Joshua Knobe

The human mind contains several faculties of thinking used for different fields of study. For instance, there are psychological processes designed for aesthetics, which are different from those assigned to religion, scientific inquiries, and ethical questions. However, recent experiments reveal that people's intuition regarding folk psychology and causal cognition can be influenced by moral judgments, instead of the sciences. This chapter seeks to understand how these results came to light. It begins with a discussion of the person-as-scientist theory in contrast with the person-as-moralist theory, followed by a series of analyses on mental states, motivational bias, types of moral judgment, and competence theories.

A long tradition of research, both in philosophy and in psychology, has sought to uncover the criteria that people use when assigning moral responsibility. Nonetheless, it seems that most existing accounts fall prey to one counterexample or another. This chapter suggests a diagnosis for this persistent difficulty. Specifically, it suggests that there simply isn't any single system of criteria that people apply in all cases of responsibility attribution. Instead, people use quite different criteria in different kinds of cases. In other words, researchers should abandon the assumption of “invariance” (that people use the same criteria in all cases) and instead adopt “variantism” (the view that people use different criteria in different cases).

Recent work has proposed that there may be two kinds of beliefs: Symbolic beliefs which express the believer's identity and epistemic beliefs which represent facts. On this proposal, several disparate features of belief – from whether a belief is important to identity to whether it is sensitive to evidence – would be related to a single dimension. In five studies, participants rated beliefs on features that were related to symbolicness and epistemicness. Study 1 found that beliefs which were important to participants were consistently rated higher on the symbolic features, but not consistently lower on the epistemic feature. Study 2 found that the symbolicness features loaded onto a single factor, while the epistemic feature did not. Study 3 expanded the assessment of epistemicness to a series of features related to objectivity, but found that symbolicness and objectivity features loaded on separate, uncorrelated factors. Study 4 recalibrated the assessment of epistemicness using a series of features related to the evidence-drivenness, and again found symbolicness and epistemicness loaded on separate factors. In the final study, third-party participants rated the beliefs from Study 4 on symbolicness and evidence-drivenness, and largely replicated the findings from Study 4. These results suggest that symbolicness and epistemicness are coherent dimensions of belief, but that these dimensions are largely orthogonal.

Suppose that a person is asked for consent. However--either due to cognitive disability, or because she is intoxicated, or because she is a child--she is not able to think through this question in the way most of us would. When this person says ‘yes,’ does she thereby consent? We suggest intuitions about such cases can reflect two different senses of consent--one more superficial sense of consent, and one deeper sense. We provide empirical evidence that apparent disagreement or ambivalence about such cases in fact reflects complex reactions of simultaneously thinking that there is a sense in which the agent consents (superficial sense), but also thinking that there is an important sense in which she did not consent at all (deeper sense). We argue that these findings carry important implications for researching and discussing consent in philosophy and public discourse.

Experimental philosophy is a new interdisciplinary field that uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy. The present review focuses on research in experimental philosophy on four central questions. First, why is it that people's moral judgments appear to influence their intuitions about seemingly nonmoral questions? Second, do people think that moral questions have objective answers, or do they see morality as fundamentally relative? Third, do people believe in free will, and do they see free will as compatible with determinism? Fourth, how do people determine whether an entity is conscious?

For many types of behaviors, whether a specific instance of that behavior is blame‐ or praiseworthy depends on how much of the behavior is done or how people go about doing it. For instance, for a behavior such as “replying to an email in x days,” whether a specific reply is perceived as blameworthy or praiseworthy will depend on how many days have elapsed before the reply. Such behaviors lie on a continuum in which part of the continuum is praiseworthy (replying quickly) and another part of the continuum is blameworthy (replying late). In the current paper, we investigate how judgments of blame and praise on such behaviors relate to people's perceptions of the statistical norms surrounding that behavior (i.e., how quickly people usually reply). We find that people do not base judgments of blame and praise on a comparison to the statistically average quantity. Instead, judgments of blame and praise are related to whether the behavior is perceived as frequent or infrequent. Notably, frequency showed an asymmetric relationship with moral judgments: higher frequency was strongly associated with reduced blame but showed a much weaker association with reduced praise.

People are more inclined to agree with certain causal statements when a person acts intentionally than when a person acts unintentionally or without agency. Most existing research has assumed that this effect is to be explained in terms of the operation of people’s causal cognition. We propose a different explanation which involves a linguistic phenomenon involving the impact of agency on people’s judgments about a broader class of sentences, including non-causal sentences. Study 1 shows that the effect arises for both causal and non-causal sentences. The remaining studies show that the effect arises only when the subject of the sentence is animate (Study 2), that the effect arises both for outcomes with negative valence and outcomes with neutral valence (Study 3) and that the effect is driven by whether or not a person exercises agentive control over her body, rather than whether or not she intends the particular outcome of her action (Study 4). We conclude with a formal linguistic theory that captures these effects.

People sometimes behave differently depending on whether they are interacting online (by email, social media, etc.) vs. interacting in person. Four studies test the hypothesis that when an agent’s behavior is different online vs. in person, people think that the online behavior is less reflective of who the agent truly is deep down. Study 1 found that the very same behavior is regarded as less reflective of the true self when it is performed online. Study 2 showed that this effect is not merely a matter of perceived impression management. Study 3 found that there is a general tendency such that behavior is seen as more reflective of the true self when it is performed in an environment regarded as “natural.” In Study 4, a manipulation that led participants to see online behavior as more natural had a downstream effect on the degree to which this behavior was seen as reflecting the true self. Taken together, these results suggest that people’s judgments about online behavior are not simply a reflection of idiosyncratic facts about the online sphere in particular but are instead driven in part by a far more general psychological process involving perceptions of naturalness.

People sometimes behave differently depending on whether they are interacting online (by email, social media, etc.) vs. interacting in person. Four studies test the hypothesis that when an agent’s behavior is different online vs. in person, people think that the online behavior is less reflective of who the agent truly is deep down. Study 1 found that the very same behavior is regarded as less reflective of the true self when it is performed online. Study 2 showed that this effect is not merely a matter of perceived impression management. Study 3 found that there is a general tendency such that behavior is seen as more reflective of the true self when it is performed in an environment regarded as “natural.” In Study 4, a manipulation that led participants to see online behavior as more natural had a downstream effect on the degree to which this behavior was seen as reflecting the true self. Taken together, these results suggest that people’s judgments about online behavior are not simply a reflection of idiosyncratic facts about the online sphere in particular but are instead driven in part by a far more general psychological process involving perceptions of naturalness.

People tend to show greater liking for expressions of sadness when these expressions are described as art. Why does this effect arise? One obvious hypothesis would be that describing something as art makes people more likely to regard it as fictional, and people prefer expressions of sadness that are not real. We contrast this obvious hypothesis with a hypothesis derived from the philosophical literature. In this alternative hypothesis, describing something as art makes people more inclined to appropriate it, that is, to see it as an expression of their own sadness. Study 1 found that describing the exact same sad text as art (e.g., a monologue) as opposed to not-art (e.g., a diary entry) led to increased liking for the work. Study 2 showed that this effect is not mediated by fictionality. Study 3 showed that the effect is mediated by appropriation. Study 4 looked at the impact of a manipulation of fictionality. Describing a work as fictional did lead to increased liking, but this effect was completely mediated by appropriation. These results provide at least some initial support for the appropriation hypothesis.

Sentences with impersonal pronouns, like 'You do it like this', seem to make both statistical and prescriptive claims, that a certain way of behaving is common and that it is prescriptively good. We argue that these kinds of sentences are closely related to another kind of sentence, namely, indefinite singular generics, like 'A person does it like this'. We propose that there is a single underlying mechanism that allows both kinds of sentences to express mixed statistical/prescriptive readings. We then provide a compositional semantic analysis of these sentences and explain how, together with this single underlying mechanism, it accounts for this phenomenon.

People attribute purposes in both mundane and profound ways—such as when thinking about the purpose of a knife and the purpose of a life. In three studies (total N = 13,720 observations from N = 3,430 participants), we tested whether these seemingly very different forms of purpose attributions might actually involve the same cognitive processes. We examined the impacts of four factors on purpose attributions in six domains (artifacts, social institutions, animals, body parts, sacred objects, and human lives). Study 1 manipulated what items in each domain were originally created for (original design) and how people currently use them (present practice). Study 2 manipulated whether items are good at achieving a goal (effectiveness) and whether the goal itself is good (morality). We found effects of each factor in every domain. However, whereas morality and effectiveness had remarkably similar effects across domains, the effects of original design and present practice differed substantially. Finally, Study 3 revealed that, within domains, the effects of original design and present practice depend on which entities design and use items. These results reveal striking similarities in purpose attributions across domains and suggest that certain entities are treated as authorities over the purposes of particular items.

Research on intuitions about philosophical thought experiments shows a striking pattern. Often, there are powerful intuitions on one side and also powerful intuitions on the exact opposite side. A question now arises about how to understand this pattern. One possible view would be that it is primarily a matter of different people having different intuitions. I present evidence for the view that this is not the correct understanding. Instead, I suggest, it is primarily a matter of individual people having *conflicting intuitions*. That is, it is primarily a matter of individual people having an intuition on one side and also having an intuition on the opposite side.

Research on dual character concepts has explored cases in which people think that a term applies to an object in a superficial sense but does not apply to that same object in a deeper sense. Most of this research has focused on cases of one particular type, namely, cases in which the object fails to embody the characteristic values of a particular category. However, there are also other types of cases in which we would be inclined to say that a term does not apply in a deeper sense. For example, we might also say this if an object has acquired a certain status but it failed to acquire this status through a morally or legally legitimate process. Or we might say it if a person has certain emotions but these emotions are not rooted in the person’s true self. I argue that these apparently unrelated types of cases are surprisingly similar in a number of important respects. Thus, we should not be seeking a separate account for each separate type of case; we should be seeking an account that explains in a more general way what people mean when they say that a term does not apply in a deeper sense.