Bernard Mandeville argued that traits that have traditionally been seen as detrimental or reprehensible, such as greed, ambition, vanity, and the willingness to deceive, can produce significant social goods. He went so far as to suggest that a society composed of individuals who embody these vices would, under certain constraints, be better off than one composed only of those who embody the virtues of self-restraint. In the twentieth century, Mandeville’s insights were taken up in economics by John Maynard Keynes, among others. More recently, philosophers have drawn analogies to Mandeville’s ideas in the domains of epistemology and morality, arguing that traits that are typically understood as epistemic or moral vices (e.g. closed-mindedness, vindictiveness) can lead to beneficial outcomes for the groups in which individuals cooperate, deliberate, and decide, for instance by propitiously dividing the cognitive labor involved in critical inquiry and introducing transient diversity. We argue that mandevillian virtues have a negative counterpart, mandevillian vices, which are traits that are beneficial to or admirable in their individual possessor, but are or can be systematically detrimental to the group to which that individual belongs. Whilst virtue ethics and epistemology prescribe character traits that are good for every moral and epistemic agent, and ideally across all situations, mandevillian virtues show that group dynamics can complicate this picture. In this paper, we provide a unifying explanation of the main mechanism responsible for mandevillian traits in general and motivate the case for the opposite of mandevillian virtues, namely mandevillian vices.@en

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and related phenomena, such as attitudes (e.g., belief, understanding, trust), attributes of these attitudes (e.g., justification, warrant, reliability), and traits (e.g., intellectual humility, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and their opposed vices such as intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility). Social epistemology is thus the study of knowledge and related phenomena as they play out in social interactions. These interactions occur at timescales that range from direct, face-to-face chatting, to asynchronous joint inquiry over the course of months, years of formal schooling, and the transmission of cumulative cultural knowledge across generations. They also occur on social scales ranging from dyads to triads to groups whose members we can track (approximately 150) to large, anonymous institutions and societies. As groups increase in size, their members may specialize into roles, and the geometry of the network by which these members are interconnected becomes highly consequential.@en

The study of intellectual humility (IH), which is gaining increasing interest among cognitive scientists, has been dominated by a focus on individuals. We propose that IH operates at the collective level as the tendency of a collective’s members to attend to each other’s intellectual limitations and the limitations of their collective cognitive efforts. Given people’s propensity to better recognize others’ limitations than their own, IH may be more readily achievable in collectives than individuals. We describe the socio-cognitive dynamics that can interfere with collective IH and offer the solution of building intellectually humbling environments that create a culture of IH that can outlast the given membership of a collective. We conclude with promising research directions.@en

Recent work by Kahan et al. (2017) on the psychology of motivated numeracy in the context of intracultural disagreement suggests that people are less likely to employ their capabilities when the evidence runs contrary to their political ideology. This research has so far been carried out primarily in the USA regarding the liberal–conservative divide over gun control regulation. In this paper, we present the results of a modified replication that included an active reasoning intervention with Western European participants regarding both the hierarchy–egalitarianism and individualism–collectivism divides over immigration policy (n = 746; considerably less than the preregistration sample size). We reproduce the motivated numeracy effect, though we do not find evidence of increased polarization of high-numeracy participants.@en

YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This is a seemingly innocuous design choice, but it has a troubling side-effect. Critics of YouTube have alleged that the recommender system tends to recommend extremist content and conspiracy theories, as such videos are especially likely to capture and keep users’ attention. To date, the problem of radicalization via the YouTube recommender system has been a matter of speculation. The current study represents the first systematic, pre-registered attempt to establish whether and to what extent the recommender system tends to promote such content. We begin by contextualizing our study in the framework of technological seduction. Next, we explain our methodology. After that, we present our results, which are consistent with the radicalization hypothesis. Finally, we discuss our findings, as well as directions for future research and recommendations for users, industry, and policy-makers.@en

Recent work by Kahan et al. (2017) on the psychology of motivated numeracy in the context of intracultural disagreement suggests that people are less likely to employ their capabilities when the evidence runs contrary to their political ideology. This research has so far been carried out primarily in the USA regarding the liberal–conservative divide over gun control regulation. In this paper, we present the results of a modified replication that included an active reasoning intervention with Western European participants regarding both the hierarchy–egalitarianism and individualism–collectivism divides over immigration policy (n = 746; considerably less than the preregistration sample size). We reproduce the motivated numeracy effect, though we do not find evidence of increased polarization of high-numeracy participants.@en