Experimental Philosophy

New experimental paper on intuitions about whether people have obligations *to themselves*

From philosopher Laura Soter (@laurasoter.bsky.social) in JPSP

psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

This is a fascinating new experimental jurisprudence paper from Chris Jaeger on what is "reasonable."

For laypeople's judgments of reasonableness, the probability of harm (P) has an important effect beyond its role in the B<PL formula.

yalelawjournal.org/article/the-...

The new journal *Experimental Philosophy* is now open for submissions! Very glad to serve as an AE and looking forward to seeing this take off. #philsky

You would want a theory according to which the right answer doesn’t just follow trivially from something about language (these people do know how to speak English correctly) but instead from something more substantive about which ordinary people could plausibly be wrong

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This is not my paper, but I do find this to be a really interesting question

The view I’ve defended about it is that if you think people’s ordinary answers are wrong, you should develop a specific type of theory

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Yes, that’s an important point. The acceptability of these sentences does seem to bear on questions about expressivism, but at the same time, there are certainly moves that expressivists could make to get out of this problem

“Murder is wrong, but I don’t disapprove of it”

Expressivist theories of moral language seem to suggest that this sentence should make no sense — but a new paper in Cognition finds that people actually *do* find this sentence largely acceptable

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Get your papers ready!

The new journal EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY will soon be accepting submissions!

A key assumption behind this question is that the way fraud works has changed over time

These days, fraudsters presumably create fake data and then run analyses on it, but back then, it seems likely that fraudsters would just directly make up the statistical results

This is *exactly* the issue I was wondering about. Does the GRIM result arise because they made a mistake in calculating the means, or does it arise because this experiment was never actually run?

Sorry, didn't mean to exclude David!

I also very much appreciated the points from @ericman.bsky.social and @bayesandbounds.bsky.social

I agree! I really appreciated this debate between Willem Sleegers (author of the replication study) and Jake Quilty-Dunn (who disagrees with him about what the replication study shows

bsky.app/profile/will...

I appreciated the debate yesterday about how to interpret the results of the cognitive dissonance replication study

Scroll up to read the points made by researchers on both sides

When I first saw the GRIM results indicating that the findings were mathematically impossible, I assumed it was just a case of sloppiness… but interestingly, Nick Brown also seems to think there is something darker here. I’m not sure what to think

That’s a great point. Whereas if I just spontaneously decided to write a counterattitudinal essay tonight, it probably would have an effect

Consider instead whether someone’s attitudes would change if we got them to just utter the one sentence “I am
in favor of the death penalty”

My guess is that would work too (maybe you disagree?),and it would call for some real explanation

I was thinking more about this, and I see now that what you were saying is right

In the specific case where someone is writing a counterattitudinal *essay*, it’s just obvious that this would make them think of arguments on the other side. So there’s nothing here that even requires explaining

It seems like you are thinking that we shouldn’t develop a more deflationary account of spreading of alternatives but should instead develop a more inflationary account of monkey cognition

Is that right? This sounds like an intriguing idea

A question arises as to whether spreading of alternatives arises because of dissonance or something else

One possible view would be that the fact that it arises in monkeys indicates it is probably due to something else

However…

My original point was just that the classic experiments themselves were bogus (e.g., with mathematically impossible results), but I have been getting a lot out of hearing your thoughts on the larger theoretical issues

(It’s hard to convey tone on Bluesky, so I just want to say explicitly that I mean this as a friendly question, and I’m very interested to hear your thoughts!)

In thinking about the ideas that are in fact true, are you thinking of certain surprising discoveries from Festinger and others? Are you thinking of things that we would have regarded as obviously true even in the absence of any studies?

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Thanks for your thoughts on this - I would love to discuss further

In thinking about dissonance, we might distinguish the things that we could have known were true without even running any experiments vs. the surprising findings obtained by social psychologists…

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I appreciate this 🙂 but I’m especially struck by the fact that GRIM shows that the original Festinger and Carlsmith results - so influential in launching this theory - are mathematically impossible

Do you have any thoughts about what we are learning from the GRIM analysis?

Just to clarify, do you mean that one wouldn’t have to even run a study to know that participants would feel more conflict in the counterattitudinal condition?

Great point. And there are other promising theories about why we might change our attitudes to fit our behavior, such as @fierycushman.bsky.social’s theory that rationalization is rational

Thanks Joseph! Can you say a little more about? Are you thinking that recent evidence speaks against the former interpretation but not the latter?

If we found an effect of perceived freedom, that would be beautiful evidence that the explanation is indeed dissonance

If we don’t, the question about what explains the effect feels more open

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For example, some of the effects explained by dissonance theory are also found in monkeys

But this finding might make one doubt that these effects are best understood in terms of dissonance

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