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Mens rea ascription, expertise and outcome effects: Professional judges surveyed
Abstract
A coherent practice of mens rea ('guilty mind') ascription in criminal law presupposes a concept of mens rea which is insensitive to the moral valence of an action's outcome. For instance, an assessment of whether an agent harmed another person intentionally should be unaffected by the severity of harm done. Ascriptions of intentionality made by laypeople, however, are subject to a strong outcome bias. As demonstrated by the Knobe effect, a knowingly incurred negative side effect is standardly judged intentional, whereas a positive side effect is not. We report the first empirical investigation into intentionality ascriptions made by professional judges, which finds (i) that professionals are sensitive to the moral valence of outcome type, and (ii) that the worse the outcome, the higher the propensity to ascribe intentionality. The data shows the intentionality ascriptions of professional judges to be inconsistent with the concept of mens rea supposedly at the foundation of criminal law.
... Further, studies suggest that there is an even more fine-grained effect of harm on intentionality, namely, the severity effect. The severity effect consists of a gradable ascription of intentionality: The greater harm, the more intentional the action is (Kneer and Bourgeois-Gironde 2017). Kneer and Bourgeois-Gironde's experiments are particularly interesting for our purposes, since they have involved sixty-eight French professional judges. ...
... Their conclusion is that the "Knobe effect is just as pronounced for professional judges as for laypeople" (ibid., 142), and for "French judges, severity of outcome correlates positively with the propensity to ascribe intentionality" (ibid., 143). This means that the more severe the harm, the more inclined the court is to ascribe (broad) intention instead of negligence (Kneer and Bourgeois-Gironde 2017;Kneer et al. in prep.). ...
... Moreover, studies suggest that the factor that mediates the relation between harm and intention is blame: The more harm there is, the more we blame the agent, and therefore the greater the intentionality we ascribe (Alicke 2000;Kneer and Bourgeois-Gironde 2017;Nadelhoffer 2004;2006a;2006b). Even if the goodness or badness of an agent's behavior should be irrelevant in ascribing broad intention to her-that is, in saying that she intentionally brought about a given side effect-evidence suggests that this is not the case. ...
This essay criticizes Dworkin’s and Greenberg’s interpretivism using one concrete example, namely, the interpretation of rules of criminal law pertaining to intentionality ascriptions. In fact, according to interpretivism, some judicial interpretations of criminal intention can be explained as practices that depart from legislatively communicated content to implement moral principles. We distinguish between a Kantian and a consequentialist approach to criminal intention and claim that judicial practice can be viewed as an implementation of the consequentialist approach which pulls apart the Kantian criteria communicated by the legislator. However, we argue that, in doing so, judges open the door to folk biases, political pressures, and stereotypes that produce distorted and unfair results. To deal with this objection, interpretivism would have to both claim that judicial practice is erroneous and provide a theory of objective moral truth, yet it fails in both respects.
... Secondly, XJur research may identify the recurrent features of legal theory and practice (e.g., Solan, 2009;Sommers, 2020). Finally, experimental research with legal experts may verify whether such experts are applying legal concepts correctly (e.g., Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017). ...
... This side-effect effect has been replicated in different demographic groups (e.g., Burra & Knobe, 2006;Leslie et al., 2006;Young et al., 2006). 17 Since intentionality (known in criminal law as mens rea) is also a fundamental concept of the law, this research has attracted significant attention among legal and empirical scholars (Duff, 2015;Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Kobick, 2010;Kobick & Knobe, 2009;Macleod, 2016;Solan, 2009). One discussion examined whether the side-effect effect challenges existing legal systems, especially those that differentiate between knowledge and intent as different categories of legally relevant mental states. ...
... One discussion examined whether the side-effect effect challenges existing legal systems, especially those that differentiate between knowledge and intent as different categories of legally relevant mental states. Some researchers have argued that this legal distinction is inconsistent with ordinary intuitions, according to which knowledge sometimes suffices for intentionality (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Kobick & Knobe, 2009), leading to a risk of inconsistent interpretations of intent by the courts. ...
The experimental philosophy of law is a recent movement that aims to inform traditional debates in jurisprudence by conducting empirical research. This paper introduces and provides a systematic overview of the main lines of research in this field. It also covers the most important debates in the literature regarding the implications of these findings for the philosophy and theory of law. It argues that three challenges arise when addressing (old) legal-philosophical questions in (new) experimental ways by drawing normative implications from empirical data: such implications are value-driven, depend on explanations of empirical findings and vary across legal systems.
... But despite conceptual alignment, people might find it difficult to disregard outcomes. An effect of this sort is also found, for instance, when it comes to the ascription of causation and mens rea in between-subjects experiments (Alicke, 1992(Alicke, , 2000Alicke & Rose, 2010;Nadelhoffer, 2006;Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017, Bourgeois-Gironde & Kneer, 2017. Hence, if reasonableness judgments were distorted, we should work towards a better understanding of their underlying "mechanics", so as to devise means to alleviate the bias. ...
... But despite conceptual alignment, people might find it difficult to disregard outcomes. An effect of this sort is also found, for instance, when it comes to the ascription of causation and mens rea in between-subjects experiments (Alicke, 1992(Alicke, , 2000Alicke & Rose, 2010;Nadelhoffer, 2006;Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017, Bourgeois-Gironde & Kneer, 2017. Hence, if reasonableness judgments were distorted, we should work towards a better understanding of their underlying "mechanics", so as to devise means to alleviate the bias. ...
... Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that the severity of harm correlates positively with mens rea ascription. For instance, the more severe an undesired, yet knowingly occasioned harm, the higher the likelihood that people will judge it intentional (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Garcia-Olier & Kneer, in prep, Prochownik et al. 2020, Tobia, 2020 or that they will judge it as known or foreseen (Kneer et al., in prep). ...
This paper presents a series of studies (total N=579) which demonstrate that folk judgments concerning the reasonableness of decisions and actions depend strongly on whether they engender positive or negative consequences. A particular decision is deemed more reasonable in retrospect when it produces beneficial consequences than when it produces harmful consequences, even if the situation in which the decision was taken and the epistemic circumstances of the agent are held fixed across conditions. This finding is worrisome for the law, where the reasonable person standard plays a prominent role. The legal concept of reasonableness is outcome-insensitive: whether the defendant acted in a reasonable fashion or not depends exclusively on her context of action, no matter how things play out. Folk judgments of reasonableness are thus inconsistent with the legal concept of reasonableness. Problematically, in common law jurisdictions, the decision whether a defendant’s behavior was reasonable or not is frequently (though not necessarily) delegated to a lay jury.
... To minimize confusion between types of probability among the participants, the subjective probability question was phrased in terms of the 1 For the effect of outcome on possibly inculpating mental states more generally, see the literature on the Knobe effect (Knobe, 2003a(Knobe, , 2003b(Knobe, , 2010 for reviews, see Feltz, 2007, Cova, Lantian, & Boudesseul, 2016, the epistemic side-effect effect (Alfano, Beebe, & Robinson, 2012;Beebe & Buckwalter, 2010;Beebe & Jensen, 2012;Kneer, 2018). For empirical studies regarding mens rea attribution conducted with legal experts (judges, lawyers or law students), see Kneer and Bourgeois-Gironde (2017), Bourgeois-Gironde and Kneer (2018), Prochownik et al. (2020), Tobia (2020a), and Kneer et al. (2022). For mock juror studies on mens rea attribution, see inter alia Shen et al. (2011), Ginther et al. (2014, Mott and Heiphetz (2022). ...
... Similar effects can be found for legal experts (for France, see e.g. Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017, Bourgeois-Gironde & Kneer, 2018, for Germany, see Prochownik, Krebs, Wiegmann, & Horvath, 2020, though see Tobia, 2020a). It thus stands to reason to explore whether the effects of outcome on the lower echelons of inculpating mental statesnegligence and recklessnessare similarly robust across cultures and expertise. ...
In a series of ten preregistered experiments (N = 2043), we investigate the effect of outcome valence on judgments of probability, negligence, and culpability – a phenomenon sometimes labelled moral (and legal) luck. We found that harmful outcomes, when contrasted with neutral outcomes, lead to an increased perceived probability of harm ex post, and consequently, to a greater attribution of negligence and culpability. Rather than simply postulating hindsight bias (as is common), we employ a variety of empirical means to demonstrate that the outcome-driven asymmetry across perceived probabilities constitutes a systematic cognitive distortion. We then explore three distinct strategies to alleviate the hindsight bias and its downstream effects on mens rea and culpability ascriptions. Not all strategies are successful, but some prove very promising. They should, we argue, be considered in criminal jurisprudence, where distortions due to the hindsight bias are likely considerable and deeply disconcerting.
... In surveys with large samples, divorce work has to some extent examined attitudes, perceptions, views, and beliefs regarding professionals' roles and practices among, for example, lawyers, judges, mediators, mental health professionals, and child custody evaluators (e.g., Arroyo & Peek, 2015;Baker, 2007;Bogoch, 2008;Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Sanders et al., 2015;Taylor, 2004). Studies on how professionals view their expertise and professional role in divorce cases have pointed to the existence of professional boundaries and competition in the judicial and mediation contexts. ...
... The few studies available have focused on the role of stereotypical attitudes in divorce professionals' decision-making and assessments pertaining to post-divorce child custody and living arrangements. Some scholars (e.g., Davidson-Arad et al., 2003;Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017) have found evidence of a gender bias favoring maternal primacy and maternal custody after divorce. Studies have shown that traditional social norms and gender role models in which the mother is considered the "natural" caretaker of children continue to influence divorce professionals' decision-making and are reflected in family law systems (Braver et al., 2002;Nouman et al., 2016). ...
This article examines divorce professionals’ attitudes and stances in response to common criticisms of how they deal with divorce outcomes for fathers, according to which men are discriminated against in negotiations on the custody and living arrangements of their children. The study applied the relatively new qualitative attitude approach, and hence a further aim was to test its fitness for studying attitudes. Eighteen Finnish family professionals who worked with divorce cases — social workers, psychologists, district court judges, and lawyers — participated in semi-structured interviews in which they discussed claims designed to be provocative. The family professionals were found to show both collective, shared attitudes and diversity in attitudes and stances. The participants strove to position themselves as gender-neutral and as promoters of equality between mothers and fathers, and thus in accordance with the ideal of a good professional. The divorce professionals argued that their overriding aim was to secure the well-being of children. The method revealed some attribution bias, manifested as victim blaming, where fathers themselves were in part held accountable for the gendered post-divorce situation. The results highlight potential areas of cooperation between different types of divorce professionals that could lay a foundation for improving services and support for divorced parents and children.
... Second, cognitive biases typically surface under conditions characterized by uncertainty, time pressure, and emotional turmoil (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Indeed, for several biases it has been demonstrated that these exert stronger effects when the situation at hand is increasingly precarious (e.g., Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Schkade & Kilbourne, 1991). Hence, the risk of financiers succumbing to unwanted cognitive biases is particularly high in the context of financial distress. ...
... Regarding the first hypothesis, based on the discussed theories (e.g., social identity theory) and the discussed literature on similarity biases in financial decision making, it stands to reason that bankers might, by virtue of being human, be vulnerable to similar fundamental processes, favoring struggling entrepreneurs who are perceived as being similar to themselves. Additionally, for several biases (e.g., hindsight bias and outcome bias) it has been shown that they exert stronger effects in the case of negative events (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Schkade & Kilbourne, 1991). It might, therefore, be that similarity bias too is more likely to surface in case of an adverse event, as such events typically trigger sensemaking processes and causal attributions (Hastie, 1984). ...
For entrepreneurs in financial distress, it is of vital importance that investors and bankers accurately assess the viability of their business, free of unwanted biases that bear no relevance to the assessment of the chance of survival. Despite the prevalence of entrepreneurs facing financial distress, little research has yet investigated the role of cognitive biases in funding decisions in this important context. The current research attends to this issue and investigated whether entrepreneurs who are perceived by a banker as more similar are more likely to receive capital to save their business from bankruptcy than entrepreneurs who are perceived as less similar to the banker. Additionally, we investigated whether similarity bias affected bankers' attributions of what caused the financial distress as well as their perceptions of entrepreneurs' trustworthiness. Using an experimental research design, we found a similarity bias in bankers' causal attributions and trustworthiness judgments, but not in their credit decisions. We contrast our findings with similarity bias research among equity investors and discuss the implications for theory and practice.
... To improve ease of presentation, we rescaled all probabilities to fit the 7-point Likert scales which we employ for the measurement of mens rea and the moral variables. The mean ratings for all dependent variables are presented in Figure 2. Consistent with previous research (Cushman 2008;Cushman et al, 2009;Gino et al, 2009;Gino et al, 2010;Young et al, 2010;Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2012;Lench et al, 2015), there is a significant main effect of outcome (all ps<.035) on the moral variables (blame, punishment, see Appendix section 1.2), mens rea (see Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017, Kneer & Machery, 2019 and perceived probability (Arkes et al, 1981, Dawson et al, 1988Christensen-Szalanski & Willham, 1991;Kamin & Rachlinski, 1995;Kneer, 2021) both when assessed in objective and subjective terms (see Appendix, B.1.1). ...
... There is, for instance, considerable evidence of a strong, cross-cultural effect of outcome on ascriptions of intention and knowledge (Kneer et al. ms). Moreover, legal experts from France (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde 2017, Bourgeois-Gironde & Kneer, 2018, Germany (Prochownik et al. 2020), the Netherlands, Brazil, and the UK seem similarly affected as the folk (Kneer et al. ms; though cf. Tobia, ms. for diverging findings for the US). ...
In a series of ten preregistered experiments (N=2043), we investigate the effect of outcome valence on judgments of probability, negligence, and culpability – a phenomenon sometimes labelled moral (and legal) luck. We found that harmful outcomes, when contrasted with neutral outcomes, lead to increased perceived probability of harm ex post, and consequently to increased attribution of negligence and culpability. Rather than simply postulating a hindsight bias (as is common), we employ a variety of empirical means to demonstrate that the outcome-driven asymmetry across perceived probabilities constitutes a systematic cognitive distortion. We then explore three distinct strategies to alleviate the hindsight bias and its downstream effects on mens rea and culpability ascriptions. Not all are successful, but at least some prove promising. They should, we argue, be taken into consideration in criminal jurisprudence, where distortions due to the hindsight bias are likely considerable and deeply disconcerting.
... To improve ease of presentation, we rescaled all probabilities to fit the 7-point Likert scales which we employ for the measurement of mens rea and the moral variables. The mean ratings for all dependent variables are presented in Figure 2. Consistent with previous research (Cushman 2008;Cushman et al, 2009;Gino et al, 2009;Gino et al, 2010;Young et al, 2010;Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2012;Lench et al, 2015), there is a significant main effect of outcome (all ps<.035) on the moral variables (blame, punishment, see Appendix section 1.2), mens rea (see Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017, Kneer & Machery, 2019 and perceived probability (Arkes et al, 1981, Dawson et al, 1988Christensen-Szalanski & Willham, 1991;Kamin & Rachlinski, 1995;Kneer, 2021) both when assessed in objective and subjective terms (see Appendix, B.1.1). ...
... There is, for instance, considerable evidence of a strong, cross-cultural effect of outcome on ascriptions of intention and knowledge (Kneer et al. ms). Moreover, legal experts from France (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde 2017, Bourgeois-Gironde & Kneer, 2018, Germany (Prochownik et al. 2020), the Netherlands, Brazil, and the UK seem similarly affected as the folk (Kneer et al. ms; though cf. Tobia, ms. for diverging findings for the US). ...
In a series of ten preregistered experiments (N=2043), we investigate the effect of outcome valence on judgments of probability, negligence, and culpability – a phenomenon sometimes labelled moral (and legal) luck. We found that harmful outcomes, when contrasted with neutral outcomes, lead to increased perceived probability of harm ex post, and consequently to increased attribution of negligence and culpability. Rather than simply postulating a hindsight bias (as is common), we employ a variety of empirical means to demonstrate that the outcome-driven asymmetry across perceived probabilities constitutes a systematic cognitive distortion. We then explore three distinct strategies to alleviate the hindsight bias and its downstream effects on mens rea and culpability ascriptions. Not all are successful, but at least some prove promising. They should, we argue, be taken into consideration in criminal jurisprudence, where distortions due to the hindsight bias are likely considerable and deeply disconcerting.
... It has been found across different cultures (e.g., Knobe & Burra, 2006; but see Lau & Reisenzein, 2016) and related to brain function (Ngo et al., 2015). Even children (Leslie, Knobe, & Cohen, 2006;Rakoczy et al., 2015) and professional judges (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017) fall prey to its influence. The effect on intentionality is also not the only side-effect effect; observed effects have involved other mental states such as knowledge (e.g., Beebe & Buckwalter, 2010;Beebe & Jensen, 2012), desire (e.g., Nadelhoffer, 2006Pettit & Knobe, 2009), judgments of "doing" versus "allowing" (Cushman, Knobe, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008), and beliefs about causality (e.g., Knobe & Fraser, 2008). ...
... This suggests that neither blame nor praise has a role in how people answer questions about intentionality. We return to this point below in our discussion of why the intentionality side effect is particularly important, both generally and in legal contexts (e.g., Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Malle & Nelson, 2003), and in our arguments for how foreknowledge, desire, blame, and praise contribute to the emergence of the side-effect effect. ...
People typically apply the concept of intentionality to actions directed at achieving desired outcomes. For example, a businessperson might intentionally start a program aimed at increasing company profits. However, if starting the program leads to a foreknown and harmful side effect (e.g., to the environment), the side effect is frequently labeled as intentional even though it was not specifically intended or desired. In contrast, positive side effects (e.g., helping the environment) are rarely labeled as intentional. One explanation of this side-effect effect-that harmful (but not helpful) side effects are labeled as intentional- is that moral considerations influence whether people view actions as intentional or not, implying that bad outcomes are perceived as more intentional than good outcomes. The present research, however, shows that people redefine questions about intentionality to focus on agents' foreknowledge in harming cases and on their lack of desire or intention in helpful cases, suggesting that the same intentionality question is being interpreted differently as a function of side effect valence. Consistent with this, removing foreknowledge lowers the frequency of labeling harming as intentional without affecting whether people label helping as intentional. Likewise, increasing agents' desire to help or avoid harming increases rates of labeling helping as intentional without affecting rates of labeling harming as intentional. In summary, divergent decisions to label side effects as intentional or not appear to reflect differences in the criteria people use to evaluate each case, resulting in different interpretations of what questions about intentionality are asking.
... On the other hand, killing with a bat might be thought more intended because wielding one requires more effort than pulling a trigger. There is also strong evidence of intention attributions being influenced by outcomes (e.g., Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Knobe, 2003;Rosset, 2008). To this extent, the two-process model would predict that intention had a strong influence on wrongness, and a moderate influence on punishment and blame judgments. ...
Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influences of outcome and negligence on moral judgments of accidental actions, and hence their roles in the explanation of moral luck. In Experiment 1 (N = 300), two previous studies were replicated in which an agent armed with either a bat or a gun (to manipulate negligence) unintentionally killed a suspected intruder who turned out, luckily, to be a burglar, or unluckily, a family friend (to manipulate outcome). In response to an online questionnaire, participants made moral judgments of punishment, blame and wrongness and rated the agent's negligence and intentionality. The effects of both outcome (victim) and negligence (weapon type) IVs were slight, whereas perceived negligence had a substantial impact on all three judgments. In Experiment 2 (N = 241) the potential influence of both outcome and negligence was raised by increasing the contrasts between conditions: the agent was armed or unarmed, and the suspected intruder was harmed or unharmed. Perceived negligence again had a substantial impact on all three judgments, but now outcome, too, had a strong and direct effect on punishment judgments. These findings indicate that outcome effects on blame and wrongness judgments of accidental agents result primarily from the differential attribution of negligence: agents are considered more negligent – and hence more culpable – when outcomes are worse. In contrast, high levels of punishment are usually assigned when, and only when, the accidental agent is considered negligent and the outcome is negative. We discuss the implications for the interpretation of previous findings of strong outcome effects, and whether these effects, and therefore moral luck, are best explained by hindsight bias or by more rational updating of moral judgments.
... On the other hand, killing with a bat might be thought more intended because wielding one requires more effort than pulling a trigger. There is also strong evidence of intention attributions being influenced by outcomes (e.g., Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Knobe, 2003;Rosset, 2008). To this extent, the two-process model would predict that intention had a strong influence on wrongness, and a moderate influence on punishment and blame judgments. ...
Moral luck and the roles of outcome and negligence in moral judgments
... Moral psychology shows with survey experiments that, when assessing intentional action, people are much more prone to blame when a bad outcome occurs than to praise when a good outcome occurs, which is called the Knobe effect (Knobe, 2003). Additionally, the more severe the outcome, the more blame is ascribed, which is the so called severity effect (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Frisch et al., 2021;Kneer et al., in preparation;Garcia Olier & Kneer, 2022). ...
Unlabelled:
Legal and moral luck goes against the basic principle of criminal law that responsibility ascriptions are based on the mental state of the perpetrator, rather than merely the outcome of her action. If outcome should not play a decisive role in responsibility ascriptions, the attempt versus perpetration distinction becomes more difficult to justify. One potential justification is that we never know whether the attempter would not have resigned from pursuing her criminal intent even at the last moment. However, this paper argues that resigning from criminal intent and trying to stop the criminal outcome, which is called the renunciation defense, can be just as subject to outcome luck as the attempt versus perpetration distinction. And yet the availability of the renunciation defense in court is outcome dependent. I show with a series of experiments (N = 479) that outcome dependence for the renunciation defense is perceived as unjust and discuss the implications for the renunciation defense as well as attempt versus perpetration distinction.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11229-022-04000-6.
... The first line of inquiry, concerning topics in special jurisprudence, investigates the folk psychological basis of core concepts in legal reasoning such as mens rea (Kneer, 2017), consent (Sommers, 2020), and causation (Knobe & Shapiro, 2021). The second line of inquiry concerns fundamental questions in general jurisprudence about the very nature of law, emphasizing its relationship to the moral domain (e.g., . ...
In characterizing the nature of law and its proper interpretation, philosophers of law often appeal to empirical assumptions about the mind and language. However, psychological research has emphasized social norms (sustained through personal interaction), while comparatively neglecting positive rules (introduced by an authority). Addressing this imbalance, recent empirical work has begun to tackle foundational questions in jurisprudence, such as the connection between law and morality, the extent and origin of cultural variability in legal concepts, and the overlap between ordinary and expert concepts in this domain. This chapter provides an overview of ongoing research in the nascent field of experimental jurisprudence and takes stock of its implications for the concept of law. This preliminary sketch of legal cognition raises deeper questions that only a more diverse research program could answer. In closing, we advocate that research in experimental jurisprudence ought to investigate proximate and ultimate questions in parallel so as to paint a detailed portrait of the ‘legal mind’.
... Schulz et al. (2011) find that "philosophical expertise in the free will debate … does not eliminate the influence of … extraversion … on judgments concerning freedom and moral responsibility." Various studies have examined the extent to which the judgment of experts about philosophically significant matters are subject to similar kinds of effect as the judgments of lay people (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2012). 7 ...
Recent metaphilosophical debates have focused on the methods/epistemology of philosophy (e.g., the role of intuitions), and the structure of the discipline (e.g., which subfields are considered central to philosophy). The paper reports the results of an exploratory study examining the relationship between personality and both kinds of metaphilosophical view. The findings reported are (a) No important link between personality and attitudes to intuitions, (b) Apparent differences between experts and non-experts as to which subfields are considered central, (c) Only limited evidence that perceptions of centrality are related to personality in minor ways. Although no dramatic relationships between personality and metaphilosophical view are found, the results nonetheless prompt some reflection about the role played by judgements about the centrality of subfields within the discipline.
... This has since been shown to be the case with related judgements of causality and blame amongst others. See Feltz (2007) and Kneer and Bourgeois-Gironde (2017) for an overview. Given the overwhelming about of research written about the effect, it is surprising that the concept of side effect hasn't been more formally identified. ...
Deployed algorithms can cause certain negative side effects on the world in pursuit of their objective. It is important to define precisely what an algorithmic side-effect is in a way which is compatible with the wider folk concept to avoid future misunderstandings and to aid analysis in the event of harm being caused. This article argues that current treatments of side-effects in AI research are often not sufficiently precise. By considering the medical idea of side effect, this article will argue that the concept of algorithm side effect can only exist once the intent or purpose of the algorithm is known and the relevant causal mechanisms are understood and mapped. It presents a method to apply widely accepted legal concepts (The Model Penal Code or MPC) along with causal reasoning to identify side effects and then determine their associated culpability.
... In legal decision-making, the outcome severity of a crime and the subject's moral character are not to be considered to ascribe inculpating mental states (mentes reae). Inconsistent with the concept of mens rea, previous research showed that professional judges are affected by the outcome severity in their ascription of intention (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017). Following ...
In legal decision-making, the outcome severity of a crime and the subject's moral character are not to be considered to ascribe inculpating mental states (mentes reae). Inconsistent with the concept of mens rea, previous research showed that professional judges are affected by the outcome severity in their ascription of intention (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017). Following Alicke (2000), we hypothesize that an affect-driven information processing could explain these findings. We assume that a more severe outcome (e.g., the victim being paralyzed) evokes stronger negative affect than a less severe outcome (e.g., the victim suffering some bruises). The negative affect, in turn, fosters the desire to blame the subject and the ascription of inculpating mental states. Similar processes might occur if judges or juries are confronted with information about the suspect's moral character (see, e.g., Nadelhoffer, 2006). A harm-causing suspect with a bad moral character might evoke stronger negative affect than a harm-causing suspect with a good moral character. Testing these hypotheses, we ran two studies (study A with a sample of laypeople, N=344 and study B with a sample of legal experts, N=130, including 17 judges, 24 prosecutors, and 56 attorneys). In both studies, participants read a case description with information about the suspect's moral character (good or bad) and the severity of the outcome (moderate or severe). After reading the case description, participants reported their negative affect and made an initial ascription of blame to the suspect (ex-ante). Participants then evaluated further evidence about the case before judging the suspect's mental state and giving their final judgments of blame (ex-post). In study B, we found that aggregating across the two outcome conditions, legal experts reported stronger negative affect, ascribed more blame, and were more willing to ascribe inculpating states of mind if the suspect had a bad moral character than if the suspect had a good moral character (all ps<.001; all ds> .50). For outcome severity, we only found a significant effect on negative affect (d=.42; p<.05) and blame ex-ante (d=.35; p<.05). In study A, we found similar results. 2 Interestingly, after evaluating further evidence, moral character had bigger effects on the ascription of blame (ex-post) and mens rea in the study with experts than in the study with laypeople, even though legal experts reported a smaller level of initial blame (ex-ante) and negative affect compared to laypeople. A possible explanation is that experts might suppress their negative affect and initial desire to blame, knowing that they should be objective in their judgment and not consider character information to ascribe mental states. However, with the additional cognitive load (evaluating further evidence), the capacity for suppression might diminish, and the influence of the affective-laden information becomes all the more apparent. In the end, both fact finders in civil law jurisdictions (juries of laypeople) and common law jurisdictions (judges as legal experts) ascribe mens rea inconsistently with the concept of mens rea supposedly at the foundation of criminal and tort law.
... But we have limited trust in legal expertise when deep-seated patterns of judgment distortion are at stake. Given that legal experts are just as sensitive to the Knobe Effect and the Severity Effect on mens rea attribution (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Kneer et al., ms), even when the mode of presentation is the exact same as in court (Kneer & Bublitz, ms), we doubt that all is gas and gaiters when it comes to causation. Given the powerful impact of morally peripheral normative factors on causation among laypeople, future research should address whether experts do any better in this regard. ...
In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to a great number of unexpected factors, some of which seem rather peripheral to causation. One of those is the norm effect (Knobe & Fraser, 2008): Agents who, in acting as they do, break a salient norm, are more likely to be considered as having caused a certain consequence than when they do not violate a norm. According to some (e.g., Alicke, 1992) this constitutes a bias. According to others (e.g., Sytsma, 2020), the folk concept of causation is sensitive to normative factors, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
In this paper, we explore the question whether the norm effect should be considered a bias from the legal perspective on the one hand, and from the psychological perspective on the other. To do this, we test whether norms which are nonpertinent to the consequences or outright silly also impact causation judgements. The data from two preregistered experiments (total N=593) clearly show they do. This, we argue, makes the bias interpretation plausible from the psychological perspective, and both plausible and problematic from the legal perspective. It also shows that the law should abstain from unreflectively assuming conceptual correspondence between legal and ordinary language concepts.
... Moral psychology shows with survey experiments that, when assessing intentional action, people are much more prone to blame when a bad outcome occurs than to praise when a good outcome occurs, which is called the Knobe effect (Knobe, 2003). Additionally, the more severe the outcome, the more blame is ascribed, which is the so called severity effect (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Frisch et al., 2021;Kneer et al., in preparation;Garcia Olier & Kneer, 2022). Moreover, as studies show, when presented with a vignette describing only either the good or bad luck scenario of negligent behavior (between-subjects design), participants assess the responsibility of the protagonists differently, in accordance with the Difference Intuition, (cf. ...
Legal and moral luck goes against the basic principle of criminal law that responsibility ascriptions are based on the mental state of the perpetrator, rather than merely the outcome of her action. If outcome should not play a decisive role in responsibility ascriptions, the attempt versus perpetration distinction becomes more difficult to justify. One potential justification is that we never know whether the attempter would not have resigned from pursuing her criminal intent even at the last moment. However, this paper argues that resigning from criminal intent and trying to stop the criminal outcome, which is called the renunciation defense, can be just as subject to outcome luck as the attempt versus perpetration distinction. And yet the availability of the renunciation defense in court is outcome dependent. I show with a series of experiments (N=479) that outcome dependence for the renunciation defense is perceived as unjust and discuss the implications for the renunciation defense as well as attempt versus perpetration distinction.
... A wide literature demonstrates that moral considerations causally influence a broad range of judgments: for example, whether an agent acted intentionally (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017;Knobe, 2003) and whether they caused a negative outcome (Alicke, 2000). ...
Objectives: We sought to understand how basic competencies in moral reasoning influence the application of private, institutional, and legal rules. Hypotheses: We predicted that moral appraisals, implicating both outcome-based and mental state reasoning, would shape participants’ interpretation of rules and statutes—and asked whether these effects arise differentially under intuitive and reflective reasoning conditions. Method: In six vignette-based experiments (total N = 2,473; 293 university law students [67% women; age bracket mode: 18–22 years] and 2,180 online workers [60% women; mean age = 31.9 years]), participants considered a wide range of written rules and laws and determined whether a protagonist had violated the rule in question. We manipulated morally relevant aspects of each incident—including the valence of the rule’s purpose (Study 1) and of the outcomes that ensued (Studies 2 and 3), as well as the protagonist’s accompanying mental state (Studies 5 and 6). In two studies, we simultaneously varied whether participants decided under time pressure or following a forced delay (Studies 4 and 6). Results: Moral appraisals of the rule’s purpose, the agent’s extraneous blameworthiness, and the agent’s epistemic state impacted legal determinations and helped to explain participants’ departure from rules’ literal interpretation. Counter-literal verdicts were stronger under time pressure and were weakened by the opportunity to reflect. Conclusions: Under intuitive reasoning conditions, legal determinations draw on core competencies in moral cognition, such as outcome-based and mental state reasoning. In turn, cognitive reflection dampens these effects on statutory interpretation, allowing text to play a more influential role.
... However, her causal status is overriden by Bob's action if Bob throws the cigarette maliciously rather than negligently, with Bob now being determined as the cause. In line with the different types of "mens rea" (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017), the agents' mental states can be ordered according to their degree of culpability, i.e. carelessness < negligence < maliciousness. Halpern and Hitchcock (2015) propose that possible worlds can be ordered by their status of normality, and that the the most "normal" (here: prescriptively normal) comparison contrast is prioritised. ...
Did Tom's use of nuts in the dish cause Billy's allergic reaction? According to counterfactual theories of causation, an agent is judged a cause to the extent that their action made a difference to the outcome (Gerstenberg, Goodman, Lagnado, & Tenenbaum, 2020; Gerstenberg, Halpern, & Tenen-baum, 2015; Halpern, 2016; Hitchcock & Knobe, 2009). In this paper, we argue for the integration of epistemic states into current counterfactual accounts of causation. In the case of ignorant causal agents, we demonstrate that people's counterfactual reasoning primarily targets the agent's epistemic state-what the agent doesn't know-, and their epistemic actions-what they could have done to know-rather than the agent's actual causal action. In four experiments, we show that people's causal judgment as well as their reasoning about alternatives is sensitive to the epistemic conditions of a causal agent: Knowledge vs. ignorance (Experiment 1), self-caused vs. externally caused ignorance (Experiment 2), the number of epistemic actions (Experiment 3), and the epistemic context (Experiment 4). We see two broad arguments for integrating epistemic states into causal models and counterfactual frameworks. First, assuming the intervention on indirect, epistemic causes might allow us to explain why people attribute decreased causality to ignorant vs. knowing causal agents. Moreover, causal agents' epistemic states pick out those factors that can be controlled or manipulated in order to achieve desirable future outcomes, reflecting the forward-looking dimension of causality. We discuss our findings in the broader context of moral and causal cognition.
... The converse is also true: people from societies that seem 'highest' in mind-mindedness also disregard mental states for some moral judgements [31,32]. The United States (US) legal system has extensive rules and case law about strict liability, cases in which people accused of harm cannot claim ignorance as a defence. ...
Cross-cultural research on moral reasoning has brought to the fore the question of whether moral judgements always turn on inferences about the mental states of others. Formal legal systems for assigning blame and punishment typically make fine-grained distinctions about mental states, as illustrated by the concept of mens rea , and experimental studies in the USA and elsewhere suggest everyday moral judgements also make use of such distinctions. On the other hand, anthropologists have suggested that some societies have a morality that is disregarding of mental states, and have marshalled ethnographic and experimental evidence in support of this claim. Here, we argue against the claim that some societies are simply less ‘mind-minded’ than others about morality. In place of this cultural main effects hypothesis about the role of mindreading in morality, we propose a contextual variability view in which the role of mental states in moral judgement depends on the context and the reasons for judgement. On this view, which mental states are or are not relevant for a judgement is context-specific, and what appear to be cultural main effects are better explained by culture-by-context interactions.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.
... In a recent study investigating outcome bias in legal decision making, judges were found to perceive a particular individual to have acted more intentionally when that person's actions resulted in a severely bad outcome versus a moderately bad outcome (Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017). Hence, outcome information can distort legally relevant judgments even of those who have received extensive training to not let irrelevant factors affect their judgment (see also Anderson et al., 1997;Charron & Lowe, 2008). ...
Following a corporate disaster such as bankruptcy, people in general and damaged parties, in particular, want to know what happened and whether the company's directors are to blame. The accurate assessment of directors’ liability can be jeopardized by having to judge in hindsight with full knowledge of the adverse outcome. The present study investigates whether professional legal investigators such as judges and lawyers are affected by hindsight bias and outcome bias when evaluating directors’ conduct in a bankruptcy case. Additionally, to advance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying these biases, we also examine whether free will beliefs can predict susceptibility to hindsight bias and outcome bias in this context. In two studies (total N = 1,729), we demonstrate that legal professionals tend to judge a director's actions more negatively and perceive bankruptcy as more foreseeable in hindsight than in foresight and that these effects are significantly stronger for those who endorse the notion that humans have free will. This contribution is particularly timely considering the many companies that are currently going bankrupt or are facing bankruptcy amidst the COVID‐19 pandemic.
... For instance, Kahan and colleagues (2016) demonstrate that expertise is capable of rendering judges immune to political biases in legal reasoning. Other research finds evidence of bias--for instance, when judges' sentencing decisions are guided by irrelevant anchors (Englich, Mussweiler, & Strack, 2006; see also Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017). To understand whether abstract/concrete discrepancies are dampened by judicial expertise, we recruited a sample of experienced federal judges for our final study. ...
Higher courts sometimes assess the constitutionality of law by working through a concrete case, other times by reasoning about the underlying question in a more abstract way. Prior research has found that the degree of concreteness or abstraction with which an issue is formulated can influence people’s prescriptive views: For instance, people often endorse punishment for concrete misdeeds that they would oppose if the circumstances were described abstractly. We sought to understand whether the so-called ‘abstract/concrete paradox’ also jeopardizes the consistency of judicial reasoning. In a series of experiments, both lay and professional judges sometimes reached opposite conclusions when reasoning about concrete cases versus the underlying issues formulated in abstract terms. This effect emerged whether participants reasoned with broad principles, such as human dignity, or narrow rules, and was largest among individuals high in trait empathy. Finally, to understand whether people reflectively endorse the discrepancy between abstract and concrete resolutions, we examined their reactions when evaluating both, either simultaneously or sequentially. These approaches revealed no single pattern across lay and expert populations, or exploratory and confirmatory studies. Taken together, our studies suggest that empathic concern plays a greater role in guiding the judicial resolution of concrete cases than in illuminating judges’ professed standards—which may result in concrete decisions in violation of their own abstract principles.
... Moral and legal judgments typically take place in such non-comparative contexts, and one would thus expect that outcome frequently influences judgment in everyday circumstances (cf. also Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017 for the effect of outcome on mens rea attribution amongst professional judges). The phenomenon should thus be of concern to legal professionals, but also to all of us when we engage in moral judgment. ...
Moral philosophers and psychologists often assume that people judge morally lucky and morally unlucky agents differently, an assumption that stands at the heart of the Puzzle of Moral Luck. We examine whether the asymmetry is found for reflective intuitions regarding wrongness, blame, permissibility, and punishment judg- ments, whether people’s concrete, case-based judgments align with their explicit, abstract principles regarding moral luck, and what psychological mechanisms might drive the effect.
Our experiments produce three findings: First, in within-subjects experiments favorable to reflective deliberation, the vast majority of people judge a lucky and an unlucky agent as equally blameworthy, and their actions as equally wrong and permissible. The philosophical Puzzle of Moral Luck, and the challenge to the very possibility of systematic ethics it is frequently taken to engender, thus simply do not arise. Second, punishment judgments are significantly more outcome- dependent than wrongness, blame, and permissibility judgments. While this constitutes evidence in favor of current Dual Process Theories of moral judgment, the latter need to be qualified: punishment and blame judgments do not seem to be driven by the same process, as is commonly argued in the literature. Third, in between-subjects experiments, outcome has an effect on all four types of moral judgments. This effect is mediated by negligence ascriptions and can ultimately be explained as due to differing probability ascriptions across cases.
... Moral and legal judgments typically take place in such non-comparative contexts, and one would thus expect that outcome frequently influences judgment in everyday circumstances (cf. also Kneer & Bourgeois-Gironde, 2017 for the effect of outcome on mens rea attribution amongst professional judges). The phenomenon should thus be of concern to legal professionals, but also to all of us when we engage in moral judgment. ...
Moral philosophers and psychologists often assume that people judge morally lucky and morally unlucky agents differently, an assumption that stands at the heart of the puzzle of moral luck. We examine whether the asymmetry is found for reflective intuitions regarding wrongness, blame, permissibility and punishment judgments, whether people's concrete, case-based judgments align with their explicit, abstract principles regarding moral luck, and what psychological mechanisms might drive the effect. Our experiments produce three findings: First, in within-subjects experiments favorable to reflective deliberation, wrongness, blame, and permissibility judgments across different moral luck conditions are the same for the vast majority of people. The philosophical puzzle of moral luck, and the challenge to the very possibility of systematic ethics it is frequently taken to engender, thus simply does not arise. Second, punishment judgments are significantly more outcome-dependent than wrongness, blame, and permissibility judgments. While this is evidence in favor of current dual-process theories of moral judgment, the latter need to be qualified since punishment does not pattern with blame. Third, in between-subjects experiments, outcome has an effect on all four types of moral judgments. This effect is mediated by negligence ascriptions and can ultimately be explained as due to differing probability ascriptions across cases.
To prove guilt, jurors in many countries must find that the criminal defendant acted with a particular mental state. However, this amateur form of mindreading is not supposed to occur in civil negligence trials. Instead, jurors should decide whether the defendant was negligent by looking only at his actions, and whether they were objectively reasonable under the circumstances. Even so, across four pre-registered studies (N=782), we showed that jurors do not focus on actions alone. US mock jurors spontaneously rely on mental state information when evaluating negligence cases. In Study 1, jurors were given three negligence cases to judge, and were asked to evaluate whether a reasonably careful person would have foreseen the risk (foreseeability) and whether the defendant acted unreasonably (negligence). Across conditions, we also varied the extent and content of additional information about defendant’s subjective mental state: jurors were provided with evidence that the defendant either thought the risk of a harm was high or was low, or were not provided with such information. Foreseeability and negligence scores increased when mock jurors were told the defendant thought there was a high risk, and negligence scores decreased when the defendant thought there was a low risk, compared to when no background mental state information was provided. In Study 2, we replicated these findings by using mild (as opposed to severe) harm cases. In Study 3, we tested an intervention aimed at reducing jurors’ reliance on mental states, which consisted in raising jurors’ awareness of potential hindsight bias in their evaluations. The intervention reduced mock juror reliance on mental states when assessing foreseeability when the defendant was described as knowing of a high risk, an effect replicated in Study 4. This research demonstrates that jurors rely on mental states to assess breach, regardless of what the legal doctrine says.
Routine business activities often lead to unintended side effects. Prior research suggests that consumers ascribe greater corporate foreknowledge when side effects are harmful (vs. helpful) but offers a controversial explanation and insufficient exploration of its consequences. The current research fills these gaps, offering a heuristic‐based explanation steeped in consumer behavior, while demonstrating the importance of this asymmetry to consumer response. First, a Pilot Study confirms the theoretical processes underlying our explanation. Study 1 tests the role of this foreknowledge asymmetry in predicting implicit bias toward the company. Studies 2 and 3 provide moderation evidence for our heuristic‐based explanation and connect the phenomenon to motive inferences and blame judgments, respectively. In sum, this work provides a novel explanation for a common marketplace phenomenon while establishing its effects on several important consumer response variables.
There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purposes to physical objects and to rules. In both cases, purpose attributions appear to be governed not so much by original intention or by moral value as by current practice. We argue that these findings in the cognitive science of purpose attribution have implications for jurisprudential questions involving purposivist legal interpretation.
In general, people will judge a morally wrong behavior when perpetrated by an artificial intelligence (AI) as still being wrong. But moral judgements are complex, and therefore we explore how moral judgements made about AIs differ from those made about humans in real-world situations. In contrast to much of the current research on the morality of AIs, we examine real-world encounters where an AI commits a moral wrong as reported by participants in previous research. We adapt these to create nearly identical scenarios with human perpetrators. In Study 1, across scenarios, humans are perceived as more wrong, intentional, and blameworthy compared to AIs. In Study 2, we replicate those results and find that showing the participants the contrasting scenario – showing the AI scenario when one is rating the human scenario or vice versa – does not have a significant effect on moral judgements. An exploratory word-frequency analysis and illustrative quotes from participants’ open-ended explanations show that AIs are more often denied agency and perceived as programmed and therefore unintentional in producing the moral outcome. In contrast, humans are perceived as highly agentic and intentional, either fully responsible for the wrongdoing or not morally culpable because the behavior was perceived as a mistake.
Recent years have seen recurring episodes of tension between proponents of freedom of speech and advocates of the disenfranchised. Recent survey research attests to the ideological division in attitudes toward free speech, whereby conservatives report greater support for free speech than progressives do. Intrigued by the question of whether "canceling" is indeed a uniquely progressive tendency, we conducted a vignette-based experiment examining judgments of offensiveness among progressives and conservatives. Contrary to the dominant portrayal of progressives and conservatives, our study documented ideological symmetry in their evaluations of offensive speech. When faced with utterances whose content matters to them, both conservatives and progressives viewed outgroup speakers as more offensive than ingroup speakers. A second contribution of this chapter is to provide a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanism implicated in evaluating outgroup speech as more offensive than ingroup speech. Our results suggest that perception of offensiveness is mediated by ascriptions of intent: we tend to attribute negative intent to the speaker whenever we deem their utterances to be offensive, even against the explicitly stated speaker's background attitudes.
There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to
attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there
has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about
how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two
separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence.
Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the
same criteria to attribute purposes to physical objects and to rules. In
both cases, purpose attributions appear to be governed not so much by
original intention or by moral value as by current practice. We argue that
these findings in the cognitive science of purpose attribution have
implications for jurisprudential questions involving purposivist legal
interpretation.
The side-effect effect (SEE) demonstrates that the valence of an unintended side effect influences intentionality judgements; people assess harmful (helpful) side effects as (un)intentional. Some evidence suggests that the SEE can be moderated by factors relating to the side effect’s causal agent and to its recipient. However, these findings are often derived from between-subjects studies with a single or few items, limiting generalisability. Our two within-subjects experiments utilised multiple items and successfully conceptually replicated these patterns of findings. Cumulative link mixed models showed the valence of both the agent and the recipient moderated intentionality and accountability ratings. This supports the view that people represent and consider multiple factors of a SEE scenario when judging intentionality. Importantly, it also demonstrates the applicability of multi-vignette, within-subjects approaches for generalising the effect to the wider population, within individuals, and to a multitude of potential scenarios. For open materials, data, and code, see https://www.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/5MGKN.
Zusammenfassung
Dem sogenannten Knobe-Effekt zufolge bestimmt die moralische Valenz von Nebeneffekten menschlichen Verhaltens die Zuschreibung ihrer absichtlichen Verursachung. Wir argumentieren, dass erstens die empirisch ermittelten sozialpsychologischen Daten den Knobe-Effekt in der üblichen Lesart nicht belegen, vor allem wegen der unvollständigen Untersuchung der entscheidenden moralischen Varianzfaktoren. Zweitens zeigen wir, dass - und wie - eine spezifische Version des traditionellen Prinzips des Doppeleffekts den empirisch bestätigten Teil des Knobe-Effekts philosophisch erklärt. Die Erklärungskraft des Prinzips des Doppeleffekts kann auch als eine Rechtfertigung eben dieses Prinzips gesehen werden.
Are the cognitive sciences relevant for law? How do they influence legal theory and practice? Should lawyers become part-time cognitive scientists? The recent advances in the cognitive sciences have reshaped our conceptions of human decision-making and behavior. Many claim, for instance, that we can no longer view ourselves as purely rational agents equipped with free will. This change is vitally important for lawyers, who are forced to rethink the foundations of their theories and the framework of legal practice. Featuring multidisciplinary scholars from around the world, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of law and the cognitive sciences. It develops new theories and provides often provocative insights into the relationship between the cognitive sciences and various dimensions of the law including legal philosophy and methodology, doctrinal issues, and evidence.
Estratégias de pesquisa consagradas nas áreas de Psicologia Experimental e Economia Comportamental vêm sendo empregados nos últimos vinte anos para investigar se variáveis extrajurídicas influenciam no processo de tomada de decisão judicial. Esses estudos mostram que questões pessoais, constrangimentos de tempo e de volume de trabalho, bem como vieses cognitivos e estereótipos inconscientes podem interferir no resultado de casos submetidos a magistrados, o que pode ser problemático à luz dos ideais normativos de justiça. Contudo, as pesquisas empíricas em Julgamento e Tomada de Decisão aplicadas a contextos judiciais ainda são pouco conhecidas pela comunidade jurídica brasileira. Nesta revisão, apresentamos um balanço das metodologias empregadas em trabalhos recentes, bem como discutimos suas limitações e desafios. Com esse levantamento crítico, busca-se estimular o emprego dessas estratégias de pesquisa na realidade institucional do Poder Judiciário brasileiro.
The capacity to distinguish between intentional and unintentional actions is a crucial aspect of moral competence. Therefore, the processes shaping intentionality attribution, as well as their dysfunction, are object of intense inquiry. The 'Knobe effect' refers to the intriguing finding that people are more likely to judge as intentional actions leading to negative as opposed to positive side effects, which has been attributed to the emotional response elicited by negative (vs. positive) outcomes. Whether and how emotion drives the Knobe effect, however, is currently debated. Here, individuals with low (LA) and high (HA) levels of alexithymia, a personality trait characterized by difficulties in emotional processing, judged the intentionality of actions with side effects that varied in valence (positive/negative) and salience (low/high), while their subjective emotional response and skin conductance level were assessed. LA individuals attributed more intentionality to actions leading to negative (vs. positive) side effects, and to high (vs. low) salience side effects, and this related to their subjective emotional response to negative side effects. In the context of a generally reduced physiological activation to emotional stimuli, HA (compared to LA) individuals attributed less intentionality to actions leading to negative side effects, especially those with low salience, showing a reduced Knobe effect, which was accompanied by a reduced subjective emotional response to negative side effects. These results confirm the crucial role of emotion on intentionality attribution. Moreover, they contribute to qualifying the emotional processing difficulties associated with alexithymia, and their impact on moral cognition.
Using hypothetical divorce cases we examine the role of gender stereotypes in decisions about child custody. Good mothers received greater custody allocations than did good fathers across a tightly‐matched pair of vignettes in three culturally‐distinct samples: Argentina, Brazil and the United States (Experiment 1). Two follow‐up studies indicated that the warmth dimension of stereotype content partly accounted for the asymmetry in custody awards: The proportion of maternal‐primary custody was predicted by the tendency to ascribe warmth‐related traits—such as friendliness, generosity or trustworthiness—to mothers (Study 2) and associate them to female over male nouns (Study 3). We also found that endorsing shared custody mitigated the asymmetry in custody awards documented in our studies. Together, these results highlight the interplay of stereotyped attitudes and egalitarian commitments in the context of judicial decisions about child custody.
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This article explores whether perspective taking has an impact on the ascription of epistemic states. To do so, a new method is introduced which incites participants to imagine themselves in the position of the protagonist of a short vignette and to judge from her perspective. In a series of experiments (total N=1980), perspective proves to have a significant impact on belief ascriptions, but not on knowledge ascriptions. For belief, perspective is further found to moderate the epistemic side-effect effect significantly. It is hypothesized that the surprising findings are driven by the special epistemic authority we enjoy in assessing our own belief states, which does not extend to the assessment of our own knowledge states.
This article explores whether perspective taking has an impact on the ascription of epistemic states. To do so, a new method is introduced which incites participants to imagine themselves in the position of the protagonist of a short vignette and to judge from her perspective. In a series of experiments (total N=1980), perspective proves to have a significant impact on belief ascriptions, but not on knowledge ascriptions. For belief, perspective is further found to moderate the epistemic side-effect effect significantly. It is hypothesized that the surprising findings are driven by the special epistemic authority we enjoy in assessing our own belief states, which does not extend to the assessment of our own knowledge states.
Based on the “Knobe Effect,” Knobe has argued that moral evaluations can influence intentionality judgments. However, two methodological objections have been raised against this claim: first, that participants’ answers do not accurately reflect what they think and, second, that the Knobe Effect can be fully explained by non-moral factors, such as the agent’s desires or beliefs. In this article, we discuss these two methodological objections to the existence of the Knobe Effect and provide new evidence that moral evaluations can shape intentionality judgments. First, Study 1 shows that standard measures of intentionality do not overestimate participants’ intentionality judgments. Second, Studies 2 and 3 suggest that participants’ moral evaluations still mediate the impact of positive versus negative side-effects on judgments about intentional action, even when taking into account a whole range of non-moral factors. Results suggest that moral evaluations play an irreducible role in shaping our judgments about intentional action.
This Article empirically tests two key questions. First: How sensitive are jurors to variations in the language that delineates the criminal mental state categories? Second: To what extent do jurors assign culpability in the manner assumed by the Model Penal Code (MPC)? In prior work, we challenged numerous assumptions underlying the MPC mental state architecture, which divides guilty minds into four kinds: purposeful, knowing, reckless, and negligent. Our experiments showed that subjects had profound difficulty categorizing some of the mental states, particularly recklessness, in the context of scenarios in which hypothetical actors caused harmful results. And, when asked to punish hypothetical actors, subjects punished knowing behavior and reckless behavior indistinguishably. Here, we extend our prior work in two main ways. First, we show that a person's ability to apply the MPC mental states is susceptible to subtle variations in the language that defines and communicates them. For instance, we demonstrate that using slightly different wording can significantly improve participants' ability to accurately identify the mental state of recklessness (notwithstanding that reckless and knowing mental states remain by far the hardest to classify). Second, we show that even when people can see the mental state distinctions that the MPC draws, they don't necessarily rank order the mental states - by culpability level - in the order the MPC assumes. These findings raise questions about the normative basis for the knowing/reckless distinction in the MPC's mental state hierarchy in the context of result elements. Further, because even small changes in phrasing can produce significant differences in juror evaluation, the findings raise genuine concerns about the adequacy of MPC-based culpability instructions in criminal cases. Our results suggest the need for a critical reexamination of the substantial divide between the expectations and assumptions of drafters of criminal codes, on one hand, and empirical reality, on the other.
"Culpable causation" refers to the influence of the perceived blameworthiness of an action on judgments of its causal impact on a harmful outcome. Four studies were conducted to show that when multiple forces contribute to an unfortunate outcome, people select the most blameworthy act as the prepotent causal factor. In Study 1, an actor was cited more frequently as the primary cause of an accident when his reason for speeding was to hide a vial of cocaine than when it was to hide his parents' anniversary gift. In Study 2, of the 4 acts that produced an unfortunate outcome, the most blameworthy act was cited as the factor with the greatest causal impact. Study 3 found that greater causal influence was perceived throughout a causal chain when the act that engaged the chain was positive rather than negative. Finally, Study 4 found that both traditional causal factors (i.e., necessity and sufficiency) and culpable factors influenced perceived causation.
In a justly famous study, Joshua Knobe found an asymmetry in the way we ascribe intentional action (Knobe 2003). Consider an executive who, motivated entirely by the goal of maximizing profit, embarks on a policy that he knows will also cause environmental damage. Does he intentionally harm the environment? Most people hold that he does. In contrast, when considering an otherwise identical case in which the side effects would be beneficial to the environment, most people hold that the executive does not intentionally help the environment. A number of follow-up studies have found that the finding is robust, that it applies to children as young as four, and that it occurs in other languages and cultures (Knobe 2006).
Forthcoming in The Monist) Recent work in experimental philosophy has shown that people are more likely to attribute intentionality, knowledge, and other psychological properties to someone who causes a bad side-effect than to someone who causes a good one. We argue that all of these asymmetries can be explained in terms of a single underlying asymmetry involving belief attribution because the belief that one's action would result in a certain side-effect is a necessary component of each of the psychological attitudes in question. We argue further that this belief-attribution asymmetry is rational because it mirrors a belief-formation asymmetry and that the belief-formation asymmetry is also rational because it is more useful to form some beliefs than others.
In the last decade, experimental philosophers have documented sys-tematic asymmetries in the attributions of mental attitudes to agents who produce different types of side effects. We argue that this effect is driven not simply by the violation of a norm, but by salient-norm violation. As evidence for this hypothesis, we present two new studies in which two conflicting norms are present, and one or both of them is raised to salience. Expanding one's view to these additional cases presents, we argue, a fuller conception of the side-effect effect, which can be reversed by reversing which norm is salient.
ABSTRACT The concept of acting intentionally is an important nexus where theory of mind and moral judgment meet. Preschool children's judgments of intentional action show a valence-driven asymmetry. Children say that a foreseen but disavowed side effect is brought about “on purpose” when the side effect itself is morally bad, but not when it is morally good. This is the first demonstration in preschoolers that moral judgment influences judgments of whether something was done on purpose (as opposed to judgments of purpose influencing moral judgment). Judgments of intentionality are usually assumed to be purely factual. That these judgments are sometimes partly normative—even in preschoolers—challenges current understanding. Young children's judgments regarding foreseen side effects depend on whether the children process the idea that the character does not care about the side effect. As soon as preschoolers effectively process the theory-of-mind concept “not care that P,” children show the side-effect effect.
The article discusses the Knobe effect, which refers to a phenomenon discovered by philosopher Joshua Knobe involving peoples' attribution of intention to an actor based on resulting side-effects of an action. Reviewing previous studies, the authors contend that the Knobe effect is due to respondents' theory of mind, which attributes more significance to the violation of norms than to following norms in ascribing mental states to an actor.
Knobe (Analysis 63:190-193, 2003a, Philosophical Psychology 16:309-324, 2003b, Analysis 64:181-187, 2004b) found that people are more likely to attribute intentionality to agents whose actions resulted in negative side-effects that to agents whose actions resulted in positive ones. Subsequent investigation has extended this result to a variety of other folk psychological attributions. The present article reports experimental findings that demonstrate an analogous effect for belief ascriptions. Participants were found to be more likely to ascribe belief, higher degrees of belief, higher degrees of rational belief, and dispositional belief to agents in central Knobe effect cases who bring about negative side-effects than to agents who bring about positive ones. These findings present a significant challenge to widely held views about the Knobe effect, since many explanations of it assume that agents in contrasting pairs of Knobe effect cases do not differ with respect to their beliefs. Participants were also found to be more confident that knowledge should be attributed than they were that belief or dispositional belief should be attributed. This finding strengthens the challenge that Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (2013) have launched against the traditional view that knowledge entails belief.
Accounts of act individuation have attempted to capture peoples’ pre-theoretic intuitions. Donald Davidson has argued that a multitude of action descriptions designate only one act, while Alvin Goldman has averred that each action description refers to a distinct act. Following on recent empirical studies, I subject these accounts of act individuation to experimentation. The data indicate that people distinguish between actions differently depending upon the moral valence of the outcomes. Thus, the assumption that a single account of act individuation applies invariantly seems mistaken.
When perceiving, explaining, or criticizing human behavior, people distinguish between intentional and unintentional actions. To do so, they rely on a shared folk concept of intentionality. In contrast to past speculative models, this article provides an empirically based model of this concept. Study 1 demonstrates that people agree substantially in their judgments of intentionality, suggesting a shared underlying concept. Study 2 reveals that when asked to define directly the termintentional,people mention four components of intentionality: desire, belief, intention, and awareness. Study 3 confirms the importance of a fifth component, namely skill. In light of these findings, the authors propose a model of the folk concept of intentionality and provide a further test in Study 4. The discussion compares the proposed model to past ones and examines its implications for social perception, attribution, and cognitive development.
Recent work in social psychology and experimental philosophy has suggested that moral considerations (praise vs. blame) can inuence judgments about the intentional status of an act, contradicting both lay and legal assumptions about the relationship between theory of mind and morality. A corollary of this account suggests that dierent assessments of intentional action should emerge whenever people hold dierent moral values. Five studies validated
Moral philosophers and psychologists often assume that people judge morally lucky and morally unlucky agents differently, an assumption that stands at the heart of the Puzzle of Moral Luck. We examine whether the asymmetry is found for reflective intuitions regarding wrongness, blame, permissibility, and punishment judg- ments, whether people’s concrete, case-based judgments align with their explicit, abstract principles regarding moral luck, and what psychological mechanisms might drive the effect.
Our experiments produce three findings: First, in within-subjects experiments favorable to reflective deliberation, the vast majority of people judge a lucky and an unlucky agent as equally blameworthy, and their actions as equally wrong and permissible. The philosophical Puzzle of Moral Luck, and the challenge to the very possibility of systematic ethics it is frequently taken to engender, thus simply do not arise. Second, punishment judgments are significantly more outcome- dependent than wrongness, blame, and permissibility judgments. While this constitutes evidence in favor of current Dual Process Theories of moral judgment, the latter need to be qualified: punishment and blame judgments do not seem to be driven by the same process, as is commonly argued in the literature. Third, in between-subjects experiments, outcome has an effect on all four types of moral judgments. This effect is mediated by negligence ascriptions and can ultimately be explained as due to differing probability ascriptions across cases.
This chapter provides a critical though comprehensive review of the empirical literature on the folk concept of intentional action. Recently, experimental evidence suggested that authors? judgments about whether an action counts as intentional are sensitive to normative, or evaluative, factors. Evidence for the putative influence of such considerations on ascriptions of intentionality arises from the study of two phenomena, both discovered by Joshua Knobe, namely the Knobe effect and the skill effect. Knobe distinguishes between two kinds of evaluations: the judgment that an action has led to a bad, or good, outcome, and the judgment that one deserves blame, or praise, for a given action. The skill effect and more notably the Knobe Effect are two puzzling phenomena that have drawn a lot of attention, sometimes at the expense of the bigger picture. The chapter also presents the implications for action theory.
Learning more about philosophical cognition has yielded significant insights into the methods that we employ when doing philosophy, and has led some experimental philosophers to raise concerns about the role that intuitions play in philosophical practice. One popular response to these methodological concerns involves appeal to philosophical expertise, and has become known as the expertise defense because it aims to defend the use of at least some kinds of intuitional evidence in philosophy. The basic idea is that philosophical expertise consists in having developed, through a process of critical reflection, increased conceptual competence and theoretical accuracy, as well as a special knack for reading and thinking about philosophical thought experiments that call upon us to exercise our conceptual competence and theoretical acumen. It turns out to be an open question whether this folk theory of philosophical expertise can restore hope in the value of intuitional evidence, and here we examine two ways of trying to answer that question: one that involves careful reflection on the supposed benefits of philosophical education, and one that involves careful empirical examination of ?expert? philosophical intuitions.
A great deal of attention has been paid in recent years to the functional roles of intentions in intentional action. In this paper we sketch and defend a position on this issue while attacking a provocative alternative. Our position has its roots in a cybernetic theory of purposive behavior and is only part of the larger task of understanding all goal-directed behavior. Indeed, a unified model of goal-directed behavior, with appropriate modifications for different types of systems, is a long-range ambition.
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 effect. 1 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 concept of intentional action. I discuss some problems with these explanations and conclude with some possible avenues for future research.
The challenges facing criminal law are many. There are crises of over-criminalization and over-imprisonment; penal policy has become so politicized that it is difficult to find any clear consensus on what aims the criminal law can properly serve; governments seeking to protect their citizens in the face of a range of perceived threats have pushed the outer limits of criminal law and blurred its boundaries. To think clearly about the future of criminal law, and its role in a liberal society, foundational questions about its proper scope, structure, and operations must be re-examined. What kinds of conduct should be criminalized? What are the principles of criminal responsibility? How should offences and defences be defined? The criminal process and the criminal trial need to be studied closely, and the purposes and modes of punishment should be scrutinized. Such a re-examination must draw on the resources of various disciplines — notably law, political and moral philosophy, criminology and history; it must examine both the inner logic of criminal law and its place in a larger legal and political structure; it must attend to the growing field of international criminal law, it must consider how the criminal law can respond to the challenges of a changing world. Topics covered in this book include the question of criminalization and the proper scope of the criminal law; the grounds of criminal responsibility; the ways in which offences and defences should be defined; the criminal process and its values; criminal punishment; and the relationship between international criminal law and domestic criminal law.
Intention, intentional action, and the connections between them are central topics of the philosophy of action, a branch of the philosophy of mind. One who regards the subject matter of the philosophy of mind as having at its core some aspect of what lies between environmental input to beings with minds and behavioural output may be inclined to see the philosophy of action as concerned only with the output end of things. That would be a mistake. Many intentional actions depend for their development on the processing of input - both from the environment and from the body.
Many themes in the papers collected here are negative: there is no a priori knowledge or analytic truth; logic is not a theory of reasoning; a theory of truth conditions is not a theory of meaning; a purely objective account of meaning or mind cannot say what words mean or what it is like to see things in colour. Other themes are positive: theoretical reasoning has important practical aspects; meaning depends on how words are used to think with i.e. on how concepts function in reasoning, perception and action; the relevant uses or functions relate concepts to aspects of the environment and other things in the world; translation plays a central role in any adequate account of mind or meaning.
Many philosophers hold that experts’ semantic intuitions are more reliable and provide better evidence than lay people’s intuitions – a thesis commonly called “the Expertise Defense.” Focusing on the intuitions about the reference of proper names, this article critically assesses the Expertise Defense.
We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers' judgments about a moral puzzle case (the "trolley problem") and a version of the Tversky & Kahneman "Asian disease" scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced delay during which participants were encouraged to consider "different variants of the scenario or different ways of describing the case". Nor were framing and order effects lower among participants reporting familiarity with the trolley problem or with loss-aversion framing effects, nor among those reporting having had a stable opinion on the issues before participating the experiment, nor among those reporting expertise on the very issues in question. Thus, for these scenario types, neither framing effects nor order effects appear to be reduced even by high levels of academic expertise.
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Certain recent experiments are often taken to show that people are far more likely to classify a foreseen side-effect of an action as intentional when that side-effect has some negative normative valence. While there is some disagreement over the details, there is broad consensus among experimental philosophers that this is the finding. We challenge this consensus by presenting an alternative interpretation of the experiments, according to which they show that a side-effect is classified as intentional only if the agent considered its relative importance when deciding on the action. We present two new experiments whose results can be explained by our hypothesis but not by any version of the consensus view. In the course of doing so, we develop a methodological critique of the previous literature on this topic and draw from it lessons for future experimental philosophy research.
Recent empirical and conceptual research has shown that moral considerations have an influence on the way we use the adverb ‘intentionally’. Here we propose our own account of these phenomena, according to which they arise from the fact that the adverb ‘intentionally’ has three different meanings that are differently selected by contextual factors, including normative expectations. We argue that our hypotheses can account for most available data and present some new results that support this. We end by discussing the implications of our account for folk psychology.
We examined the effects of order of presentation on the moral judgments of professional philosophers and two comparison groups. All groups showed similar‐sized order effects on their judgments about hypothetical moral scenarios targeting the doctrine of the double effect, the action‐omission distinction, and the principle of moral luck. Philosophers' endorsements of related general moral principles were also substantially influenced by the order in which the hypothetical scenarios had previously been presented. Thus, philosophical expertise does not appear to enhance the stability of moral judgments against this presumably unwanted source of bias, even given familiar types of cases and principles.
In this paper, we argue that the so-called Knobe-Effect constitutes an error. There is now a wealth of data confirming that people are highly prone to what has also come to be known as the ‘side-effect effect’. That is, when attributing psychological states—such as intentionality, foreknowledge, and desiring—as well as other agential features—such as causal control—people typically do so to a greater extent when the action under consideration is evaluated negatively. There are a plethora of models attempting to account for this effect. We hold that the central question of interest is whether the effect represents a competence or an error in judgment. We offer a systematic argument for the claim that the burden of proof regarding this question is on the competence theorist. We sketch an account, based on the notion of the reactive attitudes, that can accommodate both the idea that these sorts of judgments are fundamentally normative and that they often constitute errors.
Recently, a number of philosophers have advanced a surprising conclusion: people's judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally are pervasively influenced by normative considerations. In this paper, we investigate the ‘Chairman case’, an influential case from this literature and disagree with this conclusion. Using a statistical method called structural path modeling, we show that people's attributions of intentional action to an agent are driven not by normative assessments, but rather by attributions of underlying values and characterological dispositions to the agent. In a second study, we examined people's judgments about what they think drives asymmetric intuitions in the Chairman case and found that people are highly inaccurate in identifying which features of the case their intuitions track. In the final part of the paper, we discuss how the statistical methods used in this study can help philosophers with the critical features problem, the problem of figuring out which among the myriad features present in hypothetical cases are the critical ones that our intuitions are responsive to. We show how the methods used in this study have some advantages over both armchair methods used by traditional philosophers and survey methods used by experimental philosophers.
Knobe (2003a, 2003b, 2004b) and others have demonstrated the surprising fact that the valence of a side-effect action can affect intuitions about whether that action was performed intentionally. Here we report the results of an experiment that extends these findings by testing for an analogous effect regarding knowledge attributions. Our results suggest that subjects are less likely to find that an agent knows an action will bring about a side-effect when the effect is good than when it is bad. It is further argued that these findings, while preliminary, have important implications for recent debates within epistemology about the relationship between knowledge and action.
One aim of this article is to explore the connection between the Knobe effect and the epistemic side-effect effect (ESEE). Additionally, we report evidence about a further generalization regarding probability judgments. We demonstrate that all effects can be found within German material, using ‘absichtlich’ [intentionally], ‘wissen’ [know] and ‘wahrscheinlich’ [likely]. As the explanations discussed with regard to the Knobe effect do not suffice to explicate the ESEE, we survey whether the characteristic asymmetry in knowledge judgments is caused by a differing perception of probabilities concerning the occurrence of the side-effects. Our findings show that a negative side-effect is judged more probable, even if the objective probabilities would suggest otherwise. We argue that the best explanation for these results is that the Knobe effect applies to the perception of probabilities as well: a probabilistic side-effect effect.
Because punishable guilt requires that bad thoughts accompany bad acts, the Model Penal Code (MPC) typically requires that jurors infer the past mental state of a criminal defendant. More specifically, jurors must sort that mental state into one of four specific categories - purposeful, knowing, reckless, or negligent - which in turn defines the nature of the crime and the extent of the punishment. The MPC therefore assumes that ordinary people naturally sort mental states into these four categories with a high degree of accuracy, or at least can reliably do so when properly instructed. It also assumes that ordinary people will order these categories of mental state, by increasing amount of punishment, in the same severity hierarchy that the MPC prescribes. The MPC, now turning 50 years old, has previously escaped the scrutiny of comprehensive empirical research on these assumptions underlying its culpability architecture. Our new empirical studies, reported here, find that most of the mens rea assumptions embedded in the MPC are reasonably accurate as a behavioral matter. Even without the aid of the MPC definitions, subjects were able to regularly and accurately distinguish among purposeful, negligent, and blameless conduct. Nevertheless, our subjects failed to distinguish reliably between knowing and reckless conduct. This failure can have significant sentencing consequences in some types of crimes, especially homicide.
ow are our actions sorted into those that are intentional and those that are not? The philosophical and psychological literature on this topic is livelier now than ever, and we seek to make a contribution to it here. Our guiding question in this article is easy to state and hard to answer: How do various factors— specifically, features of vignettes—that contribute to majority folk judgments that an action is or is not intentional interact in producing the judgment? In pursuing this question we draw on a number of empirical studies, including some of our own, and we sketch some future studies that would shed light on our topic. We empha- size that the factors that concern us here are limited to features of stories to which subject respond: examples include the value of the action asked about, the agent's being indifferent to performing that action, and the agent's seeking to perform it. We do not discuss underlying cognitive or emotional processes here, nor do we discuss whether respondents are making errors of any kind. (Both of these issues are discussed in Cushman and Mele (forthcoming).)
La lógica formal, la teoría de la probabilidad y la teoría de la decisión no son teorías del proceso de razonamiento. El razonamiento interno en el pensamiento debe ser distinguido del razonamiento externo con otros. Es difícil distinguir el razonamiento interno de otros procesos computacionales internos. Las diferencias entre razonamiento teórico y práctico nos da pruebas en contra de tratar de reducir uno al otro. El razonamiento interno tiende a ser inconsciente, aunque sus productos puedan ser conscientes. Hay evidencia para sostener un modelo de razonamiento de satisfacción de constricción paralelo respecto del equilibrio reflexivo. Los principios relevantes del razonamiento moral pueden que no sean los principios familiares a los que la gente apela en una discusión. La emoción podría jugar un rol significativo en el razonamiento.
Recent work by Joshua Knobe indicates that people's intuitions about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this effect is that there are stable individual differences in how 'intentional' gets interpreted. That is, in Knobe's cases, different people interpret the term in different ways. This interpretive diversity of 'intentional' opens up a new avenue to help explain Knobe's results. Furthermore, the paper argues that the use of intuitions in philosophy is complicated by fact that there are robust individual differences in intuitions about matters of philosophical concern.
The side-effect effect, in which an agent who does not specifically intend an outcome is seen as having brought it about intentionally, is thought to show that moral factors inappropriately bias judgments of intentionality, and to challenge standard mental state models of intentionality judgments. This study used matched vignettes to dissociate a number of moral factors and mental states. Results support the view that mental states, and not moral factors, explain the side-effect effect. However, the critical mental states appear not to be desires as proposed in standard models, but rather ‘deeper’ evaluative states including values and core evaluative attitudes.
Recent experimental research on the ‘Knobe effect’ suggests, somewhat surprisingly, that there is a bi-directional relation between attributions of intentional action and evaluative considerations. We defend a novel account of this phenomenon that exploits two factors: (i) an intuitive asymmetry in judgments of responsibility (e.g. praise/blame) and (ii) the fact that intentionality commonly connects the evaluative status of actions to the responsibility of actors. We present the results of several new studies that provide empirical evidence in support of this account while disconfirming various currently prominent alternative accounts. We end by discussing some implications of this account for folk psychology.
Recent experimental philosophy arguments have raised trouble for philosophers' reliance on armchair intuitions. One popular line of response has been the expertise defense: philosophers are highly-trained experts, whereas the subjects in the experimental philosophy studies have generally been ordinary undergraduates, and so there's no reason to think philosophers will make the same mistakes. But this deploys a substantive empirical claim, that philosophers' training indeed inculcates sufficient protection from such mistakes. We canvass the psychological literature on expertise, which indicates that people are not generally very good at reckoning who will develop expertise under what circumstances. We consider three promising hypotheses concerning what philosophical expertise might consist in: (i) better conceptual schemata; (ii) mastery of entrenched theories; and (iii) general practical know-how with the entertaining of hypotheticals. On inspection, none seem to provide us with good reason to endorse this key empirical premise of the expertise defense. 1. Setting the Stage: The Restrictionist Challenge and the Expertise Defense 1.1. The Restrictionist Challenge A number of experimental philosophers in recent years (e.g., Machery, Mallon, Nichols, & Stich, 2004; Swain, Alexander, & Weinberg, 2008; Weinberg, Nichols, & Stich, 2001; see also Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008) have begun to challenge analytic philosophy's longstanding practice of deploying armchair intuitive judgments about cases. This has sometimes been called the restrictionist challenge (Alexander & Weinberg, 2007), as these philosophers contend that
Fiery Cushman and Alfred Mele recently proposed a ‘two-and-a-half rules’ theory of folk intentionality. They suggested that
laypersons attribute intentionality employing: one rule based on desire, one based on belief, and another principle based
on moral judgment, which may either reflect a folk concept (and so count as a third rule) or a bias (and so not count as a
rule proper) and which they provisionally count as ‘half a rule’. In this article, I discuss some cases in which an agent
is judged as having neither belief nor desire to bring about an action, and yet laypersons find the agent’s action to be intentional.
Many lay responses apparently follow a rule, but many other seem biased. The contribution of this study is two-fold: by addressing
actions performed without desire or belief, it expands Mele and Cushman’s account; it also helps discriminate between a two-rules
and a three-rules theory. As a conclusion, I argue in favor of a three-and-a-half concepts theory.