Episode 35: Douchebags and Desert
Explicit content warning
11/11/13 • 61 min
1 Listener
Dave and Tamler talk about the influence of character judgments on attributions of blame. What is the function of the blame--to assign responsibility or to judge a person's character? Is it fair that we blame douchebags more than good people who commit exactly the same act, or is it yet another cognitive bias that should be avoided? Plus we delve into the Richie Incognito hazing story (maybe a little early since the story has developed) and Tamler tries to figure out how to teach the Gospels to students who know roughly 100 times as much about them than he does.
Links- "The Miami Dolphins and Everything that Will Never Make Sense." by Andrew Sharp. (grantland.com)
- Interview with Richie Incognito (youtube.com)
- Gospel of Matthew [wikipedia.org]
- Synoptic Gospels [wikipedia.org]
- Pizarro, D.A. & Tannenbaum, D. (2011). Bringing character back: How the motivation to evaluate character influences judgments of moral blame. In M. Mikulincer & Shaver, P. (Eds) The Social psychology of morality: Exploring the causes of good and evil. APA Press.
- A recent chapter on character and moral psychology that David wrote (with Roy Baumeister) just to be able to talk about comics and porn : Superhero Comics as Moral Pornography. In R. Rosenberg (Ed.) Our Superheroes, Ourselves. Oxford University Press.
- Tannenbaum, D., Uhlmann, E. L., & Diermeier, D. (2011). Moral signals, public outrage, and immaterial harms. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(6), 1249-1254.
Dave and Tamler talk about the influence of character judgments on attributions of blame. What is the function of the blame--to assign responsibility or to judge a person's character? Is it fair that we blame douchebags more than good people who commit exactly the same act, or is it yet another cognitive bias that should be avoided? Plus we delve into the Richie Incognito hazing story (maybe a little early since the story has developed) and Tamler tries to figure out how to teach the Gospels to students who know roughly 100 times as much about them than he does.
Links- "The Miami Dolphins and Everything that Will Never Make Sense." by Andrew Sharp. (grantland.com)
- Interview with Richie Incognito (youtube.com)
- Gospel of Matthew [wikipedia.org]
- Synoptic Gospels [wikipedia.org]
- Pizarro, D.A. & Tannenbaum, D. (2011). Bringing character back: How the motivation to evaluate character influences judgments of moral blame. In M. Mikulincer & Shaver, P. (Eds) The Social psychology of morality: Exploring the causes of good and evil. APA Press.
- A recent chapter on character and moral psychology that David wrote (with Roy Baumeister) just to be able to talk about comics and porn : Superhero Comics as Moral Pornography. In R. Rosenberg (Ed.) Our Superheroes, Ourselves. Oxford University Press.
- Tannenbaum, D., Uhlmann, E. L., & Diermeier, D. (2011). Moral signals, public outrage, and immaterial harms. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(6), 1249-1254.
Previous Episode
Episode 34: Does Reading Harry Potter Make You Moral? (with Will Wilkinson)
Special guest Will Wilkinson joins the podcast to talk about whether fiction makes us better people, and to discuss his recent Daily Beast article that trashed Dave's profession and livelihood. Also, Dave and Tamler try to make sense of Ancient Greek justice in a myth about incest, adultery, daughter-killing, husband-killing, matricide, cannibalism, and trash talking to disembodied heads.
Links- Agamemnon [wikipedia.org]
- Will Wilkinson [wikipedia.org]
- The Will Wilkinson article that hurt David's feelings [thedailybeast.com]
- Hurt Feelings by Flight of the Concords [youtube.com]
- Does great literature make us better? by Gregory Currie [nytimes.com]
- Reading literature makes us smarter and nicer by Annie Murphy Paul [time.com]
- Want to learn how to think? Read fiction by Tom Jacobs [psmag.com]
- In Pursuit of Happiness Research [pdf] by Will Wilkinson
Special Guest: Will Wilkinson.
Next Episode
Episode 36: An Irresponsible Meta-Book Review of Joshua Greene's "Moral Tribes"
Our most irresponsible episode ever! Dave and Tamler talk about two reviews of a book they haven't read--Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them--and feel only a little shame. (Since the recording, at least one of us has finished the book). Can Greene successfully debunk all non-utilitarian intuitions? Does Greene have a dark enough view of human nature? What would an ideal moral world look like? Will Dave ever stop making fun of Tamler's haunted boy haircut? We answer all of these questions and more. Plus we respond to a listener's email and read a couple of our favorite iTunes reviews.
Links
- Moral tribes: Emotion, reason, and the gap between us and them by Joshua Greene [amazon.com]
- Joshua Greene's website [harvard.edu]
- Why can't we all just get along? The uncertain biological basis of morality. Robert Wright reviews "Moral Tribes" for The Atlantic.
- You Can't Learn About Morality from Brain Scans: The problem with moral psychology. Thomas Nagel Reviews "Moral Tribes" for the New Republic
- If you don't already have it, Tamler's interview with Joshua Greene and Liane Young in his book A Very Bad Wizard is worth the read [amazon.com]
- On Debunking (Tamler's five part series of posts at Eric Schwitzgebel's blog The Splintered Mind)
*book links are amazon affiliate links. They are the same price for you but sends a few pennies our way.
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