I was attracted to this book because it captures an overarching theme about how I have come to view the world. Everything I read these days jumps together into some grand puzzle, and social psychology, the field I study, is a natural glue (not the only possible glue, but a useful one for me). Almost anything can be studied by social psychologists...culture, health, gender, marketing, politics, morality, sports, poverty, love, justice, religion and death are all prominent topics that social psychologists study. I dare say that list includes most any big question that people care about.

Perhaps social psychology is just a set of methods and standards of analysis, but those do not seem unique either. The gold standard of generating new knowledge in social psychology is the experimental method using random assignment, a method shared with most every other scientific discipline. Social psychologists analyze the text of books, measure reaction times, examine images of the brain, do surveys of large nationally representative samples, and construct mathematical models.

In sum, social psychology can be the study of almost anything that people do by almost any method that can be quantified. Some people might take that as a knock on social psychology, but personally, I think the interdisciplinary or amorphous nature of the field is it's strength. The need to point to a unique contribution of one's field is part of the business of academia, not part of the quest to understand the world (see Louis Menand's Marketplace of Ideas for a discussion of this point). If you want to understand the world, this "jumping together"/consilience is perhaps the only way to get a true perspective.

A Booth at the Book Fair on "Happy Science"

Consider an age old question like 'what makes people happy?'. To be sure, it's a vague question that scientific/quantitative methods can make more precise. But the people at the booth from the book fair in this picture (left) probably have a reasonably well thought out perspective on what makes people happy as well. Philosophers probably think the answer lies in contemplation. English majors might think the answer is revealed by great literature. Neuroscientists and biologists seek answers in brain chemistry. Religious scholars in religious texts. Psychologists randomly assign people to do things and see if it makes them happier. Who has the answer? I would say nobody...and everybody...Just as any psychological finding is made more robust by the convergence of findings using multiple methods by multiple researchers in various settings on diverse individuals...so too is any greater theory about the human condition more easily believed through the convergence of knowledge across disciplines...or consilience.

For those who embrace this convergence, it's an exciting time. People are generating far more quantitative data as every facebook interaction, google search, credit card swipe, & GPS location can be mashed up into some application or graph that provides some evidence of the human condition. People are generating far more qualitative data as well, in the form of countless public blogs, forums, tweets, and facebook posts. Logic, statistics, & the scientific method can be used by people of any discipline to take this wealth of data and produce convergent knowledge.

I still plan to focus on posting graphs about quantitative findings that relate to psychological theories on this blog.  But one of the main purposes of this blog is for me to store my own thoughts. My thought processes about the psychology of anything would be incomplete if I didn't have a place to store experiences that didn't explicitly have any data component to them...the random news article, observation, book review or quote that provides external validity to anything psychologists study. It is one thing to see something in a psychological experiment.  But sometimes you only know it is real when you see the same thing exhibited in a character in a novel, in a quote from a politician, or in an essay by a philosopher.

Hence this section of the blog is born...the consilience section, where I jumble together news and assorted ideas from tangential areas that hopefully relate to moral and political psychology.

Posts in this category below:

• On Hyperpartisanship, Hypermoralism, and the Supernormal Stimuli of Modern Politics
• Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation Leads to Greater Reward – 2 Theories
• Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation Leads to Greater Reward – 2 Theories
• Appreciating American Libertarians – Insight from Ted Conover’s Book, Rolling Nowhere
• Appreciating American Libertarians – Insight from Ted Conover’s Book, Rolling Nowhere
• Psychological Causes of Violence in Sports Riots
• Psychological Causes of Violence in Sports Riots
• What can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities cannot?
• Can open government data inform voters in the 2010 election?
• Consilience – The jumping together of psychology, technology, statistics, news and ?
• Consilience – The jumping together of psychology, technology, statistics, news and ?
• Methland by Nick Reding: Moral Maximizing and the Drug War
• What the positive psychology approach can learn from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided
• Gratitude Video from Conan O’Brien and Louis CK
• France to consider measures of gross national “bonheur” (happiness)
• Hyperpartisanship & Obama’s speech to kids in US schools
• Three polls which point to differing underlying fairness principles driven by differing goals
• Democracy Promotion vs. Dignity Promotion

I hope to explore the idea of hypermoralism in a series of blog posts.

Posts in this category:

• On Hyperpartisanship, Hypermoralism, and the Supernormal Stimuli of Modern Politics
• On Hyperpartisanship, Hypermoralism, and the Supernormal Stimuli of Modern Politics
• Sam Harris’ TED video and the danger of liberal atheist moral absolutism
• The Psychology of Aggression and the Ugliness of the Health Care Reform Debate
• Religion does not cause racism, but group morality may underlie both.
• Hypermoralism – Morality causes ordinary people to do immoral things.
• Hypermoralism – Morality causes ordinary people to do immoral things.
• Methland by Nick Reding: Moral Maximizing and the Drug War

• Appreciating American Libertarians – Insight from Ted Conover’s Book, Rolling Nowhere
• What is more Immorral? Distracted Driving or Smoking Marijuana?
• Democrats and Republicans agree that Justice & Fairness are about Equity, not Equality or Impartiality
• A Difference Between Democrats and Republicans – The Effects of Empathy on Political Interest
• What are the psychological differences that make people liberal democrats, conservative republicans, or libertarians?

Still, technology has changed the way we communicate in almost every arena and the pace of that change seems to be accelerating.  Will the peer review system survive?  If not, what will take it's place? I don't know the answer to that question, but perhaps examining some of the areas where the current business of psychology and the current world don't match will lead us to some answers.

• It's slow for authors - Peer review is already derided as a slow process and given the pace of the modern world, it seems inevitable that change needs to occur in this area.  There are too many researchers producing too much work for unpaid experts to keep up willingly.  This will only get worse as online sites like Facebook produce mountains of data that should be analyzed.
• It's binary - What makes matters worse about the speed of the process is the fact that decisions are binary.  You either are accepted (rarely in social psychology) or you are rejected.  Yet papers exist on a continuum and some research gets cited hundreds of times while most research never gets cited at all...which is a chilling fact given how much effort and time went into it.  All that work that reviewers do in their expert review of the research gets lost in the binary nature of their result and the fact that their comments are never revealed to the public.
• It's slow for readers - Invariably, the research that is most interesting is the research that is going on right now.  How are discoveries expected to be made if cycles of research are delayed for years by inefficiencies in sharing information?
• It's static - Most papers in psychology contain a review of current literature and a discussion which talks about why the paper helps advance current knowledge.  Unfortunately, that information becomes outdated soon after it is written and is even more outdated by the time it is published.
• It confounds praise with publicity - Having your article published serves two purposes.  It helps you get a job in that it proves the worth of your work.  It also allows other people to read your work and build upon it.  However, these two things don't necessarily need to go together.  'Unsuccessful' research needs to be shared as 'failure' can be very instructive.  Meta-analyses and other research aggregation techniques require that information.
• It is inefficient for authors - In most businesses, people specialize in certain tasks.  In order to be a standout psychologist, you need to be able to be able to combine knowledge of psychology with writing skills and knowledge of statistics and increasingly, technical knowledge to collect data online.  Few people can do all of these things well.

What kind of systems should stand in place of the current peer review journal article system?  I don't have the answer to that, but I hope to talk about ideas for how technology may change the peer review system in successive posts.  The problems of information overload facing academics is the same problem which everyone has these days.  And people are continually improving systems which address this problem through innovations like crowd-sourcing (digg), leveraging social networks to filter information (facebook), collaborative writing (wikipedia), and sharing data across data sources (semantic web and freebase).

I'll write more in successive posts about specific solutions, but I think an ideal system would be one where all data is published, but the prestige that comes from a publication is awarded by crowd-sourced ratings and reviews, not by the act of being published.  The publishing of a paper is the beginning of a conversation with the world, not the end.  I say data, because I think people should be able to publish data or literature reviews or a combination...but that it should be possible to publish data for others to analyze, just like people publish theories for others to test.  Analyses and literature reviews should be separate as analyses should remain relatively static while literature reviews and conclusions will inevitably change and should be updateable by the original authors (eg. see Psychwiki).  Any review of a paper should include semantically tagged ratings of the research so that others can combine these ratings into meta-analyses.  Indeed, eventually all data should be semantically tagged such that the aggregation of data points, not just studies, is possible.

I know that is a dense paragraph and I know I'll want to change it as soon as I hit publish....and the beauty of the internet is that I can.  But rather than pretend I have the answer (I don't), I'll try and blog about innovations to the publishing process and the business of psychology in later posts, all in the business of psychology category of this blog.

Posts in this category:

• Intrinsic, not Extrinsic Motivation Leads to Greater Reward – 2 Theories
• What can psychology tell us about moral reasoning that literature and the humanities cannot?
• Wanted: Motivated Academic Writers to Help Publish Our Data
• Can open government data inform voters in the 2010 election?
• Consilience – The jumping together of psychology, technology, statistics, news and ?
• How to publish a Replication of Disgust & Big Five Personality Trait Correlations
• Nate Silver and Veronique de Rugy demonstrate how a more modern peer review process could work.
• The Business of Psychology: Will the peer review journal article system be changed by technology?

What is moral confabulation?

Confabulation is a well studied phenomenon in psychology.  It refers to the formation of false beliefs or perceptions due to some "imperfection" of the brain.  I put "imperfection" in quotes because psychology is consistently proving that confabulation is the norm, not the exception.  Rational beliefs that we have reasons for may be considered more legitimate, but irrational beliefs may actually be more psychologically functional.  Given how negative emotion is stronger than positive emotion, it is not necessarily functional for us to see the world as it truly is.   Consider this video on synthetic happiness by Dan Gilbert:

Synthesizing happiness, even if it's a trick of our minds, works.  Confabulation often serves the purpose of helping us synthesize happiness.  We synthesize beliefs that may not accurately reflect reality, but which feel good.  Our moral intuitions are part of this "emotional immune system" which keeps us happy and functional.

Psychologist Geoffrey Cohen illustrated this in the moral/political realm in a 2003 paper where he surveyed liberals and conservatives as to their preference for generous or stringent welfare policies.  In the absence of knowledge about whether the policies were supported by Democrats or Republicans, liberals supported generous welfare policies and conservatives supported stringent welfare policies.  However, a liberal who learned that Democrats supported stringent policies was likely to support the stringent policy and a conservative who learned that Republicans supported generous policies was likely to support generous policies.  Further, they confabulated (synthesized or made up) the reason for this support as being based on the details of the proposal or their philosophy of government rather than on the fact that this was their parties' belief.

What if we didn't confabulate?  A person would be left with the correct but disturbing belief that they blindly follow their party.  While it might be true, that belief isn't very complimentary and we have a word for people who don't avoid having these emotionally negative beliefs....the word is depressed.

Moral confabulation is simply the study of confabulation in the moral realm.  We are constantly making judgments about things as morally good or bad, right or wrong.  However, we sometimes don't actually know the real reason why we make these judgments.

Why does it matter?

One could study food confabulation and the fact that people believe things taste good or bad when 80% of taste is actually a result of smell.  However, somehow I don't think many people would care why food really tastes good or bad as there are no consequences of taste, unless you are a food manufacturer.

On the other hand, moral confabulation has important negative consequences.

• Increased Group Conflict - It feels good to bolster your group and feel morally superior to the other group.  Fighting the cold war feels better when you can think of the USSR as the evil empire.  Liberals enjoy demonizing conservatives and vice versa.  It's fun...but the conflicts continue and lead to bad policy (due to liberal vs. conservative acrimony) and bad lives (oppressed Palestinians and insecure Israelis).
• Poor Choices - It is easy to confuse the policy choice which feels good with the policy choice that leads to the best outcome.  Consider a hypothetical case where 10 terrorists kill 1000 Americans.  These 10 terrorists then decide to hide in a village which we can bomb, killing the 10 terrorists, but also 3 innocent villagers.  These 3 villagers have 30 relatives who will then become terrorists if we do this.  Depending on your emotional makeup, it may feel especially wrong to let these 10 terrorists go unpunished or it may feel especially wrong to kill 3 innocent villagers.  But the important thing to notice about this scenario is that your feelings have nothing to do with making America safer.  However, I'm betting that if you are honest with yourself, you are much more susceptible about arguments to justify why reducing terrorism depends upon whichever choice seems less 'wrong' to you.  It is moral confabulation to believe that your decision is based on reducing terrorism and not on following whichever moral intuition feels most just.  In cases where the prudent decision is the decision which is also unjust, moral confabulation is bound to lead to poor choices.

Our hope is that popularizing the term will allow it to go from being an academic term to one which enters regular culture.  Perhaps conscious awareness of the phenomenon will lead to less division in the world and more prudent choices, as people consciously attempt to avoid the phenomenon.  It is neither a liberal or conservative phenomenon and anyone who makes judgments routinely confabulates.  You can help in this effort by mentioning the term to your friends or writing about it on your facebook page or blog.

What previous research exists?

I did not invent the term moral confabulation.  I don't think even the people who first used the term moral confabulation invented it as moral confabulation is implicit in the study of processing biases, intuition, ingroup bias, balance theory, cognitive dissonance, and numerous other areas of social psychology that are as old as the discipline itself.  However, I would point the reader to this article by Jon Haidt (with Selin Kesebir), whose moral intuitionist perspective is well cited in current moral psychology research.  It's a fairly current overview of much of the research on this topic in psychology.

Posts in this category:

• Sarah Palin confabulates that “Jewish people will be flocking to Israel”
• Is Keith Bardwell confabulating his reason for being against interracial marriage?
• J Street vs. The Weekly Standard: Is it possible to be pro-peace and pro-Israel?
• Moral Confabulation: What is it and why does it matter?
• Moral Confabulation: Glenn Beck says Obama is a racist, Liberals compare Bush to Hitler
• Moral confabulation: when you dislike something so much that you make up stuff