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Showing posts with label Normality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Normality. Show all posts

Saturday, January 28, 2023

The pervasive impact of ignorance

Kirfel, L., & Phillips, J.
Cognition
Volume 231, February 2023, 105316

Abstract

Norm violations have been demonstrated to impact a wide range of seemingly non-normative judgments. Among other things, when agents' actions violate prescriptive norms they tend to be seen as having done those actions more freely, as having acted more intentionally, as being more of a cause of subsequent outcomes, and even as being less happy. The explanation of this effect continue to be debated, with some researchers appealing to features of actions that violate norms, and other researcher emphasizing the importance of agents' mental states when acting. Here, we report the results of two large-scale experiments that replicate and extend twelve of the studies that originally demonstrated the pervasive impact of norm violations. In each case, we build on the pre-existing experimental paradigms to additionally manipulate whether the agents knew that they were violating a norm while holding fixed the action done. We find evidence for a pervasive impact of ignorance: the impact of norm violations on non-normative judgments depends largely on the agent knowing that they were violating a norm when acting. Moreover, we find evidence that the reduction in the impact of normality is underpinned by people's counterfactual reasoning: people are less likely to consider an alternative to the agent's action if the agent is ignorant. We situate our findings in the wider debate around the role or normality in people's reasoning.

General discussion

Studies show that norm violations influence a wide range of domains, including judgments of causation, freedom, happiness, doing vs. allowing, mental state ascriptions, and modal claims. A continuing debate centers on why normality has such a pervasive impact, and whether one should attempt to offer a unified explanation of these various effects (Hindriks, 2014). In this study, we found evidence that the epistemic state of norm-violating agents plays a fundamental role in the impact of norms on non-normative judgments. Across a wide range of intuitive judgments and highly different manipulations of an agents' knowledge, we found that the impact of normality on non-normative judgments was diminished when the agent did not know that they were violating a norm. More precisely, the agent's knowledge of the norm violation determined the extent to which abnormal actions increased judgments of causation, decreased attribution of force, increased attributions of intentional action, and so on. In other words, the impact of ignorance appears to be as pervasive as the impact of normality itself. In addition, our study showed that the agent's epistemic state also influenced to what extent people engage in reasoning about alternatives to the agent's action. If the agent was ignorant when they violated a norm, people were less inclined to consider what the agent could have done differently.

At the broadest level, the current results provide evidence that the pervasive impact of normality likely warrants a unified explanation at some level: we considered a specific feature that had been shown to moderate the impact of normality in one domain (causation) and demonstrated that this same feature of the impact of normality can be found across a wide range of other domains. This finding suggests that the impact of norms arises from a shared underlying mechanism that is recruited across domains. Specific accounts may, of course, seek to incorporate agents' epistemic states into their respective theory of how normality influences judgments in one particular domain. However, such an approach will miss out on a generalization and will necessarily be less parsimonious. Accordingly, we turn now to considering two broad approaches to offering a unified account of the pervasive impact of ignorance.

Friday, October 14, 2022

9th Circuit Upholds Ban on Conversion Therapy for Minors in First Amendment Challenge

Debra Cassens Weiss
ABA Journal
Originally published 7 SEPT 22

Washington state’s ban on conversion therapy for minors does not violate the First or 14th Amendments, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law, which subjects licensed therapists to discipline if they practice therapy that seeks to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of a person under age 18.

The appeals court said the law was intended to prevent psychological harm to LGBTQ minors subjected to conversion therapy, including depression, self-stigma and emotional distress.

The appeals court ruled against Christian marriage and family counselor Brian Tingley, who claimed the ban on conversion therapy for minors violated his free speech and free exercise rights under the First Amendment. He also claimed the Washington state law was unconstitutionally vague under the 14th Amendment.

The appeals court noted its 2014 decision, Pickup v. Brown, upheld a nearly identical law in California. Tingley had argued, however, that the U.S. Supreme Court abrogated the Pickup decision in 2018 when it ruled for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers challenging California’s required notice on the availability of state-subsidized abortions.

The Supreme Court held the abortion-notice law was a content-based restriction that was likely unconstitutional. The case was National Institute of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra.

Sunday, February 20, 2022

The Pervasive Impact of Ignorance

Kirfel, L., & Phillips, J. S. 
(2022, January 16). 
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/xbrnj

Abstract

Norm violations have been demonstrated to impact a wide range of seemingly non-normative judgments. Among other things, when agents' actions violate prescriptive norms they tend to be seen as having done those actions more freely, as having acted more intentionally, as being more of a cause of subsequent outcomes, and even as being less happy. The explanation of this effect continues to be debated, with some researchers appealing to features of actions that violate norms, and other researchers emphasizing the importance of agents' mental states when acting. Here, we report the results of two large-scale experiments that replicate and extend twelve of the studies that originally demonstrated the pervasive impact of norm violations. In each case, we build on the pre-existing experimental paradigms to additionally manipulate whether the agents knew that they were violating a norm while holding fixed the action done. We find evidence for a pervasive impact of ignorance: the impact of norm violations on non-normative judgments depends largely on the agent knowing that they were violating a norm when acting. Moreover, we find evidence that the reduction in the impact of normality is underpinned by people's counterfactual reasoning: people are less likely to consider an alternative to the agent’s action if the agent is ignorant. We situate our findings in the wider debate around the role of normality in people's reasoning.

General Discussion

Motivated Moral Cognition

On the one hand, blame-based accounts may try and use this discovery to their ad-vantage by arguing that an agent’s knowledge is directly relevant to whether they should be blamed (Cushman et al., 2008; Cushman, Sheketoff, Wharton, & Carey, 2013; Laurent, Nuñez, & Schweitzer, 2015; Yuill & Perner, 1988), and thus that these effects reflect that theimpact of normality arises from the motivation to blame or hold agents responsible for theiractions (Alicke & Rose, 2012; Livengood et al., 2017; Samland & Waldmann, 2016). For example, the tendency to report that agents who bring about harm acted intentionally may serve to corroborate people’s desire to judge the agent’s behaviour negatively (Nadelhoffer, 2004; Rogers et al., 2019). Motivated accounts differ in terms of exactly which moral judgment is argued to be at stake, i.e. whether norm-violations elicit a desire to punish (Clarket al., 2014), to blame (Alicke & Rose, 2012; Hindriks et al., 2016), to hold accountable (Samland & Waldmann, 2016) or responsible (Sytsma, 2020a), and whether its influence works in form of a cognitive bias (Alicke, 2000), or a more affective response (Nadelhoffer,2004). Common to all, however, is the assumption that it is the impetus to morally condemn the norm-violating agent that underlies exaggerated attributions of specific properties, from free will to intentional action.

Our study puts an important constraint on how the normative judgment that motivated reasoning accounts assume might work. To account for our findings, motivated ac-counts cannot generally appeal to whether an agent’s action violated a clear norm, but have to take into account whether people would all-things-considered blame the agent (Driver,2017). In that sense, the mere violation of a norm must not, itself, suffice to trigger the relevant blame response. Rather, the perception of this norm violation must occur in con-junction with an assessment of the epistemic state of the agent such that the relevant motivated reasoning is only elicited when the agent is aware of the immorality of their action. For example, Alicke and Rose’s 2012 Culpable Control Model holds that immediate negative evaluative reactions of an agent’s behaviours often cause people to interpret all other agential features in a way that justifies blaming the agent. Such accounts face a challenge. On the one hand, they seem committed to the idea that people should discount the agent’s ignorance to support their immediate negative evaluation of the harm causing actions. On the other hand, they need to account for the fact that people seem to be sensitive to fine-grained epistemic features of the agent when forming their negative evaluation of the harm causing action.

Monday, November 15, 2021

On Defining Moral Enhancement: A Clarificatory Taxonomy

Carl Jago
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 95, July 2021, 104145

Abstract

In a series of studies, we ask whether and to what extent the base rate of a behavior influences associated moral judgment. Previous research aimed at answering different but related questions are suggestive of such an effect. However, these other investigations involve injunctive norms and special reference groups which are inappropriate for an examination of the effects of base rates per se. Across five studies, we find that, when properly isolated, base rates do indeed influence moral judgment, but they do so with only very small effect sizes. In another study, we test the possibility that the very limited influence of base rates on moral judgment could be a result of a general phenomenon such as the fundamental attribution error, which is not specific to moral judgment. The results suggest that moral judgment may be uniquely resilient to the influence of base rates. In a final pair of studies, we test secondary hypotheses that injunctive norms and special reference groups would inflate any influence on moral judgments relative to base rates alone. The results supported those hypotheses.

From the General Discussion

In multiple experiments aimed at examining the influence of base rates per se, we found that base rates do indeed influence judgments, but the size of the effect we observed was very small. We considered that, in
discovering moral judgments’ resilience to influence from base rates, we may have only rediscovered a general tendency, such as the fundamental attribution error, whereby people discount situational factors. If
so, this tendency would then also apply broadly to non-moral scenarios. We therefore conducted another study in which our experimental materials were modified so as to remove the moral components. We found a substantial base-rate effect on participants’ judgments of performance regarding non-moral behavior. This finding suggests that the resilience to base rates observed in the preceding studies is unlikely the result of amore general tendency, and may instead be unique to moral judgment.

The main reasons why we concluded that the results from the most closely related extant research could not answer the present research question were the involvement in those studies of injunctive norms and
special reference groups. To confirm that these factors could inflate any influence of base rates on moral judgment, in the final pair of studies, we modified our experiments so as to include them. Specifically, in one study, we crossed prescriptive and proscriptive injunctive norms with high and low base rates and found that the impact of an injunctive norm outweighs any impact of the base rate. In the other study, we found that simply mentioning, for example, that there were some good people among those who engaged in a high base-rate behavior resulted in a large effect on moral judgment; not only on judgments of the target’s character, but also on judgments of blame and wrongness. 

Friday, July 30, 2021

The Impact of Ignorance Beyond Causation: An Experimental Meta-Analysis

L. Kirfel & J. P. Phillips
Manuscript

Abstract

Norm violations have been demonstrated to impact a wide range of seemingly non-normative judgments. Among other things, when agents’ actions violate prescriptive norms they tend to be seen as having done those actions more freely, as having acted more intentionally, as being more of a cause of subsequent outcomes, and even as being less happy. The explanation of this effect continue to be debated, with some researchers appealing to features of actions that violate norms, and other researcher emphasizing the importance of agents’ mental states when acting. Here, we report the results of a large-scale experiment that replicates and extends twelve of the studies that originally demonstrated the pervasive impact of norm violations. In each case, we build on the pre-existing experimental paradigms to additionally manipulate whether the agents knew that they were violating a norm while holding fixed the action done. We find evidence for a pervasive impact of ignorance: the impact of norm violations on nonnormative judgments depends largely on the agent knowing that they were violating a norm when acting.

From the Discussion

Norm violations have been previously demonstrated to influence a wide range of intuitive judgments, including judgments of causation, freedom, happiness, doing vs. allowing, mental state ascriptions, and modal claims. A continuing debate centers on why normality has such a pervasive impact, and whether one should attempt to offer a unified explanation of these various effects (Hindriks, 2014).

At the broadest level, the current results demonstrate that the pervasive impact of normality likely warrants a unified explanation at some level. Across a wide range of intuitive judgments and highly different manipulations of an agents’ knowledge, we found that the impact of normality on nonnormative judgments was diminished when the agent did not know that they were violating a norm. That is, we found evidence for a correspondingly pervasive impact of ignorance.

Friday, June 11, 2021

Causal judgments about atypical actions are influenced by agents' epistemic states

Kirfel, L. & Lagnado, D.
Cognition, Volume 212, July 2021.

Abstract

A prominent finding in causal cognition research is people’s tendency to attribute increased causality to atypical actions. If two agents jointly cause an outcome (conjunctive causation), but differ in how frequently they have performed the causal action before, people judge the atypically acting agent to have caused the outcome to a greater extent. In this paper, we argue that it is the epistemic state of an abnormally acting agent, rather than the abnormality of their action, that is driving people's causal judgments. Given the predictability of the normally acting agent's behaviour, the abnormal agent is in a better position to foresee the consequences of their action. We put this hypothesis to test in four experiments. In Experiment 1, we show that people judge the atypical agent as more causal than the normally acting agent, but also judge the atypical agent to have an epistemic advantage. In Experiment 2, we find that people do not judge a causal difference if no epistemic advantage for the abnormal agent arises. In Experiment 3, we replicate these findings in a scenario in which the abnormal agent's epistemic advantage generalises to a novel context. In Experiment 4, we extend these findings to mental states more broadly construed and develop a Bayesian network model that predicts the degree of outcome-oriented mental states based on action normality and epistemic states. We find that people infer mental states like desire and intention to a greater extent from abnormal behaviour when this behaviour is accompanied by an epistemic advantage. We discuss these results in light of current theories and research on people's preference for abnormal causes.

From the Conclusion

In this paper, we have argued that the typicality of actions changes how much an agent can foresee the consequences of their action. We have shown that it is this very epistemic asymmetry between a normally and abnormally acting agent that influences people’s causal judgments. Both employee and party organiser acted abnormally, but when acting, they also could have foreseen the event of a dust explosion to a greater extent. While further research is needed on this topic, the connection between action typicality and epistemic states brings us one step closer to understanding the enigmatic role of normality in causal cognition.

Monday, December 19, 2016

Normality: Part descriptive, part prescriptive

Adam Bear and Joshua Knobe
Cognition
Published October 24, 2016

Abstract

People’s beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both people’s representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that people’s notion of normality incorporates both of these types of norms. In particular, people’s representations of what is normal were found to be influenced both by what they believed to be descriptively average and by what they believed to be prescriptively ideal. This is shown across three domains: people’s use of the word ‘‘normal” (Study 1), their use of gradable adjectives (Study 2), and their judgments of concept prototypicality (Study 3). A final study investigated the learning of normality for a novel category, showing that people actively combine statistical and prescriptive information they have learned into an undifferentiated notion of what is normal (Study 4). Taken together, these findings may help to explain how moral norms impact the acquisition of normality and, conversely, how normality impacts the acquisition of moral norms.

The article is here.