Laura Niemi

According to theoretical work on epistemic injustice, baseless discrediting of the knowledge of people with marginalized social identities is a central driver of prejudice and discrimination. Discrediting of knowledge may sometimes be subtle, but it is pernicious, inducing chronic stress and coping strategies such as emotional avoidance. In this research, we sought to deepen the understanding of epistemic injustice’s impact by examining emotional responses to being discredited and assessing if marginalized social group membership predicts these responses. We conducted a novel series of three experiments (Total N = 1690) in which participants (1) shared their factual knowledge about how a game worked or their personal feelings about the game; (2) received discrediting feedback (invalidating remarks), validating feedback (affirming remarks), or insulting feedback (general negative social evaluation); and then (3) reported their affect. In all three studies, on average, affective responses to discrediting feedback were less negative than to insulting feedback, and more negative than to validating feedback. Participants who shared their knowledge reported more negative affect after discrediting feedback than participants who shared their feelings. There were consistent individual differences, including a twice-replicated finding of reduced negative affect after receiving discrediting and insulting feedback for Black men compared to White men and women and Black women. Black men’s race-based traumatic symptom scores predicted their affective responses to discrediting and insulting feedback, suggesting that experience with discrimination contributed to the emotional processing of a key aspect of epistemic injustice: remarks conveying baseless discrediting of knowledge.

The fast-developing field of neuroscience has given philosophy, as well as other disciplines and the public broadly, many new tools and perspectives for investigating one of our most pressing challenges: addressing the health and well-being of our mental lives. In some cases, neuroscientific innovation has led to clearer understanding of the mechanisms of mental illness and precise new modes of treatment. In other cases, features of neuroscience itself, such as the enticing nature of the data it produces compared to previous behavioral methods, together with its costliness and “coldness” have complicated understanding of mental illness and decision making about mental illness. Taking neuroscientific information into account can leave practitioners in psychiatry and law with difficult questions, stemming not only from the complexity of these fields, but also from our rapidly evolving understanding of and facility with neuroscience. In this chapter, we will review several examples of the insights and dilemmas that have unfolded as mental illness has been examined through the lens of neuroscience, covering diagnoses such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia, addiction, and severe mood disorders.

Normative ethical theories and religious traditions offer general moral principles for people to follow. These moral principles are typically meant to be fixed and rigid, offering reliable guides for moral judgment and decision-making. In two preregistered studies, we found consistent evidence that agreement with general moral principles shifted depending upon events recently accessed in memory. After recalling their own personal violations of moral principles, participants agreed less strongly with those very principles—relative to participants who recalled events in which other people violated the principles. This shift in agreement was explained, in part, by people’s willingness to excuse their own moral transgressions, but not the transgressions of others. These results have important implications for understanding the roles memory and personal identity in moral judgment. People’s commitment to moral principles may be maintained when they recall others’ past violations, but their commitment may wane when they recall their own violations.

Messaging from U.S. authorities about COVID-19 has been widely divergent. This research aims to clarify popular perceptions of the COVID-19 threat and its effects on victims. In four studies with over 4,100 U.S. participants, we consistently found that people perceive the threat of COVID-19 to be substantially greater than that of several other causes of death to which it has recently been compared, including the seasonal flu and automobile accidents. Participants were less willing to help COVID-19 victims, who they considered riskier to help, more contaminated, and more responsible for their condition. Additionally, politics and demographic factors predicted attitudes about victims of COVID-19 above and beyond moral values; whereas attitudes about the other kinds of victims were primarily predicted by moral values. The results indicate that people perceive COVID-19 as an exceptionally severe disease threat, and despite prosocial inclinations, do not feel safe offering assistance to COVID-19 sufferers. This research has urgent applied significance: the findings are relevant to public health efforts and related marketing campaigns working to address extended damage to society and the economy from the pandemic. In particular, efforts to educate the public about the health impacts of COVID-19, encourage compliance with testing protocols and contact tracing, and support safe, prosocial decision-making and risk assessment, will all benefit from awareness of these findings. The results also suggest approaches, such as engaging people's stable values rather than their politicized perspectives on COVID-19, that may reduce stigma and promote cooperation in response to pandemic threats.

Prior work has found that moral values that build and bind groups—that is, the binding values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and preservation of purity—are linked to blaming people who have been harmed. The present research investigated whether people's endorsement of binding values predicts their assignment of the causal locus of harmful events to the victims of the events. We used an implicit causality task from psycholinguistics in which participants read a sentence in the form “SUBJECT verbed OBJECT because…” where male and female proper names occupy the SUBJECT and OBJECT position. The participants were asked to predict the pronoun that follows “because”—the referent to the subject or object—which indicates their intuition about the likely cause of the event. We also collected explicit judgments of causal contributions and measured participants' moral values to investigate the relationship between moral values and the causal interpretation of events. Using two verb sets and two independent replications (N = 459, 249, 788), we found that greater endorsement of binding values was associated with a higher likelihood of selecting the object as the cause for harmful events in the implicit causality task, a result consistent with, and supportive of, previous moral psychological work on victim blaming. Endorsement of binding values also predicted explicit causal attributions to victims. Overall, these findings indicate that moral values that support the group rather than the individual reliably predict that people shift the causal locus of harmful events to those affected by the harms.