People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms driving this resistance to belief change has focused on a limited set of well-known, charged, contentious issues and has not accounted for deliberation over reasons and arguments in belief formation prior to experimental sessions. With a large, heterogeneous sample (N = 3,001), we attempt to overcome these existing problems, and we investigate the causes and (...) consequences of resistance to belief change for five diverse and less contentious socio-political issues. After participants chose initially to support or oppose a given socio-political position, they were provided with reasons favoring their chosen position (affirming reasons), reasons favoring the other, unchosen position (conflicting reasons), or all reasons for both positions (reasons for both sides). Our results indicate that participants are more likely to stick with their initial decisions than to change them no matter which reasons are considered, and that this resistance to belief change is likely due to a motivated, biased evaluation of the reasons to support their initial beliefs (prior-belief bias). More specifically, they rated affirming reasons more favorably than conflicting reasons—even after accounting for reported prior knowledge about the issue, the novelty of the reasons presented, and the reported strategy used to make the initial decision. In many cases, participants who did not change their positions tended to become more confident in the superiority of their positions after considering many reasons for both sides. (shrink)

People maintain a positive identity in at least two ways: They evaluate themselves more favorably than other people, and they judge themselves to be better now than they were in the past. Both strategies rely on autobiographical memories. The authors investigate the role of autobiographical memories of lying and emotional harm in maintaining a positive identity. For memories of lying to or emotionally harming others, participants judge their own actions as less morally wrong and less negative than those in which (...) other people lied to or emotionally harmed them. Furthermore, people judge those actions that happened further in the past to be more morally wrong than those that happened more recently. Finally, for periods of the past when they believed that they were very different people than they are now, participants judge their actions to be more morally wrong and more negative than those actions from periods of their pasts when they believed that they were very similar to who they are now. The authors discuss these findings in relation to theories about the function of autobiographical memory and moral cognition in constructing and perceiving the self over time. (shrink)

Having positive moral traits is central to one’s sense of self, and people generally are motivated to maintain a positive view of the self in the present. But it remains unclear how people foster a positive, morally good view of the self in the present. We suggest that recollecting and reflecting on moral and immoral actions from the personal past jointly help to construct a morally good view of the current self in complementary ways. More specifically, across four studies we (...) investigated the extent to which people believe they have changed over time after recollecting their own moral or immoral behaviors from the personal past. Our results indicate that recollecting past immoral actions is associated with stronger impressions of dissimilarity and change in the sense of self over time than recollecting past moral actions. These effects held for diverse domains of morality (i.e., honesty/dishonesty, helping/harming, fairness/unfairness, and loyalty/disloyalty), and they remained even after accounting for objective, calendar time. Further supporting a motivational explanation, these effects held when people recollected their own past actions but not when they recollected the actions of other people. (shrink)

Although many philosophers argue that making and revising moral decisions ought to be a matter of deliberating over reasons, the extent to which the consideration of reasons informs people’s moral decisions and prompts them to change their decisions remains unclear. Here, after making an initial decision in 2-option moral dilemmas, participants examined reasons for only the option initially chosen(affirming reasons), reasons for only the option not initially chosen (opposing reasons), or reasons for both options. Although participants were more likely to (...) change their initial decisions when presented with only opposing reasons compared with only affirming reasons, these effect sizes were consistently small. After evaluating reasons, participants were significantly more likely not to change their initial decisions than to change them, regardless of the set of reasons they considered. The initial decision accounted for most of the variance in predicting the final decision, whereas the reasons evaluated accounted for a relatively small proportion of the variance in predicting the final decision. This resistance to changing moral decisions is at least partly attributable to a biased, motivated evaluation of the available reasons: participants rated the reasons supporting their initial decisions more favorably than the reasons opposing their initial decisions, regardless of the reported strategy used to make the initial decision.Overall, our results suggest that the consideration of reasons rarely induces people to change their initial decisions in moral dilemmas. (shrink)

The 1919 eclipse expedition’s confirmation of general relativity is often celebrated as a triumph of scientific internationalism. However, British scientific opinion during World War I leaned toward the permanent severance of intellectual ties with Germany. That the expedition came to be remembered as a progressive moment of internationalism was largely the result of the efforts of A. S. Eddington. A devout Quaker, Eddington imported into the scientific community the strategies being used by his coreligionists in the national dialogue: humanize the (...) enemy through personal contact and dramatic projects that highlight the value of peace and cooperation. The essay also addresses the common misconception that Eddington’s sympathy for Einstein led him intentionally to misinterpret the expedition’s results. The evidence gives no reason to think that Eddington or his coworkers were anything but rigorous. Eddington’s pacifism is reflected not in manipulated data but in the meaning of the expedition and the way it entered the collective memory as a celebration of international cooperation in the wake of war.Science is above all politics.—Sir Oliver Lodge Is it not an actual fact that babies have been killed in ways almost inconceivably brutal, and not as a mere individual excess, but as a part of the deliberate and declared policy of the German army? … Is it not a fact that German men of science have gone out of their way to declare their adhesion to these things?—“From an Oxford Note‐Book,” Observatory. (shrink)

Science and religion have long been thought incompatible. But nowhere has this apparent contradiction been more fully resolved than in the figure of A. S. Eddington (1882–1944), a pioneer in astrophysics, relativity, and the popularization of science, and a devout Quaker. Practical Mystic uses the figure of Eddington to shows how religious and scientific values can interact and overlap without compromising the integrity of either. Eddington was a world-class scientist who not only maintained his religious belief throughout his scientific career (...) but also defended the interrelation of science and religion while drawing inspiration from both for his practices. For instance, at a time when a strict adherence to deductive principles of physics had proved fruitless for understanding the nature of stars, insights from Quaker mysticism led Eddington to argue that an outlook less concerned with certainty and more concerned with further exploration was necessary to overcome the obstacles of incomplete and uncertain knowledge. By examining this intersection between liberal religion and astrophysics, Practical Mystic questions many common assumptions about the relationship between science and spirituality. Matthew Stanley’s analysis of Eddington’s personal convictions also reveals much about the practice, production, and dissemination of scientific knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Abstract. A historical perspective allows for a different view on the compatibility of theistic views with a crucial foundation of modern scientific practice: the uniformity of nature, which states that the laws of nature are unbroken through time and space. Uniformity is generally understood to be part of a worldview called “scientific naturalism,” in which there is no room for divine forces or a spiritual realm. This association comes from the Victorian era, but a historical examination of scientists from that (...) period shows that uniformity was an important part of both theistic and naturalistic worldviews. Victorian efforts to maintain the viability of miracles and divine action within a universe ruled by natural laws receives special attention. The methodological practices of theistic and naturalistic scientists in the nineteenth century were effectively indistinguishable despite each group's argument that uniformity was closely dependent on their worldview. This similarity is used to reexamine both the reasons for the decline of the role of religion within the scientific community and claims made by the intelligent design movement about the relationship of science and religion. (shrink)

This paper argues that that political context of British science popularization in the inter-war period was intimately tied to contemporary debates about religion and science. A leading science popularizer, the Quaker astronomer A.S. Eddington, and one of his opponents, the materialist Chapman Cohen, are examined in detail to show the intertwined nature of science, philosophy, religion, and politics.

The neural reuse framework developed primarily by Michael Anderson proposes that brain regions are involved in multiple and diverse cognitive tasks and that brain regions flexibly and dynamically interact in different combinations to carry out cognitive functioning. We argue that the evidence cited by Anderson and others falls short of supporting the fundamental principles of neural reuse. We map out this problem and provide solutions by drawing on recent advances in network neuroscience, and we argue that methods employed in network (...) neuroscience provide the means to fully engage in a research program operating under the principles of neural reuse. (shrink)

James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory famously unified many of the Victorian laws of physics. This essay argues that Maxwell saw a deep theological significance in the unification of physical laws. He postulated a variation on the design argument that focused on the unity of phenomena rather than Paley's emphasis on complexity. This argument of Maxwell's is shown to be connected to his particular evangelical religious views. His evangelical perspective provided encouragement for him to pursue a unified physics that supplemented his (...) other philosophical, technical and social influences. Maxwell's version of the argument from design is also contrasted with modern ‘intelligent-design’ theory. (shrink)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were many attempts to justify political and social systems on the basis of physics and astronomy. By the early twentieth century such moves increasingly also integrated the life and social sciences. The physical sciences gradually became less appealing as a sole source for sociopolitical thought. The details of this transition help explain the contemporary reluctance to capitalize on an ostensibly rich opportunity for naturalistic social reasoning: the anthropic principle in cosmology, which deals with (...) the apparent “fine-tuning” of the universe for life. (shrink)

Theoretical astrophysics emerged as a significant research programme with the construction of a series of stellar models by A. S. Eddington. This paper examines the controversies surrounding those models as a way of understanding the development and justification of new theoretical technologies. In particular, it examines the challenges raised against Eddington by James Jeans, and explores how the two astronomers championed different visions of what it meant to do science. Jeans argued for a scientific method based on certainty and completeness, (...) whereas Eddington called for a method that valued exploration and further investigation, even at the sake of secure foundations. The first generation of stellar models depended on the validity of Eddington's approach – the physics and many of the basic facts of stars were poorly understood and he justified his models through their utility for future research and their robustness under challenging use. What would become theoretical astrophysics depended heavily on this phenomenological outlook, which Jeans dismissed as not even science. This was a dispute about the practice of theory, and it would be this methodological debate that made theoretical astrophysics viable. (shrink)

One might be surprised at finding a protracted refutation of the theory of relativity in a turbine engineering journal. Milena Wazeck says we should not. Once we grasp the common threads among anti-relativity activists in the 1920s, she argues, it becomes clear why turbine engineering was a natural home for such ideas.Einstein’s Opponents contends that historians’ current understanding of the anti-relativity movement is obscured by the enormous shadow of the Nazis. Instead of reaching forward to the 1930s to explain the (...) clash of the 20s, it instead points us back to the long nineteenth century. There we find the wonderfully named “world riddle solvers.” They were a group who saw themselves as scientists generating new knowledge, although they functioned almost completely outside the circles of academic science. They often worked in spiritual or holistic contexts and built elaborate theories based on core ideas such as occultism, vitalism, and monism. These theories carried titles such .. (shrink)

Greek historical accounts of ancient eclipses were an important, if peculiar, focus of scientific attention in the nineteenth century. Victorian-era astronomers tried to correct the classical histories using scientific methods, then used those histories as data with which to calibrate their lunar theories, then rejected the histories as having any relevance at all. The specific dating of these eclipses—apparently a simple exercise in celestial mechanics—became bound up with tensions between scientific and humanistic approaches to the past as well as with (...) wider social debates over the power and authority of science in general. The major figures discussed here, including G. B. Airy, Simon Newcomb, and T. H. Huxley, argued that the critical question was whether science could speak authoritatively about the past. To them, the ability of science to talk about the past indicated its power to talk about the future; it was also the fulcrum of fierce boundary disputes among science, history, and religion. (shrink)