
Mark Robert AlfanoMacquarie University · Department of Philosophy
Mark Robert Alfano
PhD
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163
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Introduction
Mark Alfano works on moral psychology, broadly construed to include ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychology. He also maintains an interest in Nietzsche, focusing on Nietzsche’s psychological views. He is the author of two monographs on virtue and moral psychology, the editor of three volumes on moral and intellectual virtues, and the series editor of The Moral Psychology of the Emotions.
Additional affiliations
February 2017 - present
September 2015 - present
June 2015 - present
Education
September 2006 - May 2011
September 2001 - June 2005
Publications
Publications (163)
Conspiracy beliefs have been linked to perceptions of collective victimhood. We adopt an individual perspective on victimhood by investigating the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and the individual disposition to perceive and react to injustice as a victim (i.e., victim justice sensitivity; VJS). Data from two German samples (Ns = 370, 373)...
This paper examines the potential educational uses of chat-based large language models (LLMs), moving past initial hype and skepticism. Although LLM outputs often evoke fascination and resemble human writing, they are unpredictable and must be used with discernment. Several metaphors—like calculators, cars, and drunk tutors—highlight distinct model...
Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns w...
Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as public health, new technologies or climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science-society nexus acros...
Introduction: Lived experience of negative environmental change can evoke distress called ‘solastalgia’. Worldwide, people are reporting emotional challenges relating to awareness of current and continued environmental decline, even without a lived direct experience of climate change. Our research examines the measurement of anticipatory solastalgi...
We take up the challenge of developing an international network with capacity to survey the world’s scientists on an ongoing basis, providing rich datasets regarding the opinions of scientists and scientific sub-communities, both at a time and also over time. The novel methodology employed sees local coordinators, at each institution in the network...
This Element argues for an interpretation of Nietzsche on virtue according to which he believes that because different people have different constellations of instincts and other drives, and because instincts and drives can only be shaped and redirected within boundaries, he recommends different virtues as fitting and conducive to flourishing for d...
Public trust in scientists may be essential for widespread acceptance of science-based solutions to societal problems, including climate change. Across 68 countries (N = 69,534), individuals expressed less trust in climate scientists than scientists in general. In most countries and overall, conservative political orientation was more strongly asso...
Climate change is currently one of humanity’s greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate chan...
“Experimental philosophy is philosophy with a little something extra” (Sytsma et al., 2023, 9). This “little something extra” is the fact that experimental philosophers conduct their own experimental studies to provide empirical insights to address philosophical issues. They use qualitative and quantitative research methods such as interactive expe...
This chapter introduces lexical dispersion analysis, time series analysis, and semantic network analysis. The case study in this chapter uses State of the Union addresses delivered yearly by American Presidents from George Washington to Donald Trump. Lexical dispersion refers to the embedding of words, stems, and n-grams across corpora. Time series...
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 tha...
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly being used not only to classify and analyze but also to generate images and text. As recent work on the content produced by text and image Generative AIs has shown (e.g., Cheong et al., 2024, Acerbi & Stubbersfield, 2023), there is a risk that harms of representation and bias, already documented...
Generative artificial intelligence systems based on transformers, including both text-generators like GPT-4 and image generators like DALL-E 3, have recently entered the popular consciousness. These tools, while impressive, are liable to reproduce, exacerbate, and reinforce extant human social biases, such as gender and racial biases. In this paper...
Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic 1,2. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low pub...
Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and a...
Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment may challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science society nexus across different cultural contexts,...
Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public...
What is the cross-cultural prevalence of the seven moral values posited by the theory of “morality-as-cooperation”? Previous research, using laborious hand-coding of ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, found examples of most of the seven morals in most societies, and observed these morals with equal frequency across cultural regions....
There has been widespread media commentary about the potential impact of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT on the Education field, but little examination at scale of how educators believe teaching and assessment should change as a result of generative AI. This mixed methods study examines the views of educators (n = 318) from...
Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of...
Protests and counter-protests seek to draw and direct attention and concern with confronting images and slogans. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space, such images and slogans have also gone online. Two main ways in which these images and slogans are translated to the online space is through...
Effectively reducing climate change requires dramatic, global behavior change. Yet it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an e...
In “Calvin and Hobbes,” the character Calvin invents the game of Calvinball. No two games of Calvinball are alike because the only stable rule of Calvinball is that the players make up the rules as they go along, and no rule (other than the one stable rule) can be used twice. Whether a player is winning at a particular game of Calvinball is thus de...
Intellectual humility (IH) is often conceived as the recognition of, and appropriate response to, your own intellectual limitations. As far as we are aware, only a handful of studies look at interventions to increase IH - e.g. through journalling - and no study so far explores the extent to which having high or low IH can be predicted. This paper u...
Understanding what factors are linked to public health behavior in a global pandemic is critical to mobilizing an effective public health response. Although public policy and health messages are often framed through the lens of individual benefit, many of the behavioral strategies needed to combat a pandemic require individual sacrifices to benefit...
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public...
The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that ta...
Political philosophy asks questions of great importance to our lives, both as individuals and members of political communities: What is justice? What does the state owe to its citizens? Under which conditions are different forms of government likely to be stable? The relevance of empirical research to such questions, however, has been largely under...
Few emotions have divided opinion as deeply as shame. Some scholars have argued that shame is essentially a maladaptive emotion used to oppress minorities and reinforce stigmas and traumas, an emotion that leaves the self at the mercy of powerful others. Other scholars, however, have argued that the absence of a sense of shame in a subject—their sh...
The testimonies of celebrities affect the lives of their many followers who pay attention to what they say. This gives celebrities a high degree of epistemic power, which has come under scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper investigates the duties that arise from this power. We argue that celebrities have a negative duty of testimonial...
Trust in vaccination is eroding, and attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized. This is an observational study of Twitter analyzing the impact that COVID-19 had on vaccine discourse. We identify the actors, the language they use, how their language changed, and what can explain this change. First, we find that authors cluster into seve...
The social media platform Twitter platform has played a crucial role in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The immediate, flexible nature of tweets plays a crucial role both in spreading information about the movement’s aims and in organizing individual protests. Twitter has also played an important role in the right-wing reaction to BLM, provi...
There is not as much resistance to COVID-19 mitigation as there seems, but there are structural features that make resistance seem worse than it is. Here, we describe two ways that the problem seeming to be worse than it is can make it worse. First, visible hesitation to implement COVID-19 responses signals to the wider society that mitigation meas...
This chapter sets out the context for the book, exploring the role of masculinities in violent extremism. It also outlines the current challenges faced by scholars and practitioners on a global scale in addressing the rise of the far-right, Salafi Jihadism and anti-women online movements. We outline the key research questions and methodological app...
The final chapter returns to the key research questions outlined in Chap. 1 and will synthesise key findings into an accessible conclusion that identifies key intervention points for policy makers. We also explore implications for government policy, lessons for policy makers and practitioners (including law enforcement) and areas for future investi...
This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the views and agendas of those involved in violent extremism and the progenitor groups that may serve as gateways to participation. Progenitors are legal civil society actors who shared considerable overlap with extremist groups in their views. This includes men’s rights groups, far-right wing associatio...
This chapter outlines what is known about the intersection of masculinity and violent extremism, based on an extensive literature review. The literature review is composed of a systematic review of scholarly and policy literature on issues of masculinities in relation to both violent extremism and policies and programmes to CVE. It focuses on works...
This chapter focuses on exploring the intersection between mainstream (normative) conceptions of masculinity (derived from an international survey and 41 in-depth interviews with Australian men) and the conceptions evident in violent extremist groups and networks. This is based on a representative survey of Australian men on attitudes about masculi...
The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated the importance of public support for non-pharmaceutical public health interventions and the perils of rampant spread of misinformed or conspiratorial beliefs. Open-minded epistemic attitudes may be associated with adherence to public health recommendations and protect against holding false beliefs. In a large (...
The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [2020] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that...
What is the cross-cultural prevalence of the seven moral values posited by the theory of “Morality-as-Cooperation”? Previous research, using hand-coding of ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, found examples of most of the seven morals in most societies, and observed these morals with equal frequency across cultural regions. Here we e...
At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied ma...
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behavior change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public h...
Attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized; it is common to see vaccine disinformation and fringe conspiracy theories online. An observational study of Twitter vaccine discourse is found in Ojea Quintana et al. (2021): the authors analyzed approximately six months' of Twitter discourse -- 1.3 million original tweets and 18 million retwe...
Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...
Trust in vaccination is eroding, and attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized. This is an observational study of Twitter analyzing the impact that COVID-19 had on vaccine discourse over the first 5 months of the pandemic. Using Gephi's implementation of the Louvain modularity algorithm, we find that authors cluster into several large,...
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
In the age of the Internet, people have increased access to information along multiple dimensions. It might seem that we are on our way to an epistemic utopia in which we spend less time and effort on basic cognitive tasks while devoting more time and effort to complex deliberation. However, though there are many accurate sources on the Internet, t...
I propose an account of how our forward-looking moral and epistemic responsibility practices arose, how they related to backward-looking responsibility practices, and what makes them stable. This account differs in several ways from prominent theories already in the literature. Traditionally, forward-looking accounts of responsibility are framed th...
The contours of Nietzsche’s socio-moral framework are idiosyncratic when compared to contemporary neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. Nietzsche starts with a naturalistic conception of drives, instincts, and types of people. He then moves in a normative direction by identifying some drives and instincts as virtues – at least for certain types of people...
What is morality? How many moral values are there? And what are they? According to the theory of morality-as-cooperation, morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. This theory predicts that there will be as many different types of morality as there are different type...
Protests and counter-protests seek to draw and direct attention and concern with confronting images and slogans. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space, such images and slogans have also gone online. Two main ways in which these images and slogans are translated to the online space is through...
Why are mistaken beliefs about COVID-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only part of the differences between people in their susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, mai...
Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks n...
Few recent developments in information technology have been as hyped as blockchain, the first implementation of which was the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Such hype furnishes ample reason to be skeptical about the promise of blockchain implementations, but I contend that there’s something to the hype. In particular, I think that certain blockchain imple...
This paper presents two studies on the development and validation of a ten-item scale of epistemic vice and the relationship between epistemic vice and misinformation and fake news. Epistemic vices have been defined as character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. Examples of epistemic vice are gullibility...
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a devastating global health crisis. Without a vaccine or effective medication, the best hope for mitigating virus transmission is collective behavior change and support for public health interventions (e.g., physical distancing, physical hygiene, and endorsement of health policies). In a large-scale international co...
This letter addresses the editorial decision to publish the article, “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” (Cofnas, 2020). Our letter points out several critical problems with Cofnas's article, which we believe should have either disqualified the manuscript upon submission or been addressed during the review pro...