Explaining the Knobe Effect

I've written a very short piece on the Knobe Effect and hope that there is something in it that would interest the X-philes (Here).  Suppose that our judgments about whether some effect was brought about intentionally depended (in part) upon whether the effect is bad or beneficial.  Does this give us reason to think that there is more to mastering some folk-psychological concepts than predicting, controlling, and explaining behavior?  I argue that it doesn't.  I think we should accept that the negative effects that are "besides the intention" with which someone acts are brought about intentionally even though the positive effects are not.  But I also think that this asymmetry is just what we'd expect on the assumption that the judgment that such and such effect was brought about intentionally plays a purely explanatory role.

Of course, comments and suggestions would be very much appreciated.

-Clayton

[Also, I'd like to thank Joshua Knobe for his comments and encouragement and Thomas Nadelhoffer for the invitation to post]

Comments

[Mark Phelan]

Hey Clayton,

I tend to agree with the central idea of the paper, that the information revealed about the agents’ motives in Knobe’s chairman cases is the sort of information that would be useful for explaining and, more to the point I think, predicting behavior. Hagop and I batted around the idea that we form a notion of someone’s character based upon the actions they intentionally perform. In that case, it might make predictive sense for subjects to judge that Knobe’s harming-chairman acted intentionally. If one forms an idea of his character as that of a person who will harm for profit, one will be likely to judge that, when presented with such situations, this chairman will choose to harm (the environment)—and business people such as the chairman are often presented with such situations (or, at least we believe.) If the character shaping theory were correct, it would also be predictively helpful to judge that the helping-chairman did not act intentionally. After all, a person with her character would be unlikely to help the environment in the future, provided such a fortuitous overlap of profitability and environmental-stewardship did not recur.

[Bruce L. Thiessen, Ph.D.]

As a psychologist and a university instructor who teaches History and Systems of Psychology (basically a philosophy course), I find this quite intriguing.

Actual outcome and expectations or anticipated outcome associated with the initiation of a specific purposeful act are often quite different. We all want more control over our environment so we fool ourselves into believing we have more control than we actually do. It is human nature to want everything to follow the rules of:

Predicatability
words and music by Dr. BLT (c)2006
http://www.drblt.net/music/predict.mp3

Bruce
aka Dr. BLT
The world's first blog 'n roll artist

[Galen Strawson]

The anti-Knobe effect? Perhaps this is a standard point — but there are, surely, people who are biassed the other way: inclined to think the best of people, more likely to think that good deeds are fully intentional and that bad deeds to be explained away. Many — perhaps most — people have this attitude when it comes to their own friends.

[Joshua Knobe]

Galen,

This is a very good point, which it would be helpful to explore further.

There are a number of different theories about precisely why people think that bad side-effects are intentional, and some of these theories specifically suggest that the effect is due to a motivational bias.

But if there is a motivational bias at work here, then it shouldn't apply in judgments about one's own friends (or a fortiori about one's own self). So it seems like a good way to test these theories would be to check to see whether the effect continued to arise even in judgments about one's friends or oneself.

(I know that Thomas Nadelhoffer ran some interesting studies on this question, but I don't know precisely what the results were.)