Experimental Philosophy

Nahmias Interview with 3:AM

Our own Eddy Nahmias has an illuminating  interview with 3:AM's Richard Marshall--who has been doing a number of really nice interviews as of late with a wide variety of philosophers.  So, when you're done reading the interview with Eddy, you should check out some of Marshall's other interviews for 3:AM as well!

Replication problems in Experimental Philosophy of Free Will

Hi everyone,

As everyone here knows, Nichols and Knobe (Nous, 2007) have uncovered two striking constrasts in intuitions about free will and determinism. In their first experiment, they have found a contrast between an abstract and a concrete case. In their second experiment, they have found a contrast between a high-affect and a low-affect case.

Now, the first contrast (abstract VS concrete) has been replicated many times (see for example the cross-cultural study by Sarkissian et al.), included by myself. However, I have tried many times to replicate the second contrast (high-affect VS low-affect) but have failed many times (I first thought French subjects were just weird, but I was successful in replicating my non-replication on Amazon Mechanical Turk).

I have found only one published study trying to replicate this contrast: the one by Feltz et al., and it actually fails to replicate the contrast.

So, I was wondering: how many of you actually tried to replicate this contrast (the one between raping VS  cheating on one's taxes)? How many of you succeeded and how many of you failed? I think a quick and dirty 'meta-analysis' would be useful to everyone.

Thanks

Judgments about Free Will and Determinism in patients with emotional deficits...

...is now available online. Since the last version, we added new participants, but failed to find any significant difference between control participants and patients with behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia. We argue that these results spell troubles for the idea that emotional reactions drive compatibilist responses.

The Manipulation Argument and the Deep Self

Compatibilist philosophers often suggest that you act freely whenever your actions stem in the right sort of way from your own psychological states. (For example, they may say that you act freely to the extent that you act on your own values, or to the extent that you engage in the right sort of deliberation.) Of course, your psychological states might themselves be determined by your genes and environment, but compatibilists often say that the causal origin of your psychological states is neither here nor there. As long as your actions arise in the right way from your own psychology, those actions are free.

But now suppose we introduce a somewhat fanciful thought experiment. Suppose that a skillful manipulator has set things up from the very beginning of your life to make sure that you perform a particular action. He carefully arranged your whole childhood, exposing you to certain friends, certain TV shows, etc. In the end, his plan works perfectly. You end up acquiring exactly the beliefs, desires and values he wanted you to have, and as a result of having those psychological states, you perform exactly the action he was trying to get you to perform.

Now we face a problem. According to many compatibilist theories, since your actions stemmed directly from your own values, your action should count as perfectly free. Yet it seems intuitive that your action is not free at all. So it seems intuitive that an action can stem directly from your own values but nonetheless be unfree. This is the famous manipulation argument, and it is widely thought to be a big problem for certain compatibilist theories.

Judgments about Free Will and Determinism in patients with emotional deficits

Nichols and Knobe have famously advanced the hypothesis according to which compatibilist intuitions are the product of emotional reactions. To test for this hypothesis, Maxime Bertoux, Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde, Bruno Dubois and I ran a study on patients suffering from a behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia. These patients have emotional deficits, so, we argue, Nichols and Knobe's hypothesis shoud predict that they would be less likely to give compatibilist responses than control participants. The results of our experiment can be found in the draft of our paper.

Comments are welcome!

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?

 

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?

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!

Nahmias and Murray on Free Will

Eddy Nahmias and Dylan Murray have conducted some very intriguing new studies in the experimental philosophy of free will. I think they are on to something important, but it's hard to know quite how to explain their results.

In any case, I offer a brief summary here (along with some quick follow-up studies I ran to extend their findings).

Failure of the Expertise Defense: Persistent Bias in Expert Intuitions

Over the past several years, experimental philosophers have presented several studies indicating that some philosophically relevant intuitions are subject to a host of undesirable biases (order effects, framing effects, and actor-observer differences among others). For example, our research suggests that heritable personality traits predict bias in some fundamental philosophically relevant intuitions (Feltz & Cokely 2008, 2009; Cokely & Feltz, 2009; Feltz, Perez, & Harris, in press; Feltz, Harris, & Perez, 2010). In response to these findings, “philosophical expertise” has been used to shield some parts of standard philosophical practice from the worries presented by experimental philosophers (e.g., Ludwig, 2007; Kauppinen 2007; Horvarth, 2010; Sosa, 2010; Williamson, 2007, 2011). One important part of the “Expertise Defense” is that philosophers are assumed to be relevantly different from the folk (e.g., as a result of their years of training) and consequently philosophers' intuitions shouldn’t display the same (or similar) biases.

 

But more recently, there have been serious concerns raised by experimental philosophers about the Expertise Defense. Some have used indirect strategies suggesting that philosophical expertise is unlike expertise in areas known to result in the relevant differences (e.g., in chess) (Weinberg, Gonnerman, Buckner, & Alexander, 2010 see related discussion here). Others have opted for direct strategies showing that for many important everyday behaviors (e.g., voting, returning library books, showing common courtesy) philosophers often display the same (or similar) biases as the folk (Schwitzgebel 2009; Schwitzgebel & Rust, 2010, 2009; Schwitzgebel & Cushman, in press). In a new paper (Schulz, Cokely, & Feltz, in press), we also adopt the direct strategy and present the first evidence that personality predicts persistent bias in verifiable expert intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important fundamental philosophical debates, the Expertise Defense fails.