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16It’s personal: The effect of personal value on utilitarian moral judgmentsJudgment and Decision Making 11 (4): 326-331. 2016.We investigated whether the personal importance of objects influences utilitarian decision-making in which damaging property is necessary to produce an overall positive outcome. In Experiment 1, participants judged saving five objects by destroying a sixth object to be less acceptable when the action required destroying the sixth object directly (rather than as a side-effect) and the objects were personally important (rather than unimportant). In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that utilitarian ju…Read more
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40Parallels in Preschoolers' and Adults' Judgments About Ownership Rights and Bodily RightsCognitive Science 39 (1): 184-198. 2015.Understanding ownership rights is necessary for socially appropriate behavior. We provide evidence that preschoolers' and adults' judgments of ownership rights are related to their judgments of bodily rights. Four-year-olds and adults evaluated the acceptability of harmless actions targeting owned property and body parts. At both ages, evaluations did not vary for owned property or body parts. Instead, evaluations were influenced by two other manipulations—whether the target belonged to the agen…Read more
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736How Do Children Represent Pretend Play?In Marjorie Taylor (ed.), Oxford handbook of the development of imagination, Oxford University Press. pp. 186-195. 2013.How do young children represent pretend play? One possibility is that recognizing and representing pretend play depends on children’s ability to infer the mental states of the person engaged in pretend play (mentalist account). The two dominant alternative possibilities are that children view as a distinctive form of non-representational behavior (behavioral account), and that children represent pretense by temporarily treating objects as though they have fictional or make-believe properties (fl…Read more
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499Winners and Losers in the Folk Epistemology of LotteriesIn James R. Beebe (ed.), Advances in Experimental Epistemology, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 45-69. 2014.We conducted five experiments that reveal some main contours of the folk epistemology of lotteries. The folk tend to think that you don't know that your lottery ticket lost, based on the long odds ("statistical cases"); by contrast, the folk tend to think that you do know that your lottery ticket lost, based on a news report ("testimonial cases"). We evaluate three previous explanations for why people deny knowledge in statistical cases: the justification account, the chance account, and the sta…Read more
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408Ownership RightsIn Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Blackwell. pp. 247-256. 2016.A chapter reviewing recent experimental work on people's conceptions of ownership rights.
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42Non-interpretative metacognition for true beliefsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (2): 146-147. 2009.Mindreading often requires access to beliefs, so the mindreading system should be able to self-attribute beliefs, even without self-interpretation. This proposal is consistent with Carruthers' claim that mindreading and metacognition depend on the same cognitive system and the same information as one another; and it may be more consistent with this claim than is Carruthers' account of metacognition
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2577The folk conception of knowledgeCognition 124 (3): 272-283. 2012.How do people decide which claims should be considered mere beliefs and which count as knowledge? Although little is known about how people attribute knowledge to others, philosophical debate about the nature of knowledge may provide a starting point. Traditionally, a belief that is both true and justified was thought to constitute knowledge. However, philosophers now agree that this account is inadequate, due largely to a class of counterexamples (termed ‘‘Gettier cases’’) in which a person’s ju…Read more
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54A developmental shift in processes underlying successful belief‐desire reasoningCognitive Science 28 (6): 963-977. 2004.Young children’s failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the most likely content for the belief to be attributed from amongst several competing contents [Leslie, A. M., & Polizzi, P. (1998). Developmental Scienc…Read more
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27Identical but not interchangeable: Preschoolers view owned objects as non-fungibleCognition 146 16-21. 2016.Owned objects are typically viewed as non-fungible-they cannot be freely interchanged. We report three experiments (total N=312) demonstrating this intuition in preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, children considered an agent who takes one of two identical objects and leaves the other for a peer. Children viewed this as acceptable when the agent took his own item, but not when he took his peer's item. In Experiment 2, children considered scenarios where one agent took property from another…Read more
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48For the greater goods? Ownership rights and utilitarian moral judgmentCognition 133 (1): 79-84. 2014.People often judge it unacceptable to directly harm a person, even when this is necessary to produce an overall positive outcome, such as saving five other lives. We demonstrate that similar judgments arise when people consider damage to owned objects. In two experiments, participants considered dilemmas where saving five inanimate objects required destroying one. Participants judged this unacceptable when it required violating another’s ownership rights, but not otherwise. They also judged that…Read more
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94Taking ‘know’ for an answer: A reply to Nagel, San Juan, and MarCognition 129 (3): 662-665. 2013.Nagel, San Juan, and Mar report an experiment investigating lay attributions of knowledge, belief, and justification. They suggest that, in keeping with the expectations of philosophers, but contra recent empirical findings [Starmans, C. & Friedman, O. (2012). The folk conception of knowledge. Cognition, 124, 272–283], laypeople consistently deny knowledge in Gettier cases, regardless of whether the beliefs are based on ‘apparent’ or ‘authentic’ evidence. In this reply, we point out that Nagel e…Read more
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54Determining who owns what: Do children infer ownership from first possession?Cognition 107 (3): 829-849. 2008.A basic problem of daily life is determining who owns what. One way that people may solve this problem is by relying on a ‘first possession’ heuristic, according to which the first person who possesses an object is its owner, even if others subsequently possess the object. We investigated preschoolers’ use of this heuristic in five experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, 3- and 4-year-olds inferred that an object was owned by the character who possessed it first, even though another character subse…Read more
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24Acquiring ownership and the attribution of responsibilityCognition 124 (2): 201-208. 2012.How is ownership established over non-owned things? We suggest that people may view ownership as a kind of credit given to agents responsible for making possession of a non-owned object possible. On this view, judgments about the establishment of ownership depend on attributions of responsibility. We report three experiments showing that people’s judgments about the establishment of ownership are influenced by an agent’s intent and control in bringing about an outcome, factors that also affect a…Read more