Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Paul Formosa (Macquarie University) on his recent paper (co-authored with Siavosh Sahebi at Macquarie University) " Social Media and its Negative Impacts on Autonomy " ( Philosophy and Technology, 2022). Paul Formosa Social media plays a crucial role in the lives of many people. It can entertain, inform, influence, and even transform who we are and what we believe and care about. This can include both more extreme cases of radicalisation, where a person is led down rabbit holes of misinformation that can fundamentally rewrite who they are as a person, to more mundane cases of being pushed by an influencer to buy a new pair of shoes you didn’t really need.  But whenever technology has the potential to change who we are, what we do, and what we care about, it raises important questions about our autonomy. When technology changes us or leads us to act or believe in a certain way, does that technology and its use constitute an authentic expression or exten...

This post is part of a series on the new journal Memory, Mind & Media . Today, Qi Wang talks about her research on the triangular self. Her paper, ‘ The triangular self in the social media era ’, is now available open access. Qi Wang is Professor of Human Development and Psychology at Cornell University. Her research examines how cultural forces, including the Internet technology, impact autobiographical memory and the sense of self. She is the author of The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture (OUP 2013) and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition . Qi Wang In the era of social media, we can share online our daily experiences as our lives unfold, at any time and as frequently as we’d like, with diverse audiences physically afar. This way of remembering and sharing personal experiences is unprecedented in human history. It also uniquely contributes to how we view ourselves in a digitally mediated world. I propose a triangular theory of self...

This is part of one week series of posts on a new journal,  Memory, Mind & Media . Today's post is by Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) who talks about the role of stories in public debates. She is summarising a paper co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti and recently published in the inaugural issue of  Memory, Mind & Media . The paper is available  open access here . Kathleen Murphy-Hollies We are all drawn to stories in their many forms, and the prevalence of them on digital media may be one reason why we have embraced those media so much. On social media we see lots of stories being told, often in support some general claim. For example, people have been sharing experiences of getting the COVID vaccine and of not getting the vaccine, often in the hopes of supporting general claims about whether people should get vaccinated. However, can personal stories be taken as evidence supporting general claims?  People’s stories about...

This is part of one week series of posts on a new journal, Memory, Mind & Media . Today's post is by Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow) and Amanda Barnier (Macquarie University), Founding Co-Editors-in-Chief of the journal. Andrew Hoskins   In September 2018,  Dr Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh  appeared before the United States Judiciary Committee as part of Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a new US Supreme Court Justice. During the confirmation process, Blasey Ford  alleged  that in the summer of 1982 when she and Kavanaugh were in high school, he sexually assaulted her at a party. Blasey Ford recalled the assault in detail, describing the events as “seared” into her memory. But when given his opportunity before the Committee, Kavanaugh unequivocally and angrily  denied this accusation . We, Andrew and Amanda, were in the same place at the same time – in Glasgow – when Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh gave their testimony. Together, we watched...

Mount Fuji from the venue, Komaba campus On 14th and 15th December 2019 Kengo Miyazono and John O’Dea organised a workshop at the University of Tokyo on themes related to agency and rationality. In this post, I summarise some of the talks presented at the conference. On day 1, Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (Veritas Research Centre, Underwood International College, Yonsei University) kicked off the workshop with a talk about social media, data analysis, psychological profiling and freedom. Although social media enables connectivity and has a number of other advantages, it represents a threat to privacy. That is because when we register for platforms like Facebook, we give consent to our data being shared, but that does not count as informed consent. People are often attributed five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Can people be profiled based on their “likes”? It is said that computer-based judgemen...

For today's post I interviewed Fabienne Peter , Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, specializing in political philosophy, moral philosophy, and social epistemology. She talks about her research interests, a new exciting project she is participating in, and the role of philosophers in public life. LB: How did you become interested in the norms that govern political debate? FP: I’ve been doing research on the question of what makes political decisions legitimate for some time now. This research has led me to see that an inclusive and fair political debate is an important condition for legitimate political decision-making. Inclusive and fair political debate of political issues matters in a number of ways. It helps to gather relevant considerations that bear on the decision-making, for example in relation to the implications of possible political decisions for different people. It also helps to weigh the importance of those considerations. Political debate...

Today's post is by David Edmonds, presenter and producer at the BBC, host of The Big Idea , author of many books, including Would You Kill the Fat Man? and (with John Eidinow)  Wittgenstein’s Poker . David is also a senior research associate at Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle.  In this post he introduces his new book, Ethics and the Contemporary World. I was rummaging through my attic last week when I came across some notes and essays I’d written as an undergraduate and graduate studying ethics in the 1980s. What surprised me – apart from the clunky prose and the no-nonsense typeface produced by my clunky dot-matrix printer – was the narrowness of subject range. There was a lot, for example, on abortion. It’s easy to forget that abortion was only legalized in Britain in 1967 and the key Supreme Court ruling in the US, Roe v Wade, was in 1973. Then there was capital punishment – the death penalty...

A nna Lavis is a Lecturer in Medical Sociology and Qualitative Methods in the Social Studies in Medicine (SSiM) Team in the Institute of Applied Health Research at the University of Birmingham. She also holds an honorary research position in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Her work explores individuals’ and informal caregivers’ experiences and subjectivities of mental illness and distress across a range of social and cultural contexts, both offline and on social media, with a particular focus on eating disorders and self-harm.  In this post Eugenia Lancellotta interviews Anna on her latest project, Virtual Scars: Exploring the Ethics of Care on Social Media through Interactions Around Self-Injury , funded by the Wellcome Trust, Seed Award in Humanities and Social Science. EL: How did you become interested in the ethics of care in self-harming online communities? AL: I started work on relationships between social media an...

This post is written by Dr Victoria Goodyear.  Victoria Goodyear is a Lecturer in Pedagogy of Sport, Physical Activity and Health in the School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences , University of Birmingham UK. Victoria's research focuses on understanding and enhancing young people's health and wellbeing through research on pedagogy.  Her recent work has focused on pedagogy in the context of digital technologies, and how young people's engagement with social media, apps, and/or wearable devices shapes health-related knowledge and behaviours. Victoria can be found on Twitter . An example of her research can be found here . Here Victoria presents her new book Young People, Social Media and Health. Young People, Social Media and Health adopts a novel approach to understanding, explaining and communicating young people's experiences of health-related social media, and the impacts young people report on their health, wellbeing, and levels of physical...

                 Today's post is written by Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall . In this post, they present their new book The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread , published by Yale University Press. Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of science and applied mathematician specializing in models of social interaction. She is Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine.  James Owen Weatherall is a philosopher of physics and philosopher of science. He is Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science.    Since early 2016, in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK, there has been a growing appreciation of the role that misinformatio...

On 14th November there was an interesting conference at the Royal Society of Medicine on the effects of social media on mental health. Mary Aiken (University of College Dublin) discussed the Cyber Effect , her book which addresses the risks of social media on young people (cover below). Cyber space is a space and we need to consider the impact of it on vulnerable populations such as teens. We need to factor in developmental aspects (at what age should parents let children have a smartphone?). We need to recognise the continuous evolution of behaviour and as experts we need to drive policy initiatives and develop guidelines for parents and educators. Jon Goldin (Great Ormond Street Hospital) talked about the risks and benefits of social media for young people. Children like using social media for different reasons: they use it for communication, to express themselves, to gain confidence, for popularity, for entertainment, to develop a sense of belonging, to receive informati...