•  1921
    Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cros…Read more
  •  1349
    Resistance to Position Change, Motivated Reasoning, and Polarization
    with Matthew L. Stanley, Paul Henne, and Brenda Yang
    Political Behavior. forthcoming.
    People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms driving this resistance to belief change has focused on a limited set of well-known, charged, contentious issues and has not accounted for deliberation over reasons and arguments in belief formation prior to experimental sessions. With a large, heterogeneous sample (N = 3,001), we attempt to overcome these existing problem…Read more
  •  1108
    I’m not the person I used to be: The self and autobiographical memories of immoral actions
    with Matthew L. Stanley, Paul Henne, Vijeth Iyengar, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
    Journal of Experimental Psychology. General 146 (6): 884-895. 2017.
    People maintain a positive identity in at least two ways: They evaluate themselves more favorably than other people, and they judge themselves to be better now than they were in the past. Both strategies rely on autobiographical memories. The authors investigate the role of autobiographical memories of lying and emotional harm in maintaining a positive identity. For memories of lying to or emotionally harming others, participants judge their own actions as less morally wrong and less negative th…Read more
  •  961
    Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent Cultures
    with Julian De Freitas, Hagop Sarkissian, George E. Newman, Igor Grossmann, Andres Luco, and Joshua Knobe
    Cognitive Science 42 (S1): 134-160. 2018.
    People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous; that is deep inside, every person is motivated to behave in morally good ways. Is this belief particular to individuals with optimistic beliefs or people from Western cultures, or does it reflect a widely held cognitive bias in how people understand the self? To address this question…Read more
  •  837
    Multivariate pattern analysis and the search for neural representations
    with Bryce Gessell and Benjamin Geib
    Synthese 199 (5-6): 12869-12889. 2021.
    Multivariate pattern analysis, or MVPA, has become one of the most popular analytic methods in cognitive neuroscience. Since its inception, MVPA has been heralded as offering much more than regular univariate analyses, for—we are told—it not only can tell us which brain regions are engaged while processing particular stimuli, but also which patterns of neural activity represent the categories the stimuli are selected from. We disagree, and in the current paper we offer four conceptual challenges…Read more
  •  753
    Cause by Omission and Norm: Not Watering Plants
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (2): 270-283. 2017.
    People generally accept that there is causation by omission—that the omission of some events cause some related events. But this acceptance elicits the selection problem, or the difficulty of explaining the selection of a particular omissive cause or class of causes from the causal conditions. Some theorists contend that dependence theories of causation cannot resolve this problem. In this paper, we argue that the appeal to norms adequately resolves the selection problem for dependence theories,…Read more
  •  747
    Mental control and attributions of blame for negligent wrongdoing
    with Samuel Murray, Kristina Krasich, Zachary Irving, and Thomas Nadelhoffer
    Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. forthcoming.
    Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others’ menta…Read more
  •  720
    Know-how, intellectualism, and memory systems
    Philosophical Psychology 32 (5): 720-759. 2019.
    ABSTRACTA longstanding tradition in philosophy distinguishes between knowthatand know-how. This traditional “anti-intellectualist” view is soentrenched in folk psychology that it is often invoked in supportof an allegedly equivalent distinction between explicit and implicitmemory, derived from the so-called “standard model of memory.”In the last two decades, the received philosophical view has beenchallenged by an “intellectualist” view of know-how. Surprisingly, defenders of the anti-intellectu…Read more
  •  706
    Responsibility for forgetting
    with Samuel Murray, Elise D. Murray, Gregory Stewart, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
    Philosophical Studies 176 (5): 1177-1201. 2019.
    In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our results show that we are disposed to hold others responsible for some of their forgetfulness. The level of stress that the forgetful agent is under modulates judgments of responsibility, though the level of care that the agent exhibits toward p…Read more
  •  660
    If You Like It, Does It Matter if It’s Real?
    Philosophical Psychology 23 (1): 43-57. 2010.
    Most people's intuitive reaction after considering Nozick's experience machine thought-experiment seems to be just like his: we feel very little inclination to plug in to a virtual reality machine capable of providing us with pleasurable experiences. Many philosophers take this empirical fact as sufficient reason to believe that, more than pleasurable experiences, people care about “living in contact with reality.” Such claim, however, assumes that people's reaction to the experience machine tho…Read more
  •  643
    The Explanatory Indispensability of Memory Traces
    The Harvard Review of Philosophy 27 23-47. 2020.
    During the first half of the twentieth century, many philosophers of memory opposed the postulation of memory traces based on the claim that a satisfactory account of remembering need not include references to causal processes involved in recollection. However, in 1966, an influential paper by Martin and Deutscher showed that causal claims are indeed necessary for a proper account of remembering. This, however, did not settle the issue, as in 1977 Malcolm argued that even if one were to buy Mart…Read more
  •  574
    Remembering moral and immoral actions in constructing the self
    with Matthew L. Stanley and Paul Henne
    Memory and Cognition. forthcoming.
    Having positive moral traits is central to one’s sense of self, and people generally are motivated to maintain a positive view of the self in the present. But it remains unclear how people foster a positive, morally good view of the self in the present. We suggest that recollecting and reflecting on moral and immoral actions from the personal past jointly help to construct a morally good view of the current self in complementary ways. More specifically, across four studies we investigated the ex…Read more
  •  491
    Norms Affect Prospective Causal Judgments
    with Paul Henne, Kevin O’Neill, Paul Bello, and Sangeet Khemlani
    Cognitive Science 45 (1). 2021.
    People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm- conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments—i.e., judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm- violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as …Read more
  •  431
    Prediction and Topological Models in Neuroscience
    with Bryce Gessell, Matthew Stanley, and Benjamin Geib
    In Fabrizio Calzavarini & Marco Viola (eds.), Neural Mechanisms: New challenges in the philosophy of neuroscience., Springer. forthcoming.
    In the last two decades, philosophy of neuroscience has predominantly focused on explanation. Indeed, it has been argued that mechanistic models are the standards of explanatory success in neuroscience over, among other things, topological models. However, explanatory power is only one virtue of a scientific model. Another is its predictive power. Unfortunately, the notion of prediction has received comparatively little attention in the philosophy of neuroscience, in part because predictions see…Read more
  •  398
    “Repressed Memory” Makes No Sense
    Topics in Cognitive Science. forthcoming.
    The expression “repressed memory” was introduced over 100 years ago as a theoretical term purportedly referring to an unobservable psychological entity postulated by Freud’s seduction theory. That theory, however, and its hypothesized cognitive architecture, have been thoroughly debunked—yet the term “repressed memory” seems to remain. In this paper I offer a philosophical evaluation of the meaning of this theoretical term as well as an argument to question its scientific status by comparing it …Read more
  •  382
    Misremembering is a systematic and ordinary occurrence in our daily lives. Since it is commonly assumed that the function of memory is to remember the past, misremembering is typically thought to happen because our memory system malfunctions. In this paper I argue that not all cases of misremembering are due to failures in our memory system. In particular, I argue that many ordinary cases of misremembering should not be seen as instances of memory’s malfunction, but rather as the normal result o…Read more
  •  297
    Norms and the meaning of omissive enabling conditions
    with Paul Henne, Paul Bello, and Sangeet Khemlani
    Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 41. 2019.
    People often reason about omissions. One line of research shows that people can distinguish between the semantics of omissive causes and omissive enabling conditions: for instance, not flunking out of college enabled you (but didn’t cause you) to graduate. Another line of work shows that people rely on the normative status of omissive events in inferring their causal role: if the outcome came about because the omission violated some norm, reasoners are more likely to select that omission as a ca…Read more
  •  296
    Attention and consciousness
    with J. Prinz
    Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews 1 (1): 51-59. 2010.
    For the past three decades there has been a substantial amount of scientific evidence supporting the view that attention is necessary and sufficient for perceptual representations to become conscious (i.e., for there to be something that it is like to experience a representational perceptual state). This view, however, has been recently questioned on the basis of some alleged counterevidence. In this paper we survey some of the most important recent findings. In doing so, we have two primary goa…Read more
  •  293
    Simulationism and Memory Traces
    In Sara Aronowitz & Lynn Nadel (eds.), Space, Time, and Memory. forthcoming.
    In the philosophy of memory there is a tension between a preservationist and a constructivist view of memory reflected in the debate between causalism and simulationism. Causalism is not only committed to the claim that there must be an appropriate causal connection between the remembered event and the content represented at retrieval but also that such connection is possible because of a content-preserving memory trace. Simulationism, by contrast, rejects the need for an appropriate causal cond…Read more
  •  273
    Not Every Thing Must Go
    with Trey Boone and Nina Van Rooy
    Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. forthcoming.
    In The Entangled Brain, Pessoa criticizes standard approaches in cognitive neuroscience in which the brain is seen as a functionally decomposable, modular system with causal operations built up hierarchically. Instead, he advocates for an emergentist perspective whereby dynamic brain networks are associated, not with traditional psychological categories, but with behavioral functions characterized in evolutionary terms. Here, we raise a number of concerns with such a radical approach. We ultimat…Read more
  •  241
    Recently, psychologists have explored moral concepts including obligation, blame, and ability. While little empirical work has studied the relationships among these concepts, philosophers have widely assumed such a relationship in the principle that “ought” implies “can,” which states that if someone ought to do something, then they must be able to do it. The cognitive underpinnings of these concepts are tested in the three experiments reported here. In Experiment 1, most participants judge that…Read more
  •  198
    Consciousness, Attention and Commonsense
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (9-10): 189-201. 2010.
    In a recent paper, Christopher Mole (2008) argued in favour of the view that, according to our commonsense psychology, while consciousness is necessary for attention, attention isn’t necessary for consciousness. In this paper I offer an argument against this view. More precisely, I offer an argument against the claim that, according to our commonsense psychology, consciousness is necessary for attention. However, I don’t claim it follows from this argument that commonsense has it the other way a…Read more
  •  181
    Responsibility and the brain sciences
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 12 (5): 511-524. 2008.
    Some theorists think that the more we get to know about the neural underpinnings of our behaviors, the less likely we will be to hold people responsible for their actions. This intuition has driven some to suspect that as neuroscience gains insight into the neurological causes of our actions, people will cease to view others as morally responsible for their actions, thus creating a troubling quandary for our legal system. This paper provides empirical evidence against such intuitions. Particular…Read more
  •  151
    Moralization and self-control strategy selection
    Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 30 (4). 2023.
    To manage conflicts between temptation and commitment, people use self-control. The process model of self-control outlines different strategies for managing the onset and experience of temptation. However, little is known about the decision-making factors underlying strategy selection. Across three experiments (N = 317), we tested whether the moral valence of a commitment predicts how people advise attentional self-control strategies. In Experiments 1 and 2, people rated attentional focus strate…Read more
  •  150
    An Empirical Refutation of ‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can’
    with Paul Henne, Vladimir Chituc, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
    Analysis 76 (3): 283-290. 2016.
    Most philosophers assume that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, and most of them hold that this principle is true not only universally but also analytically or conceptually. Some skeptics deny this principle, although they often admit some related one. In this article, we show how new empirical evidence bolsters the skeptics’ arguments. We then defend the skeptical view against some objections to the empirical evidence and to its effect on the traditional principle. In light of the new evidence, we conclud…Read more
  •  147
    The Nature of Memory Traces
    Philosophy Compass 9 (6): 402-414. 2014.
    Memory trace was originally a philosophical term used to explain the phenomenon of remembering. Once debated by Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno of Citium, the notion seems more recently to have become the exclusive province of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. Nonetheless, this modern appropriation should not deter philosophers from thinking carefully about the nature of memory traces. On the contrary, scientific research on the nature of memory traces can rekindle philosopher's interest o…Read more
  •  137
  •  135
    The Effect of What We Think may Happen on our Judgments of Responsibility
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (2): 259-269. 2013.
    Recent evidence suggests that if a deterministic description of the events leading up to a morally questionable action is couched in mechanistic, reductionistic, concrete and/or emotionally salient terms, people are more inclined toward compatibilism than when those descriptions use non-mechanistic, non-reductionistic, abstract and/or emotionally neutral terms. To explain these results, it has been suggested that descriptions of the first kind are processed by a concrete cognitive system, while …Read more
  •  134
    People’s causal judgments are susceptible to the action effect, whereby they judge actions to be more causal than inactions. We offer a new explanation for this effect, the counterfactual explanation: people judge actions to be more causal than inactions because they are more inclined to consider the counterfactual alternatives to actions than to consider counterfactual alternatives to inactions. Experiment 1a conceptually replicates the original action effect for causal judgments. Experiment 1b…Read more
  •  131
    What are the grounds for the distinction between the mental and the physical? What is it the relation between ascribing mental states to an organism and understanding its behavior? Are animals and complex systems vehicles of inner evolutionary environments? Is there a difference between personal and sub-personal level processes in the brain? Answers to these and other questions were developed in Daniel Dennett’s first book, Content and Consciousness (1969), where he sketched a unified theoretica…Read more