OVERCOMING EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES Edited by Benjamin R. Sherman and Stacey Goguen Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. 6 Tinworth Street, London SE1 1 5AL www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and London (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright CO 2019 by Benjamin R. Sherman and Stacey Goguen Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-705-8 ISBN: PB 978-1-78660-706-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78660-705-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-706-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-707-2 (electronic) 0' The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Chapter Five The Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue Alex Madva What should we do to overcome epistemic injustice?1 Miranda Fricker (2007, 2010b) argues that we as individuals ought to cultivate certain testimonial and interpretive virtues. This chapter defends and expands upon her proposals. My background motivation is to respond to two prominent objections to Fricker's virtue-theoretic proposals. First, the situationist objection states that her account of virtue cultivation is empirically implausible, suffering both from the general limitations that (situationists argue) plague all ethical and epistemological virtue theory, as well as from more particular pitfalls facing individuals who try to overcome their own "bias blind spots" (e.g., Alfano 2015, Davidson and Kelly 2015, Sherman 2015). Second, and relatedly, the structuralist objection argues that Fricker's prescriptions for cultivating epistemic virtue are excessively individualistic, and fail to appreciate the underlying structural factors driving epistemic oppression (Alcoff 2010, Anderson 2012, Ayala-Lopez 2018, Dotson 2012, Langton 2010, Medina 2013, Washington 2016). I say these challenges represent the background motivations for this chapter because I won't have the space to respond to them in depth. They have, in more general terms, been litigated extensively elsewhere (e.g., Fairweather and Alfano 2017). Instead, the brunt of this chapter will be dedicated to making the positive case that Fricker's account is both empirically oriented and plausible-indeed, pursuing epistemic virtue in roughly the way she 1. The inception and early development of this chapter owe an immeasurable debt to Jennifer Kanyuk. Jen and I originally intended to write this together, until scheduling conflicts made that impossible. I am also grateful for insightful, rigorous, and patient feedback from Stacey Goguen and Benjamin Sherman, as well as for the audience's questions and suggestions during a poster presentation of this material at the Bias in Context #4 conference at the University of Utah in October 2017. 85 86 Alex Madva describes is inevitable for anyone who takes seriously the systemic epistemic injustices she and others have identified. According to Fricker (and numerous feminist-epistemological forerunners and commentators), the pivot away from epistemic injustice depends in part on moments of self-critical awareness, states of cognitive dissonance in which an individual realizes that she may, for example, be underestimating an interlocutor's credibility due to stereotypes or prejudices. Fricker further advocates that individuals cultivate epistemic habits that aim to consistently neutralize the effects of such prejudices on their credibility estimates. I agree on both counts: working to cultivate such habits is an integral component of what we ought to do in the face of pervasive epistemic injustice. I sample from a range of findings from social and cognitive psychology that bear these claims out. That said, Fricker is clear that her specific proposals do not constitute the only means through which individuals and institutions should combat epistemic injustice. I therefore build on her account-drawing inspiration from several essays written after Epistemic Injustice (Fricker 2010b, 2010a, 2012, 2013)-by beginning to sketch a fuller, antiindividualistic picture of the structure of cultivating individual epistemic virtue(s). OBJECTIONS TO EPISTEMIC-JUSTICE VIRTUE THEORY Structuralists and situationists share much in common. Both claim that what's outside individual hearts and minds is more important than what's in them (i.e., more important than individuals' idiosyncratic beliefs, desires, prejudices, and traits) when it comes to the main drivers of human behavior, and therefore to the perpetuation and eradication of epistemic injustice, from which it would seem to follow that philosophical and activist attention to individual vices and virtues is misplaced. Structuralists and situationists will, for example, both emphasize the power of social roles to shape behavior over and above idiosyncratic character traits ("it's not that I have an authoritarian or evil personality, or that I harbor ill will toward members of such-and-such group . . . I was just following orders"). The difference between these objections is that situationists typically focus on normatively irrelevant or inappropriate influences on behavior, as when judges deny parole applications because it's close to lunch and they're hungry (Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso 2011), whereas structuralists often focus on prima facie normatively appropriate influences on human behavior. For example, Saray AyalaLopez (2018) argues that many instances of testimonial injustice are less a matter of individuals harboring prejudices against speakers, and more about individuals simply following publicly shared norms. Very roughly, her argument locates the problem in the unfair "rules of the game" rather than in the irrationality, ignorance, or self-interest of the "players." Structuralists also The Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue 87 point to still broader societal and environmental factors like group-based segregation, wealth inequality, education-funding streams, environmental toxins, and so on, to explain the perpetuation of systemic epistemic injustices. Situationists and structuralists have identified a range of incredibly important phenomena. I disagree profoundly with the lessons they draw (Brownstein, Madva, and Gawronski under review; Madva forthcoming, 2016b, 2016a, 2017; Madva and Brownstein 2018). I cannot here catalogue all my grievances, and I will rest my response to their claims primarily on the conceptual distinctions and empirical evidence I highlight in the following sections. In order to provide some context for those claims, however, I home in on some of Benjamin Sherman's (2015) arguments against the wisdom or feasibility of Fricker's recommendations for taking meaningful steps to become more epistemically just. Recall that Fricker argues for the necessity of self-critical awareness, moments of cognitive dissonance in which an individual considers that his assessments of others' credibility might be biased. She writes, "the initial step towards improved, less prejudiced forms of social perception can only be a step of critical reflection . . . the initial moves towards finding ways to neutralize the impact of prejudice in our judgements have to be self-reflective in the first instance" (Fricker 2010b, 166). Fricker argues, furthermore, that individuals should practice trying to neutralize the effects of prejudice on their credibility judgments. Sherman is dubious about these proposals. First, he argues that when individuals step back and critically reflect on their intuitive credibility judgments, they will most likely find their initial impressions to be accurate. (Sherman is, of course, not skeptical of critical reflection's general value, but of its specific relevance to catching and correcting our own errors in assigning credibility to other speakers, through the specific methods recommended by Fricker.) For example, research on the "bias blind spot" suggests we tend to think our judgments are more objective than they really are (Pronin, Lin, and Ross 2002). As a result, Sherman writes (citing Moore's Paradox), "your own present judgments will always seem correct to you" (2015, 11). Sherman predicts not just that Fricker-style self-critical awareness is unlikely to ameliorate testimonial injustice, but that it is more likely to reentrench our biased assessments than to undermine them. I will eventually argue in section 3 that Sherman's predictions about what "always" happens are belied by the empirical evidence. It bears noting, however, that Fricker nowhere purports to offer an easy, fail-safe debiasing procedure . Like most moments of cognitive dissonance, reflection on our potentially biased epistemic habits and judgments can be resolved in variously vicious or virtuous ways, or simply ignored altogether. The point is instead that such moments of self-critical reflection must happen if progress is to be made. I agree. The rarity, difficulty, and potential backfiring effects of these 88 Alex Madva self-critical moments represent just one important set of considerations; the further question is whether there is any viable alternative. Are we seriously to consider that progress toward the social-epistemic overhauls advocated by situationists and structuralists is possible without a whole bunch of currently complicit citizens of liberal democracies coming to reconsider the correctness of their epistemic judgments and then taking steps to do something about it? Can, for example, enduring racial epistemic justice be achieved without a critical mass of white Americans reassessing their skeptical impressions of the credibility of people of color who testify to, and protest against, ongoing oppression? Even if we grant that moments of self-critical awareness have an unavoidable role to play in spurring resistance against epistemic injustice, a further set of questions regards the form that resistance should take. Following other situationists and structuralists, Sherman is skeptical that our efforts should be invested in aiming for virtue. He doubts there is any such attainable ideal as individual epistemic justice and suggests that striving for such an impossible goal might be counterproductive or even incoherent. There will, he suspects, be better ways of reducing testimonial injustice than for each individual to try compensating for the role of prejudice in their epistemic assessments. Some of his concerns here are weightier than others. It is perhaps humanly impossible to shoot 100 percent from the free-throw line, or to accurately answer every trivia question on every episode of Jeopardy!, but people can practice sinking as many shots and answering as many questions as they can. Similarly, there's clearly room to want to be, and practice being, as accurate in our testimonial uptake as we can. We have all had experiences of thinking someone was lying or misremembering only to discover they were telling the truth (it turns out we were misremembering!), or observing a disagreement about some trivial factual issue (like directions or opening hours) and being persuaded by the uber-confident, outspoken, cis able-bodied white man when it turns out that a less socially privileged person was right all along. We (can) learn from such mistakes and (should) try to do better next time. We do not always get feedback about the accuracy of our initial credibility estimates, but we get plenty, and we can be more or less diligent about absorbing it and trying to do better. Now, is there such a thing as full-blown testimonial virtue, where this refers to an actually existing earthling mammal whose responses to testimony are perfectly accurate and just? Presumably not. Although I take it to be obvious that most individuals cannot achieve perfect moral-epistemic virtue, many individuals can (and therefore should try to) get much closer to the ideals than they already are. I tend to focus on the cultivation of these virtues rather than the virtues themselves, because I follow nonideal theorists and responsibilists like Lorraine Code and Fricker in asserting that we can take The Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue 89 steps in the right direction(s) despite failing to settle with full precision what the fmal destination is or having a detailed map for how to get there: epistemic responsibility does not come complete with a set of accompanying rules for the direction of the mind. Like many virtues, it names a precept, a principle, whose effects are diffuse, unpredictable, and open to ongoing, collaborative-contestatory deliberation. Often they do not speak for themselves but require collective processes of evaluation/negotiation. I do not spell out necessary and sufficient conditions for achieving epistemic responsibility, and for good reasons: there are none. But guidelines can be sketched: impressionistic though they may be. (Code 2017, 96) The implausibility of context-general codification is itself a central motivation for a virtue-theoretic rather than rule-based approach (Fricker 2007, 73-76, and 171-73). (Some readings of Fricker as making unduly narrow proposals for combating epistemic injustice may fail to take seriously her emphasis on uncodifiability.) I also follow the many feminist epistemologists who take for granted that avoiding the perpetuation of epistemic oppression and the attainment of full epistemic virtue is extremely difficult, if not impossible (Dotson 2012, 24-25; Medina 2013, sec. 5.2), and yet who for precisely this reason insist on being as vigilant as possible in advancing justice and knowledge. The process of getting better is ongoing. We know enough now to make meaningful improvements. We will learn more as we go, revising our current sense of "best practices" in light of continued empirical investigation and collective-contestatory deliberation. Epistemic-virtue cultivation is necessary but not sufficient for social change. Fricker writes, for example, that "virtuous individuals working within an institutional body are obviously only part of the story" (2012, 296), because "combating epistemic injustice clearly calls for virtues of epistemic justice to be possessed by institutions as well as by individuals" (Fricker, 2007, 176). Such caveats would almost seem to go without saying (hence the terms "obviously" and "clearly" in these passages), yet many structuralists seem to attribute to Fricker the implausible claim that individual virtue is sufficient. One reason epistemic-virtue cultivation is insufficient is that it must be socially and institutionally embedded. The requisite moments of self-reflection are unlikely to burst forth ex nihilo from a social vacuum. Someone else (a parent, teacher, friend, politician), or at least some event external to your own mind (e.g., a person who is profoundly skeptical about the reality of police brutality until he personally suffers or witnesses it), likely must confront you with at least a smidgen of counterevidence (or epistemic friction) to set the relevant self-reflection in motion. For how this kind of prompting might go in practice, see David Broockman and Joshua Kalla's (2016) study of door-to-door canvassing reducing voters' transphobia for at least three 90 Alex Madva months.2 Note that it follows from the necessary embeddedness of virtue cultivation that Fricker's occasional talk of self-critical reflection coming "first" is a mistake. Various interpersonal, situational, and structural conditions are at least conducive (and perhaps necessary) for enabling the relevant self-reflection. This point is implicitly baked into several of Fricker's examples of individuals raised in thoroughly hierarchical and prejudiced societies (2007, sec. 4.2; see also 2012, 2013). (Jose Medina [2013, 18] also sometimes slips into saying that epistemic resistance "has to begin within ourselves," although he elsewhere emphasizes all manner of social preconditions that perforce precede such introspective first steps.) The upshot is that movements toward individual and institutional virtues are interdependent. Neither comes first; neither comes second. They are irredeemably entangled in a complex set of holistic interrelations. So although I agree with more or less all of Fricker's necessary conditions, there is, as she says, more to the story. To better capture the interdependence of individual and structural change, and to thereby do some justice to the spirit, if not the letter, of situationists' and structuralists' concerns, I propose augmenting our account of epistemic virtue. STRUCTURING VIRTUE CULTIVATION I highlight here two underappreciated distinctions for cultivating epistemic virtue. The first involves the cognitive architecture of the virtues themselves. The second involves what we might call the targets of virtuous attention, that is, what good epistemic agents think about and react to. First, epistemic-virtue cultivation must occur along (at least) two psychological levels (or "systems"). Discussions of epistemic virtue have focused on our self-reflective, corrective, metacognitive dispositions, such as the second-order ability (presumably necessary for open-mindedness and humility) to recognize when our first-order epistemic intuitions might be in error. This emphasis on metacognition is premised on the assumption that our firstorder, intuitive cognitive tendencies are very stubborn, if not altogether incorrigible (e.g., Alfano 2013, 147; Kahneman 2011, 417; cf. Madva 2016b, 2017), perhaps because these tendencies are hardwired from birth, or perhaps because these tendencies reflect learned prejudices and other habits of thought too deeply ingrained and socially reinforced for individuals to change. Either way, the stubbornness assumption is wrong. Epistemic-virtue cultivation can and must incorporate the direct retraining of our relatively spontaneous, unreflective ("System-1") patterns of thinking, feeling, perceiving, and reacting to epistemic social reality (Alcoff 2006). I should note there will likely be more finely grained or alternative-but-useful ways of slicing 2. For illuminating examples of how these conversations went, see Resnick (2016). The Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue 91 virtue's cognitive-architectural pie. It might, for example, be important to demarcate the cognitive, affective, and motivational dimensions of virtue (although I tend to be skeptical of distinctions between "reason" and "passion"; Madva and Brownstein, 2018). The second distinction regards the targets of virtuous attention. Fricker's original treatment of epistemic virtue focuses primarily on becoming a better epistemic agent in local interactions, in the form of reliably and responsibly evaluating and interpreting others' testimony. This interactional dimension of epistemic virtue is certainly crucial. Here the conceptual and empirical questions are: what is the cognitive architecture of an epistemically debiased mind and which strategies promote it? However, the cultivation of epistemic virtue must have a multidirectional orientation, such that our attention is directed not only to the credibility and intelligibility of other individuals but also, more broadly, to the structures and institutions in which we are all embedded. Before I explain why, note that Fricker's account of testimonial justice is not comprehensive even as an account of interactional virtue. Consider, as an extreme example, a person who reliably self-corrects his deflated estimates of oppressed speakers' credibility, such that his assessments of testimony are perfectly accurate (thereby meeting Fricker's central criterion for testimonial justice); yet he then turns around and intentionally tells everyone else that these oppressed speakers are less credible than he knows them to be. It would be absurd to suggest that this person was testimonially virtuous. The wrongs done in this case are not merely moral but epistemic: he is degrading others' knowledge, he is failing to respect the oppressed speakers' status as knowers and others' status as acquirers of knowledge, and so on. Interactional epistemic virtue is, then, as much about telling truths as about believing them. So meeting Fricker's criterion is necessary but not sufficient for local-interactional testimonial virtue. In this vein, Jason Kawall (2002) points out that virtue epistemologists have been preoccupied with individualistic, self-regarding epistemic virtues (the personal acquisition of truth and avoidance of error via, e.g., open-mindedness or humility) and not enough with other-regarding epistemic virtues (e.g., the dissemination of truth via, say, honesty or courage). Kawall convincingly argues that certain otherregarding dispositions are full-blooded components of epistemic virtue. We must take this insight further, such that structure-facing dispositions claim an equal place in the pantheon of epistemic virtues. Take, for example, a member of Congress who voted to forbid the Center for Disease Control from even studying the effects of gun violence, or climate scientists who know full well the harm we are doing to the planet but accept money from private industry to spread lies, fund bogus studies, sow doubt, and so on. Again, it would be absurd to suggest that such individuals who know the facts, or know how to acquire them, but take steps to prevent our community from doing so, are epistemically virtuous. Epistemic virtue requires being the 92 Alex Madva sort of person who reliably and responsibly supports institutions that generate, disseminate, and retain knowledge. This involves taking steps to promote (or, minimally, not taking steps to impede) the creation, revision, or maintenance of just bodies of knowledge. It also requires attention to the ways that individuals' social locations and situations inform their beliefs and other epistemic dispositions (e.g., Ayala-Lopez and Vasilyeva, this volume; Grasswick 2017). Here the conceptual and empirical questions are: what is the cognitive architecture of an epistemically resistant mind and which strategies promote it? Cultivating epistemic virtue thus requires a multidirectional orientation, targeting both micro-interactions and macro-structures. Again, there are surely more fine-grained and illuminating ways to parse the objects of virtuous attention, as well as other objects of virtuous attention beyond these two (consider, e.g., nonsocial truths and other epistemic goods, such as scientists who must be conscientious in the management of their data). But the foregoing distinction represents a useful first pass for my purposes. Whether interactional and structure-facing epistemic virtues are "unified" in the Socratic sense is also an important question. Can a person move closer to interactional virtue without approaching structure-facing virtue, and vice versa? These are essentially empirical matters, not to be adjudicated via armchair analysis. I'll next underscore evidence of overlap between interactional and structurefacing virtue, but it is presumably possible for them to come apart, or work cross purposes. In the nonepistemic realm, someone can be compassionate and respectful in their micro-interactions but remain politically oblivious, indifferent, or even deeply committed to the perpetuation of unjust institutions. Similar disconnects may arise in the epistemic domain. Let me also stress that the virtues are highly contextual and open-textured, and that epistemic-virtue cultivation must be tailored to specific embodied minds occupying specific social locations operating in specific political conditions. For one very crude example, perhaps those who occupy privileged positions typically ought to focus more on cultivating epistemic humility while those who occupy oppressed positions might be more warranted in seeking out strategies for cultivating more epistemic confidence or self-respect. Processes of virtue cultivation must be indexed to individuals' antecedent personality dispositions, social locations, and so forth, which will inevitably complicate our guidelines and taxonomies. Does acknowledging complexity leave room to say anything systematic and general about epistemicvirtue cultivation? Yes, but, as Kristie Dotson emphasizes, only so long as we "move toward open conceptual structures that signify without absolute foreclosure so as to reduce the continued propagation of epistemic oppression" (2012, 25). What follows is a proof of concept that meaningful steps toward epistemic virtue can be taken. These are some of the things that some individuals can (should) do to cultivate epistemic virtue. The Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue 93 EVIDENCE First, consider a way to retrain our automatic, interactional dispositions, via what Fricker might call an "unreflective psychological work-out" (2010b, 165-66). The ultimate attribution error refers to the tendency for individuals to interpret undesirable behaviors performed by outgroup members in terms of dispositional traits stereotypical of the outgroup, but to interpret their positive behaviors in terms of situational factors. This social-explanatory bias has clear implications for epistemic injustice. Take Herbert dismissing Marge's testimony on the grounds that "there's female intuition, and then there are the facts" (Pricker 2007, 9). Part of what paves the way for this credibility deficit is Herbert wrongly attributing Marge's anger and frustration, which are actually justified, to the stereotypical-dispositional trait of the "hysterical" woman (2007, 88), easily overrun by feelings Evidence suggests that both men and women are more likely to interpret women's anger in terms of dispositional traits (e.g., "She must be an emotional person") rather than situations (e.g., "She is justifiably angry given the circumstances"), and, as a result, to perceive angry women as less knowledgeable and lower in social status than angry men (Brescoll and Uhlmann 2008). Such attribution errors clearly contribute to epistemic injustice. However, targeted practice can reduce this automatic bias (Stewart, Lau, Kawakami, and Myers 2010; see also Levontin, Halperin, and Dweck 2013).3 During Situational Attribution Training, participants are shown many examples of behaviors, for which they must select potential explanations. For example, a photo of a black man's face might be paired with the behavioral description, "Arrived at work an hour late," and participants must then choose between two potential explanations, "The power went out and reset his alarm," or "He is a particularly irresponsible person" (Stewart, Latu, Kawakami, and Myers 2010, 223). This training reshaped some of participants' epistemic dispositions, by increasing the automatic cognitive accessibility of situational explanations and decreasing the accessibility of dispositional ones. What's more, the training reduced the overall cognitive accessibility of racial stereotypes. This latter evidence, of a close psychological connection between individuals' epistemic-explanatory dispositions and their implicit stereotypes, supports Fricker's contention that social bias is deeply tied to credibility deficits and other epistemic injustices. Studies like this also exemplify how part of what it is to be epistemically virtuous is to be attuned to the powerful role of situations in explaining behavior. Becoming more epistemically virtuous, even in micro-interactional contexts, involves an es3 . One would like to see these studies replicated with larger samples. I cite more recent and high-powered evidence for epistemic-debiasing techniques in what follows. See Madva (2017) for a qualitative survey and philosophical defense of similar debiasing procedures. See also Ayala-Lopez and Vasilyeva (this volume). 94 Alex Madva sentially situation-facing dimension, that is, better understanding testifiers' contexts and social locations. (Such findings also illustrate how situationist objections against epistemic virtue risk being self-defeating, by demonstrating one way in which awareness of situational influence must be built in to what individual virtue requires.) Situational Attribution Training admittedly sounds simplistic and heavyhanded, but one can easily imagine more sophisticated, "gamified" analogues involving riddles or puzzles, perhaps modeled on games like Clue,4 as well as straightforward ways for us to practice these strategies in daily life (e.g., "Whenever I get frustrated with a student, I will try to think of three situational explanations!"). Although critics of epistemic virtue (largely under the influence of Daniel Kahneman) have emphasized the stubbornness of our epistemic dispositions, a growing literature demonstrates that targeted, gamified training significantly reduces such notorious cognitive tendencies as the confirmation bias, the "bias blind spot," and the "anchoring" and "representativeness" heuristics in durable and domain-general ways (Dunbar et al. 2014, Morewedge et al. 2015). Pervasive pessimism about individual change has been premature. At present we have basically no idea just how flexible these dispositions are. Nevertheless, there will presumably be some limits to how far unreflective psychological workouts can take us, and there will accordingly remain an ineliminable role for more self-corrective epistemic virtues. Margot Monteith's (1993) "Self-Regulation of Prejudice" model, cited by Fricker (2010b, 165; see also Saul 2017), offers a helpful framework for sketching the general structure of metacognitive virtues. On this model, individuals with the virtuous commitment to be unprejudiced can form the habit of attending to their own spontaneous prejudiced thoughts and impulses, feeling guilty in response, and then doubling down on their motivation to do better. For example, calling these individuals' attention to the discrepancies between their antiprejudiced commitments and their actual dispositions makes them less likely to draw stereotypical inferences or find racist jokes funny (Burns, Monteith, and Parker 2017). Importantly, these and other findings highlight that the automatic activation of stereotypes does not guarantee that the stereotypes will be applied in our considered judgments. To the contrary, metacognitive virtue (partly) involves reliably interpreting one's impulsively biased thoughts and feelings as signals that this is an opportunity to be just (Madva, forthcoming). Skepticism about the prospects of introspective selfcorrection has been overblown. It is simply not true that our present judgments will always strike us as correct. To the contrary, many individuals regularly experience palpable cognitive dissonance between their reflective 4. Compare the games available on tiltfactor.org. The Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue 95 commitments and their unreflectively biased judgments and feelings (Davidson and Kelly 2015; Gawronski et al. 2008). Another empirically well-supported example of metacognitive epistemic virtue is perspective-taking. Fricker, Medina, and others rightly emphasize that the imaginative occupation of others' points of view can reduce testimonial and hermeneutic injustice. Fricker cites, for example, Simone Weil's claim that "Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand" (Fricker 2012, 287, Weil 1978, 139). Consider in this vein a preregistered study that tested the effects of a twentyminute, online "choose-your-own-adventure" game, in which Hungarians in their mid-twenties occupied the perspective of an individual in the Hungarian Roma minority (Simonovits, Kezdi, and Kardos 2018). Both immediately after the game and at least one month later, participants reported much less anti-Roma prejudice, as well as less prejudice toward another social group (refugees) who were not mentioned in the game. Participants were even 10 percent less likely to intend to vote for Hungary's far-right white-supremacist party. While this particular study did not directly test, say, participants' interpretations of or belief in Roma testimony, the epistemic implications of perspective-taking are clear. The whole point is to better know and understand others' views. Thus mock jurors encouraged to adopt the perspective of defendants become less likely to find them guilty (Skorinko et al. 2014). And although perspective-taking is intuitively more at home in interactional contexts (when one person imagines the perspective of another), it also has clear structure-facing implications. For example, adolescents with perspective-taking personalities are less punitive and more supportive of restorative justice, agreeing with such statements (about the testimonial structure of the criminal justice system) as, "I believe that victims' voices should be heard as part of the justice process" (Rasmussen et al. 2018, 73). Moreover, although being disposed to take others' perspectives (at the right times in the right way) is an individual-level virtue, there is much that institutions should do to promote it, principally by bringing members of different groups together under terms of cooperation and social equality (Anderson 2012; Galinsky et al. 2015). It should come as no surprise that racially diverse juries are both more likely than homogeneous juries to consider an array of perspectives and to more accurately recall case facts and testimony (Sommers 2006). What about the structure-facing virtues and vices? One of the most pernicious psychological dispositions propping up unjust structures is a kind of default tendency to assume that the status quo is just (Jost 2015). This suggests that debiasing procedures should be oriented toward shifting our defaults, such that our operating assumption is that the status quo is not fair, and that things can and must be done to change it. A key set of structurefacing dispositions therefore revolves around seeing structural change as desirable and believing that agents and groups have the power to bring the 96 Alex Madva requisite changes about (Corcoran, Pettinicchio, and Young 2011; Johnson and Kentaro 2012; Stewart, Latu, Branscombe, and Denney 2010; van Zomeren 2013). Which psychological and structural factors make individuals more likely to adopt these structure-facing virtues? Many of the answers are relatively unsurprising. Individuals are more likely to participate in collective action against unjust systems when, for example, they strongly identify with an oppressed group, swiftly and reliably get angry in response to injustices done to that group, and hold a firm conviction in the difference-making power of their participation in collective action. I want to conclude, however, with some perhaps less predictable dispositions that conduce to structure-facing virtue-and that wear their epistemic relevance on their sleeves. Evidence suggests that individuals are more apt to see injustice for what it is, and collectively protest against it, precisely when they are more willing and able to question their epistemic and political intuitions (cf., open-mindedness and humility), to practice and take pleasure in engaging difficulty cognitive activity (cf., curiosity and diligence), and to be relatively untroubled when they see the world differently from those around them (cf., a critical openness to interpersonal epistemic friction). In short, structure-facing epistemic virtue requires resistance to "certainty, security, and conformity" (Jost 2015, 623). By contrast, individuals will more likely rush to judging that the status quo is fair, and even protest to preserve inegalitarian institutions, if they feel a strong need to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity, prefer not to think long and hard about difficult questions, and strongly desire to share an epistemic reality with their proximate peers. This conformist need for shared belief is particularly salient for situationist and structuralist criticisms of epistemic virtue and individual agency. Situationists have, since the earliest high-profile social-psychological experiments on conformity, obedience, and intergroup conflict, portrayed shared reality as a virtually inevitable byproduct of plunking human cognitive systems into certain social contexts (i.e., contexts marked by hierarchical power relations and group-competitive dynamics). Shared reality bias also features in Elizabeth Anderson's (2012) structuralist criticism of individual virtue cultivation. She treats the impulse toward shared reality as one of a handful of universal and powerful biases, such that everyone's views tend to converge simply by virtue of sharing social space. But while it is certainly true that structures can be designed to either promote or counteract in-group consensus and conformity, matters are much more complex. One dimension of this complexity is that the need for shared reality varies between individuals, making it a fruitful site for individual-level intervention. Other things equal (making allowances for variations in social position), seeking out a soundproof echo chamber is an epistemic vice, whereas openness to epistemic friction is a virtue. The Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue 97 I feel compelled to note that, while the empirical evidence for the value of interventions like perspective-taking is robust, many of these interventions are continuous with thoroughly commonsensical pieces of folk wisdom, and with claims that social justice theorists of many stripes have long defended. Although we should continue seeking out new methods and remain open to new discoveries about how best to become better, we should not falsely portray these strategies as radically novel, inaccessible to laypeople, or fundamentally unknowable sans academic research. REFERENCES Alcoff, Linda Martin. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New York: Oxford University Press. . 2010. "Epistemic Identities." Episteme 7 (2): 128-37. Alfano, Mark. 2013. Character as Moral Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 2015. "Becoming Less Unreasonable: A Reply to Sherman." Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4 (7): 59-62. 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