Kurt Gray

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/opinion/human-nature-polarization-predator.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Are we more predators or prey? We’ve guessed wrong for a century.

Today we can shoot wolves from helicopters but—I argue in the @nytimes today—humans evolved more as hunted than hunters.

Link ⬇️

The Assassination of a CEO Why some celebrate the pain of the powerful

We also talk about it in our latest substack: https://www.moralunderstandingnewsletter.com/p/the-assassination-of-a-ceo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/12/20/brian-thompson-ceo-killing/

Why some celebrate the murder of Brian Thompson.

I talked with @AnnieDuke about the psychology of victimhood and harm for her latest @washingtonpost column. Link below

Take home: "If you want to understand why your father-in-law votes differently from you, or why a foreign-exchange student emphasizes different values, your best bet is to understand their perceptions of harm."

with @sampratt99!

Taxonomies: there are lots of different ways to count moral concerns. We cover taxonomies of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. But distinctness between these themes exists more in the minds of researchers than in the minds of the people we study.

Cognition: Moral pluralism is obviously true, but our mind uses a harm-based template to make more judgments, explaining why perceived harm almost perfectly predicts condemnation across different acts.

Politics: Political disagreement is connected to assumptions of vulnerability, a new (under review) idea from our lab. Libs vs. con see different people as especially vulnerable to victimization.

Culture: We draw from Shweder's classic work on "ontologies of suffering" how different cultures understand what causes harm. If you think defiling sacredness causes suffering, you think it's immoral.

In this new review, we explore the idea of moral pluralism, and how it can arise from psychological (and cultural) concerns about suffering. Moral differences arise when different people make different assumptions about harm.

fulltext: https://tinyurl.com/moralityinourmind

Online ahead of print in Annual Review. How to make sense of moral differences across cultures and politics.

While creating HLLMs (historical LLMs) can be challenging, we believe they provide a novel research opportunity to overcome the present-focus of current work and give voice to societies of the past.

Authors: Michael Varnum, Nicolas Baumard, & @MohammadAtari90

LLMs have successfully replicated human responses (like moral judgments & cognitive biases) in present participants.

Training them using historical texts would allow researchers to examine non-WEIRD populations, cultural change, & generalizability of psych phenomena.

2/3

🏯🕌🏦 New paper in @PNASNews: Historical Large Language Models (HLLMs) can be a tool in behavioral science for collecting data from *past societies* by simulating responses from “participants”—namely, the dead—through history.
https://dir.lat/zuydaF

🧵1/3

How Do We Turn Down the Heat in U.S. Politics? Research suggests that balancing perspectives and seeking...

How Do We Turn Down the Heat in U.S. Politics?

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_do_we_turn_the_heat_down_in_us_politics

Great coverage of the work of @CurtisPuryear on the power of Balanced Pragmatism to bridge divides.

Mom says she never returns grocery cart when she’s with k... “You can judge me all you want.”

https://www.today.com/parents/moms/mom-shopping-cart-debate-rcna154889

Moms Doesn't Return Grocery Cart When She Shops With Kids

Mom is worried about pedophiles, commenters call her a monster.

I argue it’s the dilemma of the commons. (Also not great for civil discourse to end a video with “F— off.”)...

Big thanks to amazing lab managers/RAs @blakey_will & @sampratt99 for all their help with the manuscript and throughout the process.
Orange/harms figure credit: Kevin House
Amazon pre-order: https://a.co/d/bF9bQJf

It won't come out until January--after the election, but just in time for the inauguration. Hopefully, by then, people will be more interested in understanding each other than winning. But I'll be covering its contents in the substack.

You can get the summary at
https://www.moralunderstandingnewsletter.com/p/outraged-why-we-fight-about-morality

I'm really pleased that it's (mostly) done. The proposal "the victim within" was rejected by everyone, until Edward Kastenmeier at @PantheonBooks saw its promise. He had me (repeatedly) reframe and rewrite it into something much better.

Liberals and conservatives seem to have different morals, but I argue that we all share a harm-based moral mind. Our evolutionary past makes us worry about harm, but people today disagree about which harms are most important/real, creating moral outrage and political disagreement

🚨Book!🚨
"Outraged: Why We Fight about Morality and Politics" has an Amazon listing:
"A groundbreaking new perspective on the moral mind that rewrites our understanding of where moral judgments come from, and how we can overcome the feelings of outrage that so often divide us"

https://youtu.be/4Jv3HuBsKsY?si=3Z0QRpWpwWMjg20X

The real reason why we fight about morality and politics.

It’s not because we have different values.

It’s because we see harm differently—especially about the powerful and othered.

(Also because we evolved from terrified little hominids)
...

DANGER! Why MORAL PANICS(!) Are Irresistible to Your Brain Humans are meerkats, kids are on social media, and dogs a...

https://www.moralunderstandingnewsletter.com/p/danger-why-moral-panics-are-irresistible?r=lh5af&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Worrying about kids on social media is the latest moral panic.

We explain why panics thrive online and why we can't just quit feeling afraid.

DANGER! Why MORAL PANICS(!) Are Irresistible to Your Brain

w @sampratt99 & @CurtisPuryear ...

🚨Job🚨
Come join the Deepest Beliefs Lab!

We're hiring a full-time RA/outreach person. Perfect for a media-savvy graduating senior thinking about grad school. We have a great record of placing folks!

https://bit.ly/3TU7ky2

The big idea: do our political opponents really hate us? Not half as much as we think, according to the evidence –...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/08/the-big-idea-do-our-political-opponents-really-hate-us