•  62
    Vigilance and mind wandering
    Mind and Language. forthcoming.
    Mind wandering is a pervasive feature of subjective experience. But why does the mind tend to wriggle about rather than always staying focused? To answer this question, this paper defends the claim that mind wandering consists in task-unrelated thought. Despite being the standard view of mind wandering in cognitive psychology, there has been no systematic elaboration or defense of the task-unrelated thought view of mind wandering. Here, I argue for the task-unrelated thought view by showing how …Read more
  •  141
    Blame for Hum(e)an beings: The role of character information in judgments of blame
    with Kevin O'Neill, Jordan Bridges, Justin Sytsma, and Zac Irving
    Social Psychological and Personality Science. forthcoming.
    How does character information inform judgments of blame? Some argue that character information is indirectly relevant to blame because it enriches judgments about the mental states of a wrongdoer. Others argue that character information is directly relevant to blame, even when character traits are causally irrelevant to the wrongdoing. We propose an empirical synthesis of these views: a Two Channel Model of blame. The model predicts that character information directly affects blame when this in…Read more
  •  80
    The third Meditation is typically understood to contain two a posteriori arguments for the existence of God. The author focuses on the second argument, where Descartes proves the existence of God partly in virtue of proving that Descartes cannot be the cause of himself. To establish this, Descartes argues that if he were the cause of himself, then he would endow himself with any conceivable perfection. The justification for this claim is that bringing about a substance is more difficult than cre…Read more
  • Experimental Advances in Philosophy of Action (edited book)
    with Paul Henne
    Bloomsbury. 2023.
  •  502
    Are we ever morally permitted to do what is morally wrong? It seems intuitive that we are, but evidence for dissociations among judgment of permissibility and wrongness are relatively scarce. Across 4 experiments (N = 1,438), we show that people judge that some behaviors can be morally wrong and permissible. The dissociations arise because these judgments track different morally relevant aspects of everyday moral encounters. Judgments of individual rights predicted permissibility but not wrongne…Read more
  •  458
    What’s inside is all that counts? The contours of everyday thinking about self-control
    with Juan Pablo Bermúdez, Louis Chartrand, and Sergio Barbosa
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (1): 33-55. 2023.
    Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studies (N = 296) that indicate the structure of everyday use of the concept. In Study 1, participants rated the degree to which different strategies to re…Read more
  •  82
    Negligence and self-trust
    Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. forthcoming.
    Why are we accountable for negligent wrongdoing? This paper develops a contractualist account of accountability for negligent wrongdoing rooted in maintaining self-trust. Displays of negligence threaten the self-trust needed to exercise planning agency. People thus have reason to take responsibility for being negligent to defeat higher-order evidence about the unreliability of one’s planning agency. Individuals are rationally required to take responsibility for negligence in virtue of the demand…Read more
  •  138
    Some have argued that advances in the science of human decision-making, particularly research on automaticity and unconscious priming, would ultimately thwart our commonsense understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Do people interpret this research as a threat to their self-understanding as free and responsible agents? We approached this question by seeing how feelings of surprise mediate the relationship between personal sense of control and third-personal attributions of free will…Read more
  •  86
    Bringing self-control into the future
    In Paul Henne & Samuel Murray (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action, Bloomsbury. pp. 51-72. 2023.
    The standard story about self-control states that self-control is limited, aversive, and that the function of self-control is to resist impulses or temptation. Several cases are provided that challenge this standard story. An alternative, future-oriented account of self-control is defended, where the function of self-control is to manage interference that arises from overlapping information processing pathways. This provides a computationally tractable account of self-control rooted in one’s bei…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
  •  223
    Fitouchi et al. claim that seemingly victimless pleasures and nonproductive activities are moralized because they alter self-control. Their account predicts that: (1) victimless excesses are negatively moralized because they diminish self-control, and (2) restrained behaviors are positively moralized because they enhance self-control. Several examples run contrary to these predictions and call into question the general relationship between self-control and cooperation.
  •  4
    Piercing the Smoke Screen: Dualism, Free Will, and Christianity
    with Elise Murray and Thomas Nadelhoffer
    Journal of Cognition and Culture 21 (1-2): 94-111. 2021.
    Research on the folk psychology of free will suggests that people believe free will is incompatible with determinism and that human decision-making cannot be exhaustively characterized by physical processes. Some suggest that certain elements of Western cultural history, especially Christianity, have helped to entrench these beliefs in the folk conceptual economy. Thus, on the basis of this explanation, one should expect to find three things: a significant correlation between belief in dualism a…Read more
  •  400
    The scientific study of passive thinking: Methods of mind wandering research
    with Zachary C. Irving and Kristina Krasich
    In Felipe De Brigard & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (eds.), Neuroscience and Philosophy, Mit Press. pp. 389-426. 2022.
    The science of mind wandering has rapidly expanded over the past 20 years. During this boom, mind wandering researchers have relied on self-report methods, where participants rate whether their minds were wandering. This is not an historical quirk. Rather, we argue that self-report is indispensable for researchers who study passive phenomena like mind wandering. We consider purportedly “objective” methods that measure mind wandering with eye tracking and machine learning. These measures are vali…Read more
  •  303
    Do people understand determinism? The tracking problem for measuring free will beliefs
    with Elise Dykhuis and Thomas Nadelhoffer
    Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Experimental work on free will typically relies on deterministic stimuli to elicit judgments of free will. We call this the Vignette-Judgment model. We outline a problem with research based on this model. It seems that people either fail to respond to the deterministic aspects of vignettes when making judgments or that their understanding of determinism differs from researcher expectations. We provide some empirical evidence for this claim. In the end, we argue that people seem to lack facility …Read more
  •  747
    Mental control and attributions of blame for negligent wrongdoing
    with Kristina Krasich, Zachary Irving, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Felipe De Brigard
    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
  •  302
    The Catch-22 of Forgetfulness: Responsibility for Mental Mistakes
    with Zachary C. Irving, Aaron Glasser, and Kristina Krasich
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Attribution theorists assume that character information informs judgments of blame. But there is disagreement over why. One camp holds that character information is a fundamental determinant of blame. Another camp holds that character information merely provides evidence about the mental states and processes that determine responsibility. We argue for a two-channel view, where character simultaneously has fundamental and evidential effects on blame. In two large factorial studies (n = 495), part…Read more
  •  8
    Irena Backus. Leibniz: Protestant Theologian
    Journal of Analytic Theology 6 754-759. 2018.
  •  443
    Intuitions About Free Will and the Failure to Comprehend Determinism
    with Thomas Nadelhoffer and Elise Dykhuis
    Erkenntnis 88 (6): 2515-2536. 2023.
    Theories of free will are often measured against how well they capture everyday intuitions about free will. But what are these everyday intuitions, and what theoretical commitments do they express? Empirical methods have delivered mixed messages. In response, some free will theorists have developed error theories to undermine the credentials of countervailing intuitions. These efforts are predicated on the idea that people might misunderstand determinism in any of several ways. This paper sheds …Read more
  •  216
    The impact of error-consequence severity on cue processing in importance-biased prospective memory
    with Kristina Krasich, Eva Gjorgieva, Shreya Bhatia, Myrthe Faber, Felipe De Brigard, and Marty Woldorff
    Cerebral Cortex Communications. forthcoming.
    Prospective memory (PM) enables people to remember to complete important tasks in the future. Failing to do so can result in consequences of varying severity. Here, we investigated how PM error-consequence severity impacts the neural processing of relevant cues for triggering PM and the ramification of that processing on the associated prospective task performance. Participants role-played a cafeteria worker serving lunches to fictitious students and had to remember to deliver an alternative lun…Read more
  •  27
    Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action (edited book)
    with Paul Henne
    Bloomsbury. 2023.
    What is self-control? Does a person need to be conscious to act? Are delusions always irrational? Questions such as these are fundamental for investigations into action and rationality, as well as how we assign responsibility for wrongdoing and assess clinical symptoms. Bridging the gap between philosophy and psychology, this interdisciplinary collection showcases how empirical research informs and enriches core questions in the philosophy of action. Exploring issues such as truth, moral judgeme…Read more
  •  948
    What are the benefits of mind wandering to creativity?
    with Nathan Liang, Nick Brosowsky, and Paul Seli
    Psychology of Creativity, Aesthetics, and the Arts. forthcoming.
    A primary aim of mind-wandering research has been to understand its influence on task performance. While this research has typically highlighted the costs of mind wandering, a handful of studies have suggested that mind wandering may be beneficial in certain situations. Perhaps the most-touted benefit is that mind wandering during a creative-incubation interval facilitates creative thinking. This finding has played a critical role in the development of accounts of the adaptive value of mind wand…Read more
  •  198
    Thought dynamics under task demands
    with Nick Brosowsky, Jonathan Schooler, and Paul Seli
    Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. forthcoming.
    As research on mind wandering has accelerated, the construct’s defining features have expanded and researchers have begun to examine different dimensions of mind wandering. Recently, Christoff and colleagues have argued for the importance of investigating a hitherto neglected variety of mind wandering: “unconstrained thought,” or, thought that is relatively unguided by executive-control processes. To date, with only a handful of studies investigating unconstrained thought, little is known about …Read more
  •  1098
    Attention need not always apply: Mind wandering impedes explicit but not implicit sequence learning
    with Nicholaus Brosowsky, Jonathan Schooler, and Paul Seli
    Cognition 209 (C): 104530. 2021.
    According to the attentional resources account, mind wandering (or “task-unrelated thought”) is thought to compete with a focal task for attentional resources. Here, we tested two key predictions of this account: First, that mind wandering should not interfere with performance on a task that does not require attentional resources; second, that as task requirements become automatized, performance should improve and depth of mind wandering should increase. Here, we used a serial reaction time t…Read more
  •  787
    Piercing the smoke screen: Dualism, free will, and Christianity
    with Elise Dykhuis and Thomas Nadelhoffer
    Journal of Cognition and Culture. forthcoming.
    Research on the folk psychology of free will suggests that people believe free will is incompatible with determinism and that human decision-making cannot be exhaustively characterized by physical processes. Some suggest that certain elements of Western cultural history, especially Christianity, have helped to entrench these beliefs in the folk conceptual economy. Thus, on the basis of this explanation, one should expect to find three things: (1) a significant correlation between belief in duali…Read more
  •  618
    Confabulation is typically understood to be dysfunctional. But this understanding neglects the phenomenon’s potential benefits. In fact, we think that the benefits of non-clinical confabulation provide a better foundation for a general account of confabulation. In this paper, we start from these benefits to develop a social teleological account of confabulation. Central to our account is the idea that confabulation manifests a kind of willful ignorance. By understanding confabulation in this way…Read more
  •  742
    Can the mind wander intentionally?
    with Kristina Krasich
    Mind and Language 37 (3): 432-443. 2020.
    Mind wandering is typically operationalized as task-unrelated thought. Some argue for the need to distinguish between unintentional and intentional mind wandering, where an agent voluntarily shifts attention from task-related to task-unrelated thoughts. We reveal an inconsistency between the standard, task-unrelated thought definition of mind wandering and the occurrence of intentional mind wandering (together with plausible assumptions about tasks and intentions). This suggests that either the …Read more