The comparative social psychologists tend to do fine graded research on for example how cancer patients use statements about their mental state in relation their emerging cancer condition to self evaluate their attitudes on how to then emotionally maintain their self compared to other patients in a cancer group who disapprove of how some cope and disapprove of other cancer patients attitude to their predicament. Why study that is because people have to find a new discourse which gets to the core of cognitivism. So social applied philosophy attempts to give some basic principles around self to get the methodology off the table and into the field as it were to then make predictions. So maybe there is a cohort getting prescriptive about it which is in line with conservative politics which influences philosophers maybe.