The Impact of Moral Judgment on Weakness of Will Attributions

Guest post by Mario Attie highlighting new research by Attie and Knobe as part of the x-phi replicability project

Consider the following case:

Phil has recently joined a French class. He is deeply committed to the class and to what they are trying to achieve, though he tends to put off reading the classic French texts that the teacher insists they all study. He finds them a bit of a drag.

This evening he has resolved to stay home and read some of the texts. But some friends call up and try to persuade him to come out with them. If things go as normal they’ll have a pizza and watch a movie. He thinks it would be better to stay home and read as planned, but he gives in and goes with them.

Would you say that Phil displays weakness of will in going with his friends? Now consider the following variation of the story:

This evening he has resolved to stay home and read some of the texts. But some friends call up and try to persuade him to come out with them. If things go as normal they’ll hang out at the mall, have rather too many beers, and pick fights with some of the local immigrant kids. He thinks it would be better to stay home and read as planned, but he gives in and goes with them.

If you are like the participants in May and Holton study, you feel somewhat more inclined to attribute weakness of will in the latter case. This is evidence that factors other than acting against one’s judgments (or resolutions) of what is best for one to do can have an influence on attributions of weakness of will. 

May and Holton showed that moral judgment has such an impact. They found that the moral valence of the action has an effect on whether people think it counted as weak-willed. When the agent decided to forgo his original intention to perform a morally bad action (pick a fight with the local immigrant kids) participants were more willing to attribute weakness of will than in morally permissible actions (watch a movie with his friends). Surprisingly, the moral valence of the intention had no effect, a finding that it is somehow inconsistent with the idea that moral judgment has a direct influence on weakness of will attributions.

As part of the Xphi Replicability Project, Josh Knobe and I conducted a direct replication of May and Holton original study. The results not only replicated the original effect of action valence, but also showed a corresponding effect of intention valence. Participants were less inclined to attribute weakness of will when the intention that agents didn’t act on was morally wrong (stay home to study Nazi texts) than when it was morally permissible (stay home to study French texts).

The results show a more consistent picture of the impact of morality on weakness of will attributions. They also show the value of conducting adequately powered replications of influential findings. We sometimes give way to our theorizing before stopping to ask whether the effect (or lack thereof) is not merely a result of small sample sizes. This was the case here: intention valence does have the effect we would expect to find if moral judgment influences weakness of will attributions.

Comments

[Josh May]

Mario and Josh,

Thanks for conducting this wonderful replication! It's great to see direct replication efforts in experimental philosophy. I was excited to see this run regardless of the results, but of course it's welcome news that the original finding replicated, especially given that the sample was slightly different (online Mturkers vs in-person undergrads).

I'm also delighted to see you found the intention-valence effect, which we surprisingly didn't observe. I suspect our study was simply underpowered---as, alas, too many are.

In fact, despite a successful replication, I think your study exemplifies some important, even if now familiar, methodological virtues that our study lacked:

- Your achieved more power and as a result observed an additional effect.

- You conducted a power analysis to guide the choice of how many participants to include.

- You calculated and reported effect sizes.

Science moves forward!

[Josh May]

Some quick thoughts on weakness of will and the TRUE SELF:

Richard and I originally fit this valence effect into a story specific to weakness of will. However, Knobe and his collaborators have integrated it beautifully into their ongoing research on the true self (see e.g. Newman et al 2015: https://philpapers.org/archive/NEWBAT-2.pdf).

Roughly, the idea is that we tend to assume other people deep down are truly good, and this assumption colors the ways in which we see people's actions deviating from the good true self. If an agent goes against their best judgment but in so doing does something we regard as bad, then we're more inclined to attribute weakness, since this is inconsistent with the assumed values of the true self.

Indeed, the true self model could explain some other recent data gathered by Doucet and Turri (2014: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11229-014-0508-0). Roughly, they report finding that "non-psychological" factors affect attributions of weakness of will---particularly, whether the action's effects are good/bad (even for non-moral issues) and whether the agent lacks certain commitments in the first place. Perhaps we should treat these as psychological factors if we link them with tacit assumptions about the agent's true self. For example, when only the valence of an action's outcome is manipulated, people assume the agent's true self is good, which then explains the finding that people perceive greater weakness when the action's outcome is bad (D&T's Experiment 5). That is, people assume the agent didn't deep down want that outcome to occur.

(BTW, this last experiment by D&T might also be treated as a conceptual replication of our valence finding, although they didn't use the exact same materials and they focus on non-moral outcomes.)

Because of how fruitful this true self framework has been in a variety of areas, I'm coming around to the idea that it explains the moral valence effect on attributions of weakness of will. One might offer a separate explanation of the effect on weakness of will (e.g. say Beebe has done: https://philpapers.org/rec/BEEWOW), that doesn't really appeal to the true self. But, like the side-effect effect, the case is mounting that there is a more general phenomenon here.

Ultimately, though, I think various true self and non-true self theories are compatible with the cluster concept idea that Holton and I originally presented. That's more about the structure of the concept than about why it has that structure. But I really value these deeper explanations that try to illuminate the why-question.