Psychology Today Blogs - Joshua Knobe

Torn Between Left and Right

Joshua Knobe — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:53:04 -0700

Suppose that one person happens to be born with more talent than another and is therefore able to accomplish more with the same effort. Will people think that it is fair for this person to make more money?

At first, it may seem that the answer is obvious. Some people are more to the right of the political spectrum, others are more to the left. Those who are more to the right will say that the person who accomplishes more deserves to make more money, while those who are more to the left will say that it would be more fair for the two to receive equal pay.

But perhaps things are not as simple as they seem. A new experimental philosophy study by Chris Freiman and Shaun Nichols points to an interesting new angle on this traditional debate. Freiman and Nichols gave subjects precisely the question at the beginning of this post -- but with a twist. Subjects were randomly assigned either to receive 'abstract' question or a 'concrete.'

Subjects who had been assigned to receive an abstract question were asked:

Suppose that some people make more money than others solely because they have genetic advantages.

Please tell us whether you agree with the following statement:

- It is fair that those genetically-advantaged people make more money than others.

Meanwhile, subjects who had been assigned to receive a concrete question were asked:

Suppose that Amy and Beth both want to be professional jazz singers. They both practice singing equally hard. Although jazz singing is the greatest natural talent of both Amy and Beth, Beth's vocal range and articulation is naturally better than Amy's because of differences in their genetics. Solely as a result of this genetic advantage, Beth's singing is much more impressive. As a result, Beth attracts bigger audiences and hence gets more money than Amy.

Please tell us whether you agree with the following statement:

- It is fair that Beth makes more money than Amy.

Surprisingly, subjects who were given the abstract question said that it was not fair, but subjects who were given the concrete question said that it actually was fair! In other words, it seems that each individual person is torn between left and right. People seem to have a kind of leftist intuition in the abstract but to move to the right when they turn to more concrete cases. Perhaps the differences we observe between the views of different individuals are due in part to the degree to which they hold on to this abstract principle.

Can the mentally ill be to blame?

Joshua Knobe — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:03:53 -0700

Suppose you discovered that someone has committed a horribly violent crime. And now suppose I tell you one additional fact about the person who performed this act: he or she is mentally ill. In fact, suppose I tell you that the reason he performed this act he is suffering from damage to a particular area of his brain. Would you still conclude that he could be morally responsible for what he had done?

At this point, you might be guessing that no one would hold an agent morally responsible in such a circumstance. After all, how could we hold someone morally responsible for behavior that was clearly the result of neurological illness? Surely, anyone would agree in such a case that the agent is not to blame for what he has done!

Guess again. As Matthew Hutson has recently emphasized, people show a depressingly persistent tendency to attribute moral responsibility -- a tendency that persists even in the face of strong theoretical reasons to reach the opposite conclusion.

A particularly striking example of this tendency emerges in a recent study from Eric Mandelbaum, David Ripley and Felipe De Brigard. In their study, subjects were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Subjects in the 'abstract' condition received the following story:

Dennis has recently found out from his doctor that he has a neurological condition that has caused him to behave in certain ways. Were someone else to have this neurological condition then that person would have had to behave in the same ways as Dennis.

Just as you might expect, most subjects who received this story said that Dennis was not morally responsible for the behaviors he performs. But don't be too swift to assume that people with neurological conditions will get off the hook. Mandelbaum and colleagues also included a 'concrete' condition, in which subjects were told:

Dennis has recently found out from his doctor that he has a neurological condition that has, in the past, caused him to rape women. Were someone else to have this neurological condition then that person would have had to behave in the same ways as Dennis.

When the story is made more concrete in this way, people's intuitions change radically. They end up concluding that Dennis actually is morally responsible for what he'd done.

So it seems that, no matter how much we tell people about damage to an agent's brain, the impulse to blame will get the last word. It is as though people are thinking: 'Well, he does have a neurological condition... but then again, someone ended up getting raped. We just can't let this go by without declaring at least one person to be morally responsible!'

[Eric Mandelbaum, David Ripley & Felipe De Brigard, 'Responsibility and the Brain Sciences']

Would You be Willing to Enter the Matrix?

Joshua Knobe — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:13:47 -0700

Long before Hollywood gave us the Matrix, philosophers were wondering whether it would be right to choose a life of illusion if one could thereby have a more pleasurable existence. The usual way of framing this problem was to ask the reader to imagine that he or she had the opportunity to enter an 'experience machine.' If you entered this machine, you would have the experience of being a successful rock star, living a fabulous life filled with interesting friends, adoring fans, and fascinating artistic challenges... but, ultimately, it would all be an illusion. In reality, you would just be sitting in a machine somewhere having a kind of hallucination that all of these wonderful things were occurring.

The traditional view was that people would choose not to enter such a machine and that this fact showed that people care not only about having pleasant experiences but also about being in touch with reality.

The experimental philosopher Felipe De Brigard has now run an interesting series of studies challenging this traditional conclusion. He suggests that people's unwillingness to enter the experience machine might be due not so much to an interest in staying in touch with reality as to a phenomenon called the status quo bias. The basic idea here is just that people have a bias toward choosing options that allow everything to stay the same as it was. If you're outside the machine now, you might well prefer to stay outside the machine just as a way of avoiding change.

To test this hypothesis, De Brigard gave people a story that was, in essence, an inverted version of the experience machine story. People were told to imagine discovering that they were already in the experience machine. So you would be told to imagine discovering that you aren't actually an intellectually curious person reading about philosophy on a Psychology Today blog. Instead, you are actually a much more tedious individual leading a much less interesting life, but someone gave you an opportunity a number of years ago to enter an experience machine... and after you agreed, he erased all of your old memories so that you came to think that you were living the life you are leading right now. If all that turned out to be the case, would you prefer to stay in the machine, or would you want to leave it for the real world?

When De Brigard gave subjects the original experience machine story and this modified version, he obtained a surprising result. Subjects who had been given the original story said that they would prefer to remain in reality, but subjects who were given the modified version said that they wanted to stay in the machine!

Do you need to have a body to have a mind?

Joshua Knobe — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:18:30 -0700

Philosophers have long debated the relationship between mind and body. Some have said that our minds reside outside the body in some sort of immaterial 'soul'; others have suggested that the mind actually arises entirely from the workings of our physical body (especially the brain).

But perhaps there is another interesting question here. Even if we don't know how the mind really relates to the body, we can ask how people think the two are connected. This is where experimental philosophy comes in.

In recent work, philosophers Bryce Huebner, Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery have asked whether people might think one needs to have a body to have a mind. They proceeded by giving people questions about a creature that does not have a human body but still seems to do some kinds of human-like things -- a robot. The people in their experiments said that a robot could think about math problems and know various facts about the world but that robots could never actually feel anything. But here is the surprising part. Huebner then asked people about a creature that has a CPU in its head but has an ordinary human body. When people were asked that question, they were significantly more likely to say that the creature could have feelings! In other words, it seems like people think the ability to have feelings depends in some way on having a body.

Jesse Prinz and I tried a similar experiment with another sort of creature that seems to perform actions without having a body -- a corporation. If you stop to think about it, corporations can pursue goals and take certain actions... but the corporation itself can never actually have a body. Sure enough, people were happy to say that Microsoft Corporation could 'intend to release a product' or that it could 'believe that Google was one of its main competitors.' But people definitely didn't think it was ok to say that Microsoft could 'get depressed' or 'feel upset.' The principle here seems to go something like: no body, no feelings.

Researchers are still trying to figure out what these findings mean, but it is definitely beginning to look like people's whole way of thinking about each other's feelings is connected in some way with the body. One recent study even showed that people believed that God (the ultimate disembodied being) is not capable of truly feeling emotions!

Introducing Experimental Philosophy

Joshua Knobe — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:47:04 -0700

It may seem a bit odd that a magazine like Psychology Today is sponsoring a blog by a band of philosophers. After all, isn't philosophy supposed to be something entirely separate from psychology? Aren't philosophers just supposed to sit in their armchairs pondering the great imponderables, while psychologists busy themselves delving into the actual facts of human thought and behavior?

Well, yes and no. It is true that many philosophers regard questions about how people actually think and feel as completely irrelevant to their discipline, but there has always been a strain within philosophy that concerns itself with questions about what people are actually like. Philosophers who work within this strain suppose that an important aspect of going after the big questions -- questions about morality, free will, consciousness, and so forth -- is to think deeply about the facts of human psychology.

In recent years, certain philosophers have sought to take this approach as far as it could go. Thus arose the movement usually called experimental philosophy. Philosophers working within this movement abandon their armchairs to actually go out and conduct systematic experiments. (For more on experimental philosophy, see the articles in the New York Times and Slate.)

In the months to come, we'll be blogging about some of the new research that has come out of this approach and, more generally, about how experimental studies can shed light on the age-old problems of philosophy. In the meantime, we'll leave you with something less intellectually demanding -- the experimental philosophy music video.