Psychology Today Blogs - Experiments in Philosophy

Know thyself?

Edouard Machery — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:33:31 -0700

Knowledge about our own mental states seems to be the most secure thing in the world, doesn’t it? I certainly know what I feel and think right now and I know it more securely than any other thing I might know. Right? Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel begs to differ.

Skepticism about our knowledge of the external world (questioning whether we know anything about the external world) has a long tradition in philosophy. You believe that you know that you have two hands, don’t you? But you could be dreaming that you have two hands or it could be that an evil demon (of the kind considered by Descartes in the Metaphysical Meditations) is fooling you. Do you really know that you are not dreaming? Do you really know that you are not being fooled by an evil demon? Or to put it in more contemporary terms, do you really know that you are not in the matrix? And if you do not know these things, then how can you claim to know that you have two hands?

By contrast, knowledge about ourselves seems much more secure! I certainly know that I have the impression to see two hands (whether or not I am in fact seeing two hands). I certainly know that I have the impression to see my laptop (whether or not I am in fact seeing my laptop). Sure, I can be wrong about my past mental states (my memory could fail me), but I could not be wrong about my current mental states.

Schwitzgebel strongly disagrees with this line of thought. He claims that our knowledge of our own subjective experience is at best spotty and that our claims about what we are experiencing are typically unreliable. In any case, they are typically less reliable than claims about the external world! You don’t really know what you are really feeling and thinking right now!

By contrast, psychologist Russ Hurlburt believes that we can gain some accurate knowledge of ourselves, when introspection is done methodically by means of an experimental protocol he designed (Descriptive Experience Sampling). Hurlburt gives subjects a beeper that beeps randomly. When the beeper beeps, subjects are supposed to write down their current experiences. Later on, the psychologist (viz. Hurlburt) interviews these subjects and invites them to describe their past experiences in greater detail.

Recently, Schwitzgebel and Hurlburt teamed up to put Schwitzgebel’s skepticism to test. They interviewed together a subject (named “Melanie”) according to Hurlburt’s experimental protocol. Describing Inner Experience describes the results of this collaboration. Much of the book reports the interviews of Melanie done by Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel.

In the book, Schwitzgebel is constantly skeptical of the claims Melanie makes about her own experiences. In my opinion, the exchanges between Melanie, Schwitzgebel, and Hurlburt somewhat support Schwitzgebel’s skepticism. Like Schwitzgebel, I feel that Melanie is unintentionally led by Hurlburt to describe her past experiences in specific ways. But the reader of this blog ought to make up his or her own mind. This is a fascinating book and I highly recommend it.

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']

What’s the matter with a little brother/sister action?

Tamler Sommers, Ph.D. — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:41:57 -0700

Fellow "Experiments in Philosophy" blogger Jesse Prinz posted about UVA psychologist Jon Haidt's work on political differences. I want to continue exploring the philosophical implications of Haidt's work by asking whether it's all right for Julie and her brother Mark to have sex.

Here's a scenario drawn from a study Haidt conducted:

"Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide never to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it ok for them to make love?"

If you're like most people, your response is "absolutely not," but you'll find it more difficult than you think to come up with a justification. "Genetic defects from inbreeding." Yes, but they were using two forms of birth control. (And in the vanishingly small chance of pregnancy, Julie can get an abortion.) "It will mess them up emotionally." On the contrary, they enjoyed the act and it brought them closer together. "It's illegal." Not in France. "It's disgusting." For you, maybe, but not for them (obviously). Do you really want to say that private acts are morally wrong just because a lot of people find those acts disgusting? And so on.

The scenario of course is designed to ward off the most common moral objections to incest, and in doing so demonstrate that much of moral reasoning is a post-hoc affair-a way of justifying judgments that you've already reached though an emotional gut response to a situation. Although we like to think of ourselves as arriving at our moral judgments after painstaking rational deliberation, or at least some kind of deliberation anyhow, Haidt's model-the "social intuititionist model"-sees the process as just the reverse. We judge and then we reason. Reason is the press secretary of the emotions, as Haidt is fond of saying, the ex post facto spin doctor of beliefs we've arrived at through a largely intuitive process.

As Haidt recognizes, his theory can be placed within a grand tradition of moral psychology and philosophy-a return to an emphasis on the emotions which began in full force with the work of Scottish philosophers Adam Smith and David Hume. Although the more rationalist theories of Piaget and Kohlberg were dominant for much of the twentieth century, Haidt-style views have gained more and more adherants over the last 10 years. Which leads to the question: are their any philosophical/ethical implications of this model, should it be the right one? Plenty, in my view, and I'll conclude this post by mentioning just a few of them.

First, although Haidt may disagree (see my interview with him for a discussion about this issue) I believe Haidt's model supports a subjectivist view about the nature of moral beliefs. My thinking is as follows: We arrive at our judgments through our emotionally charged intuitions, intuitions that do not track any kind of objective moral truth, but instead are artifacts of our biological and cultural histories. Haidt's model reveals that there is quite a bit of self-deception bound up in moral beliefs and practice. The strength of these intuitions leads us to believe that the truth of our moral judgments is "self-evident"-think: declaration of independence-in other words, that they correspond to an objective moral reality of some kind. That is why we try so hard to justify them after the fact. But we have little to no reason to believe that this moral reality exists. (I should add that contrary to the views of newspaper columnists across the country, claiming that a view might lead to moral relativism or subjectivism is not equivalent to saying that the view is false. This is not a reductio ad absurdum. If Haidt's model is vindicated scientifically, and it does indeed entail that moral relativism or subjectivism is true, then we have to accept it. Rejecting a theory just because you feel uncomfortable about its implications is a far more skeptical or nihilistic stance than anything I've discussed in this post.)

Second, and less abstractly, I think it would make sense to subject our own values to far more critical scrutiny than we're accustomed to doing. If Haidt is right, our values may not be on the secure footing that we believe them to be. We could very well find that upon reflection, many of our values do not reflect our considered beliefs about what makes for a good life. It's important to note that Haidt does not claim that it's impossible for reason to change our moral values or the values of others. He just believes that this kind of process happens far less frequently than we believe, and furthermore that when values are affected by reason, it is because reason triggers a new emotional response which in turn starts a new chain of justification.

Finally, I think we might become a little more tolerant of the moral views of others (within limits of course-sometimes too much tolerance is tantamount to suicide). Everyone is morally motivated, as Haidt says: liberals should stop thinking of conservatives as motivated only by greed and racism. And conservatives should stop thinking of liberals as-as Jesse Prinz puts it in his post-"either tree-hugging fools or calculating agents of moral degeneracy." More importantly, if Haidt is correct, we must recognize even the people we consider to be the epitome of pure evil-the Islamic fundamentalists who engineered 9/11 for example-are motivated by moral goals, however distorted we find them to be. As Haidt told me in our interview:

"One of the most psychologically stupid things anyone ever said is that the 9/11 terrorists did this because they hate our freedom. That's just idiotic. Nobody says: "They're free over there. I hate that. I want to kill them." They did this because they hate us, they're angry at us for many reasons, and terrorism and violence are "moral" actions, by which I don't mean morally right, I mean morally motivated."

It seems plausible that in order to shape our policies properly, we need to have an accurate understanding of the moral motivations of the people with whom we're at war.

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!

Are Conservatives Stupid or Evil?

Jesse Prinz, Ph.D. — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:11:20 -0700

Liberals tend to think that conservatives are either stupid or evil. They see George W. Bush as a buffoon and Dick Cheney as a nefarious architect of doom. These two options strike liberals as the on1y possible explanations for why someone would adopt a conservative agenda. Conservatives must be either be confused about what morality demands of us in the political sphere, or they must recognize the demands of morality and simply ignore those demands, in pursuit of power or lucre. Conservatives have no more a flattering conception of liberals. For their vantage point, liberals either look hopelessly naïve (read "stupid") or dangerously corrupted (read "evil"). Liberals are either tree-hugging fools or calculating agents of moral degeneracy. Why is this?

One answer is that liberals and conservatives each make the same false assumption about the other side: they assume that their opponents share the same basic moral values. Suppose you and I share the same basic values, but you advocate some policy that I oppose. That means one of us is either making a mistake about what our shared values entail or willfully pursuing something we know to be immoral. One of us is stupid or evil. But there is another possibility: perhaps we have some different basic values. Perhaps we are both pursuing exactly what our values demand of us, but, since those values differ, we are pursuing different political agendas.

The idea that liberals and conservatives have some different basic values gains support from recent psychological research. For example, in a recent issue of Science, psychologist Jonathan Haidt reports that conservatives are deeply concerned about factors that fall outside of liberal morality. For liberals, morality is pretty much about harm and justice. To decide whether a policy is wrong, they want to know whether any one will be hurt by it and whether it will be fair to all those affected. Conservative care about harm and justice too, but they also care about three things that liberals tend to ignore: purity, respect for authority, and loyalty to the ingroup. Consider gay sex. A liberal will say, as long as no one is harmed, we should not prohibit gay sex; indeed such a prohibition would be unfair. A conservative might say that gay sex can be prohibited on the grounds that it is impure ("an unnatural act"). Or consider flag burning. A liberal will again say: no one is harmed, and everyone has the right to self-expression. Conservatives will say that flag burning is an act of desecration that disrespects the authority of this great nation. Or take preemptive war and regime change. Liberals will caution that it is bad to harm others and unjust to threaten the autonomy of other nations. Conservatives will focus on the threat that others pose to us here at home, and they will plaster their cars with stickers that say "support our troops," showing deep concern for the ingroup. The political agendas of liberals and conservative differ, because conservatives have some core values that are not part of liberal morality. Political disputes are not the result of ignorance or iniquity. Both sides are advocating policies that follow logically from their divergent moral values.

Other researchers have found further examples of divergence. The Berkeley linguist George Lakoff argues that liberals and conservatives base their political views on fundamentally different metaphors of how to run a society. For both, a government should be like a family, but for liberals, the ideal family is one that is run by a nurturing parent who forgives mistakes and wants all of her children to flourish and have new experiences. For conservatives, the ideal family is run by a stern parent, who emphasizes accountability and self-reliance, not self-expression. Think June Clever vs. Ward Clever. When people stray, liberals offer second chances and cite external influences; conservatives favor discipline and say three strikes and you're out. Lakoff argues that these different ideals inform many political debates. To liberals, conservatives appear inconsistent when they oppose abortion and favor the death penalty. In reality, both views derive from the same conservative principle: if a person does something imprudent (getting pregnant or committing a capital crime), that person should deal with the consequences. The abortion debate does not hinge on a scientific or theological debate about the beginning of life; it reflects different conceptions of responsibility.

Findings like this have important implications for understanding politics. Liberals and conservatives never seem to convince each other. They incessantly present arguments for their views on television and talk radio, but it's rare to see anyone getting persuaded to join the opposing side. The arguments used by spinners and editorialists serve more to rally the base than to convince the opposition. Liberals and conservatives are equally intelligent and they have access to the same facts, but they arrive at opposing views because they value different things. To this extent, cross-party political debate is a bit of a charade. There can be no consensus if the sides value different things. At best, the sides can look for some overlapping values and find rare islands of agreement or they can compromise and agree to tolerate policies that favor the opposition, provided the concessions aren't too great.

The findings also have important philosophical implications. Philosophers have traditionally assumed that there is a single morality shared by all people. Some philosophers think that morality has a rational foundation that can be discovered by intelligent reflection, while others presume it is hard wired into human nature. The fact that liberals and conservatives fail to agree, despite their intelligence, moral concern, and access to information, suggests that the traditional philosophical picture is mistaken. There are multiple moralities. Some moral values may have biological roots, but experience determines which values get emphasized, and, as in the case of liberals, some biologically rooted dispositions (such as preferential treatment of the ingroup) never become central aspects of morality. Most likely, we catch values from those around us, through processes of social conformity, emotional conditioning, imitative learning, and mere exposure. Moral values correlate with demographic and geographic variables. If morality reflected something more universal or rational, there wouldn't be red states and blue states. Once acquired, moral values are resilient to change through argument (when was the last time Rush Limbaugh convinced a liberal?). As a result, liberals and conservatives live in somewhat different moral worlds, and none of the arguments used in political discourse will bring us to total consensus. Failure to appreciate this simple fact leads to confusion and name-calling on both sides.

For more on these themes, see:

Haidt, J. (2007). The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology. Science, 316, 998-1002.

Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

What's Innate and What's Not? And Should We Care?

Edouard Machery — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:25:07 -0700

Philosophers and psychologists often debate about whether our beliefs, emotions, desires, values, etc., are innate or whether they are learned. But does this type of debate make sense? Paul Griffiths, Stefan Linquist and I have argued that it does not!

It is very common to hear psychologists and philosophers say that some idea or belief is innate. Psychologist Paul Bloom, for instance, has argued that we have an innate disposition to be dualist, while, following John Mikhail, psychologist Marc Hauser has proposed in his noted book Moral Minds that we have an innate moral faculty (for a good illustration, see also Joshua Knobe and Paul Bloom’s debate on Bloggingshead.tv).

The contrast between innate and learned psychological traits has naturally a very very long history. The contrast is already present in Plato’s Republic. You might remember that Plato argues that the souls of men are made of different metal (gold, argent, bronze): in substance, the idea is that people’s behaviors often express their inner natures; these behaviors are innate and are largely impervious to people's environment. Good for you if you have a soul made out of gold, too bad if your soul is made out of bronze (my case, I am afraid)! Of course, whether our psychology is innate or learned was also at the core of the controversy between Descartes and Locke.

The fact that the notions used by philosophers and psychologists to think about the ontogeny of our minds have been around for 2,500 years should make us skeptic that these notions are really appropriate for the job. After all, one would think that the way we study and understand development should have made some progress over the centuries!

And indeed, biology and the philosophy of biology suggest that the contrast between innateness and learned is very confused. Following debates in ethology most biologists and philosophers of biology reject the notion of innateness (for a classic formulation of this point, see, e.g., Paul Griffiths’s What is Innateness?).

But if the notion of an innate trait really has no scientific value, why do philosophers and psychologists (all very clever people!) still debate about whether psychological traits are innate or learned? This is the very question that Paul Griffiths, Stefan Linquist and I have been investigating experimentally. We have shown that the idea that some behaviors express animals’ and people’s deep nature is part and parcel of a folk theory of development (maybe a cross-cultural theory, but so far we have no evidence about this). (You can read a draft of the paper here). If that’s true, the notion of innateness is a folk concept that illegitimately masquerades as a genuine scientific notion, and debates about innateness are pseudo-debates! Psychologists should stop looking for innate traits and philosophers should stop debating about ideas; beliefs and values are innate.

No Soul? I Can Live with That. No Free Will? AHHHHH!!!

Tamler Sommers, Ph.D. — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:56:25 -0700

Imagine a world where no one believed in free will. Life would no longer have meaning, right? We’d be robots, puppets on a string, living a mockery of a real human existence. And why be moral? After all, if we do something bad, we didn’t freely choose to do it, and so we cannot be morally responsible for that choice. So why bother?

In part because of the perceived ethical hazards I’ve mentioned, the same philosophers and scientists who are happy to reject God, an immaterial soul, and even absolute morality, cannot bring themselves to embrace free will. “Tell it like is” atheists Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for example, insist that we have the kind of free will that would make us genuinely morally responsible for our actions. (Though it’s possible that Dawkins pulls back here…) One well known philosopher—the University of Haifa’s Saul Smilansky—though a free will skeptic himself, argues that we should not broadcast the truth of his position to the public at large. Why, you ask? Because, well… see here. It appears that philosophers, scientists, and most everyone else regard positions that deny free will much like the wife of the Bishop of Worcester regarded Darwinism: “My dear, let us hope it isn’t true! But if it is, let us pray it does not become widely known!”

Until recently, however, there was no empirical support whatsoever for this pessimism about a widespread denial of free will. Then came the 2008 study by Volhs and Schooler in Psychological Science—a study that was pounced upon by the popular press. (See here for one example.) Briefly, the authors gave two groups tasks which featured opportunities to cheat, including one where they could pocket some extra money for doing so. The first group was given an excerpt from Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis which stated that scientists had denounced the notion of free will. The control group read another excerpt that did not refer to free will. The subjects in the first group were more likely to cheat on their tasks. The authors end their paper by asking: “Does the belief that forces outside the self determine behavior drain the motivation to resist the temptation to cheat, inducing a “why bother” mentality?...Or perhaps denying free will simply provides the ultimate excuse to behave as one likes.”

Does this mean that many of the fears about a world without free will are justified? I think the answer is no.

My goal here is not to trash this study, or even to nitpick about the methods, but rather to argue that the results, even when accepted at face value, don’t shed light on the most important questions about the implications of denying free will. The reason is simple: The way people might react in the short term upon having their belief in free will challenged likely has very little bearing on than how they would behave over the course of their lives once the initial shock wears off. (Having your worldview shaken up will certainly have some short-term negative effects on behavior.Right after Grady Little inexplicably allowed Pedro give up the lead to the Yankees in game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, I would have done a lot worse than cheat on a psychology quiz!)

In sum, there's no reason to think that our behavior just after hearing that a cherished belief is false has any bearing whatsoever on how we'll act after further reflection. Has there been a single study that documents such a correlation? If there is none, then it seems that this study only shows that it’s undesirable for people to find out there's no free will fifteen minutes before they submit their tax return.What really matters is how people would handle this belief in the long run. Here is my prediction on that front. First, there would be a good amount of variation. Some people would shrug off the belief in free will without a second thought, right away. But some wouldn’t. Those on the dark end of the spectrum might get depressed—at first. They might think their lives had little meaning. They might confuse determinism with fatalism. They might think: what’s the point of accomplishing something if I won’t be morally responsible for the accomplishment? They might not stay late at work, or show up for their community service duty that week. They might spend their first few days watching eight straight hours of Law and Order and eating quarts of Starbucks ice cream. But then they would stop and think. Why was I really leading the life I was leading? Why was I trying to become a doctor, philosopher, novelist, snowboarder, actor, good father, good wife, generous person, philanthropist? Was it so that I could say that freely chose to be those things, that I was morally responsible, that deserved praise, for being these things? Was it so I could sit back one day and say: “man, it’s nice to be morally responsible for being an accomplished writer who gave a lot of money to charity, and who was also a good father to my daughter”? No. It’s because I want to become these things, because that would give my life the most fulfillment, the deepest happiness, and because I was in a position to help other people achieve their goals. That’s enough, isn’t it? So my prediction is that the masses can handle the truth, just not, in some cases, right away. (A helpful analogy might be what happens to observant theists once they lose their faith.) Anyone who is reflective enough to understand the reasoning behind arguments against free will should be able to understand that living morally and pursuing real goals are good things even if you don’t deserve praise for doing them.

That’s my prediction, an optimistic one. But how do you test it? The whole point of my prediction is that it will take some time, some reflection, to understand that living without free will is not that bad. By definition that means that an experiment that disabuses people of free will and then tests their reaction cannot support or undermine this prediction one way or the other. You could imagine a series of surveys over the course of a few years given to people who seem to have genuinely denied free will. A “35-Up” for free will deniers. But that would be methodologically challenging, if not outright impossible. At the same time, it is an empirical claim, in the same way that the pessimistic claim is empirical. So if we’re going to answer these questions, we’ll need empirical support. Any ideas?

(For some optimistic accounts of living without free will, see Derk Pereboom’s Living without Free Will. See also Greene and Cohen’s article “For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything,” my paper “The Objective Attitude” (subscription required here, draft here), my interview with Galen Strawson in The Believer, and a host of essays and articles on the fantastic naturalism.org.)

Donating money makes us happy. Is that why we do it?

David Pizarro — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:57:55 -0700

As my second official post, I'll point our readers to a finding that recently appeared in Science. Elizabeth Dunn (UBC) and her colleagues demonstrated that giving money to others makes us more happy overall than using that money for ourselves.

While not emphasized in their paper, I think these findings raise an intriguing question that turns out to have a deep history in philosophy and in psychology: Do we ever act in a truly altruistic fashion? Many social scientists answer in the negative. For them, the only plausible motivation for any human action is self-interest. Now, if I take the Dunn et al. findings at face value, and decide that I'm going to start donating to charity solely because it will improve my happiness, I'm acting selfishly am I not? So is it possible that the only reason we do things that appear altruistic on the surface is for the happiness they bring us? That helping is just one among many things we can do to feel good (eat good food, have sex, go to a movie), and that's why we do it? (This question directly led to one of the most fruitful debates in social psychology--between those who think that we sometimes act solely out of concern for others and those who think we only help others for the hedonic rewards it provides). I'll let others chime in on the possibility of true altruism...

What Experimental Philosophy means for Traditional Psychology

David Pizarro — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:36:50 -0700

I have a confession to make. Although our group of bloggers is described as "a band of philosophers," I'm faking the funk, so to speak. In real life, I'm a psychologist through and through. So I'm thankful to my real-philosopher colleagues for giving me a "pass" to contribute to this blog (and to the field). At the end of the day, I like to think that experimental philosophy is really social psychology with a fresh set of questions to investigate.

But still, what is a psychologist doing on a blog about experimental philosophy? Aside from the required quota of one psychologist per Psychology Today blog (okay, I just made that up), here's a more interesting, albeit indirect answer. As Joshua explained in his first post, there didn't used to be much of a distinction between philosophy and psychology. In fact, in my own institution the first 20 years of psychology were taught from within the department of philosophy. For many reasons, philosophy and psychology soon parted ways--this made sense given that psychology was struggling to become a scientific discipline in its own right. But it turns out that the divide between the two wasn't very deep. Psychologists never stopped being influenced by philosophers (as most evident in field of cognitive science, which, among other disciplines, includes philosophy and cognitive psychology), and philosophers continued to write about psychological matters.

My career choice was a direct result of the ongoing relationship between philosophy and psychology. One of the primary reasons I originally became interested in psychology was because I was intrigued by some of the "big" questions about how the mind works that I had been exposed to by reading philosophy as an undergraduate. Rather than go to graduate school in philosophy, however, I was excited about the possibility of discovering new things about the mind through experimentation, which led me to pursue training in empirical psychology. But I couldn't shake the feeling that philosophers were asking fundamentally interesting questions (sometimes far more interesting than the psychology I was reading), so I kept a not-so-secret life as an amateur philosopher.

So when I first heard about experimental philosophy (through Joshua Knobe, fellow blogger, whose work I knew about because of his publications in social psychology journals), I was very excited that a group of philosophers were turning their attention toward the empirical process. But I was especially excited that an empirically trained psychologist like me, who was never able to shake his love for philosophy, might get a chance to collaborate with people who were asking such interesting questions. As it turned out from browsing Thomas Nadelhoffer's website (a great place to find experimental philosophers discussing their work with each other), I shared research interests with many experimental philosophers; I was doing work that they considered experimental philosophy, and they were doing work that I considered social psychology.
 

What continues to excite me about experimental philosophy is not only the interesting questions this group of philosophers ask, but the tools they bring to the empirical approach. As psychology students we are trained to be rigorous in our empirical approach (experimental design, methods, statistical analyses, etc.). Traditional philosophy has little need for these tools, but philosophers receive training that emphasizes a clarity and rigor of thought that can be invaluable to a social scientist constructing and testing theories. It is not an insult to either field to say that there is a clear benefit to collaboration. (And I'm clearly not the first to realize this. We're talking about philosophy on a website called Psychology Today, after all.)

That said, in my role as token psychologist (which I embrace with humility), I'll play to my strengths and talk a bit more often about findings from my own field (social psychology) and how they relate to experimental philosophy.

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!