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!
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