Experimental Philosophy

Collective Agency: From Intuitions to Mechanisms

Dear X-philies,

My colleague Benoit Dubreuil and I recently finished a paper that you might be interested in. We discuss the question of  collective agency and show how, in the first sections how some  x-phi  experiments (e.g. Knobe and Prinz) plays an important role in this debate. Comments welcome !

Hardy-Vallée,B & Dubreuil, B.  Collective Agency: From Intuitions to Mechanisms(pdf)

Abstract:

The debate on the nature of collective agency has been at the center of the philosophy of the social sciences for the last century. In recent years, philosophy of language has been the dominant approach to a debate that has often been reduced to the question of the legitimacy of interpreting collective agency on the basis of folk-psychological categories like belief and desire. In this article, we argue that the debate between individualists and collectivists is currently stagnating, but can be revived by a more empirically sensitive approach to agency. Understanding agents, collective or individual, requires an understanding of the mechanisms that bring about and maintain agency. Collective agents, we suggest, are legitimate constructs in social ontology, but their agency is special. Although they implement control mechanisms similar to that of individual agents, they do not have a conscious first-person point of view. Therefore, like individualists, we recognize the ontological salience of individual agency, and like collectivists, we recognize the soundness of collective agents. However, we reject the folk-psychological account of agency (shared by individualists and collectivists) and favor a mechanistic one.

The "Deep Self" Model

Hi all,

Like many others,  I've contracted a bad case of "Knobe Effect" fever!  I've written a paper on a model, which I call the Deep Self Model, that attempts to explain a variety of asymmetries in intentionality and responsibility judgments using a unified framework.

Quoting from the abstract, "The model proposes that people make an intuitive distinction between two parts of an agent’s psychology, a Deep Self that contains the agent’s stable and central psychological attitudes and a Superficial Self that contains attitudes that are less central and more fleeting".  An intriguing aspect of the model is that the distinction between an agent's Deep Self and Superficial Self is one already made by, or is implicit in the work of, a number of philosophers including Harry Frankfurt, Gary Watson and others.  Thus I hope the Deep Self Model will help anchor the recent asymmetry findings from the experimental literature in an already familiar and well accepted philosophical framework.

I would much welcome any comments and feedback.

-Chandra

Download sripada_the_deep_self_model_and_asymmetries_in_folk_judgments_about_intentionality_and_responsibility.doc

Moral Psychology Conference at USF

For people in the Bay Area, or those interested in making a trip to it, there will be a small conference entitled "Mind, Agency, and Emotion: New Perspectives on Moral Psychology" held at the University of San Francisco on November 9th and 10th.

Speakers will include Chrisoula Andreou, John Doris, Anne Jacobson, Jeanette Kennett, Benoit Monin, Shaun Nichols, Jenefer Robinson, and Christine Swanton.

For more information, go here. 

Experimental Social Ontology

Some people have expressed interest about experimental economics in the past. Here are some examples of how this methodology can be put to work on philosophical issues. The first one is a recently published survey article in the Philosophy Compass:

"The Philosophy of Social Science: Metaphysical and Empirical",

The second one is a working paper describing some experiments I have recently done on David Lewis's theory of conventions:

"Are There Lewis Conventions?"

Both are very much in the spirit of experimental philosophy.

It looks like I was wrong

It is now widely agreed that people's moral judgments have some impact on their intuitions about whether a behavior was performed intentionally, but there has been considerable disagreement about precisely what sort of moral judgment is having an impact here.  Is it a judgment about whether the behavior itself was morally bad?  Or about whether the agent was blameworthy?  Or about whether it was wrong for the agent to perform the action? 

In earlier work, I suggested that the relevant moral judgment was a judgment as to whether the action itself was a bad one.  This hypothesis has been put to the test in a number of subsequent experiments, and I am sorry to say that the results overwhelmingly indicate that the hypothesis is false.  Indeed, my beloved hypothesis has been falsified independently in experimental work by Cushman, Machery, Nichols, Phelan & Sarkissian, Pizarro et al., Sinnott-Armstrong et al., and Wright & Bengson.   (Unfortunately, not all of the papers are available on the web.)

But it seems to me that these studies, taken collectively, also show something of deeper importance.  It's not just that one particular hypothesis turned out to be incorrect; it's that it hasn't been possible to identify any conscious moral judgment that can explain the full range of results.  That is, it doesn't seem possible to point to some specific type of conscious moral judgment and say, 'This particular type of moral judgment explains the full range of results we have amassed thus far.' 

I now think that the best way to understand these phenomena is to posit non-conscious moral judgments.  The basic process would then go something like this: As soon we encounter a behavior, we make an automatic and extremely swift moral judgment that remains entirely shielded off from consciousness.  It is this non-conscious moral judgment that influences intuitions about intentional action.  Of course, a person can then reflect and arrive at a conscious moral judgment after further thought, but this conscious moral judgment will not affect intuitions about intentional action; those intuitions will be determined entirely by the immediate, automatic non-conscious judgment.  (For a more detailed discussion, see the later sections of this new paper.)

In any case, whether or not you decide to read the full paper, I would love to hear your thoughts on these matters.  Does the new hypothesis look like a promising one?

Experimental Economics meets Economic Anthropology

I was wondering whether aficionados of experimental philosophy have paid any attention to the emerging work at the interface of experimental economics and economic anthropology, epitomized in the book of a few years ago by Joseph Henrich, Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd and others called

Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies 

that Oxford published.  I have just started in on this, and immediately thought that there was a rich fund of material here for Exp Philers to chew over and contribute to and, given that, that you're probably already onto it.  Just let me know where I should look.  (A useful critical response from the anthropological side of the ledger can be found in Michael Chibnik's "Experimental economics in anthropology: A critical assessment" American Ethnologist May 2005, Vol. 32, No. 2: 198-209.) 

For those who haven't encountered it at all, basically it takes some standard games (e.g., the ultimatum game) and runs them in diverse societies, with some results that have been unexpected--it's moving not only from the normative perspectives provided by standard rational choice theory to experiments with American college kids, but to The Folk proper.  So it's a bit like actually ASKING the folk what they think about various decision-theoretic options, and so leaving the armchair.  Thoughts?

Intentionality and Implicit Moral Judgment

Joshua Knobe, Paul Bloom, and I have just written a short empirical piece using the 'side-effect effect' as a measure of 'implicit' moral judgments, entitled 'College students implicitly judge interracial sex and gay sex to be morally wrong.' In short, we demonstrate that while inidividuals explicitly report that certain acts are morally permissible (gay kissing and interracial sex), they still report these acts as more intentional.

Any comments would be welcome! Any errors of the analytical or otherwise philosophical sort should be directed solely to Joshua Knobe. Paul Bloom should receive complaints about psychological matters or quantitative errors. Which leaves me alone to respond to any positive comments.

And thanks to Thomas for granting access to a social psychologist...

-David

Folk Psychology Conference

York University in Toronto is hosting a one-day conference on Folk Psychology that may be of interest to some readers of this blog.   It's short notice, but you can find the conference program, as well as abstracts for the papers, HERE.

Legal Decision Theory: A Cautionary Tale

In a series of well-written and well-researched articles, Gregory Mitchell--the Sheila McDevit professor of Law at Florida State University--has launched an assualt on the behavioral law and economics movement (or as he calls it, "legal decision theory"). Legal decision theorists typcially rely on empirical research from social psychology--especially the research on heuristics and biases--to undermine some of the foundational assumptions of traditional law and economics (especially the rational actor models of human psychology and decision-making so prevalent among economists). According to Mitchel, legal decision theorists all-too-often make sweeping claims about human rationality (or lack thereof) that often go well beyond the data that have been collected. On his view, much more caution is in order. Conceding that many of the recent developments in social psychology give us reason for being suspicious of many of the main tenents of law and economics, Mitchell nevertheless thinks that legal decision theorists overstate their case--a trend that he believes may unfortunately threaten to undermine the long-term credibility of empirical research among legal theorists. Mitchell points out a number of problems with the research that is relied on by legal decision theorists--many of which are relevant to the work being done in experimental philosophy. For example, small sample sizes, the near exclusive reliance on between-subject studies, using the rational or right choice as the null-hypothesis, the overstating of the significance of "statistical significance," the dearth of meta-analyses, making inferences about individual differences based on group differences, etc. Nearly all of the worries that Mitchell expresses about legal decision theory are worries that apply equally to the kinds of studies that we experimental philosophers have relied on so far. As such, I think we would all do well to pay attention to Mitchell's important work in this area.

Folk intuitions and the Criminal Law

During the break I finally had a chance to read a few books that I had been excited to read but that for some time now had been set aside for more pressing things.  One of these books is Paul Robinson and John Darley's "Justice, Liability, and Blame: Community Views and the Criminal Law"( 1995)--a highly recommended read for any of you who, like myself until recently, have yet to do so.  One of the issues that they raise is particularly fascinating:  What is the proper relationship between folk intuitions--or, as they say, community views--and the criminal law.  More specifically, should a system of criminal law reflect the views of the community concerning condemnation, punishment, deserved liability, desert, justice, proportionality, etc.?  If so, to what degree?  If not, why not?  Robinson and Darley discuss the results of some fascinating empirical studies they ran that probed folk intuitions concerning issues as diverse as criminal attempt, self-defense,  voluntary intoxication, insanity, felony murder, and sexual offense.   Their data suggest that there is a tension between the legal code in America and folk intuitions concerning criminal culpability and the proportionality of punishment.  The existence of this sort of tension should force us to evaluate the proper relationship between a legal code and public opinion.   Rather than attempt to address such a broad, yet important, question, I will focus instead on the pending Surpreme Court decision in the Acuna death penalty case--(out of where else--Texas!)--involving the Constitutionality of executing someone who committed the crime before the age 18.  According to the landmark Furman v. Georgia (1972), a punishment is cruel and unusual under the 8th Amendment if it is either:  a) severe to the point of degrading either the criminal or society, b) arbitrarily inflicted, c) unacceptable to contemporary society, or d) excessive or disproportional.  For present purposes,  (c) is the most salient.  If it turned out that opinion polls showed that a majority of American citizens living in states that have capital punishment are opposed to executing juvenile offenders, is that a good reason--in and of itself--for judging that these executions are unconstitutional?   Should a legal code be subject to the waxing and waning of the beliefs of "the people" in this way?  What is going to count as a majority in these sorts of situations?  Does world opinion matter and should it?  By asking these sorts of questions, we are forced to examine the proper relationship between folk intuitions, the criminal law, and public policy--thereby cutting across issues in moral, political, and legal philosophy.   During the next few weeks I will be running some studies in an effort to get at folk intuitions concerning the legal notion of transferred intent--a notion that I think conflicts with our ordinary notions of intent and intentional action.  In the meantime, I wanted to probe each of your intuitions concerning some of the issues that Robinson and Darley raise.