The utilitarian brain: Moving beyond the Free Energy Principle.

The Free Energy Principle (FEP) is a normative computational framework for iterative reduction of prediction error and uncertainty through perception-intervention cycles that has been presented as a potential unifying theory of all brain functions (Friston, 2006). Any theory hoping to unify the brain sciences must be able to explain the mechanisms of decision-making, an important cognitive faculty, without the addition of independent, irreducible notions. This challenge has been accepted by several proponents of the FEP (Friston, 2010; Gershman, 2019). We evaluate attempts to reduce decision-making to the FEP, using Lucas' (2005) meta-theory of the brain's contextual constraints as a guidepost. We find reductive variants of the FEP for decision-making unable to explain behavior in certain types of diagnostic, predictive, and multi-armed bandit tasks. We trace the shortcomings to the core theory's lack of an adequate notion of subjective preference or "utility", a concept central to decision-making and grounded in the brain's biological reality. We argue that any attempts to fully reduce utility to the FEP would require unrealistic assumptions, making the principle an unlikely candidate for unifying brain science. We suggest that researchers instead attempt to identify contexts in which either informational or independent reward constraints predominate, delimiting the FEP's area of applicability. To encourage this type of research, we propose a two-factor formal framework that can subsume any FEP model and allows experimenters to compare the contributions of informational versus reward constraints to behavior.

Diffusion of punishment in collective norm violations.

People assign less punishment to individuals who inflict harm collectively, compared to those who do so alone. We show that this arises from judgments of diminished individual causal responsibility in the collective cases. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 1002) assigned less punishment to individuals involved in collective actions leading to intentional and accidental deaths, but not failed attempts, emphasizing that harmful outcomes, but not malicious intentions, were necessary and sufficient for the diffusion of punishment. Experiments 2.a compared the diffusion of punishment for harmful actions with 'victimless' purity violations (e.g., eating a dead human's flesh as a group; N = 752). In victimless cases, where the question of causal responsibility for harm does not arise, diffusion of collective responsibility was greatly reduced-an outcome replicated in Experiment 2.b (N = 479). Together, the results are consistent with discounting in causal attribution as the underlying mechanism of reduction in proposed punishment for collective harmful actions.

Think of the consequences: A decade of discourse about same-sex marriage.

Approaching issues through the lens of nonnegotiable values increases the perceived intractability of debate (Baron & Spranca in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 70, 1-16, 1997), while focusing on the concrete consequences of policies instead results in the moderation of extreme opinions (Fernbach, Rogers, Fox, & Sloman in Psychological Science, 24, 939-946, 2013) and a greater likelihood of conflict resolution (Baron & Leshner in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 6, 183-194, 2000). Using comments on the popular social media platform Reddit from January 2006 until September 2017, we showed how changes in the framing of same-sex marriage in public discourse relate to changes in public opinion. We used a topic model to show that the contributions of certain protected-values-based topics to the debate (religious arguments and freedom of opinion) increased prior to the emergence of a public consensus in support of same-sex marriage (Gallup, 2017), and declined afterward. In contrast, the discussion of certain consequentialist topics (the impact of politicians' stance and same-sex marriage as a matter of policy) showed the opposite pattern. Our results reinforce the meaningfulness of protected values and consequentialism as relevant dimensions for describing public discourse and highlight the usefulness of unsupervised machine-learning methods in tackling questions about social attitude change.

Community appeal: Explanation without information.

Formal or categorical explanation involves the use of a label to explain a property of an object or group of objects. In four experiments, we provide evidence that label entrenchment, the degree to which a label is accepted and used by members of the community, influences the judged quality of a categorical explanation whether or not the explanation offers substantive information about the explanandum. Experiment 1 shows that explanations using unentrenched labels are seen as less comprehensive and less natural, independent of the causal information they provide. Experiment 2 shows that these intuitions persist when the community has no additional, relevant featural information, so the label amounts to a mere name for the explanandum. Experiment 3 finds a similar effect when the unentrenched label is not widely used, but is defined by a group of experts and the recipient of the explanation is herself an expert familiar with the topic. The effect also obtains for categories that lack a coherent causal structure. Experiment 4 further demonstrates the domain generality of the entrenchment effect and provides evidence against several interpretations of the results. A majority of participants in Experiments 3 and 4 could not report the impact of entrenchment on their judgments. We argue that this reliance on community cues arose because the community often has useful information to provide about categories. The common use of labels as conduits for this communal knowledge results in reliance on community cues even when they are uninformative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).