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21Epistemic vice predicts acceptance of Covid-19 misinformationEpisteme 21 (1): 207-228. 2024.Why are mistaken beliefs about COVID-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only part of the differences between people in their susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to …Read more
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17Misinformation and disagreementIn Maria Baghramian, J. Adam Carter & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement, Routledge. forthcoming.This chapter addresses the relationship between misinformation and disagreement. We begin by arguing that one traditional bogeyman in this domain, ideological polarization, does not account for the many problems that have been documented. Instead, affective polarization seems to be the root cause of most of these problems. We then discuss the relationships between moral outrage, misinformation, and affective polarization. We next turn to the political implications of affective polarization and c…Read more
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22Now you see me, now you don’t: an exploration of religious exnomination in DALL-EEthics and Information Technology 26 (2): 1-13. 2024.Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly being used not only to classify and analyze but also to generate images and text. As recent work on the content produced by text and image Generative AIs has shown (e.g., Cheong et al., 2024, Acerbi & Stubbersfield, 2023), there is a risk that harms of representation and bias, already documented in prior AI and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms may also be present in generative models. These harms relate to protected categories suc…Read more
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50The Affective Scaffolding of Grief in the Digital Age: The Case of DeathbotsTopoi 1-13. forthcoming.Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of grieving. In this paper, we present a framework that helps make sense of this process. In particular, we argue that deathbots can serve as affective …Read more
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54Exploring intellectual humility through the lens of artificial intelligence: Top terms, features and a predictive modelActa Psychologica 238 (103979). 2023.Intellectual humility (IH) is often conceived as the recognition of, and appropriate response to, your own intellectual limitations. As far as we are aware, only a handful of studies look at interventions to increase IH – e.g. through journalling – and no study so far explores the extent to which having high or low IH can be predicted. This paper uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques to develop a predictive model for IH and identify top terms and features that indicate…Read more
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5The Situation of the JuryIn Fritz Allhoff & S. Waller (eds.), Serial Killers ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010-09-24.This chapter contains sections titled: Attribution Bias in the Trials of Accused Serial Killers Introduction The Case of Doug Clark Situationism and Destructive Behavior Attribution Biases Seeing Ghosts “Ewww…Guilty!” “You people are all…” “Aren't you the guy who…?” Doug Clark Again Conclusion.
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32The Moral Psychology of Trust (edited book)Lexington Books. 2023.This edited volume features discussions by leading scholars on the topic of trust and its place in moral psychology. The contributors cover theoretical and applied issues relating to trust, including trust and distrust in conditions of oppression, trust and technology, and trust in medical ethics.
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12Talk at the Philosophy [in:of:for:and] Digital Knowledge Infrastructures online workshop (08/09/2022).
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25The Moral Psychology of Trust (edited book)Lexington Books. 2023.This edited volume features discussions by leading scholars on the topic of trust and its place in moral psychology. The contributors cover theoretical and applied issues relating to trust, including trust and distrust in conditions of oppression, trust and technology, and trust in medical ethics.
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Polarization and trust in the evolution of vaccine discourse on Twitter during COVID-19PLoS ONE 12 (17). 2022.Trust in vaccination is eroding, and attitudes about vaccination have become more polarized. This is an observational study of Twitter analyzing the impact that COVID-19 had on vaccine discourse. We identify the actors, the language they use, how their language changed, and what can explain this change. First, we find that authors cluster into several large, interpretable groups, and that the discourse was greatly affected by American partisan politics. Over the course of our study, both Republi…Read more
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1318Investigating gender and racial biases in DALL-E Mini ImagesAcm Journal on Responsible Computing. forthcoming.Generative artificial intelligence systems based on transformers, including both text-generators like GPT-4 and image generators like DALL-E 3, have recently entered the popular consciousness. These tools, while impressive, are liable to reproduce, exacerbate, and reinforce extant human social biases, such as gender and racial biases. In this paper, we systematically review the extent to which DALL-E Mini suffers from this problem. In line with the Model Card published alongside DALL-E Mini by i…Read more
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Friendship and the structure of trustIn Alberto Masala & Jonathan Webber (eds.), From Personality to Virtue: Essays on the Philosophy of Character, Oxford University Press Uk. 2016.
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243Attention and counter-framing in the Black Lives Matter movement on TwitterHumanities and Social Sciences Communications 9 (367). 2022.The social media platform Twitter platform has played a crucial role in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The immediate, flexible nature of tweets plays a crucial role both in spreading information about the movement’s aims and in organizing individual protests. Twitter has also played an important role in the right-wing reaction to BLM, providing a means to reframe and recontextualize activists’ claims in a more sinister light. The ability to bring about social change depends on the balanc…Read more
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378Having a sense of humor as a virtueJournal of Value Inquiry 1-22. forthcoming.Could having a sense of humor be a virtue? In this paper, we argue for an affirmative answer to this question. Like other virtues, a sense of humor enhances and inhibits the expression of various emotions, especially amusement, contempt, trust, and hope. Someone possesses a virtuous sense of humor to the extent that they are well-disposed to appropriately enhance or inhibit these emotions in themselves and others through both embodied reactions (e.g., smiling, laughter, eyerolls) and language (e…Read more
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326A tragic coalition of the rational and irrational: a threat to collective responses to COVID-19Philosophical Psychology (6). 2022.There is not as much resistance to COVID-19 mitigation as there seems, but there are structural features that make resistance seem worse than it is. Here we describe two ways that the problem seeming to be worse than it is can make it worse. First, visible hesitation to implement COVID-19 responses signals to the wider society that mitigation measures may not succeed, which undermines people’s conditional willingness to join in on those efforts. Second, our evaluations of others’ willingness to …Read more
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294Misinformation and disagreementIn Maria Baghramian, J. Adam Carter & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement, Routledge. forthcoming.This chapter addresses the relationship between misinformation and disagreement. We begin by arguing that one traditional bogeyman in this domain, ideological polarization, does not account for the many problems that have been documented. Instead, affective polarization seems to be the root cause of most of these problems. We then discuss the relationships between moral outrage, misinformation, and affective polarization. We next turn to the political implications of affective polarization and c…Read more
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48Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learningProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Nexus. forthcoming.At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to …Read more
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252A normative framework for sharing information onlineIn Carissa Véliz (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2023.People have always shared information through chains and networks of testimony. It’s arguably part of what makes us human and enables us to live in cooperative communities with populations greater than the Dunbar number. The invention of the Internet and the rise of social media have turbo-charged our ability to share information. In this chapter, we develop a normative framework for sharing information online. This framework takes into account both ethical and epistemic considerations that are …Read more
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4712Fake news, conspiracy theorizing, and intellectual viceIn Mark Alfano, Colin Klein & Jeroen de Ridder (eds.), Social Virtue Epistemology, Routledge. 2022.Across two studies, one of which was pre-registered, we find that a simple questionnaire that measures intellectual virtue and vice predicts how many fake news articles and conspiracy theories participants accept. This effect holds even when controlling for multiple demographic predictors, including age, household income, sex, education, ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, and news consumption. These results indicate that self-report is an adequate way to measure intellectual virtue and …Read more
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263Varieties of moral motivation: Empirical perspectivesIn David Copp (ed.), The Oxford handbook of ethical theory, Oxford University Press. 2006.This chapter examines three recent empirical approaches to the study of moral motivation: moral foundations theory, deep pragmatism, and morality-as-cooperation. All three approaches conceptualize moral motivation as a suite of desires, emotions, sentiments, dispositions, values, and relationships that move people to think, judge, and act in accordance with morality. Moral foundations theory posits five or six basic foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and sometimes liberty…Read more
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46Masculinity and Violent ExtremismPalgrave. 2022.This book explores men's attraction to violent extremist movements and terrorism. Drawing on multi-method, interdisciplinary research, this book explores the centrality of masculinity to violent extremist recruitment narratives across the religious and political spectrum. Chapters examine the intersection of masculinity and violent extremism across a spectrum of movements including: the far right, Islamist organizations, male supremacist groups, and the far left. The book identifies key sites an…Read more
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2Online trust and distrustIn Michael Hannon & Jeroen de Ridder (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology, Routledge. 2021.Trust makes cooperation possible. It enables us to learn from others and at a distance. It makes democratic deliberation possible. But it also makes us vulnerable: when we place our trust in another’s word, we are liable to be deceived—sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. Our evolved mechanisms for deciding whom to trust and whom to distrust mostly rely on face-to-face interactions with people whose reputation we can both access and influence. Online, these mechanisms are largely …Read more
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383Automated psycholinguistic analysis of the Anglophone manosphereIn Matthew Lindauer, James R. Beebe & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury. 2023.
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365Reactionary attitudes: Strawson, Twitter, and the Black Lives Matter MovementIn Fernando Aguiar-Gonzalez & Antonio Gaitan (eds.), Experimental Methods in Moral Philosophy, Routledge. forthcoming.On 25 May 2020, Officer Derek Chauvin asphyxiated George Floyd in Minneapolis — a murder that was captured in a confronting nine-minute bystander video that set off a firestorm of activity on online social networks, in the streets of the United States, and even worldwide. These protests captured the collective rage, dissatisfaction, and resentment personally and vicariously experienced towards the widespread systematic injustice and mistreatment of African Americans by police and vigilantes. The…Read more
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329Fanaticism in the manosphereIn Paul Katsafanas (ed.), Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy, Rewriting the History of Philosophy. 2023.This chapter explores a case study in contemporary fanaticism. We adopt Katsafanas’s conceptualization of fanaticism to make possible an in-depth discussion of and evaluation of a diffuse but important social movement — the anglophone manosphere. According to Katsafanas, fanatics are fruitfully understood as members of a group that adopts sacred values which they hold unconditionally to preserve their own psychic unity, and who feel that those values are threatened by those who do not accept the…Read more
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327The wisdom-of-crowds: an efficient, philosophically-validated, social epistemological network profiling toolkitIn Hocine Cherifi, Rosario Nunzio Mantegna, Luis M. Rocha, Chantal Cherifi & Salvatore Miccichè (eds.), Complex Networks and Their Applications XI: Proceedings of The Eleventh International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications: COMPLEX NETWORKS 2022 — Volume 1, Springer. 2023.The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter…Read more
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23How One Becomes What One Is Called: On the Relation between Traits and Trait-Terms in NietzscheJournal of Nietzsche Studies 46 (2): 261-269. 2015.According to Nietzsche, drives are the ultimate constituents of virtues and vices. I argue that Nietzsche identifies two blueprints for character construction: a slavish, interpersonal blueprint, and a masterly, reflexive blueprint. When the interpersonal blueprint is implemented, a person becomes what he is called: his drives are shaped by the traits ascribed to him so that he becomes more like the sort of person he’s taken to be. When the reflexive blueprint is implemented, a person becomes mo…Read more
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757Nietzsche on styleNineteenth Century Prose. forthcoming.Nietzsche talks about style [Stil and cognates] in all of his published and authorized works, from The Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo. He refers to style in over one hundred passages. Yet the scholarly literature on Nietzsche and style includes only a handful of publications, among them Derrida’s notorious Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1978), which barely even engages with Nietzsche’s writings (see also Magnus 1991 and Babich 2011, 2012). Much of the rest of the literature is about Nietzsche’s style…Read more
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1Perspectives on Trust in the History of Philosophy (edited book)Lexington. 2023.This edited volume examines the topic of trust and its place in the thought of several key figures from the history of philosophy. Drawing on thinkers and philosophical traditions from across the globe, the chapters focus especially on trust's moral and social dimensions.
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1380Nietzsche on Trust and MistrustIn Mark Alfano, David Collins & Iris Jovanovic (eds.), Perspectives on Trust in the History of Philosophy, Lexington. 2023.Nietzsche talks about trust [vertraue*] and mistrust [misstrau*] in all of his published and authorized works, from The Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo. He refers to trust in 90 passages and mistrust in 101 – approximately ten times as often as he refers to resentment/ressentiment. Yet the scholarly literature on Nietzsche and trust includes just a handful of publications. Worse still, I have been unable to find a single publication devoted to Nietzsche and mistrust. This chapter aims to fill the …Read more
CUNY
Alumnus, 2011
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Normative Ethics |
19th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Social Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language, Miscellaneous |
PhilPapers Editorships
Skepticism about Character |