How People Think About Meeting Needs

I've just posted a draft paper on how people think about meeting needs co-written with Nathan Lubchenco on my website here: How People Think About Meeting Need. Comments would be lovely.

The abstract is below:

This paper tries to determine how people think about meeting needs in a way that can inform both theory and practice. It uses data gathered from Kiva, an online, non-profit, organization that allows individuals to help other individuals in need to isolate intuitions that people find broadly compelling. The central result of the paper is that people accept a sufficiency principle for distributing limited resources to people in need. A sufficiency principle of distribution holds that it is better to help those below some (e.g. welfare,) threshold than those above this threshold. This paper’s results may be useful for engaging with and evaluating philosophical theories about how people think about meeting needs. Additionally, this paper’s methodology may have advantages over the survey techniques of traditional experimental philosophy, or at least encourage methodological reflection over the range of options available.

You can download the paper here and here.

Comments

[Shen-yi Liao]

Really wonderful study! I think the methodology is definitely innovative and the results are fascinating. I first saw this at the MERG conference a couple of years ago, and am really happy to be able to read a full write-up now.

One complaint: in the methodological discussion, the paper unfortunately evokes the same old "x-phi is just surveys" trope. I discuss some reasons to banish the phrase "survey methodology" from methodological discussions here: http://gogrue.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/boo-surveys/ . While the methodological discussion is even-handed on the whole, I find the reliance on this trope actually made the central point (that analyzing existing data sets can helpfully complement experimental methods) less convincing than it would have been without it.

[Wesley Buckwalter]

Were you talking about this one passage here: "Many criticisms of experimental philosophy are about the use of surveys. Subjects may not interpret survey questions as intended. Surveys often involve vignettes of abstract and difficult thought experiments. Even when subjects are able to interpret questions as intended,their answers still depend on a variety of extrinsic, philosophically irrelevant, contextual factors such as order effects, priming and the number of possible response"?

That all sounds ok to me. Even when you understand survey methodology inclusively, as in the sense relevant to most xphi-something like a research technique involving manipulations that isn't simple polling-it's clearly still generally debatable whether or not responses of an experiment are more or less inaccurate (lying or misunderstanding), subject to bias (f/o), or better or worse than observational data, no? I'm not saying we should be convinced that the latter is always (or even most times, or presently) better than what was referred to here as the "traditional xphi methods", but I dont think my level of convincedness regarding the advantages/disadvantages of using that method in a circumstance is set by the fact that some traditionalist philosophers have hijacked the term 'survey' for dark purposes.