There is a widespread notion, both within the sciences and among the general public, that mental deterioration can rob individuals of their identity. Yet there have been no systematic investigations ...of what types of cognitive damage lead people to appear to no longer be themselves. We measured perceived identity change in patients with three kinds of neurodegenerative disease: frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Structural equation models revealed that injury to the moral faculty plays the primary role in identity discontinuity. Other cognitive deficits, including amnesia, have no measurable impact on identity persistence. Accordingly, frontotemporal dementia has the greatest effect on perceived identity, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has the least. We further demonstrated that perceived identity change fully mediates the impact of neurodegenerative disease on relationship deterioration between patient and caregiver. Our results mark a departure from theories that ground personal identity in memory, distinctiveness, dispositional emotion, or global mental function.
Faces impart exhaustive information about their bearers, and are widely used as stimuli in psychological research. Yet many extant facial stimulus sets have substantially less detail than faces ...encountered in real life. In this paper, we describe a new database of facial stimuli, the Multi-Racial Mega-Resolution database (MR2). The MR2 includes 74 extremely high resolution images of European, African, and East Asian faces. This database provides a high-quality, diverse, naturalistic, and well-controlled facial image set for use in research. The MR2 is available under a Creative Commons license, and may be accessed online.
Death and the Self Nichols, Shaun; Strohminger, Nina; Rai, Arun ...
Cognitive science,
20/May , Letnik:
42, Številka:
S1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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It is an old philosophical idea that if the future self is literally different from the current self, one should be less concerned with the death of the future self (Parfit, ). This paper examines ...the relation between attitudes about death and the self among Hindus, Westerners, and three Buddhist populations (Lay Tibetan, Lay Bhutanese, and monastic Tibetans). Compared with other groups, monastic Tibetans gave particularly strong denials of the continuity of self, across several measures. We predicted that the denial of self would be associated with a lower fear of death and greater generosity toward others. To our surprise, we found the opposite. Monastic Tibetan Buddhists showed significantly greater fear of death than any other group. The monastics were also less generous than any other group about the prospect of giving up a slightly longer life in order to extend the life of another.
It has long been known that advocating for a cause can alter the advocate's beliefs. Yet a guiding assumption of many advocates is that the biasing effect of advocacy is controllable. Lawyers, for ...instance, are taught that they can retain unbiased beliefs while advocating for their clients and that they must do so to secure just outcomes. Across ten experiments (six preregistered; N = 3,104) we show that the biasing effect of advocacy is not controllable but automatic. Merely incentivizing people to advocate altered a range of beliefs about character, guilt and punishment. This bias appeared even in beliefs that are highly stable, when people were financially incentivized to form true beliefs and among professional lawyers, who are trained to prevent advocacy from biasing their judgements.
The essential moral self Strohminger, Nina; Nichols, Shaun
Cognition,
04/2014, Letnik:
131, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
•Not all parts of the mind contribute equally to judgments of personal identity.•Memory and distinguishing features contribute less to identity than moral traits.•Moral traits are the strongest ...contributor to identity, the self, and the soul.
It has often been suggested that the mind is central to personal identity. But do all parts of the mind contribute equally? Across five experiments, we demonstrate that moral traits—more than any other mental faculty—are considered the most essential part of identity, the self, and the soul. Memory, especially emotional and autobiographical memory, is also fairly important. Lower-level cognition and perception have the most tenuous connection to identity, rivaling that of purely physical traits. These findings suggest that folk notions of personal identity are largely informed by the mental faculties affecting social relationships, with a particularly keen focus on moral traits.
How much do our choices represent stable inner preferences versus social conformity? We examine conformity and consistency in sartorial choices surrounding a common life event of new norm exposure: ...relocation. A large-scale dataset of individual purchases of women's shoes (16,236 transactions) across five years and 2,007 women reveals a balance of conformity and consistency, moderated by changes in location socioeconomic status. Women conform to new local norms (i.e., average heel size) when moving to relatively higher status locations, but mostly ignore new local norms when moving to relatively lower status locations. In short, at periods of transition, it is the fashion norms of the rich that trickle down to consumers. These analyses provide the first naturalistic large-scale demonstration of the tension between psychological conformity and consistency, with real decisions in a highly visible context.
The True Self Strohminger, Nina; Knobe, Joshua; Newman, George
Perspectives on psychological science,
07/2017, Letnik:
12, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between characteristics that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge of research has begun ...examining a further distinction. Even among characteristics that are internal to the self, people pick out a subset as belonging to the true self. These factors are judged as making people who they really are, deep down. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the true self and identify features that distinguish people’s understanding of the true self from their understanding of the self more generally. In particular, we consider recent findings that the true self is perceived as positive and moral and that this tendency is actor-observer invariant and cross-culturally stable. We then explore possible explanations for these findings and discuss their implications for a variety of issues in psychology.
Fashion is an essential part of human experience and an industry worth over $1.7 trillion. Important choices such as hiring or dating someone are often based on the clothing people wear, and yet we ...understand almost nothing about the objective features that make an outfit fashionable. In this study, we provide an empirical approach to this key aesthetic domain, examining the link between color coordination and fashionableness. Studies reveal a robust quadratic effect, such that that maximum fashionableness is attained when outfits are neither too coordinated nor too different. In other words, fashionable outfits are those that are moderately matched, not those that are ultra-matched ("matchy-matchy") or zero-matched ("clashing"). This balance of extremes supports a broader hypothesis regarding aesthetic preferences-the Goldilocks principle--that seeks to balance simplicity and complexity.
When people report that a person's identity has changed, what do they mean by this? Recent research has often assumed that participants are indicating a change in numerical, rather than qualitative, ...identity. Investigations into this matter have been hampered by the fact that English has no clear way to demarcate one type of identity from the other. To resolve this matter, we develop and test a novel task in Lithuanian, which has lexical markers for numerical and qualitative identity. We apply this task to intuitions about changes in moral capacities, which has previously shown to lead to high ratings in identity change. We discover that, when people say that a morally altered person is dramatically different, they mean the person is qualitatively transformed, but numerically intact. We conclude that this methodology is a valuable tool not only for illuminating the specific phenomenon of the moral self, but for general use in studying folk ascriptions of identity persistence.
Recently, McGinn (2011) has proposed a new theory of disgust. This theory makes empirical claims as to the history and function of disgust, yet does not take into account contemporary scientific ...research on the subject. This essay evaluates his theory for its merits as an account of disgust, and as a piece of scholarship more generally, and finds it lacking.
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