Experimental Philosophy

Deterministic beliefs promote endorsement of paternalism

Whether the state is justified in reducing self-inflicted harm by limiting people's freedom is subject to sustained philosophical debate and disagreement among the public. On one side, proponents of paternalistic regulation emphasize its net benefits for social welfare. On the other, its critics denounce, as a matter of principle, the idea that the state could interfere in citizens’ personal choices:

Photo credit: @TheResident

My favorite depiction of this sentiment (a remnant of the soda ban controversy) is a Statue of Liberty-styled silhouette raising the allegorical soda cup, next to the motto “Don’t let bureaucrats tell you what size beverage to buy.”

What underlies the conviction that personal autonomy should be protected even at substantial costs to one's health? Perhaps, we reasoned, it is sustained in part by the assumption that, barring bureaucrats' overreach, we'd be choosing freely. 

Indeed, data from 3184 US adults who took part in a survey by the Pew Research Center showed that an internal locus of control was linked to a libertarian view of government (“It’s not the government’s job to protect people from themselves”) while an external locus predicted endorsement of a paternalistic state (“Sometimes laws to protect people from themselves are necessary”), and this association was independent of political ideology.

The influence of a deterministic worldview

To hone in on the role of free will and determinism beliefs, we asked students to complete the FAD Plus Scale and rate a variety of proposed policies, ranging from strong paternalistic restrictions (e.g., banning cigarettes) to libertarian deregulation (e.g., eliminating public pension). The belief in scientific determinism was associated with a stronger preference for paternalistic legislation, particularly in the form of nudges and opt-out programs. (No relationship was found with the Free Will subscale, unexpectedly.)

In another study, participants were asked to imagine living in a hypothetical nation within either a deterministic or indeterministic world, and evaluated one of two sets of policy proposals, paternalistic or libertarian in kind. As shown below, paternalistic policies were rated more favorably in a deterministic universe, while libertarian policies revealed the opposite pattern:

Median and IQR of policy ratings.

In light of recent interest on behalf of government in nudging people toward better decisions, our study underscores the value of philosophical reflection on behavioral science. Adopting a deterministic worldview renders paternalistic regulation more agreeable, perhaps by challenging the folk notion of personal autonomy.

We look forward to your comments and reactions. The article is available online at the link below:

Hannikainen, I., Cabral, G., Machery, E., & Struchiner, N. A deterministic worldview promotes approval of state paternalism, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, in press. [preprint]

The Folk Concept(s) of Choice

Aneyn O'Grady and I have new research on the folk concept of choice that was recently published in Consciousness and Cognition, What kinds of alternatives are required for the folk concept(s) of choice. I thought that the research may be of interest to readers here. We would love to hear your thoughts.

Abstract

Our concept of choice is integral to the way we understand others and ourselves, especially when considering ourselves as free and responsible agents. Despite the importance of this concept, there has been little empirical work on it. In this paper we report four experiments that provide evidence for two concepts of choice—namely, a concept of choice that is operative in the phrase having a choice and another that is operative in the phrase making a choice. The experiments indicate that the two concepts of choice can be differentiated from each other on the basis of the kind of alternatives to which each is sensitive. The results indicate that the folk concept of choice is more nuanced than has been assumed. This new, empirically informed understanding of the folk concept of choice has important implications for debates concerning free will, responsibility, and other debates spanning psychology and philosophy.

Specifically, 'having a choice' appears to require genuinely open alternatives, or alternative possibilities that are actually realizable, while 'making a choice' appears to only require psychological open alternatives, or the ability to consider alternatives independent of whether these alternatives are actually realizable. We argue that these findings are relevant to the free will debate because choice is central to the folk concept of free will and many philosophical analysis of free will. The kinds of alternatives required for having a choice appear to be incompatibilist in nature, while the kinds of alternatives required for making a choice appear to be compatibilist in nature. If free will requires having choices, then this is perhaps evidence against compatibilism. If free will requires making choices, then this is perhaps evidence in favor of--or at least consistent with--compatibilism. 

 

What does the experimental evidence actually say about the stability of moral intuitions?

Suppose you are sitting at your desk, reflecting on a moral question. Now suppose that as you are reflecting on this question, you happen to be looking around at a somewhat disgusting scene. Perhaps there is a half-eaten apple on the desk, or a bad smell in the room, or maybe you just didn't have an opportunity to wash your hands. 

I sometimes encounter the claim that experimental studies have shown that people's moral intuitions can be pushed around in surprising ways by subtle situational factors like these. It is then sometimes suggested that philosophers need to think more about the deeper philosophical implications of this kind of 'instability' in our moral intuitions.

 

This claim strikes me as a serious misrepresentation of the present state of the empirical literature. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that existing studies provide evidence that these factors do not influence people's moral intuitions. At the very least, it would be hard to deny that a whole bunch of recent studies suggest that people's moral intuitions are surprisingly stable. 

Negative Public Perceptions of Philosophical Research

Philosophy is not always perceived as well as philosophers would like. There are public discussions of whether philosophy has any value at all (The New York Times or The Chronicle of Higher Education). Members of our own draft manifestos criticizing philosophy's contributions to the academy (see Glymour’s “Manifesto” or Thagard’s “Eleven Dogmas of Analytic Philosophy”). Presidential candidates quip we need less philosophers.

In the latest incident, my personal childhood hero, Bill Nye got skeptical with BigThink about how far philosophical methods can take you in life, compared to say, scientific ones:

  

What contributes to negative opinions about philosophical research?

Intuitive Resistance is the Mind-Killer

In a recent McSweeney’s article, Kyle York proposes some interesting takes on familiar ethical dilemmas with the potential to help reveal something truly fundamental about moral judgment. For instance, pull or no pull: 

“There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards four workers. You have the ability to pull off your head and turn it into a Chinese lantern. Your head floats into the sky until it takes the place of the sun. You look down upon the planet. It is as small as the eye of a moth. The moth flies away.”

Clearly a particular way of doing philosophy and moral psychology is being mocked. Philosophers and psychologists often rely on unrealistic thought experiments and experimental stimuli when conducting their research. To be fair, they do tend to avoid the surreal, but this does raise an interesting question. How worried should we be that deep down, we don’t actually believe the things we are asked to imagine as we make philosophically and psychologically relevant judgments about them?

Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy

I am happy to announce a forthcoming new volume from the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy Series: A Companion to Experimental Philosophy. It is edited by Justin Sytsma and myself and features over forty chapters from leading philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists from several countries across three continents. These chapters detail the application of empirical methods to philosophical questions across major sub-disciplines including the philosophy of action, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, logic, and metaphilosophy.

The general introduction to the volume is available online here, offering a summary of the goals of the volume and a brief introduction to experimental philosophy for a general audience. The table of contents and list of contributors can be found below:

The Truth about Lying

Photo credit: Tristan Schmurr

Lying is an important social and moral category. We react negatively to liars and their lies. But what is it to lie? The standard view in philosophy and social science is that a lie is a dishonest assertion. This view goes all the way back to at least the 4th century, when Augustine wrote, “He may say a true thing and yet lie, if he thinks it to be false and utters it for true.” On this view, lying is a purely psychological act: it does not require your assertion to be objectively false, only that you believe it is false.

About two years ago, my son Angelo came across an expression of the standard view of lying. He wondered whether it fit the ordinary concept of lying. (You might be able to imagine the sort of dinnertime conversations that could lead a twelve-year-old to become curious on this point.) In particular, Angelo was interested in whether, on the ordinary view, lying was a purely psychological act. So we conducted some behavioral experiments to find out.

Here is a pair of examples we used to test people’s judgments. In each version of the story, a man makes an assertion with the intention of deceiving his audience. The two stories differed in one critical respect: the man says something false in the False version, whereas he ends up saying something true in the True version.

[False/True] Jacob's friend Mary recently posted information on the internet that will alert the public to serious government corruption. Soon some federal agents visit Jacob and ask where Mary is, in order to detain her. Jacob thinks that Mary is at [the grocery store/her brother’s house], so he tells the agents, “She is at [her brother’s house/the grocery store].” In fact, Mary is at the grocery store.

Interestingly, we found evidence that the response options offered to people had a dramatic effect on how they described the case. For example, if you force people to choose between saying that the man “lied” or “didn’t lie,” then they will say the man lied, even when he says something true. However, Angelo and I wondered whether this was an artifact of the mode of questioning and, thus, should not be taken at face value, in either of two ways. On the one hand, we wondered whether it was because people simply answered in accordance with how things seem to the speaker himself (perspective-taking). On the other hand, we wondered whether people thought that answering “didn’t lie" could misleadingly suggest that the man was not trying to lie, or that he did not deserve blame for his dishonest intentions (pragmatic implication).

Accordingly, we conducted two follow-up experiments that gave people more flexible response options. These options disentangled the agent’s perspective and intentions, on the one hand, and the attribution of lying, on the other. If people continued to classify the man as a liar in the True condition, then it would show that the standard philosophical view nicely captures the ordinary concept of lying on this point. By contrast, if people no longer classified the man as a liar in the True condition, then it would show that the standard philosophical view and the ordinary concept differ fundamentally on this point.

As it turns out, when given more flexible options, people no longer classified the man as a liar in the True condition. Instead, they judged that he tried to lie but failed to do so. Alternatively, they judged that he only thinks he lied. Here is a particularly striking figure from our final study, in which people selected between "He tried to lie and actually did lie” and "He tried to lie but only thinks he lied.” The bars represent the percent of people in the two conditions who said that the man did lie.

Overall, we concluded that, on the ordinary concept, lying is not a purely psychological act. As an added bonus, in the process, Angelo might have become the youngest first-author ever on a paper published in Cognition!

[Cross-posted at PEA Soup. Head over there to discuss.]

Recent Papers on Gettier Attribution Roundup

With a lot of researchers and labs now experimentally investigating cognitive evaluations in Gettier and Gettier-style cases, I thought it might be helpful to post some links for those interested in some of the latest published findings in this fast-paced area. 

As far as the psychology of Gettier cases is concerned, it turns out that there’s not one correct answer to the question of whether laypeople attribute knowledge to Gettiered subjects. Instead, what researchers have discovered is that laypeople seem to make a range of different knowledge judgments about a variety of individual thought experiments philosophers have loosely tended to categorize under the “Gettier” heading, sometimes attributing, and sometimes denying knowledge. Following Gettier’s original insight, the efforts of the researchers below have been to understand why they do this, or the specific factors and mechanisms associated with luck, ability, evidence, presentation and task demands, and so on, that trigger attributions or denials as revealed in these different cases.

Why Do Experiments?

On psychologist Simine Vazire's always-excellent blog, sometimes i'm wrong, there is an excerpt from John Doris's forthcoming book that reacts to #repligate. Doris makes many important points about how philosophers should respond to this episode in psychology, such as not relying too much on any single study, including any single replication.

However, I want to take issue with one parenthetical remark. Doris writes "(Less cynically: if scientific findings weren’t surprising, why would we need experiments and publications?)". Although this may just be a throwaway remark for Doris, I actually think it might be a somewhat common thought. The thought is that experiments get some of their value from surprisingness -- i.e. disconfirming some intuitive thought. Or, put it in the reverse direction, if people were able to reliably predict whether an experiment would confirm or disconfirm a commonsense belief, then there would be less reason for us to do such an experiment.

I don't think that's the right view about experiments. Duncan Watts's book Everything is Obvious gives an easy way to see why. As Watts points out, many of our commonsense beliefs appear in tension with one another. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. But out of sight is out of mind. So you might imagine that, if the result of an experiment went one way, it'd be framed as "Counter-intuitive finding! Absence does not make the heart grow fonder!" for publication, but if the result of the same experiment went the other way, it'd be framed as "Counter-intuitive finding! Out of sight is not out of mind!" for publication.

Given that many of our commonsense beliefs appear in tension with one another in this way, whether an experiment is counter-intuitive or not hardly has any connection to its value. Instead, as Watts points out, what is valuable about scientific experiments is that they can delineate the scope of such commonsense beliefs. And I might add, they can estimate the magnitude of the highlighted causal relationships. From a scientific perspective, it's not that interesting to find out whether "out of sight is out of mind" is true or not, but it is interesting to find out in which cases it holds and in which case it doesn't, and to what extent it holds.

I think this view of why do experiments actually coheres with some important methodological lessons that came out from #repligate. There should be less emphasis on the yes/no question of whether p is above or under 0.05. Instead, there should be more emphasis on effect sizes, which measure the magnitude of a causal relationship, including giving confidence intervals for effect sizes. Moreover, there should be more emphasis on "scope" -- covering aspects ranging from moderating factors to conditions under which the effect is expected to replicate. For example, as I've mentioned before on this blog, psychologist Dan Simons suggests that publications of studies should come with an explicit method section on "Limits in scope and generalizability". At the same time, Many Labs 2 and Many Labs 3 are now investigating, respectively, replication across sample and setting and replication across timing of experiments.

Why do experiments? The answer has nothing to do with intuitiveness, but everything to do with magnitude and scope of causal relationships that are of interest to some of our aims.

[x-posted at Experimental Philosophical Aesthetics]

How to Better X-Phi

Many readers of this blog have probably already seen the latest issue of Emotion Review, which features Nina Strohminger's review of Colin McGinn's book on disgust. There is also a terrific set of commentaries that expand on the themes prompted by Strohminger's review.

In particular, David Pizzaro's commentary is focused on the challenges of interdisciplinary research. Pizzaro rightly joins Strohminger in excoriating McGinn's data-free approach to theorizing disgust, and noting the essentiality of data to making scientific claims. Pizarro also rightly emphasizes the importance of intellectual humility in doing interdisciplinary research. Toward the end of the commentary, Pizarro writes,

Philosophers interested in empirical questions about the mind, but who have not themselves been trained in experimental methods or statistical analyses, are more likely [...] to selectively report results that support their argument [...]

I find this claim curious. Is it the case that experimental philosophers who lack formal background in experimental methods or statistical analyses are more likely to selectively report results that support their argument?

Given the recent discussions regarding replication and research practices in psychology, what can experimental philosophers do to avoid being seen by other philosophers and psychologists as p-hackers? The replication project in X-Phi is a good start. Perhaps we should be p-curving ourselves more? Perhaps we should be registering our projects on Open Science Framework?

What other measures do you think would be helpful toward a better x-phi?