Moral learning and positive schizotypy: Social cognitive mechanisms in psychosis- proneness

BACKGROUND

Delusional thoughts such as paranoia and conspiratorial thinking reflect beliefs in others' intentions to do harm. Given the integral role of harm evaluation in moral cognition, a better understanding of how psychosis-prone individuals process others' moral characters may provide insights into social cognitive mechanisms of these types of delusions.

METHODS

An online sample of 293 participants was drawn from the general population, using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants performed a moral inference task, where they predicted and judged the binary choices of two fictitious agents ("good" or "bad") to impose harm under different levels of financial incentives. An investment game involving the same agents then examined participants' trust behavior. Psychosis-proneness was measured with the Multidimensional Schizotypy Scale Brief Edition.

RESULTS

A set of multiple regressions showed that positive schizotypy was associated with a lower yet more confident pre-experimental expectation of the agent's moral character, lower prediction accuracy of the agent's harm preferences, less belief revision, and undifferentiated perception of the good and bad agents' characters. Positive schizotypy was also related to higher expectations for reciprocity in the investment game, regardless of agent characters.

CONCLUSION

Our findings suggest that inflexible beliefs associated with psychosis-proneness extend beyond negative prior expectations, also reflecting difficulties in moral learning. The resulting undifferentiated moral impressions might contribute to undue suspicion of benevolent individuals and increased gullibility to malicious ones, potentially further strengthening conspiratorial beliefs.

Whole-of-Nation Moral Learning by Spiritual Hearts: A Case of Brunei's Transformation to tackle the COVID-19 Pandemic

All nations are continuously learning how best to live with the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing organizational moral learning and Islamic spirituality perspectives, this paper proposes a learning framework called the whole-of-nation moral learning by spiritual hearts to understand the dynamics of learning and change in a nation tackling the pandemic. It proposes that to overcome the pandemic or any other crises, governance requires the combination of moral leadership and followership by spiritual hearts as agents for moral learning and change, supported by realigned and reconfigured systems for holistic growth. Brunei's journey in tackling the pandemic illustrates the framework.

Neurocomputational mechanisms engaged in moral choices and moral learning

The neural circuitry involved in moral decisions has been studied since the early days of cognitive neuroscience, mainly using moral dilemma. However, the neurocomputational mechanisms describing how the human brain makes moral decisions and learns in various moral contexts are only starting to be established. Here we review recent results from an emerging field using model-based fMRI, which describes moral choices at a mechanistic level. These findings unify the field of moral decision making, extend a conceptual framework previously developed for value-based decision making and characterize how moral processes are computed in the brain. Moral dilemma can be modeled as value-based decisions that weigh self-interests against moral costs/harm to others and different types of prediction errors can be distinguished in different aspects of moral learning. These key computational signals help to describe moral choices and moral learning at an algorithmic level and to reveal how these cognitive operations are implemented in the brain. This researches provide a foundation to account for the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying moral decision making.

Unspoken Rules: Resolving Underdetermination With Closure Principles

When people learn normative systems, they do so based on limited evidence. Many of the possible actions that are available to an agent have never been explicitly permitted or prohibited. But people will often need to figure out whether those unspecified actions are permitted or prohibited. How does a learner resolve this incompleteness? The learner might assume if an action-type is not expressly forbidden, then acts of that type are permitted. This closure principle is one of Liberty. Alternatively, the learner might assume that if an action-type is not expressly permitted, then acts of that type are prohibited. This closure principle would be one of Residual Prohibition (Mikhail, 2011). On the basis of principles of pedagogical sampling (e.g., Shafto, Goodman, & Griffiths, ), we predicted that participants would infer the Liberty Principle (LP) when trained on prohibitions, and they would infer the Residual Prohibition Principle when trained on permissions. This is exactly what we found across several experiments. We also found a bias in favor of Liberty insofar as participants trained on both a prohibition and a permission rule tended still to infer the LP. However, we also found that if an action is potentially harmful, this diminishes the tendency to infer the LP.

Moral vindications

Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently been unearthing the unconscious processes that give rise to moral intuitions and emotions. According to skeptics like Joshua Greene, what has been found casts doubt on many of our moral beliefs. However, a new approach in moral psychology develops a learning-theoretic framework that has been successfully applied in a number of other domains. This framework suggests that model-based learning shapes intuitions and emotions. Model-based learning explains how moral thought and feeling are attuned to local material and social conditions. Philosophers can draw on these explanations, in some cases, in order to vindicate episodes of moral change. Explanations can support justifications by showing that they are not mere rationalizations. In addition, philosophical justifications are a fertile source for empirical hypotheses about the rational learning mechanisms that shape moral intuitions and emotions.

Learning a commonsense moral theory

We introduce a computational framework for understanding the structure and dynamics of moral learning, with a focus on how people learn to trade off the interests and welfare of different individuals in their social groups and the larger society. We posit a minimal set of cognitive capacities that together can solve this learning problem: (1) an abstract and recursive utility calculus to quantitatively represent welfare trade-offs; (2) hierarchical Bayesian inference to understand the actions and judgments of others; and (3) meta-values for learning by value alignment both externally to the values of others and internally to make moral theories consistent with one's own attachments and feelings. Our model explains how children can build from sparse noisy observations of how a small set of individuals make moral decisions to a broad moral competence, able to support an infinite range of judgments and decisions that generalizes even to people they have never met and situations they have not been in or observed. It also provides insight into the causes and dynamics of moral change across time, including cases when moral change can be rapidly progressive, changing values significantly in just a few generations, and cases when it is likely to move more slowly.

Moral learning as intuitive theory revision

We argue that moral learning, like much of conceptual development more generally, involves development and change in children's intuitive theories of the world. Children's intuitive theories involve coherent and abstract representations of the world, which point to domain-specific, unobservable causal-explanatory entities. From this perspective, children rely on intuitive sociological theories (in particular, an abstract expectation that group memberships constrain people's obligations), and their intuitive psychological theories (including expectations that mental states motivate individual behavior) to predict, explain, and evaluate morally-relevant action. Thus, moral learning involves development and change in each of these theories of the world across childhood, as well as developmental change in how children integrate information from these two intuitive theories. This perspective is supported by a series of research studies on young children's moral reasoning and learning, and compared to other developmental approaches, including more traditional forms of constructivism and more recent nativist perspectives.