Omar Sultan Haque

Dehumanization in Medicine Causes, Solutions, and Functions

Dehumanization is endemic in medical practice. This article discusses the psychology of dehumanization resulting from inherent features of medical settings, the doctor–patient relationship, and the deployment of routine clinical practices. First, we identify six major causes of dehumanization in medical settings (deindividuating practices, impaired patient agency, dissimilarity, mechanization, empathy reduction, and moral disengagement). Next, we propose six fixes for these problems (individuation, agency reorientation, promoting similarity, personification and humanizing procedures, empathic balance and physician selection, and moral engagement). Finally, we discuss when dehumanization in medical practice is potentially functional and when it is not. Appreciating the multiple psychological causes of dehumanization in hospitals allows for a deeper understanding of how to diminish detrimental instances of dehumanization in the medical environment.

The psychology of coordination and common knowledge.

Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum. We test whether people are sensitive to common knowledge when deciding whether to engage in risky coordination. Participants decided between working alone for a certain profit and working together for a potentially higher profit that they would receive only if their partner made the same choice. Results showed that more participants attempted risky coordination when they and their prospective partner had common knowledge of the payoffs (broadcast over a loudspeaker) than when they had only shared knowledge (conveyed to both by a messenger) or private knowledge (revealed to each partner separately). These results support the hypothesis that people represent common knowledge as a distinct cognitive category that licenses them to coordinate with others for mutual gain. We discuss how this hypothesis can provide a unified explanation for diverse phenomena in human social life, including recursive mentalizing, performative speech acts, public protests, hypocrisy, and self-conscious emotional expressions.

Religious motivations for cooperation: an experimental investigation using explicit primes

The role of religion in human cooperation remains a highly contested topic. Recent studies using economic game experiments to explore this issue have been largely inconclusive, yielding a range of conflicting results. In this study, we investigate the ability of religion to promote cooperation by using explicit theological primes. In the first study, conducted in a church, we find that subjects who report a stronger connection with a Christian passage about charitable giving are subsequently more likely to cooperate in a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game. In the second study, conducted over the Internet, we find that Christian subjects are more likely to cooperate after reading a Christian passage than a neutral one. However, in the same study, we find that Hindu and secular passages have no significant effect on Christians, and that none of the passages (Christian, Hindu, or secular) have an effect on non-Christians. Our results show the potential power of explicitly religious exhortations that promote cooperation, and also their selectivity.

Melting Lizards and Crying Mailboxes: Children's Preferential Recall of Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts

Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. This study examines whether childrens concept recall similarly is sensitive to the degree of conceptual counterintuitiveness (operationalized as a concepts number of ontological domain violations) for items presented in the context of a fictional narrative. Seven- to nine-year-old children who listened to a story including both intuitive and counterintuitive concepts recalled the counterintuitive concepts containing one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2), but not three (Experiment 3), violations of intuitive ontological expectations significantly more and in greater detail than the intuitive concepts, both immediately after hearing the story and 1 week later. We conclude that one or two violations of expectation may be a cognitive optimum for children: They are more inferentially rich and therefore more memorable, whereas three or more violations diminish memorability for target concepts. These results suggest that the cognitive bias for minimally counterintuitive ideas is present and active early in human development, near the start of formal religious instruction. This finding supports a growing literature suggesting that diverse, early-emerging, evolved psychological biases predispose humans to hold and perform religious beliefs and practices whose primary form and content is not derived from arbitrary custom or the social environment alone.

Computer-Mediated Measurement and Subjective Ratings of White Matter Hyperintensities in Vascular Dementia: Relationships to Neuropsychological Performance

White matter hyperintensities (WMHs) are frequently found on MRI studies of vascular dementia (VaD) patients. As several studies have demonstrated that WMHs are often associated with severity of illness, cognitive impairment, and functional decline, the accurate and reliable measurement of WMHs on MRI is an important, yet often overlooked, prerequisite for accurate interpretation of neuroimaging studies. Using a sample of 39 VaD patients, we evaluated the reliability and validity of a visual ordinal rating scale and a computer-mediated thresholding technique to evaluate WMHs. Results indicated the computer-mediated technique had slightly stronger inter-rater reliability than the visual ordinal rating scale. Furthermore, the computer-mediated thresholding technique was correlated with measures of neuropsychological functioning believed to be compromised in VaD (i.e., psychomotor speed, executive functioning) while the visual rating scale was not. Results suggest that this computer-mediated thresholding technique is superior to visual ratings of WMHs.

Vulnerabilities to misinformation in online pharmaceutical marketing

Given the large percentage of Internet users who search for health information online, pharmaceutical companies have invested significantly in online marketing of their products. Although online pharmaceutical marketing can potentially benefit both physicians and patients, it can also harm these groups by misleading them. Indeed, some pharmaceutical companies have been guilty of undue influence, which has threatened public health and trust. We conducted a review of the available literature on online pharmaceutical marketing, undue influence and the psychology of decision-making, in order to identify factors that contribute to Internet users’ vulnerability to online pharmaceutical misinformation. We find five converging factors: Internet dependence, excessive trust in the veracity of online information, unawareness of pharmaceutical company influence, social isolation and detail fixation. As the Internet continues to change, it is important that regulators keep in mind not only misinformation that surrounds new web technologies and their contents, but also the factors that make Internet users vulnerable to misinformation in the first place. Psychological components are a critical, although often neglected, risk factor for Internet users becoming misinformed upon exposure to online pharmaceutical marketing. Awareness of these psychological factors may help Internet users attentively and safely navigate an evolving web terrain.

How Good Is the Samaritan, and Why? An Experimental Investigation of the Extent and Nature of Religious Prosociality Using Economic Games

What is the extent and nature of religious prosociality? If religious prosociality exists, is it parochial and extended selectively to coreligionists or is it generalized regardless of the recipient? Further, is it driven by preferences to help others or by expectations of reciprocity? We examined how much of a US

Vulnerabilities among young Westerners joining ISIS

0.30 bonus Mechanical Turk workers would share with the other player whose religion was prominently displayed during two online resource allocation games. In one game (but not the other), the recipient could choose to reciprocate. Results from both games showed that the more central religion was in participants’ lives, the more of the bonus they shared, regardless of whether they were giving to atheists or Christians. Furthermore, this effect was most clearly related to self-reported frequency of “thinking about religious ideas” rather than belief in God or religious practice/experience. Our findings provide evidence of generalized religious prosociality and illuminate its basis.

Forensic Psychiatric Contributions to Understanding Financial Crime

As reported in The New York Times (Bennhold, 2015), Khadiza Sultana was a bright 16-year-old schoolgirl. She excelled in her classes, receiving nothing but straight As in all her courses. Her professors praised her for achieving beyond their expectations. She was a devoted daughter, especially so to her mother after the death of Khadizas father a few years ago. She loved fashion, Twitter, and British football teams. “She was the girl you wanted to be like,” said one 14-year-old girl from the grade below her.

Differences in cognitive style, emotional processing, and ideology as crucial variables in understanding meaning making

Forensic psychiatric evaluation and consultation can make significant contributions to understanding, preventing, and responding to financial crimes. Drawing on forensic psychiatric principles and experience, and research and analysis from related fields of inquiry, this chapter explores the individual psychological dimensions of financial crimes in their social context, the group dynamics of corrupt organizations, and the interrelationship between the two. At the individual level, there is a need to distinguish “mad” from “bad,” i.e., psychosis from character pathology and crimes committed with deliberation and foreknowledge of their consequences. In this context we explore the limitations of rational choice theory as a foundation for the legal approaches to preventing acts of financial crime, understanding their meaning, responding in accordance with the fundamentals of justice. We also address the limitations of classic actuarial responses to the prevention and postvention acts of financial crime. From a forensic psychiatric perspective the prevention and postvention of acts of financial crime needs to be on a case by case basis. In any given case a forensic psychiatric analysis may make reference to such psychopathology and character traits as manic-depressive illness and narcissitic grandiosity, Freud’s notion of “criminals from a sense of guilt,” and antisocial personality disorder. The forensic psychiatric evaluation of any act of financial crime needs to ask how it is most likely to be the product of individual or institutional psychopathology, character traits, or states of desire. While we will discuss prevention of financial crime in future work, this chapter concludes via setting forth a psychodynamically informed forensic psychiatric perspective as an aid for sentencing of white-collar crime.