Current research programs are organized into four categories:
(1) Accountability. This research explores the wide
range of strategies people use to cope with social pressures to justify their
views or conduct to others. Work to date examines such strategies as attitude
shifting/ingratiation, pre-emptive self-criticism, defensive bolstering,
decision evasion (buckpassing, procrastination, and obfuscation), protest
against “unreasonable” standards, justifications, excuses, and apologies for
disappointing conduct, exploitation of loopholes in performance evaluation
systems (cheating), exercising the exit option, and loyalty. Several studies now
shed light on the conditions under which these strategies are likely to be
activated as well as the implications of strategies for judgmental biases (in
particular, work on pre-emptive self-criticism, defensive bolstering, and
decision evasion) and for interpersonal harmony and organizational performance.
(2) Value conflict/taboo trade-offs/protecting the sacred.
This research explores the boundaries people often place on the range of the
"thinkable." Examples include taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates,
and heretical counterfactuals. The guiding conceptual framework is the
sacred-value-protection model which maintains that: (a) moral communities tend
to treat certain values as sacred, as though (at least at a rhetorical level)
the community has an unbounded or infinite commitment to the values that
precludes trade-offs, compromise, or other mingling with secular values or
considerations; (b) members in good standing in the moral community are supposed
to direct the moral outrage at those who mix secular and sacred values
considerations (and indeed are supposed to engage in meta-norm enforcement: to
punish those who fail to punish); (c) members of the moral community who have
merely witnessed the profanation of sacred values are also supposed to engage in
moral cleansing to purify the self and to reaffirm solidarity with the normative
order.
(3) The concept of good judgment. This line of work can itself be
broken down into three subcategories: work on world
politics, styles of reasoning in individuals and groups,
and alternative functionalist metaphors for judgment.
The work on world politics focuses on the costs and benefits of different styles
of reasoning in that domain. This work draws heavily on expert judgment and
deals largely with assessments of historical counterfactuals, the generation of
conditional forecasts, and reactions to the confirmation or disconfirmation of
conditional forecasts. The work on reasoning styles of individuals attempts to
identify situations in which integratively simple versus complex styles of
reasoning are especially likely to prove adaptive or maladaptive. The work on
group processes uses the political and corporate versions of the Group Dynamics
Q-sort to document the conditions under which various patterns of small group
dynamics are likely to prove adaptive or maladaptive in decision making
environments. The work on alternative functionalist metaphors explores how our
judgments of judgmental biases and errors inevitably rest on assumptions about
the goals people are trying to achieve by thinking, feeling, and acting as they
do. What looks like an error when we posit that people are intuitive scientists
(trying to understand the world) or intuitive economists (trying to maximize
utility in competitive markets) may look quite defensible, even adaptive or
appropriate when we posit that people are intuitive politicians (trying to
maintain good relations with key constituencies or intuitive theologians (trying
to protect sacred values against secular encroachments) or intuitive prosecutors
(trying to deter violations of the normative order).
(4) Political versus politicized psychology: Are value
neutrality and objectivity obsolete ideals? This series of articles
identifies criteria that can be used to gauge the impact of moral and political
objectives on psychological research programs that are ostensibly dedicated
exclusively to the pursuit of the truth. Several articles also explore the
difficulties of drawing sharp fact-value distinctions and the resulting threats
that arise to the value-neutrality and objectivity of knowledge claims in
behavioral and social science (with special reference to work on racial policy
reasoning and on foreign policy preferences). Finally, a subset of articles goes
beyond "cursing the darkness" to "lighting candles" -- to
identifying conceptual and methodological strategies for checking creeping
politicization. These strategies include turnabout thought experiments (that are
often readily translatable into actual experiments in the laboratory or in
representative-sample surveys), the development of Q-sort techniques for
translating case studies into standardized data languages with common metrics,
and adopting a posture of constructive ambiguity in evaluating styles of
reasoning in individuals and groups (recognizing the ease with which partisans
can affix negative or positive value spins to a given pattern of reasoning or to
its opposite).
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