•  6
    Personality and Philosophical Bias
    with Edward T. Cokely
    In Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.
    Heritable personality traits often predict fundamental philosophical disagreement. This conclusion is based on studies of more than 15,000 people sampled from diverse cultures and educational backgrounds, including verifiable experts. In this chapter, we review some of this research showing links between personality and philosophical bias in free will, intentional action, and ethics. Our discussion focuses on serious challenges that these philosophical biases pose (e.g., limits on the use of phi…Read more
  •  284
    In a series of recent papers, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has used findings in social psychology to put pressure on the claim that our moral beliefs can be non-inferentially justified. More specifically, he has suggested that insofar as our moral intuitions are subject to what psychologists call framing effects, this poses a real problem for moral intuitionism. In this paper, we are going to try to add more fuel to the empirical fire that Sinnott-Armstrong has placed under the feet of the intuition…Read more
  •  171
    The Philosophical Personality Argument
    with Edward T. Cokely
    Philosophical Studies 161 (2): 227-246. 2012.
    Perhaps personality traits substantially influence one’s philosophically relevant intuitions. This suggestion is not only possible, it is consistent with a growing body of empirical research: Personality traits have been shown to be systematically related to diverse intuitions concerning some fundamental philosophical debates. We argue that this fact, in conjunction with the plausible principle that almost all adequate philosophical views should take into account all available and relevant evide…Read more
  •  858
    Experimental research suggests that people draw a moral distinction between bad outcomes brought about as a means versus a side effect (or byproduct). Such findings have informed multiple psychological and philosophical debates about moral cognition, including its computational structure, its sensitivity to the famous Doctrine of Double Effect, its reliability, and its status as a universal and innate mental module akin to universal grammar. But some studies have failed to replicate the means/by…Read more
  •  652
    Natural compatibilism versus natural incompatibilism: Back to the drawing board
    with Edward T. Cokely and Thomas Nadelhoffer
    Mind and Language 24 (1): 1-23. 2009.
    In the free will literature, some compatibilists and some incompatibilists claim that their views best capture ordinary intuitions concerning free will and moral responsibility. One goal of researchers working in the field of experimental philosophy has been to probe ordinary intuitions in a controlled and systematic way to help resolve these kinds of intuitional stalemates. We contribute to this debate by presenting new data about folk intuitions concerning freedom and responsibility that corre…Read more
  •  293
    Currently, there are many advocacy interventions aimed at reducing animal consumption. We report results from a lab (N = 267) and a field experiment (N = 208) exploring whether, and to what extent, some of those educational interventions are effective at shifting attitudes and behavior related to animal consumption. In the lab experiment, participants were randomly assigned to read a philosophical ethics paper, watch an animal advocacy video, read an advocacy pamphlet, or watch a control video. …Read more
  •  290
    Developing an objective measure of knowledge of factory farming
    with Jacob N. Caton, Zac Cogley, Mylan Engel, Silke Feltz, Ramona Ilea, L. Syd M. Johnson, and Tom Offer-Westort
    Philosophical Psychology 37 (2). 2022.
    Knowledge of human uses of animals is an important, but understudied, aspect of how humans treat animals. We developed a measure of one kind of knowledge of human uses of animals – knowledge of factory farming. Studies 1 (N = 270) and 2 (N = 270) tested an initial battery of objective, true or false statements about factory farming using Item Response Theory. Studies 3 (N = 241) and 4 (N = 278) provided evidence that responses to a 10-item Knowledge of Factory Farming Scale predicted a reduction…Read more
  •  73
    Folk intuitions, slippery slopes, and necessary fictions: An essay on Saul Smilansky's free will illusionism
    with Thomas Nadelhoffer
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1): 202-213. 2007.
    A number of philosophers have recently become increasingly interested in the potential usefulness of fictitious and illusory beliefs.As a result, a wide variety of fictionalisms and illusionisms have sprung up in areas ranging anywhere from mathematics and modality to morality.1 In this paper, we focus on the view that Saul Smilansky has dubbed “free will illusionism”—for example, the purportedly descriptive claim that the majority of people have illusory beliefs concerning the existence of libe…Read more
  •  40
    Consumer Accuracy at Identifying Plant-based and Animal-based Milk Items
    with Silke Feltz
    Food Ethics 4 (1): 85-112. 2019.
    Are people are product literate enough to make informed decisions about plant-based and animal-based milk products? In 8 studies, we provide evidence that consumers do not make mistakes indicative of pervasive lack of milk product literacy. People were accurate at identifying plant-based and animal-based milk and cheese products as being plant or animal-based (74% - 84% of the time). In a more difficult task, participants were generally accurate at identifying nutritional differences between pla…Read more
  •  18
    The terror of ‘terrorists’: an investigation in experimental applied ethics
    with Edward T. Cokely
    Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression 6 (3): 195-211. 2014.
    Some theorists argue that appropriate responses to terrorism are in part shaped by popular sentiment. In two experiments, using representative design and ecological stimuli (e.g. actual news reports), we present evidence for some of the ways popular sentiment about terrorism tracks theory and can be constructed. In Experiment 1, we document that using the word ‘terrorist’ to describe a group of people decreases willingness to understand the group's grievances, decreases willingness to negotiate …Read more
  • Personality and philosophical bias
    with E. T. Cokely
    In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley & Sons. 2016.
  •  27
    Extraversion and compatibilist intuitions: a ten-year retrospective and meta-analyses
    with Edward Cokely
    Philosophical Psychology 32 (3): 388-403. 2019.
    The past ten years have seen multiple attempts to estimate the relation between the global personality trait extraversion and compatibilist free will judgments. Here, we contribute to that line of research by conducting a meta-analysis of 17 published and eight unpublished studies (N = 2,811) estimating that relation. Overall, the mean effect size was modest but remarkably robust across materials, locations, and labs (z =.19, 95% CI.15-.24, p
  •  812
    The Knobe effect: A brief overview
    Journal of Mind and Behavior 28 (3-4): 265-277. 2007.
    Joshua Knobe (2003a) has discovered that the perceived goodness or badness of side effects of actions influences people's ascriptions of intentionality to those side effects. I present the paradigmatic cases that elicit what has been called the Knobe effect and offer some explanations of the Knobe effect. I put these explanations into two broad groups. One explains the Knobe effect by referring to our concept of intentional action. The other explains the Knobe effect without referring to our con…Read more
  •  678
    Problems with the appeal to intuition in epistemology
    Philosophical Explorations 11 (2). 2008.
    George Bealer argues that intuitions are not only reliable indicators of truth, they are necessary to the philosophical endeavor. Specifically, he thinks that intuitions are essential sources of evidence for epistemic justification. I argue that Bealer's defense of intuitions either (1) is insufficient to show that actual human beings are in a position to use intuitions for epistemic justification, or (2) begs the question. The growing empirical data about our intuitions support the view that hu…Read more
  •  24
    Heuristics and Life-Sustaining Treatments
    with Stephanie Samayoa
    Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 9 (4): 443-455. 2012.
    Surrogates’ decisions to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatments (LSTs) are pervasive. However, the factors influencing surrogates’ decisions to initiate LSTs are relatively unknown. We present evidence from two experiments indicating that some surrogates’ decisions about when to initiate LSTs can be predictably manipulated. Factors that influence surrogate decisions about LSTs include the patient’s cognitive state, the patient’s age, the percentage of doctors not recommending the initia…Read more
  •  968
    Do You Know More When It Matters Less?
    Philosophical Psychology 23 (5). 2010.
    According to intellectualism, what a person knows is solely a function of the evidential features of the person's situation. Anti-intellectualism is the view that what a person knows is more than simply a function of the evidential features of the person's situation. Jason Stanley (2005) argues that, in addition to “traditional factors,” our ordinary practice of knowledge ascription is sensitive to the practical facts of a subject's situation. In this paper, we investigate this question empirica…Read more
  •  647
    When the side effect of an action involves moral considerations (e.g. when a chairman’s pursuit of profits harms the environment) it tends to influence theory-of-mind judgments. On average, bad side effects are judged intentional whereas good side effects are judged unintentional. In a series of two experiments, we examined the largely uninvestigated roles of individual differences in this judgment asymmetry. Experiment 1 indicated that extraversion accounted for variations in intentionality jud…Read more
  •  317
    The Relevance of Folk Intuitions to Philosophical Debates
    Dissertation, Florida State University. 2008.
    A large portion of philosophy done in the Western analytic tradition attempts to provide conceptual analyses which are tested by examples that elicit intuitions. These intuitions are, in turn, used as evidence either for or against a given analysis. In recent years, there has been much discussion of the uses of intuitions from empirically minded philosophers and psychologists. The basic strategy is to discover empirically how “normal” folks think about certain topics in philosophy. This applicat…Read more
  •  100
    Sommers (2010) argues that experimental philosophers of free will have largely been asking the wrong question – the question whether philosophically naïve individuals think that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. The present studies begin to alleviate this concern by testing the intuitive plausibility of Pereboom’s (2001) four case argument. The general pattern of responses from two experiments does not support Pereboom’s predictions. Moreover, those who were hig…Read more
  •  17
    Experimental Philosophy
    Analyse & Kritik 31 (2): 201-219. 2009.
    Experimental philosophy is a new approach to philosophy that incorporates the experimental methodologies of psychology, behavioral economics, and sociology. Experimental philosophers generally maintain that, in addition to traditional philosophical practices, these ways of gathering evidence can be instrumental in shedding light on philosophically important issues. Rather than relying on their own intuitions about specific cases, experimental philosophers perform systematic experiments to determ…Read more
  •  252
    Recently, there has been an increased interest in folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility from both philosophers and psychologists. We aim to extend our understanding of folk intuitions about freedom and moral responsibility using an individual differences approach. Building off previous research suggesting that there are systematic differences in folks’ philosophically relevant intuitions, we present new data indicating that the personality trait extraversion predicts, to a signi…Read more
  •  353
    Philosophical temperament
    with Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma, Richard Scheines, and Edouard Machery
    Philosophical Psychology 23 (3): 313-330. 2010.
    Many philosophers have worried about what philosophy is. Often they have looked for answers by considering what it is that philosophers do. Given the diversity of topics and methods found in philosophy, however, we propose a different approach. In this article we consider the philosophical temperament, asking an alternative question: what are philosophers like? Our answer is that one important aspect of the philosophical temperament is that philosophers are especially reflective: they are less l…Read more
  •  61
    In a series of five experiments, we demonstrate that moral judgments and folk intuitions are often predictably fragmented. Drawing on the domains of ethics and action theory, we illustrate ways in which judgment tends to be associated with stable individual differences such as personality traits and reflective cognitive styles. We argue that these individual differences pose several unique challenges as well as provide opportunities for further theoretical development in the emerging field of ex…Read more
  •  20
    Knowledge, moral praise, and moral side effects
    Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 27 (1): 123-126. 2007.
    Thomas Nadelhoffer claims that a morally praiseworthy agent cannot knowingly produce a morally positive side effect. I claim that the argument Nadelhoffer uses to establish this claim has two false premises. The two false premises are: If something is a side effect, then it is not desired or intended; and If agent S is morally praiseworthy and knows that her performing p will produce a morally positive q, then q forms part of S's reason for p-ing. I offer a counterexample that shows the falsity …Read more
  •  1695
    This chapter provides empirical evidence about everyday attitudes concerning euthanasia. These attitudes have important implications for some ethical arguments about euthanasia. Two experiments suggested that some different descriptions of euthanasia have modest effects on people’s moral permissibility judgments regarding euthanasia. Experiment 1 (N = 422) used two different types of materials (scenarios and scales) and found that describing euthanasia differently (‘euthanasia’, ‘aid in dying’, …Read more
  •  365
    Questioning the free will comprehension question.
    with E. Cokely
    In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society. pp. 2440--2445. 2010.
    Understanding the folk notion of free will and moral responsibility is important for a host of applied and theoretical issues in psychology, philosophy, and ethics. The bulk of experimental research has focused on folk intuitions concerning determinism's relation to free will and moral responsibility. However, determinism is a difficult term for many folk to understand. Accordingly researchers often use comprehension questions to identify and exclude large proportions of participants who seem to…Read more
  •  78
    The Virtues of Ignorance
    with Edward T. Cokely
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (3): 335-350. 2012.
    It is commonly claimed that fully virtuous individuals cannot be ignorant and that everyday intuitions support this fact. Others maintain that there are virtues of ignorance and most people recognize them. Both views cannot be correct. We report evidence from three experiments suggesting that ignorance does not rule out folk attributions of virtue. Additionally, results show that many of these judgments can be predicted by one’s emotional stability—a heritable personality trait. We argue that th…Read more
  •  84
    Perspective in intentional action attribution
    with Maegan Harris and Ashley Perez
    Philosophical Psychology 25 (5): 673-687. 2012.
    In two experiments, we demonstrate that intentional action intuitions vary as a function of whether one brings about or observes an event. In experiment 1a (N?=?38), participants were less likely to judge that they intended (M?=?2.53, 7 point scale) or intentionally (M?=?2.67) brought about a harmful event compared to intention (M?=?4.16) and intentionality (M?=?4.11) judgments made about somebody else. Experiments 1b and 1c confirmed and extended this pattern of actor-observer differences. Expe…Read more