scholarly journals Compatibilism and Incompatibilism in Social Cogntiion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Positive Outcomes ◽  
Social Judgments ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Opposite View ◽  
Hybrid Account

Compatibilism is the view that determinism is compatible with acting freely and being morally responsible. Incompatibilism is the opposite view. It is often claimed that compatibilism or incompatibilism is a natural part of ordinary social cognition. That is, it is often claimed that patterns in our everyday social judgments reveal an implicit commitment to either compatibilism or incompatibilism. This paper reports five experiments designed to identify such patterns. The results support a nuanced hybrid account: The central tendencies in ordinary social cognition are compatibilism about moral responsibility, compatibilism about positive moral accountability, neither compatibilism nor incompatibilism about negative moral accountability, compatibilism about choice for actions with positive outcomes, and incompatibilism about choice for actions with negative or neutral outcomes.

scholarly journals A Multi-Site Collaboration of Hostile Priming Effects-In-Principle Acceptance version

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randy J. McCarthy ◽  
Will M Gervais ◽  
Michael Magee ◽  
muriel kosaka
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Priming Effect ◽  
Social Judgments ◽  
Critical Test ◽  
Priming Effects ◽  
Cast Doubt ◽  
Academic Publications

In 1979, Srull and Wyer reported a study where a brief exposure to hostile stimuli caused participants to subsequently rate an individual as being more hostile. Srull and Wyer (1979) went on to be one of the most influential studies in social cognition: It has been cited in over 1,000 academic publications, the “Donald” vignette has been used in dozens of subsequent studies, and the results served as a foundation for subsequent priming studies that extended priming effects beyond the domain of social judgments (e.g., e.g., Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998). However, a Registered Replication Report (RRR; McCarthy et al., 2018) that contained 26 independent samples and several thousand participants did not find the predicted effect and cast doubt on whether the methods reported by Srull and Wyer would reliably produce a hostile priming effect. However, the RRR deviated from the original methods in a few ways and some criticisms of the methods were raised after the publication of the RRR. The current proposed study is intended to address these criticisms and provide a critical test of whether Srull and Wyer-esque methods can reliably produce a hostile priming effect. The current study will involve several labs who each collect an independent sample of data. Each lab will conduct a close replication of Srull and Wyer (1979) and each lab will pretest stimuli so they can conduct a conceptual replication of Srull and Wyer (1979) using stimuli that are developed specifically for their locally-available participants. Collectively, this study will test the replicability of Srull and Wyer-esque methods to produce a hostile priming effect.

scholarly journals Abnormal Processing of Social Information from Faces in Autism

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Adolphs ◽  
Lonnie Sears ◽  
Joseph Piven
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Neural Substrates ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
Social Judgments ◽  
High Functioning ◽  
Impaired Ability ◽  
Socially Relevant ◽  
Underlying Processes

Autism has been thought to be characterized, in part, by dysfunction in emotional and social cognition, but the pathology of the underlying processes and their neural substrates remain poorly understood. Several studies have hypothesized that abnormal amygdala function may account for some of the impairments seen in autism, specifically, impaired recognition of socially relevant information from faces. We explored this issue in eight high-functioning subjects with autism in four experiments that assessed recognition of emotional and social information, primarily from faces. All tasks used were identical to those previously used in studies of subjects with bilateral amygdala damage, permitting direct comparisons. All subjects with autism made abnormal social judgments regarding the trustworthiness of faces; however, all were able to make normal social judgments from lexical stimuli, and all had a normal ability to perceptually discriminate the stimuli. Overall, these data from subjects with autism show some parallels to those from neurological subjects with focal amygdala damage. We suggest that amygdala dysfunction in autism might contribute to an impaired ability to link visual perception of socially relevant stimuli with retrieval of social knowledge and with elicitation of social behavior.

scholarly journals Compatibilism Can Be Natural

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Moral Responsibilities ◽  
Philosophical Debates ◽  
Commonsense Morality

Compatibilism is the view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Natural compatibilism is the view that in ordinary social cognition, people are compatibilists. Researchers have recently debated whether natural compatibilism is true. This paper presents six experiments (N = 909) that advance this debate. The results provide the best evidence to date for natural compatibilism, avoiding the main methodological problems faced by previous work supporting the view. In response to simple scenarios about familiar activities, people judged that agents had moral responsibilities to perform actions that they were unable to perform (Experiment 1), were morally responsible for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 2), were to blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiments 3-4), deserved blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 5), and should suffer consequences for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 6). These findings advance our understanding of moral psychology and philosophical debates that depend partly on patterns in commonsense morality.

Social Classification Occurs at the Subgroup Level

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Pattyn ◽  
Yves Rosseel ◽  
Frank Van Overwalle ◽  
Alain Van Hiel
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Category Membership ◽  
Social Judgments ◽  
Social Stimuli ◽  
Specific Level ◽  
Intermediate Subgroup ◽  
Social Classification ◽  
Intermediate Degree

Although the categorization of novel social stimuli according to general qualities of gender, age, and race is known to be automatic and primordial, categorizing stimuli into more specific social subgroups (e.g., hippies or businesswomen) is much more informative and cognitively efficient. In this paper, we show that social stimuli are more likely to be grouped into subgroups with an intermediate degree of specificity than into broad, general categories or narrow, highly specific categories. Furthermore, we show that category membership at the intermediate subgroup level predicts social judgments more efficiently than category membership at a more general or more specific level. We discuss the consequences of our results for social cognition and cognitive categorization.

Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Bobzien
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Continuum Theory ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Causal Determinism ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Nature And Nurture ◽  
Main Component ◽  
Autonomous Agency ◽  
Hellenistic Philosophy

This volume assembles nine of the author’s essays on determinism, freedom, and moral responsibility in Western antiquity, ranging from Aristotle via the Epicureans and Stoics to the third century. It is representative of the author’s overall scholarship on the topic, much of which emphasizes that what commonly counts as ‘the problem of free will and determinism’ is noticeably distinct from the issues the ancients discussed. It is true that one main component of the ancient discourse concerned the question how moral accountability can be consistently combined with certain causal factors that impact human behaviour. However, it is not true that the ancient problems involved the questions of the compatibility of causal determinism with our ability to do otherwise or with free will. Instead, we encounter questions about human rational and autonomous agency and their compatibility with preceding causes, external or internal; with external impediments; with divine predetermination and theological questions; with physical theories like atomism and continuum theory, and with sciences more generally; with elements that determine character development from childhood, such as nature and nurture; with epistemic features such as ignorance of circumstances; with necessity and modal theories generally; with folk theories of fatalism; and also with questions of how human autonomous agency is related to moral development, to virtue and wisdom, to blame and praise. In Classical and Hellenistic philosophy, these questions were all debated without reference to freedom to do otherwise or free will—. This volume considers all of these questions to some extent.

scholarly journals The Moral Psychology of Raceless, Genderless Strangers

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Hester ◽  
Kurt Gray
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Police Officer ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Real World ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Structural Elements ◽  
Social Judgments ◽  
Group Affiliation

Moral psychology uses tightly controlled scenarios in which the identities of the characters are either unspecified or vague. Studies with raceless, genderless strangers help to highlight the important structural elements of moral acts (e.g., intention, causation, harm) but may not generalize to real-world judgments. As researchers have long shown, social judgments hinge on the identities (e.g., race, gender, age, religion, group affiliation) of both target and perceiver. Asking whether people generally condemn “shooting someone” is very different from asking whether liberals as opposed to conservatives condemn “a White police officer shooting a Black suspect.” We argue for the importance of incorporating identity into moral psychology. We briefly outline the central role of identity in social judgments before reviewing current theories in moral psychology. We then advocate an expanded person-centered morality—synthesizing moral psychology with social cognition—to better capture everyday moral judgments.

scholarly journals Implicit Social Cognition

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 419-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G. Greenwald ◽  
Calvin K. Lai
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Developmental Psychology ◽  
Social Judgments ◽  
Business Law ◽  
Implicit Social Cognition ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Medicine Education

In the last 20 years, research on implicit social cognition has established that social judgments and behavior are guided by attitudes and stereotypes of which the actor may lack awareness. Research using the methods of implicit social cognition has produced the concept of implicit bias, which has generated wide attention not only in social, clinical, and developmental psychology, but also in disciplines outside of psychology, including business, law, criminal justice, medicine, education, and political science. Although this rapidly growing body of research offers prospects of useful societal applications, the theory needed to confidently guide those applications remains insufficiently developed. This article describes the methods that have been developed, the findings that have been obtained, and the theoretical questions that remain to be answered.

scholarly journals Addiction, recovery and moral agency: Philosophical considerations

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-89
Author(s):  
Susanne Uusitalo
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Drug Research ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
General Level ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Addiction Recovery ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Agency Design ◽  
Reason Responsiveness

Uusitalo, S. (2015). Addiction, recovery and moral agency: Philosophical considerations. The International Journal Of Alcohol And Drug Research, X(Y), N-M. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7895/ijadr.vXiY.190 Aims: The purpose of this paper is to argue that it is important to recognize that addicts are morally accountable even for their addictive action, as moral agency is more generally an important factor in full-blown human agency. The challenge is to identify the problems that addicts have in their agency without discarding their potentially full-blown agency. Design: In philosophy of agency, moral responsibility and accountability, in particular, may refer to control over one’s action. I discuss this control as reason-responsiveness and, on a more general level, illustrate the importance of moral agency to human agency with a contrasting example of psychopaths and addicts as agents. Measures: A philosophical analysis is carried out in order to argue for the relevance and importance of moral accountability in therapeutic models of addiction. Findings: The example of psychopaths and addicts illustrates that moral agency is part of full-blown human agency, as psychopaths are generally believed to lack moral skills common to non-psychopathic individuals. I argue that addicts are not analogous to psychopaths in the framework of moral agency in this respect. Conclusions: By fleshing out the conceptual considerations in the framework of addiction therapies, I clarify the relevance and importance of moral accountability in therapeutic models of addiction. If evidence-based therapies attempt to restore the addict’s full-fledged agency at least in respect to addiction, then acknowledging addicts’ moral accountability for their action does matter.

scholarly journals Addiction, recovery and moral agency: Philosophical considerations

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Uusitalo
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Drug Research ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
General Level ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Addiction Recovery ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Agency Design ◽  
Reason Responsiveness

Uusitalo, S. (2015). Addiction, recovery and moral agency: Philosophical considerations. The International Journal Of Alcohol And Drug Research, X(Y), N-M. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7895/ijadr.vXiY.190 Aims: The purpose of this paper is to argue that it is important to recognize that addicts are morally accountable even for their addictive action, as moral agency is more generally an important factor in full-blown human agency. The challenge is to identify the problems that addicts have in their agency without discarding their potentially full-blown agency. Design: In philosophy of agency, moral responsibility and accountability, in particular, may refer to control over one’s action. I discuss this control as reason-responsiveness and, on a more general level, illustrate the importance of moral agency to human agency with a contrasting example of psychopaths and addicts as agents. Measures: A philosophical analysis is carried out in order to argue for the relevance and importance of moral accountability in therapeutic models of addiction. Findings: The example of psychopaths and addicts illustrates that moral agency is part of full-blown human agency, as psychopaths are generally believed to lack moral skills common to non-psychopathic individuals. I argue that addicts are not analogous to psychopaths in the framework of moral agency in this respect. Conclusions: By fleshing out the conceptual considerations in the framework of addiction therapies, I clarify the relevance and importance of moral accountability in therapeutic models of addiction. If evidence-based therapies attempt to restore the addict’s full-fledged agency at least in respect to addiction, then acknowledging addicts’ moral accountability for their action does matter.

scholarly journals Facing humanness: Facial width-to-height ratio predicts ascriptions of humanity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason C. Deska ◽  
Emily Paige Lloyd ◽  
Kurt Hugenberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Social Judgments ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Height Ratio ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Tasks ◽  
Ancillary Studies

The ascription of mind to others is central to social cognition. Most research on the ascription of mind has focused on motivated, top-down processes. The current work provides novel evidence that facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) serves as a bottom-up perceptual signal of humanness. Using a range of well-validated operational definitions of humanness, we provide evidence across five studies that target faces with relatively greater fWHR are seen as less than fully human compared to their relatively lower fWHR counterparts. We then present two ancillary studies exploring whether the fWHR-to-humanness link is mediated by previously established fWHR-trait links in the literature. Finally, three additional studies extend this fWHR-humanness link beyond measurements of humanness, demonstrating that the fWHR-humanness link has consequences for downstream social judgments including the sorts of crimes people are perceived to be guilty of and the social tasks for which they seem helpful. In short, we provide evidence for the hypothesis that individuals with relatively greater facial width-to-height ratio are routinely denied sophisticated, humanlike minds.

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