Thinking disposition,thinking style,and susceptibility to causal illusion predict fake news discriminability

Acceptance of fake news is probably modulated by an intricate interplay of social, cultural, and political factors. In this study, we investigated whether individual-level cognitive factors related to thinking and decision making could influence the tendency to accept fake news. A group of volunteers responded to a COVID19-related fake news discrimination scale as well as to questionnaires assessing their thinking style (reflective vs. intuitive) and thinking disposition (actively open-mindedness). Furthermore, they completed a computerized contingency learning task aimed at measuring their tendency to develop a causal illusion, a cognitive bias leading to perceive causal connections between non-contingent events. More actively open-minded and more reflective individuals presented higher fake news discrimination scores. In addition, those who developed weaker causal illusions in the contingency learning task were also more accurate at differentiating between fake and legitimate news. Actively open-minded thinking was the main contributor in a regression model predicting fake news discrimination.     

Stop the blame game: An analysis of blaming on Weibo during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in rice and wheat areas in China

In the pandemic era, social media has provided the public with a platform to make their voice heard. One of the most important public opinions online during a pandemic is blame. Blame can lead to stigma towards patients as well as potential patients and decrease social cooperation, which might impede prevention and control measures during epidemics. Thus, studying online blame during the early days of COVID-19 can facilitate the management and control of future pandemics. By analyzing 3791 posts from one of the most popular social media sites in China (Weibo) over the 10 days immediately after COVID-19 was declared to be a communicable disease, we found that there were four main agents blamed online: Individuals, corporations, institutions, and the media. Most of the blame targeted individual agents. We also found that there were regional-cultural differences in the detailed types of blamed individual agents, that is, between rice- and wheat-farming areas in China. After controlling influence of distance from the epicenter of Wuhan, there were still stable differences between regions: people in wheat areas had a higher probability of blaming agentic, harmful individuals, and people in rice areas had a higher probability of blaming individuals with low awareness of social norms for preventive health behavior. Findings have implications for preventing and predicting blame across cultures in future pandemics.     

The associations of cultural worldviews,political orientation,and trust with COVID-19 risk beliefs in the U.S.

Given that risk beliefs predict engagement in behaviors to prevent disease, it is important to understand the factors associated with risk beliefs. In the present paper, we conducted path analyses to investigate the associations of belief systems (political orientation and cultural worldviews of individualism and hierarchy) with COVID-19 risk beliefs (i.e., perceived likelihood, perceived severity, and worry about disease; Studies 1 and 2), and the indirect effect through trust in information sources in these relationships (Study 1). Two online panels of U.S. adults were surveyed at three timepoints during the COVID-19 pandemic (Study 1: baseline n = 1,667, 1-year follow-up n = 551; Study 2: n = 404). Results of path analyses indicated that, across studies and timepoints, when controlling for political orientation, trust, and demographic factors, greater individualism had consistent significant direct effects on lower perceived severity and worry about COVID-19, whereas greater hierarchy had consistent significant direct effects on lower perceived severity. However, after accounting for cultural worldviews of individualism and hierarchy (and trust and demographic factors), none of the associations among political orientation and any of the three COVID-19 risk beliefs were significant. The test of indirect effects indicated that individualism and hierarchy were indirectly associated with lower perceived severity of and worry about COVID-19 through less trust. The findings suggest that cultural worldviews of individualism and hierarchy play a role in shaping people's risk beliefs.     

THEOLOGY AS THE QUEEN (BEE) OF THE DISCIPLINES?

Abstract. Once Queen of the Medieval court of sciences, dethroned theology may be able in our time to play a strategic servant role in rightly humiliating, elevating, and ordering the disciplines, in gadflying like a mutant honeybee, generating surprise and serendipity through the intermediacy of social science, and in offering ethical homing direction to the disciplines in their applied endeavors.     

BIOLOGY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Abstract. The sciences may be conceptualized as a hierarchy ranked by level of organization (e.g., many-body physics ranks above particle physics). Each science serves as an antidiscipline for the science above it; that is, between each pair, tense but creative interplay is inevitable. Biology has advanced through such tension between its subdisciplines and now can serve as an antidiscipline for the social sciences—for anthropology, for example, by examining the connection between cultural and biological evolution; for psychology, by addressing the nature of learning and the structure of the unconscious; for economics, by examining economically irrational behavior and by comparing economic activity in humans and other species. Sociology, concerned mainly with advanced literate societies, is relatively remote from the genetic basis of human social behavior. However, moving between biological and social levels of organization generates richness and points to new and unexpected principles.     

Ethics,AIDS, and community responsibility

In the discussion of the responsibilities of society to the HIV infected and uninfected, a serious question seems to have been left out of the picture: To what extent are people who are not infected, have no special relationship to the infected and have no professional responsibilities for the care of AIDS patients under an obligation to come to the aid of people with the HIV? In this paper, I shall examine our responsibilities, as members of society, for the welfare of others to whom we may or may not have a special relationship. I shall argue that those responsibilities flow from the conditions that structure our transactions with others; conditions that make such transactions possible.     

The elderly and high technology medicine: A case for individualized,autonomous allocation

The issues involved in decision making about the aggressiveness of future medical care for older persons are explored. They are related to population trends, the heterogeneity of older persons and a variety of factors involved in individual preferences. Case studies are presented to illustrate these points, as well as a review of pertinent literature. The argument is offered that, considering these many factors, a system of flexible, individualized care by informed patient preference, is more rational than the rationing of technological services by age.     

Ethics in health care and medical technologies

In this paper a case is used to demonstrate how ethical analysis enables health care professionals, patients and family members to make treatment decisions which ensure that medical technologies are used in the overall best interests of the patient. The claim is made and defended that ethical analysis can secure four beneficial outcomes when medical technologies are employed: (1) not allowing any medical technologies to be employed until the appropriate decision makers are identified and consulted; (2) insisting that medical technologies be employed not merely to promote the medical interests of the patient but rather on the basis of their ability to contribute to the overall well-being of the patient; (3) challenging caregivers to reflect on the dynamic interplay between their conscious and unconscious values and consequent determinations of what is in the patient's best interests; and (4) providing a justification for selected interventions which makes possible rational dialogue between caregivers espousing different viewpoints about treatment options.     

Physicians,entrepreneurism and the problem of conflict of interest

This paper examines the ethical issues of conflict of interest raised by the burgeoning development of physician involvement in for-profit entrepreneurial activities outside their practice. After documenting the nature and extent of these activities, and their potential for conflicts of interest, the paper assesses the major arguments for and against physicians' referral of patients to facilities they own or in which they invest. The paper concludes that an outright ban on such activity seems ethically warranted.     

HIV and the obligation to treat

The paper is an attempt to review the basis for the claim that physicians have a professional obligation to treat AIDS patients. Considered are the historical record, two professional codes of ethics, and several recent articles. The paper concludes that the arguments considered, which attempt to support the claim that physicians have an obligation to treat, fail. It is suggested, rather, that common humanity, which physicians share with those who suffer from AIDS, ought to be the basis for engaging in the care of AIDS patients.