My research is devoted to the study of human agency: what it is, how it is possible, and how it accords with scientific accounts of human nature. My primary focus is the free will debate.
Scholars have proposed that incarceration rates might be reduced by a requirement that judges jus... more Scholars have proposed that incarceration rates might be reduced by a requirement that judges justify incarceration decisions with respect to their operational costs (e.g., prison capacity). In an Internet-based vignette experiment (N = 214), we tested this prediction by examining whether criminal punishment judgments (prison vs. probation) among university undergraduates would be influenced by a prompt to provide a justification for one's judgment, and by a brief message describing prison capacity costs. We found that (1) the justification prompt alone was sufficient to reduce incarceration rates, (2) the prison capacity message also independently reduced incarceration rates, and (3) incarceration rates were most strongly reduced (by about 25%) when decision makers were asked to justify their sentences with respect to the expected capacity costs. These effects survived a test of robustness and occurred regardless of whether participants reported that prison costs should influen...
When people exact retribution on moral offenders, what psychological goals are our punishments de... more When people exact retribution on moral offenders, what psychological goals are our punishments designed to realize? This study represents a conceptual replication and extension of recent research on two proximate drivers of retribution: evidence that the perpetrator suffered, and evidence that he understood why he is being punished. Using a contrastive vignette method, we will present U.S. adults with vignettes about a fictitious high-seriousness (robbery) and low seriousness (theft) crime. In a between-subjects design, we will independently vary perpetrator suffering (present vs. absent) and perpetrator understanding (present vs. absent), as well as the participant’s perspective (personal vs. impersonal). Following Gollwitzter and Denzler (2009), we will estimate punishment goal-fulfillment by measuring sentencing recommendations and punishment satisfaction ratings before and after exposure to the manipulations. We hypothesize that goal fulfillment will be greatest following combin...
When my wife was pregnant, our birthing coach asked the class " What is pain? " I thoug... more When my wife was pregnant, our birthing coach asked the class " What is pain? " I thought I might finally get to display some of my philosophical training, but alas, the correct answer was: " Pain is whatever she says it is. " The coach's " sufferercentric " definition echoes the one offered by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP)— " Pain is always subjective " —as well as the definition of pain offered by the philosopher Saul Kripke in his argument against identity theory— " Pain. .. is picked out by the property of being pain itself, by its immediate phenomenological quality " (1972/1980, p. 152). These subjective conceptions of pain pose problems for the scientific study of pain, as Price and Aydede point out in the introduction of their chapter. If the essence of pain is its phenomenological quality, then it seems the only way to study it directly is through introspection and subjects' verbal reports...
. This preregistered experiment examined two proximate drivers of retributive punishment attitude... more . This preregistered experiment examined two proximate drivers of retributive punishment attitudes: the motivation to make the perpetrator suffer, and understand the wrongfulness of his offense. In a sample of 514 US adults, we presented criminal case summaries that varied the level of suffering (absent vs. present) and understanding (absent vs. present) experienced by the perpetrator and measured punishment judgments and attitudes. Our results demonstrate, as predicted, that participants were more satisfied by the sentence and less punitive when they believed that the perpetrator had suffered from the punishment or that he understood the wrongfulness of his actions. This pattern held across crimes of varying seriousness (theft vs. aggravated robbery) and across two narrative perspectives (participant as victim vs. participant as third party). However, joint evidence of suffering and understanding did not strengthen this effect, contrary to predictions. We discuss the implications of these findings for leading philosophical theories of punishment.
Supplemental material, Tone_Supplemental_Figure for Social Anxiety and Social Behavior: A Test of... more Supplemental material, Tone_Supplemental_Figure for Social Anxiety and Social Behavior: A Test of Predictions From an Evolutionary Model by Erin B. Tone, Eddy Nahmias, Roger Bakeman, Trevor Kvaran, Sarah F. Brosnan, Negar Fani and Elizabeth A. Schroth in Clinical Psychological Science
To function during social interactions, we must be able to consider and coordinate our actions wi... more To function during social interactions, we must be able to consider and coordinate our actions with other people’s perspectives. This process unfolds from decision-making, to anticipation of that decision’s consequences, to feedback about those consequences, in what can be described as a “cascade” of three phases. The iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (iPD) task, an economic-exchange game used to illustrate how people achieve stable cooperation over repeated interactions, provides a framework for examining this “social decision cascade”. In the present study, we examined neural activity associated with the three phases of the cascade, which can be isolated during iPD game rounds. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 31 adult participants made a) decisions about whether to cooperate with a co-player for a monetary reward, b) anticipated the co-player’s decision, and then c) learned the co-player’s decision. Across all three phases, participants recruited the tempo...
Deception in nonhuman animals is one of the most fertile areas of research for pursuing philosoph... more Deception in nonhuman animals is one of the most fertile areas of research for pursuing philosophical questions in cognitive ethology, but it is an area rife with controversy (Byrne and Whiten 1988; Whiten and Byrne 1988.) The literature on deception is interwoven with questions and claims about intelligence, levels of representation, intentionality, and consciousness (Dennett 1983; Mitchell 1986; Perner 1991). Our aim in this essay is not to survey or evaluate the entire literature; rather, we use the phenomenon of deception as a ...
An influential evolutionary model proposed that social anxiety biases people to treat social inte... more An influential evolutionary model proposed that social anxiety biases people to treat social interactions as competitive struggles with the primary goal of avoiding status loss. Among subordinate nonhuman primates in highly hierarchical social groups, this goal leads to adaptive submissive behavior; for humans, however, affiliative responses may be more effective. We tested three predictions about social anxiety and social cognitions, emotions, and behavior that Trower and Gilbert advanced. College students ( N = 122) whose self-reported social anxiety ranged from minimal to extremely high played the Prisoner’s Dilemma game three times. Consistent with two model-based predictions, social anxiety was positively associated with self-reported competitive goals and with nervousness during game play. Unexpectedly, however, social anxiety was associated with a tendency to engage with coplayers in an ostensibly hostile, rather than appeasing, manner. We discuss implications of these findin...
I don't presume to have any methods for teaching philosophy that are better than... more I don't presume to have any methods for teaching philosophy that are better than the ones you already use. But I may have some that are different from the ones you use. And in my experience, just being exposed to different methods helps us re-think the methods we use and perhaps modify them in experimental ways, helping us to identify those methods we find most effective and also preventing us from becoming too settled and comfortable with our current teaching. One of the most difficult challenges for teachers is to change what they ...
Scholars have proposed that incarceration rates might be reduced by a requirement that judges jus... more Scholars have proposed that incarceration rates might be reduced by a requirement that judges justify incarceration decisions with respect to their operational costs (e.g., prison capacity). In an Internet-based vignette experiment (N = 214), we tested this prediction by examining whether criminal punishment judgments (prison vs. probation) among university undergraduates would be influenced by a prompt to provide a justification for one's judgment, and by a brief message describing prison capacity costs. We found that (1) the justification prompt alone was sufficient to reduce incarceration rates, (2) the prison capacity message also independently reduced incarceration rates, and (3) incarceration rates were most strongly reduced (by about 25%) when decision makers were asked to justify their sentences with respect to the expected capacity costs. These effects survived a test of robustness and occurred regardless of whether participants reported that prison costs should influen...
When people exact retribution on moral offenders, what psychological goals are our punishments de... more When people exact retribution on moral offenders, what psychological goals are our punishments designed to realize? This study represents a conceptual replication and extension of recent research on two proximate drivers of retribution: evidence that the perpetrator suffered, and evidence that he understood why he is being punished. Using a contrastive vignette method, we will present U.S. adults with vignettes about a fictitious high-seriousness (robbery) and low seriousness (theft) crime. In a between-subjects design, we will independently vary perpetrator suffering (present vs. absent) and perpetrator understanding (present vs. absent), as well as the participant’s perspective (personal vs. impersonal). Following Gollwitzter and Denzler (2009), we will estimate punishment goal-fulfillment by measuring sentencing recommendations and punishment satisfaction ratings before and after exposure to the manipulations. We hypothesize that goal fulfillment will be greatest following combin...
When my wife was pregnant, our birthing coach asked the class " What is pain? " I thoug... more When my wife was pregnant, our birthing coach asked the class " What is pain? " I thought I might finally get to display some of my philosophical training, but alas, the correct answer was: " Pain is whatever she says it is. " The coach's " sufferercentric " definition echoes the one offered by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP)— " Pain is always subjective " —as well as the definition of pain offered by the philosopher Saul Kripke in his argument against identity theory— " Pain. .. is picked out by the property of being pain itself, by its immediate phenomenological quality " (1972/1980, p. 152). These subjective conceptions of pain pose problems for the scientific study of pain, as Price and Aydede point out in the introduction of their chapter. If the essence of pain is its phenomenological quality, then it seems the only way to study it directly is through introspection and subjects' verbal reports...
. This preregistered experiment examined two proximate drivers of retributive punishment attitude... more . This preregistered experiment examined two proximate drivers of retributive punishment attitudes: the motivation to make the perpetrator suffer, and understand the wrongfulness of his offense. In a sample of 514 US adults, we presented criminal case summaries that varied the level of suffering (absent vs. present) and understanding (absent vs. present) experienced by the perpetrator and measured punishment judgments and attitudes. Our results demonstrate, as predicted, that participants were more satisfied by the sentence and less punitive when they believed that the perpetrator had suffered from the punishment or that he understood the wrongfulness of his actions. This pattern held across crimes of varying seriousness (theft vs. aggravated robbery) and across two narrative perspectives (participant as victim vs. participant as third party). However, joint evidence of suffering and understanding did not strengthen this effect, contrary to predictions. We discuss the implications of these findings for leading philosophical theories of punishment.
Supplemental material, Tone_Supplemental_Figure for Social Anxiety and Social Behavior: A Test of... more Supplemental material, Tone_Supplemental_Figure for Social Anxiety and Social Behavior: A Test of Predictions From an Evolutionary Model by Erin B. Tone, Eddy Nahmias, Roger Bakeman, Trevor Kvaran, Sarah F. Brosnan, Negar Fani and Elizabeth A. Schroth in Clinical Psychological Science
To function during social interactions, we must be able to consider and coordinate our actions wi... more To function during social interactions, we must be able to consider and coordinate our actions with other people’s perspectives. This process unfolds from decision-making, to anticipation of that decision’s consequences, to feedback about those consequences, in what can be described as a “cascade” of three phases. The iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (iPD) task, an economic-exchange game used to illustrate how people achieve stable cooperation over repeated interactions, provides a framework for examining this “social decision cascade”. In the present study, we examined neural activity associated with the three phases of the cascade, which can be isolated during iPD game rounds. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 31 adult participants made a) decisions about whether to cooperate with a co-player for a monetary reward, b) anticipated the co-player’s decision, and then c) learned the co-player’s decision. Across all three phases, participants recruited the tempo...
Deception in nonhuman animals is one of the most fertile areas of research for pursuing philosoph... more Deception in nonhuman animals is one of the most fertile areas of research for pursuing philosophical questions in cognitive ethology, but it is an area rife with controversy (Byrne and Whiten 1988; Whiten and Byrne 1988.) The literature on deception is interwoven with questions and claims about intelligence, levels of representation, intentionality, and consciousness (Dennett 1983; Mitchell 1986; Perner 1991). Our aim in this essay is not to survey or evaluate the entire literature; rather, we use the phenomenon of deception as a ...
An influential evolutionary model proposed that social anxiety biases people to treat social inte... more An influential evolutionary model proposed that social anxiety biases people to treat social interactions as competitive struggles with the primary goal of avoiding status loss. Among subordinate nonhuman primates in highly hierarchical social groups, this goal leads to adaptive submissive behavior; for humans, however, affiliative responses may be more effective. We tested three predictions about social anxiety and social cognitions, emotions, and behavior that Trower and Gilbert advanced. College students ( N = 122) whose self-reported social anxiety ranged from minimal to extremely high played the Prisoner’s Dilemma game three times. Consistent with two model-based predictions, social anxiety was positively associated with self-reported competitive goals and with nervousness during game play. Unexpectedly, however, social anxiety was associated with a tendency to engage with coplayers in an ostensibly hostile, rather than appeasing, manner. We discuss implications of these findin...
I don't presume to have any methods for teaching philosophy that are better than... more I don't presume to have any methods for teaching philosophy that are better than the ones you already use. But I may have some that are different from the ones you use. And in my experience, just being exposed to different methods helps us re-think the methods we use and perhaps modify them in experimental ways, helping us to identify those methods we find most effective and also preventing us from becoming too settled and comfortable with our current teaching. One of the most difficult challenges for teachers is to change what they ...
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