest a link between BPA and risk of breast cancer."
At Edge Video, psychologist Jonathan Haidt has given a briskly presented 30-minute lecture on what the moral sciences should look like in the 21st century. He opened his talk by indicating that we are now in a period of a new synthesis in ethics, meaning that in order to do meaningful work in the field of moral psychology, one has to draw from numerous other fields, including biology, computer science, mathematics, neuroscience, primatology and many other fields. The bottom line is that one needs to be careful to not attempt to reduce moral psychology to a single principle, as is often done by those who advocate that morality is a code word for a single test, such as welfare-maximization or justice-fairness. I have followed Jonathan Haidt’s work for several years now, and I am highly impressed with his breadth of knowledge, his many original ideas, and the way he (in keeping with his idea of what moral psychology should be like) synthesizes the work of numerous disparate fields of study. In this post, I am sharing my own notes from my viewing of heights two-part video lecture. In Haidt's approach, the sense of taste serves as a good metaphor for morality. There are only a few dominant bases for moral taste (akin to the four types of taste receptors), taste can be generally categorized as "good" or "bad," and despite the fact that there are a limited number of foundations for moral and sensory taste, there is plenty of room for cultural variation--every culture has its own approach to making good moral decisions (and making good tasting food). Haidt warns that those studying moral psychology should be careful to avoid two common errors that are well illustrated by two recent journal articles. The first article, titled "The Weirdest People in the World," indicates that most of the psychology research done in the entire world is done in the United States, and the subjects tend to be Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic ("WEIRD"). Not that one cannot do psychology with this homogenous group of subjects (typically college students), but one needs be careful to avoid generalizing to the entire world based upon a WEIRD set of subjects. In fact, WEIRD people tend to see the world much differently than people in many other cultures. They tend to see separate objects (versus relationships), and they tend to rely on analytical thinking (categories and laws, reason and logic) versus holistic thinking (patterns and context). Does this make us WEIRD people more accurate since we think in these analytical terms? Not necessarily, but before generalizing, we need to take it to heart that we live in an unusual culture. Haidt warns that this problem is exacerbated because our psychologists tend to surround themselves with similar-thinking others, and when this happens, the confirmation bias kicks in and they will inevitably find lots of evidence to condemn those who think differently. [More . . . ]
Chris Mooney reports on the work of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, who have argued that (in Mooney's words): "the human capacity for reasoning evolved not so much to get at truth, as to facilitate argumentation." I haven't yet heard Mooney's interview of Mercier, which will soon be posted at Point of Inquiry. I do look forward to this interview, because the conclusions of Mercier and Sperber (which I scanned in their recent journal article, "Why do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory") make much sense in light of the ubiquitous failings of human reason-in-action. Here is an excerpt from the abstract from their article:
Here is a comprehensive list of the techniques Fox News uses to manipulate its viewers, compliments of Dr. Cynthia Boaz. It seems to me that responsible thinkers would anticipate these techniques, recognize them and turn this drivel off. Here is the list of techniques, but I would highly recommend visiting the main article for clear explanations of each. 1. Panic Mongering. 2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem. 3. Projection/Flipping. 4. Rewriting History. 5. Scapegoating/Othering. 6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness. 7. Bullying. 8. Confusion. 9. Populism. 10. Invoking the Christian God. 11. Saturation. 12. Disparaging Education. 13. Guilt by Association. 14. Diversion. I freely admit that FOX News is not the only "news" channel that employs these techniques--I've seen most of these used on other networks, though FOX is famous for proudly using these techniques.