•  2412
    The folk conception of knowledge
    Cognition 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
  •  1046
    Children hold owners responsible when property causes harm
    with Celina K. Bowman-Smith and Brandon W. Goulding
    Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 147 (8): 1191-1199. 2018.
    Since ancient times, legal systems have held owners responsible for harm caused by their property. Across 4 experiments, we show that children aged 3–7 also hold owners responsible for such harm. Older children judge that owners should repair harm caused by property, and younger children may do this as well. Younger and older children judge that owners should apologize for harm, even when children do not believe the owners allowed the harm to occur. Children are also as likely to hold owners res…Read more
  •  1036
    Knowledge before belief
    with Jonathan Phillips, Wesley Buckwalter, Fiery Cushman, Alia Martin, John Turri, Laurie Santos, and Joshua Knobe
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.
    Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide ra…Read more
  •  670
    How 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
  •  469
    Knowledge central: A central role for knowledge attributions in social evaluations
    with John Turri and Ashley Keefner
    Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 70 (3): 504-515. 2017.
    Five experiments demonstrate the central role of knowledge attributions in social evaluations. In Experiments 1–3, we manipulated whether an agent believes, is certain of, or knows a true proposition and asked people to rate whether the agent should perform a variety of actions. We found that knowledge, more so than belief or certainty, leads people to judge that the agent should act. In Experiments 4–5, we investigated whether attributions of knowledge or certainty can explain an important find…Read more
  •  443
    Is probabilistic evidence a source of knowledge?
    with John Turri
    Cognitive Science 39 (5): 1062-1080. 2015.
    We report a series of experiments examining whether people ascribe knowledge for true beliefs based on probabilistic evidence. Participants were less likely to ascribe knowledge for beliefs based on probabilistic evidence than for beliefs based on perceptual evidence or testimony providing causal information. Denial of knowledge for beliefs based on probabilistic evidence did not arise because participants viewed such beliefs as unjustified, nor because such beliefs leave open the possibility of…Read more
  •  415
    The development of territory-based inferences of ownership
    with Brandon W. Goulding
    Cognition 177 (C): 142-149. 2018.
    Legal systems often rule that people own objects in their territory. We propose that an early-developing ability to make territory-based inferences of ownership helps children address informational demands presented by ownership. Across 6 experiments (N = 504), we show that these inferences develop between ages 3 and 5 and stem from two aspects of the psychology of ownership. First, we find that a basic ability to infer that people own objects in their territory is already present at age 3 (Expe…Read more
  •  412
    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
  •  359
    Ownership Rights
    with Shaylene Nancekivell, J. Charles Millar, and Pauline Summers
    In Justin Sytsma Wesley Buckwalter (ed.), A companion to experimental philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 247-256. 2016.
    A chapter reviewing recent experimental work on people's conceptions of ownership rights.
  •  219
    “Because it's hers”: When preschoolers use ownership in their explanations
    with Shaylene E. Nancekivell
    Cognitive Science 41 (3): 827-843. 2017.
    Young children show competence in reasoning about how ownership affects object use. In the present experiments, we investigate how influential ownership is for young children by examining their explanations. In three experiments, we asked 3- to 5-year-olds to explain why it was acceptable or unacceptable for a person to use an object. In Experiments 1 and 2, older preschoolers referenced ownership more than alternative considerations when explaining why it was acceptable or unacceptable for a pe…Read more
  •  83
    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
  •  76
    The ability to engage in and recognize pretend play begins around 18 months. A major challenge for theories of pretense is explaining how children are able to engage in pretense, and how they are able to recognize pretense in others. According to one major account, the metarepresentational theory, young children possess both production and recognition abilities because they possess the mental state concept, PRETEND. According to a more recent rival account, the Behavioral theory, young children …Read more
  •  49
    Determining who owns what: Do children infer ownership from first possession?
    with Karen R. Neary
    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
  •  46
    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
  •  42
    For the greater goods? Ownership rights and utilitarian moral judgment
    with J. Charles Millar and John Turri
    Cognition 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
  •  38
    Academics across widely ranging disciplines all pursue knowledge, but they do so using vastly different methods. Do these academics therefore also have different ideas about when someone possesses knowledge? Recent experimental findings suggest that intuitions about when individuals have knowledge may vary across groups; in particular, the concept of knowledge espoused by the discipline of philosophy may not align with the concept held by laypeople. Across two studies, we investigate the concept…Read more
  •  38
    Non-interpretative metacognition for true beliefs
    with Adam R. Petrashek
    Behavioral 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
  •  36
    Parallels in Preschoolers' and Adults' Judgments About Ownership Rights and Bodily Rights
    with Julia W. Van de Vondervoort
    Cognitive 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
  •  27
    Although people own myriad objects, land, and even ideas, it is currently illegal to own other humans. This reluctance to view people as property raises interesting questions about our conceptions of people and about our conceptions of ownership. We suggest that one factor contributing to this reluctance is that humans are normally considered to be autonomous, and autonomy is incompatible with being owned by someone else. To investigate whether autonomy impacts judgments of ownership, participan…Read more
  •  22
    The second-order problem of other minds
    with Arber Tasimi
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.
    The target article proposes that people perceive social robots as depictions rather than as genuine social agents. We suggest that people might instead view social robots as social agents, albeit agents with more restricted capacities and moral rights than humans. We discuss why social robots, unlike other kinds of depictions, present a special challenge for testing the depiction hypothesis.
  •  20
    Ownership and willingness to compete for resources
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.
    Boyer proposes that ownership intuitions depend on tracking cues predictive of agents’ motivations to compete for resources. However, the account may mis-predict people's intuitions about ownership, and it may also be too cognitively costly to be feasible. Even so, alternative accounts could benefit by taking inspiration from how the account handles thorny issues in the psychology of ownership.
  •  17
    Identical but not interchangeable: Preschoolers view owned objects as non-fungible
    with Stephanie McEwan and Madison L. Pesowski
    Cognition 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
  •  16
    Acquiring ownership and the attribution of responsibility
    with Max Palamar and Doan T. Le
    Cognition 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
  •  16
    Sunk Cost Bias and Withdrawal Aversion
    with Michał Białek, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, Ethan A. Meyers, and Martin H. Turpin
    American Journal of Bioethics 19 (3): 57-59. 2019.
  •  12
    Young children infer preferences from a single action, but not if it is constrained
    with Madison L. Pesowski and Stephanie Denison
    Cognition 155 (C): 168-175. 2016.
    Inferring others’ preferences is socially important and useful. We investigated whether children infer preferences from the minimal information provided by an agent’s single action, and whether they avoid inferring preference when the action is constrained. In three experiments, children saw vignettes in which an agent took a worse toy instead of a better one. Experiment 1 shows that this single action influences how young children infer preferences. Children aged three and four were more likely…Read more
  •  10
    Young children's understanding of ownership
    with Shaylene E. Nancekivell and Julia W. Van de Vondervoort
    Child Development Perspectives 7 (4): 243-247. 2013.
    Ownership influences the permissibility of people's use of objects. Understanding ownership is therefore necessary for socially appropriate behavior and is an important part of children's social‐cognitive development. Children are sophisticated in their reasoning about ownership early in development. They make a variety of judgments about ownership, including judgments about how ownership is acquired, who owns what, and ownership rights. Understanding how children reason about ownership can also…Read more
  •  10
    Future-oriented objects
    with Brandon W. Goulding
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.
    Hoerl & McCormack suggest that saving tools does not require temporal reasoning. However, we identify a class of objects that are only possessed in anticipation of future needs. We propose that investigating these future-oriented objects may help identify temporal reasoning in populations where this ability is uncertain.
  •  8
    It’s personal: The effect of personal value on utilitarian moral judgments
    with Charles Millar, Christina Starmans, and Jonathan Fugelsang
    Judgment 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
  •  8
    Attributing ownership to hold others accountable
    with Emily Elizabeth Stonehouse
    Cognition 225 (C): 105106. 2022.