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Cognitive biases can affect moral intuitions about cognitive enhancement
Research into cognitive biases that impair human judgment has mostly been applied to the area of economic decision-making. Ethical decision-making has been comparatively neglected. Since ethical decisions often involve very high individual as well as collective stakes, analyzing how cognitive biases...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2014
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4197737/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25360088 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00195 |
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author | Caviola, Lucius Mannino, Adriano Savulescu, Julian Faulmüller, Nadira |
author_facet | Caviola, Lucius Mannino, Adriano Savulescu, Julian Faulmüller, Nadira |
author_sort | Caviola, Lucius |
collection | PubMed |
description | Research into cognitive biases that impair human judgment has mostly been applied to the area of economic decision-making. Ethical decision-making has been comparatively neglected. Since ethical decisions often involve very high individual as well as collective stakes, analyzing how cognitive biases affect them can be expected to yield important results. In this theoretical article, we consider the ethical debate about cognitive enhancement (CE) and suggest a number of cognitive biases that are likely to affect moral intuitions and judgments about CE: status quo bias, loss aversion, risk aversion, omission bias, scope insensitivity, nature bias, and optimistic bias. We find that there are more well-documented biases that are likely to cause irrational aversion to CE than biases in the opposite direction. This suggests that common attitudes about CE are predominantly negatively biased. Within this new perspective, we hope that subsequent research will be able to elaborate this hypothesis and develop effective de-biasing techniques that can help increase the rationality of the public CE debate and thus improve our ethical decision-making. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4197737 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2014 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-41977372014-10-30 Cognitive biases can affect moral intuitions about cognitive enhancement Caviola, Lucius Mannino, Adriano Savulescu, Julian Faulmüller, Nadira Front Syst Neurosci Neuroscience Research into cognitive biases that impair human judgment has mostly been applied to the area of economic decision-making. Ethical decision-making has been comparatively neglected. Since ethical decisions often involve very high individual as well as collective stakes, analyzing how cognitive biases affect them can be expected to yield important results. In this theoretical article, we consider the ethical debate about cognitive enhancement (CE) and suggest a number of cognitive biases that are likely to affect moral intuitions and judgments about CE: status quo bias, loss aversion, risk aversion, omission bias, scope insensitivity, nature bias, and optimistic bias. We find that there are more well-documented biases that are likely to cause irrational aversion to CE than biases in the opposite direction. This suggests that common attitudes about CE are predominantly negatively biased. Within this new perspective, we hope that subsequent research will be able to elaborate this hypothesis and develop effective de-biasing techniques that can help increase the rationality of the public CE debate and thus improve our ethical decision-making. Frontiers Media S.A. 2014-10-15 /pmc/articles/PMC4197737/ /pubmed/25360088 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00195 Text en Copyright © 2014 Caviola, Mannino, Savulescu and Faulmüller. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution and reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Neuroscience Caviola, Lucius Mannino, Adriano Savulescu, Julian Faulmüller, Nadira Cognitive biases can affect moral intuitions about cognitive enhancement |
title | Cognitive biases can affect moral intuitions about cognitive enhancement |
title_full | Cognitive biases can affect moral intuitions about cognitive enhancement |
title_fullStr | Cognitive biases can affect moral intuitions about cognitive enhancement |
title_full_unstemmed | Cognitive biases can affect moral intuitions about cognitive enhancement |
title_short | Cognitive biases can affect moral intuitions about cognitive enhancement |
title_sort | cognitive biases can affect moral intuitions about cognitive enhancement |
topic | Neuroscience |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4197737/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25360088 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00195 |
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