Experimental Philosophy

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.

X-Phi makes the Annual Review of Psychology

Each year, Annual Review of Psychology commissions critical reviews documenting the most important scholarly advances on a range of different scientific topics.  So it is really exciting that in a forthcoming volume, they have chosen to include an article specifically on experimental philosophy.

Readers of the blog may be interested in this paper ("Experimental Philosophy") by Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols, Philip Robbins, Hagop Sarkissian, Tamler Sommers and I, summarizing (from a slightly more psychological perspective) some of the incredible new discoveries that experimental philosophers have made regarding questions about morality, metaethics, free will, and consciousness.

Abstract: Experimental philosophy is a new interdisciplinary field that uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy. The present review focuses on research in experimental philosophy on four central questions. First, why is it that people’s moral judgments appear to influence their intuitions about seemingly nonmoral questions? Second, do people think that moral questions have objective answers, or do they see morality as fundamentally relative? Third, do people believe in free will, and do they see free will as compatible with determinism? Fourth, how do people determine whether an entity is conscious?

 

Two New Papers That May Be of Interest

There are two new papers on SSRN that readers of the X-Phi Blog might find interesting:

1) Stephen Stich, "Do Different Groups Have Different Epistemic Intuitions?  A Reply to Jennifer Nagel"  [http://ssrn.com/abstract=1919107]

Abstract:     
Intuitions play an important role in contemporary epistemology. Over the last decade, however, experimental philosophers have published a number of studies suggesting that epistemic intuitions may vary in ways that challenge the widespread reliance on intuitions in epistemology. In a recent paper, Jennifer Nagel offers a pair of arguments aimed at showing that epistemic intuitions do not, in fact, vary in problematic ways. One of these arguments relies on a number of claims about the psychological literature on intuitive judgment and on mental state attribution (also known as “theory of mind”, “mindreading” and “folk psychology”). I call this the "theoretical argument". The other argument relies on recent experimental work carried out by Nagel and her collaborators. It is my contention that in setting out her theoretical argument, Nagel offers an account of the relevant scientific literature that is, in crucial respects, both flawed and misleading. My main goal in this paper is to rectify these errors and to make it clear that, once this is done, Nagel’s theoretical argument collapses. Thus her paper provides no support at all for her bold claim that “neither ethnicity nor gender has a significant impact on knowledge ascription in general, nor on epistemologically interesting cases in particular.” In the final section, I offer some critical observations about Nagel’s strategy for dealing with empirical data that does not support her view – both other people’s and her own.

 

2) Kevin Tobia, Wesley Buckwalter & Stephen Stich, "Moral Intuitions: Are Philosophers Experts?" [http://ssrn.com/abstract=1923260]

Abstract:     
Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people’s moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers’ moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philosophers and non-philosophers do indeed sometimes have different moral intuitions, but challenging the notion that philosophers have better or more reliable intuitions.

 

Experiment Month Results: Norm Salience and Consideration

Along with a few others that have already posted here, we (Mark Alfano and I, along with our project advisor, James Beebe) are happy to share with everyone our initial results from Yale’s Experiment Month Initiative.

The salience of a norm is of importance to a number of philosophical topics, including the Knobe Effect.  We wanted to examine the correlation between a norm’s salience and how much an agent considered it.  Prima facie, one might think that if a norm is salient, then the agent will have considered it.  But we also wanted to consider another factor: whether or not the agent acted in accordance with or violated the salient norm.  One might think that this would make no difference, but we suspected otherwise.  

The Experiment (You can read the full text of all six vignettes here.)  
Here’s the basic setup of our experiment.  There is an agent, Carl, who has just inherited $50,000 and “is considering whether to invest the money or give it to Oxfam.”  His friend, Diana, makes salient either the norm of investing for retirement or donating to Oxfam to help people in need (or makes both norms salient in the last two vignettes).  Carl responds that he doesn’t care; he just wants to invest/donate the money and then acts accordingly.  We then asked participants the same two questions (regardless of which vignette they read): (1) “To what extent do you think that Carl considered whether his action would allow him to retire in comfort?”  (2) “To what extent do you think that Carl considered whether his action would help others?”

Prediction
We predicted that in cases where only one norm was made salient but the agent violated it (e.g., the agent is reminded of the norm of saving for retirement but instead donates his money), then participants would report at higher rates that the agent considered the other norm, i.e., the norm that the agent did fulfill.  However, when both norms are made salient, then participants would report at higher rates that the agent considered the norm that he acted in accordance with than the one he didn’t.

Results
Our hypotheses were borne out by the data gathered.  The protagonist in the Self-Norm/Help Condition (where only the self-norm is salient and the agent violates it by donating instead) was deemed to have considered whether his actions would help others to a significantly higher degree than in any other condition where only one norm was salient.  (Note 1)

(Click image for full-size version.)

Similarly, the protagonist in the Other-Norm/Invest Condition (where the other-norm of helping is salient and the agent violates it by investing instead) was deemed to have considered whether his actions would allow him to retire in comfort to a significantly higher degree than in any other condition where only one norm was salient.  (Note 2)

Then, when both norms are salient and the agent invests, the agent was found to have considered whether his actions would allow him to retire in comfort to a significantly higher degree than in the condition where he donates.  (Note 3)

Finally, when both norms are salient and the agent donates, the agent was found to have considered whether his actions would help others to a significantly higher degree than in the condition where he invests.  (Note 4)

---

Notes

1) Results were subject to a multivariate correlation.  (M = 6.14 on a Likert scale; SD = 1.445; N = 66.  In comparison to all other one-salient-norm conditions, p < 0.000.)

2) M = 5.13 on a Likert scale; SD = 1.621; N = 63.  In comparison to all other one-salient-norm conditions, p < 0.000.

3) M = 5.81 on a Likert scale; SD = 1.649; N = 58.  In comparison to the other both-salient-norm condition, p < 0.000.

4) M = 5.09 on a Likert scale; SD = 2.013; N = 68.  In comparison to the other both-salient-norm condition, p < 0.000.

 

Moral from Non-Moral

  Imagine that you are building a person. First you put in all of the capacities this person will need to make ordinary, non-moral judgments. So you put in capacities for understanding causation, for thinking about other people's mental states, for making sense of physics, biology, sociology. Now suppose that once you've already finished all that, you want to add whatever would be necessary to allow your creation also to think about moral questions. How much more would you have to add? 

One obvious answer would be: quite a bit. After all, experimental studies have shown incredibly complex patterns in people's moral judgments, and it might be thought that you would really have to put in some pretty sophisticated mechanisms to generate patterns of judgment like these. 

In a recent paper that I hope will one day be regarded as a classic in the field, Fiery Cushman and Liane Young put forward a very different proposal. They suggest that it would be possible to generate some of the complex patterns we find in people's moral judgments without adding in very much at all that was specific to morality. Much of the complexity found in people's moral judgments, they suggest, could just be a by-product of their complex way of thinking about non-moral issues.

Experiment Month Results on Thomson’s Violinist

In her classic paper, “In Defense of Abortion,” Judith Jarvis Thomson uses a number of intuition pumps to argue in favor of a fairly permissive stance on abortion. The first thought experiment asks you, the reader, to imagine that you woke up tethered to a famous violinist, who will not survive without the support of your kidneys for the next several months. Thomson assumes you recognize a right to your own bodily integrity, and that your response to the violinist case will be governed by the intuition that violations of this right are unjust. However, at the end of her paper, Thomson anticipates an objection: “It may be said that what is important is not merely the fact that the fetus is a person, but that it is a person for whom the woman has a special kind of responsibility issuing from the fact that she is its mother. And it might be argued that all my analogies are therefore irrelevant—for you do not have that special kind of responsibility for that violinist” (1971, p. 64).

We (Jeanine Weekes Schroer and I) tend to agree with this objection, and hypothesized that responses to the violinist case may be driven by care-based concerns, either entirely or in addition to justice-based concerns. The care approach argues for a shift away from rights and fairness talk, which conceptualizes moral philosophy from the atomistic agent’s perspective outward, and toward responsibility and needs talk, which conceptualizes moral decision-making as happening always already within a network, where the modernist individual is no longer an interesting metaphysical unit for explanatory purposes. We predicted that this care effect would appear when participants were asked whether there was a moral obligation to remain attached to a relative, as opposed to a complete stranger.

The experiment. Our study asked participants to respond to two of four possible vignettes, all of which closely resembled Thomson's orginal case. We manipulated the perspective through which each participant interacted with the case, as “you” or as a third person thinking about “Lee,” and the relationship to the sick person, either a “violinist” or a “half-sibling.” Participants were asked to answer two sets of two (balanced) questions on Likert scales (emphases below added):

• Will you/Lee remain connected to the violinist/half-sibling?
• Are you/is Lee morally obliged to remain connected to the violinist/half-sibling?
•  In thinking about how you arrived at your answers to the first two questions, did you think about the quality or character of your/Lee’s relationship with the violinist/half-sibling?
• In thinking about how you arrived at your answers to the first two questions, did you think about the rights and privileges you/Lee and other people have when it comes to your body/their bodies?

First Batch of Experiment Month Results

I am happy to share two sets of preliminary results from my recent experiment with Yale's Experiment Month initiative.  My experiment was motivated by two thoughts: (1) the thought that moral intuitions may be influenced by personality traits, and (2) the further thought that if some moral intuitions are found to correlate with morally undesirable personality traits (traits that almost everyone agrees are morally bad, e.g. narcissism, psychopathy, etc.), then perhaps we should doubt the truth of those intuitions (for why, offhand, should we lend much epistemic credence to intuitions linked to morally bad personality traits?).  Anyway, both sets of results are briefly summarized below.  I have also posted links to draft write-ups for anyone interested.  I hope you find them interesting!

Personality Traits and Trolley Cases: A Correlational Study: this study examined whether personality traits predict responses to two famous Trolley Cases (i.e. “pulling the switch” vs. “pushing the fat man”, in each case saving five lives at the cost of one).  The experiment yielded no significant correlations between personality traits and the “pulling the switch” trolley case.  Positive moral evaluations of “Pushing the Fat Man,” on the other hand (i.e. pushing the fat man in front of the trolley is "good" or "right"), correlated significantly with psychopathy, cruelty, disagreeableness, revenge seeking, and carelessness.

I believe these results raise interesting new questions about trolley cases, and cast doubt on Joshua Greene's (2007)  fMRI-based arguments in favor of consequentialism over deontology.  According to Greene, fMRI studies show that deontological judgments about the “pushing the fat man” case (i.e. it is “bad” or “wrong” to push the fat man) are based on evolutionarily old, crude, and "morally confabulated" emotional processing.  My results suggest, to the contrary, that if deontological judgments about the fat man case are influenced by emotions, those emotions are an important and legitimate part of human moral cognition, comprising parts of our moral personality that prevent us from being callous, careless, and cruel to others.

Bad News for Conservatives? Moral Judgments and the "Dark Triad" Personality Traits: A Correlational Study: this study examined whether there is any link between three dark personality traits -- Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy -- and traditional liberal/conservative divides on moral issues.  My results suggest that conservatives may have darker personality profiles, on average, than liberals.  Here is brief summary of the study's complete results:

• 44.6% (5 of 12) of conservative response-types correlated significantly with at least one dark personality trait.
• 25% (3 of 12) of conservative response-types correlated significantly with two dark personality traits.
• Only 8.3% (1 of 12) of liberal response-types correlated significantly with one dark personality trait.
• Machiavellianism correlated significantly with conservative positions on Welfare, taxation for greater economic equality, free markets, and capital punishment.
• Machiavellianism and psychopathy both correlated significantly with conservative views on free markets and capital punishment.
• Narcissism and psycopathy both correlated with the conservative view that the government has a right to wage war in violation of UN resolutions.
• Conservative positions on capital punishment (i.e. CP is "good" or "right") correlated significantly with survey items "I like to pick on losers" and "It is true that I can be cruel."
• Psychopathy correlated significantly with the liberal view that it is bad or wrong to restrict civil liberties "somewhat" to protect citizens against terrorism.

Although these results are limited in scope, I think they raise interesting new questions about the relationship between personality traits and liberal/conservative divides.

Questions/comments/objections are warmly welcomed.  Finally, I’d also like to thank Mark Phelan, Adam Feltz, Joshua Knobe, and everyone else at Experiment Month for their support!

 

Moral Psychology REP Entry

Research in moral psychology has often been done either primarily from the armchair (consider Nagel, Smith, Korsgaard, etc.) or primarily in reference to empirical work (consider Kohlberg, Batson, Damasio, etc.). But a hope I share with many others is to continue the trend of blurring these into a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach.

Partly toward that goal, I've completed a draft of a relatively short entry for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy entitled "Empirical Work in Moral Psychology" (PDF). It covers both x-phi as well as empirical work not done by philosophers, and it ties them to traditional debates in philosophical moral psychology. The condensed range of topics included are: free will and moral responsibility, egoism and altruism, moral judgment and motivation, weakness and strength of will, and moral judgment and intuitions. The article is meant as a short introduction to this burgeoning field while following closely to the topics that appear in Michael Slote's REP entry "Moral Psychology."

Any feedback would be great, either in the comments thread or via email (joshdmay at gmail). Of course, if I've made a shameful error, feel free to let me know privately! I throw this initial draft out there only because I hope input will make it the best resource it can be. There are many constraints on this particular piece, so I certainly cannot accomodate all feedback. But I'll do what I can.

Thanks!

Genre and Folk Evaluations of Art

How do our moral evaluations of artworks relate to our aesthetic evaluations? Put it another way: do moral defects cause or constitute aesthetic defects, cause or constitute aesthetic virtues, or are they aesthetically irrelevant? This is the question that we (Shen-yi Liao and Jonathan Phillips) attempted to answer in recent studies. Our findings suggest that there is no univocal answer to the question. Instead, the influence that moral evaluations have on aesthetic evaluations of artworks partly depends on genre.

Let's run through one study (N = 50; between-participants). In one condition, participants listened to a 30-second clip of a Taiwanese folk ballad song.

(Please enable flash to listen to the clip.)

Then they were shown two sets of "translated lyrics", and asked which set of lyrics would make the song more appealing.

"Show You the Facts" (Moral)
Men say stupid things like
“Women are not worth anything
I use them and then I toss them”
They don’t treat women like they should
Let me show you the facts, get it right:
Women are equals in every respect

"Game Over" (Immoral)
Another woman dropped down
I wanted it, I got it, and I’m gone
There’s another one around the corner
I’ll do the same thing with her
You know they want more from me
But the game’s over when I score

In the other condition, participants listened to a 30-second clip of a Taiwanese hip hop song.

Then they were shown the same two sets of "translated lyrics" as before, and asked which set of lyrics would make the song more appealing.

The Self-Reported Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors

New essay in draft here, co-authored with Joshua Rust.

Abstract:

We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with self-report. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show significantly better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: Ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation.

Warning: This essay is monstrously long -- 70 pages! In earlier (uncirculated) drafts we had tried to keep it to normal journal-article length, but eventually we decided to give up on that. It's a very complicated study, so it just takes some space to lay it all out properly.

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]