Experimental Philosophy

The Essence of Morality is Mind Perception

Two favorite topics of X-Phi are morality and how we perceive the minds of others.  In a recent paper, Liane Young, Adam Waytz and I argue that the very essence of moral judgment is mind perception.   Briefly, we outline the idea that people have a psychological prototype of morality consisting of a moral dyad of two perceived minds - an agent and a patient (i.e., interpersonal harm).   Grounding morality in harm is a bit contentious given recent research, but you can be the judge of whether we've made a good argument for it.

We've solicited a number of official commentaries in Psychological Inquiry, but we'd love to get some more informal feedback.  Here's the paper.  And here - just as a teaser - is the first figure.

One-Day Conference on Mind Perception

Adam Waytz and I would like to announce a conference on Mind Perception to be held on January 26, 2012 as a pre-conference at SPSP 2012, San Diego. 

Mind perception encompasses a variety of topics including empathy, perspective-taking, theory of mind, religious belief, mentalizing, agency detection, anthropomorphism, dehumanization and morality.  We have an exceptional line-up of speakers who explore mind perception from a variety of perspectives, including experimental philosophy, social cognition, development, and neuroscience.

http://www.mindperceptionconference.com/

Speakers include Alison Gopnik, Joshua Knobe, Jason Mitchell, Ara Norenzayan, Rebecca Saxe, Thalia Wheatley and Liane Young.  Also speaking will be Jonah Lehrer, best selling author and writer for Wired magazine.

Registration will include lunch, after which will be a poster session.  If you have a suitable poster, submissions are due by Nov 1st - all those with accepted posters will have the registration fee waived.

We are grateful to the Kellogg School of Management for their support.

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?

 

X-Phi of Consciousness Meets Pornography

Although work in the experimental philosophy of consciousness has investigated a number of intriguing questions, much of this work has been concerned in one way or another with the importance of the body. 

Most of the studies in this tradition make use of the same sort of method. Participants are asked to consider an entity that does not have a biological body (a robot, a corporation, God). Participants are then given a series of questions about this entity's psychological states. Does it know that 2 + 2 = 4? Can it plan for the future? Can it feel happy? Such studies appear to be pointing to a surprising conclusion. It looks like people think that disembodied entites can have psychological states of various sorts but that they cannot have states that require phenomenal consciousness. (See this post for a quick summary.)

But now suppose we go in the opposite direction. Suppose we find an entity that is even more saliently embodied than you or I. What sorts of psychological states might people ascribe to an entity like that?

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 Paradox of Moral Focus

Liane Young and I have recently become interested in what I think is an intriguing feature of morality's influence on social and causal cognition. This research began by borrowing from some studies which suggested that people's moral judgments can influence their judgments of force and freedom (if you don't know it, here's a funny 3 minute and 29 second overview). Liane and I took these cases and changed them just a little bit, to see if  people's moral jugments could actually lead them to giving directly contradictory judgments. 

I think the basic finding can be explained pretty simply. In one study, participants read a vignette about a hospital where a chief of surgery orders a subordinate doctor (against his will) to prescribe a drug called Accuphine. And, in some cases, the patient dies as a result of having taken the drug. Then, after reading the vignette, particpiants were asked one of two related questions:

• Did the chief of surgery force the doctor to prescribe Accuphine?
• Was the doctor forced to prescribe Accuphine?

While most participants agreed with the first claim, they actually disagreed with the second :   But this pattern of responses seems obviously inconsistent: participants both agreed that the chief forced the doctor, and disagreed that the doctor was forced. So what might explain this paradoxical pattern of responses? (more after the break.)

Intentional Side-Effects and X-Phi Methods: new paper

Robin Scaife and I have a new paper on intentional side-effects forthcoming in Journal of Moral Philosophy. You can download a draft here.

The paper argues against the consensus view that experiments have shown a normative dimension to the folk concept of intentional action (or at least to its application).

Our preferred hypothesis is that the outcome of an action is classified as intentional only if the agent is taken to have assigned it some relative importance when deciding what to do.

We argue that the existing experiments support this hypothesis and we present data from two experiments of our own that we claim can only be explained by our hypothesis.

Our hypothesis is broader than Machery’s cost–benefit analysis account, since cost in relation to benefit is only one among various ways in which relative importance can be assigned to a side-effect. We argue that our hypothesis explains the data Mallon presents against Machery as well as Machery’s data (and Knobe’s data, Nadelhoffer’s data, our data, and more).

Over the course of the paper, we develop a methodological critique of the preceding literature. We are particularly concerned with the effect that changing one word in a vignette (e.g. changing ‘harm’ for ‘help’ in Knobe’s original experiment) has on the way the reader takes other sentences in the vignette (e.g. ‘I don’t care at all about the environment!’).

We also introduce qualitative analysis of the comments provided by respondents and reflect on the relation between these and the respondents’ actual practice in applying the concept ‘intentional’. From this, we sketch a picture of the relation between experimental philosophy and more traditional conceptual analysis.

Enjoy.