Experimental Philosophy

The Folk Concept(s) of Happiness

I've finally written up a rough summary of some survey results I've been collecting for several years now, posted at the link below. This has been pretty informal so far, and I'd like to follow up with better studies using larger samples, as well as to address some questions not yet studied here. You'll see that my methods are primitive, but I think the results are interesting all the same. 

The Folk Concept(s) of Happiness: Preliminary Notes

Very briefly and crudely, I take the studies to offer some evidence that:

1. 'Happy' is primarily a psychological term in folk usage, whereas 'happy life' is closer to the normative notion of well-being or eudaimonia.
2. Hedonism about well-being is probably not a majority view.
3. Intuitions about well-being depend heavily on subtleties of wording.
4. To count as happy (by lay stds), a mere majority of positive vs. negative affect does not suffice.
5. Happiness ascriptions may draw on inferences about nonconscious affective states.
6. People are happy to ascribe happiness based purely on affective information.

Comments and suggestions for future surveys most welcome!

Dan

Vignette-Borrowing Etiquette

The X-Phi community is marked by a great deal of collaboration and sharing. Suppose, however, that you want to take someone's vignette and use it or modify it in a follow-up experiment. If you were to ask the original author of the vignette if this is OK, that would be nice. But are there are circumstances in which asking the author is required by some set of norms governing research and creative activity?

If the author has published the vignette, is your only obligation to cite the source? I've borrowed many vignettes from other X-Philes--sometimes I've asked, sometimes I haven't. When the vignettes I've borrowed are already published, I don't feel any qualms about using them without asking. But when the vignettes are unpublished or when my follow-up experiment is something the author might well be interested in doing, I don't feel comfortable doing so without asking first.

Do my qualms in the latter case reflect proper adherence to a norm we should make explicit and endorse throughout the X-Phi community? Or am I just being too sensitive?

New Journal

Dario Taraborelli has asked me to attract your attention to a new journal, The Review of Philosophy of Psychology. The RPP accepts proposals for special issues as well as submitted articles, and the editors seem to welcome articles in experimental philosophy (Dario is the editor in chief).

Keep this journal in mind!

Edouard

Background Shifts Affect Explanatory Style

Seth and I would welcome any comments on the following article from readers interested in the cog sci and phil sci literatures on explanation (i.e. on how people explain and the concept of scientific explanation, not on reductive explanations of mind). The article is an empirical, rather than experimental, philosophy article. But I think it implicitly addresses a few x-phi issues. Most importantly, it serves as an example of what can come from cross-divisional collaboration between philosophers and scientists. (We didn't run into any serious methods/stats issues. And I was able to benefit from Seth's expertise in experimental design.) This is our first publication in this area, so we would really appreciate any feedback.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/g13238184987j320/?p=9f8c02ed20f544f28c8927ca0a825104&pi=9

Thanks,
Alexandra and Seth

European Journal for Philosophy of Science

Franz Huber has asked me to post the following announcement:

The European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA) is pleased to
announce the launch of its new journal:

EUROPEAN JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (EJPS)

Editor-in-Chief: Carl Hoefer (Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain)
Deputy Editor: Mauro Dorato (University of Rome III, Italy)
Associate Editors: Franz Huber (Konstanz, Germany), Edouard Machery
(Pittsburgh, USA), Michela Massimi (London, UK), Samir Okasha (Bristol,
UK) and Jesús Zamora (UNED, Spain).
The Editorial Team will be assisted in its work by an Editorial Board of
highly reputed philosophers of science from around the world.

EJPS is the official journal of EPSA and will appear three times a year,
beginning in January 2011. EJPS intends to publish first-rate research in
all areas of philosophy of science, and now welcomes submissions via the
on-line portal:  http://www.editorialmanager.com/epsa

The Journal’s website (still partly under construction) is here:
http://www.springer.com/philosophy/philosophy+of+sciences/journal/13194

European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA): http://www.epsa.ac.at

Two New Surveys

First, Sally Haslanger asked me to make the following announcement about a survey she has undertaken as part of the important Women in Philosophy Task Force:

All professional philosophers are invited to participate in a survey on publishing in philosophy.  It should take about 10 minutes.  It will be useful to have your CV handy as you fill it out.  Please go here If all goes well, Sally Haslanger will report on the results at the December APA in the symposium on philosophy publishing (Wednesday December 30th, 11:15-1:15). Thanks for your help.  Please spread the word.

Second, David Chalmers is running a new survey over at PhilPapers with David Bourget concerning philosophers' views on issues ranging from meta-ethics to the philosophy of time!  Here is how he describes the study:

David Bourget and I have recently launched a new PhilPapers project: the Philosophical Survey.  This is a survey of the philosophical views of members of the philosophy profession and others.  We encourage all professional philosophers, graduate students, and interested others to take part.

The survey contains thirty questions, each giving a choice between 2-4 views on a philosophical issue.  Respondents can indicate that they accept or lean toward one of the options or can give one of a variety of "other" answers.  We have kept the questions as simple as possible, as clarification would be a never-ending process.  The survey also asks for some optional background information.

We have already launched the survey by e-mail to philosophers in 99 leading departments and to users of PhilPapers, and so far we have had responses by around 1000 professional philosophers and 700 others.  We are now opening up the survey publicly so that anyone can take it. The questions focus on issues in analytic philosophy, and will make most sense to those with some experience in the area, but anyone is welcome to take it.  We will publish results for the population of professional philosophers, graduate students, and other groups.

You can take the survey here.  Note that to take the survey, you must either have a PhilPapers account or  create a guest survey account, which will require a valid email address.  If you have received a direct email invitation to take the survey, please use the unique link found in that email instead.  These measures allow us to minimize survey abuse and to maximize the reliability of responses.  For further information about privacy concerns and about the methodology of the survey, see the survey's information page.

Happy polling!

Shameless self-promotion: BBS' call for commentaries on Doing without Concepts

Some readers of this blog might be interested by the following news:

Behavioral and Brain Sciences will publish a precis on my book, Doing without Concepts, and is now accepting proposals for commentaries. If you are not on the list of potential commentators, but would like to propose a commentary, e-mail me (machery@pitt.edu), and I'll suggest your name.

E

Levin on X-Phi

I just found this critical notice by Janet Levin, which came out in the October issue of Analysis:

http://analysis.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/extract/69/4/761

She discusses nearly every chapter in the collection by Knobe and Nichols, Experimental Philosophy, and ultimately argues that:

the results of the most methodologically sound and philosophically relevant studies discussed in this volume could have been obtained from the armchair, and thus that experimental philosophy may not present a serious challenge to the traditional methods of analytic philosophy. (p. 761)

However, I think this statement of her conclusion is a bit misleading. Sometimes she does, as this quote indicates, simply want to reject the revisionist claim that x-phi should replace the armchair entirely (or pretty much entirely).  But at other times she seems to be targeting the more modest claim that x-phi is a more promising methodology for some projects in philosophy. For example, she says "it seems that traditional analytic methods may well suffice for identifying the judgements that provide the right sorts of data for philosophical theories" (p. 767). Here she's not just saying x-phi doesn't undermine the armchair entirely; she's suggesting the armchair is as good as x-phi at gathering the relevant information about our concepts and so on.

Anywho, I thought readers of this blog might like to take a look at her piece if they haven't already.

Who's Thinking Boeing's Thoughts?

Consider the following sentence: “After Boeing lost the Army contract, Boeing expected to have to lay off workers.” Now, consider this sentence: “After Boeing lost the Army contract, Boeing felt anxious about having to lay off workers.”   Some recent work in experimental philosophy suggests that people think sentences such as the latter “sound weirder” than sentences such as the former: that is, that sentences attributing phenomenal states (e.g. happiness, fear) to groups are weirder than sentences attributing  intentional states (e.g. belief, desire). There has been a spirited discussion about how to interpret these results (e.g. Knobe & Prinz, 2008; Sytsma & Machery, 2009; Huebner, Bruno, & Sarkissian; forthcoming, and Arico; forthcoming). One of the most interesting proposals is that the data indicate that the folk are “realists” about group intentionality – that people think that groups literally have intentional states (though not phenomenal states) above and beyond the states of their members. But is this the correct interpretation of the data? Do people really think Boeing has desires and thoughts?

Inspired by this question, Adam Arico, Shaun Nichols and I have just completed a study on intuitions about attributions of mental states to groups.  Our study attempted to get beyond weirdness assessments to people’s tendencies to attribute mental states to groups (as opposed to the members of those groups). First, we piloted a paraphrase method I have used elsewhere. In our initial pilot, we noticed something interesting. When people paraphrased sentences with group mental state attributions, they seemed to use plural pronouns to refer to the group. This suggested the possibility that the folk are attributing mental states to groups in a “distributivist” fashion. That is, when they attribute mental states to a group, they are often attributing the mental states to members of the group rather than to the group itself. To explore this idea, we devised a pronoun replacement task. 

We divided sixty participants at Yale University between three conditions: one involving non-mental group attributions (e.g. “After Boeing lost the Army contract, Boeing needed to lay off workers”), another involving intentional mental states (e.g., “After Boeing lost the Army contract, Boeing expected to have to lay off workers”), and a third involving phenomenal mental states (e.g., “After Boeing lost the Army contract, Boeing felt anxious about having to lay off workers”). Each condition included four test sentences (i.e. group attributions) and four other filler sentences. For each sentence, participants were asked to replace the second, underlined instance of the group name (or noun phrase) with either the pronoun “it” or the pronoun “they”.  (Versions of our test materials are available here.) For each participant we calculated a “distributivist score” by awarding 1 point each time the participant selected “they” to replace the underlined name in one of our test sentences, and 0 points each time the participant selected “it”. Given that we had four test sentences, the highest distributivist score one could get was 4, the lowest was 0.

Our prediction was that participants would be more inclined to use the “it” pronoun in the condition attributing non-mental states than in either mental state condition, and, in fact, this hypothesis was born out. Here are the mean and median distributivist scores for each of our three conditions (with 20 participants in each condition):

Mean Distributivist Ratings:

Non-mental: 1.45

Intentional: 2.45

Phenomenal: 2.75

Median Distributivist Ratings:

Non-mental: 1

Intentional: 3

Phenomenal: 2.5

There were significant differences between non-mental state attribution sentences and each type of mental state attribution sentences (i.e., intentional > non-mental; phenomenal > non-mental). However, there was no significant difference in responses to intentional and phenomenal mental state attributions. Our results suggest that when mental state attributions are involved, people are more inclined to treat groups distributively.  This provides some reason to doubt that people really think that Boeing – the corporate entity itself – has desires and thoughts.  Our results also differ in an interesting way from Josh and Jesse’s original results on the attributions of mental states to groups. Whereas they found a big difference between phenomenal and intentional state attributions, in our study, people responded much the same for phenomenal and intentional state attributions.

Comments and suggestions are much appreciated!

 

New Book from Tamler Sommers

Tamler Sommers has a new book out, collecting interviews he has conducted with various people doing exciting work in moral cognition. 

As many of you will know, Tamler is not only an insightful philosopher but also an awe-inspiringly good writer and both of those talents are clearly on view here. 

Society for Philosophy and Psychology: CfP

SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY: 36th Annual Meeting

June 9-12, 2010, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon.

Submission Deadline: February 1, 2010. 

Submissions should be tailored to one of the following three presentation types: 

            • 45 Minute Contributed Sessions with Commentators: Suitable for longer papers featuring empirical research or sustained arguments on complex issues. Papers must not exceed a length of 3,500 words and should be accompanied by an abstract (of less than 300 words). 

            • 15 Minute "Cutting Edge" Research Presentations: Suitable for brief presentations of exciting new empirical research or works in progress. For this category, an abstract of not more than 1,500 words should be submitted. 

            • Poster only presentations: Best for those who prefer the poster presentation format, and can communicate the substance and significance of their work in a short abstract. For this category, an abstract of not more than 750 words should be submitted.

Submssions in the first two categories that are not accepted for oral presentation will automatically be considered for presentation as posters, unless the author stipulates otherwise. 

Papers and abstracts must be written in a format appropriate for anonymous review and employ gender-neutral language. Individual authors may submit only one paper or abstract as first author, though they may be co-authors on other submissions. 

All submissions will be made using our online submission system, which will open December 1, 2009. Check here for details: http://www.socphilpsych.org/meetings.html 

Invited Speakers for the 2010 SPP meeting include: Liane Gabora, Joshua Greene, John-Dylan Haynes, Scott Barry Kaufman, Katherine Kinzler, Edouard Machery, Casey O'Callaghan, Elliot Paul, Brian Scholl, Linda Skitka, Keith Stanovich, and Stephen Stich. 

There will also be a Presidential Address by Betram Malle. 

Symposia topics will include: The Neuroscience of Lying, Cognizing Human Groups, Creativity & Imagination, and Object Perception.

This year's conference will be preceded on June 9th by a workshop in Moral Psychology. More details on the worshop will be posted soon. 

For more information on the annual meeting, please contact the program chairs: Ron Mallon (rmallon@philosophy.utah.edu) and Jen Wright (wrightjj1@cofc.edu).

Experiments at Schools

X-Philes,

I have a question about doing experiments at schools. I assume it is unlikely that school teachers will ever let X-Philes administer surveys or other materials to an entire class at once. If someone has ever found a way to get a teacher to agree to this, I would be very interested in hearing how it was accomplished.

I assume that the norm involves something like one or two researchers (perhaps accompanied by a teacher's aide) performing their experiments in an unoccupied classroom, where children are sent one-by-one or two-by-two to the researchers. Can some of you with experience doing experiments at schools tell me whether it is generally the case that schools insist upon a teacher's aide being present for the entire research session? If so, is it necessary/desirable to compensate the school for the aide's time?

If those of you with experience doing this could offer any other helpful tips on how to make research in school settings work smoothly, I think everyone would appreciate it. Thanks.

Experimental Philosophy and Grad School?

As it's growing closer to the time when students are applying to philosophy graduate schools, I thought some of the  readers might be interested in this list of x-phi friendly graduate programs. The schools listed are an  attempt to represent the philosophy departments where students will find professors and other students who are also interested in experimental philosophy.

Readers of the blog who are not applying themselves could also help by offering their advice on the different programs in the comments section. (The facebook page that is hosting the list occasionally sends out updates about current x-phi research. Feel free to join.)

X-Phi 'Lab Meetings' in NYC

Experimental philosopher extraordinaire Mark Phelan is organizing a series of experimental philosophy 'lab meetings' for students and faculty in the New York area. 

The plan is for people from New York area institutions to have a chance to present ideas for experiments and then hone their experimental designs in a collaborative discussion with other lab members. The first meeting will be held in around a week, on Monday, Nov. 9 at CUNY Graduate Center, room 3309. 

If you are interested, Mark has put up all the details about this first meeting, and there is a facebook page where you can RSVP. 

New Experimental Political Philosophy - But Better!

Hi all,

Bertil just sent me this paper on people's intuitions about meeting needs. I think the methodology should be of interest even to those who are not interested in distributive justice or political philosophy. He says it is posted at Equality Exchange. Here's the title etc.:

Cappelen A. W., Moene K. O., Sørensen E. Ø., Tungodden B., Rich meets poor - an international fairness experiment.

Cheers, -Nicole

Motivated moral reasoning

Hi all-

Eric Uhlmann, David Tannenbaum, Peter Ditto and I have just published an empirical paper in Judgment and Decison Making on the motivated use of moral principles (157 kb pdf download can be found here or this paper and others of ours at peezer.net/publications; html version available here).

 Some of you have seen early drafts of this, but essentially we show that individuals differentially endorse consequentialist or deontological options in moral dilemmas that are structurally similar but that differ only in whether or not the content conflicts with their underlying social/political motivations.

This is perhaps most easily illustrated by one of our studies--in a variation of the infamous footbridge dilemma, when the "large man" is referred to as "Tyrone Payton" (a stereotypical African American name), conservatives are more likely to endorse the consequentialist option of sacrificing one innocent person for the sake of the greater good. Liberals, on the other hand, prefer the consequentialist option if the large man is named "Chip Ellsworth III". Across a number of studies we show that such political/social motivations point toward a flipping of what many (including our own subjects) presume are invariant principles. In the final study  we demonstrate that we can even prime individuals to make judgments akin to the conservative or liberal participants in the previous studies simply by priming them using the ubiquitous sentence-unscrambling procedure and including words that point to multiculturalism or patriotism. Of note, if we can refer to this as "bias", liberals and conservatives both show a bias across our studies. Also, the vast majority of our subjects indicate that they would never allow race or nationality influence their judgments in these dilemmas. Any comments/criticisms welcome!

Best,
David

Where The Wild Things Are...

In the event that some of you missed the following two op-eds by David Brooks in The New York Times, I thought I would pass them along: (a) "The Young and the Neuro," and (b) "Where the Wild Things Are."

The Survey Says...

Stephen Stich has asked me to post the following call for help.*  Hopefully, everyone will take a few minutes to play along:

Dear Colleagues,

In collaboration with Joe Henrich and Taylor Davis at the University of British Columbia, I’m conducting a study on philosophers’ views about normative judgments.  Joe, Taylor and I would be very grateful if you would participate in our study.

Participation should take 30 minutes or less, and it involves responding to a 20-item questionnaire.  In developing the questionnaire, we found that many respondents find consideration of the issues involved interesting and engaging.  The research has been approved by UBC’s Behavioral Research Ethics Board and is open to all faculty and graduate students in philosophy.

Here's a link to the test:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=u_2fmW1lVR2ZyszkTSH2Jnzw_3d_3d 

We encourage you to forward this notice to other philosophers you think might be interested. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me at sstich@ruccs.rutgers.edu or Taylor Davis at taylorth@interchange.ubc.ca. 

Many thanks for whatever assistance you can provide.

With best wishes,

Stephen Stich

Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy & Cognitive Science Rutgers University

Collaborators:

Joe Henrich: Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition & Evolution, Departments of Psychology & Economics, University of British Columbia

Taylor Davis: Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia

*Here is the link to the official letter/invitation.

Are People Actually Moral Objectivists?

Metaethicists disagree about a whole lot of stuff—whether moral properties exist and, if so, what the heck they are and how we have knowledge of them; whether one can derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ ; whether moral judgments are the deliverances of affective or purely cognitive faculties; and a whole lot besides. 

One particular claim, though, seems to have widespread endorsement—the claim that the folk are objectivists about morality—that ordinary folk view moral issues as having a single correct answer.  When ordinary individuals claim, for example, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were wrong or immoral, they mean that it is wrong or immoral *full stop*.  If someone were to disagree with such a claim, then at least one of the persons would have to be wrong.

The claim of folk objectivism is a datum that most metaethical theories try to vindicate or accommodate.  But is it true?  Are ordinary folks objectivists about morality?  John Park (a philosopher at Duke), Joshua Knobe (someone you don’t know) and I have been pursuing this question, and our initial findings suggest that folk objectivism might be rather relative in nature. 

For example, we asked subjects to interpret disagreement on the morality of the following action: “Dylan buys an expensive new knife and tests its sharpness by randomly stabbing a passerby on the street.”  When asked whether disagreeing Americans could both be correct in their judgments about the morality of this action, the folk were predictably objectivist. 

Things began to shift, though, when the disagreeing individuals were depicted as belonging to different cultural groups.  When the disagreement was between an American and a member of an Amazonian warrior culture, or a member of an extraterrestrial species called the Pentars, objectivity levels dropped in turn.  It seems as though subjects think that there could be objectively correct moral judgments within cultures, but not between them.  The greater the disparity of the cultural groups, the more the folk started to embrace a relativistic conception of morality.

So perhaps people aren’t actually objectivists about morality after all. Perhaps they think that moral judgments can only be true or false relative to a particular individual… but then if the individuals turn out to be very similar to each other, they assume that anything that is true relative to one of them will also be true relative to the other.

Here is a link to our (extremely brief) paper. Download Are the Folk Objectivists About Morality.

 

 

 

Experiments in the Humanities

Thanks to Jonathan Kramnick for sending me a link to this interesting upcoming event at Rutgers (New Brunswick) entitled Experiments in the Humanities.  Here is the description of the conference:

Experiments in the Humanities features two world-renowned humanists interested in bringing empirical methods to bear on longstanding questions in their disciplines: Stephen Stich, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers will discuss how research in cognitive science can advance and transform traditional philosophical debates, especially in moral theory. Franco Moretti, Professor of English at Stanford, will discuss how quantitative analysis can illuminate our understanding of the novel, especially questions of plot.

It's free and open to the public, so if you're in the area you should certainly check it out!  It ought to be exciting!