Month: May 2025

Priming Effects Are Fake, but Framing Effects Are Real

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

A few decades ago, it was pretty common to mush together priming effects and framing effects and see them as two closely connected parts of a single Bigger Truth about the human mind. Of course, everyone understood that the effects themselves were a bit different, but one common view was that they were providing evidence for the same larger picture. That larger picture said: People’s judgments are radically unstable, easily pushed around by subtle and almost unnoticeable factors.

Things have changed so much since then. Priming research in social psychology has experienced a series of truly spectacular replication failures, while research on framing effects continues to look very solid. In light of this change, we should rethink our understanding of what framing effects show about human cognition. We shouldn’t see them as part of a larger picture that also includes priming. We need an understanding of framing that allows us to situate it within a larger picture, according to which priming effects are not real.

The priming literature seemed to be showing that people’s judgment and decision-making are highly unstable and can be easily shifted around by small manipulations of the external situation. The thought was that if you just happen to be holding a hot coffee, or sitting at a dirty desk, or in a room that includes a picture of dollar bills, your whole way of thinking about things will be shifted in some fundamental respect. For example, you will end up making deeply different moral judgments.

The key lesson of more recent research is simple: these priming effects do not occur. More generally, we cannot shift people’s moral judgments around in some radical way just by making subtle changes in their situation. Your moral judgments will not shift around completely if you are seated at a dirty desk. That is not how the human mind works.

Okay, with all of that in mind, let’s rethink framing effects. For concreteness, we can focus on a famous study from Tversky and Kahneman (1981). In this study, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Participants in the gain framing condition read the following case:

A disease is expected to kill 600 people. You can choose between two options:

  • If you choose the first option, 200 people will be saved.
  • If you choose the second option, there is one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that 0 people will be saved.

Meanwhile, participants in the loss framing condition read:

A disease is expected to kill 600 people. You can choose between two options:

  • If you choose the first option, 400 people will die.
  • If you choose the second option, there is one-third probability that 0 people will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.

Clearly, the two descriptions are logically equivalent, but they tend to yield very different responses. Participants tend to be risk-averse in the first case, risk-seeking in the second.

During the heyday of priming research, many of us thought that this sort of effect should be understood within a larger picture of the mind that also included priming. Basically, the idea was something like this: “People’s judgments about a case can be shifted around but all sorts of little things, including everything from the decor in the room to the precise words used to describe it.” But in light of everything we know now, we need to revisit this view. Framing effects are very real, but that larger picture seems to be mistaken. We need to understand framing effects within a larger picture of the mind, according to which people’s judgments don’t just shift around randomly as a result of all sorts of little factors.

I’d be very open to different views about what the right picture is, but just as a first step in this direction, let’s consider a picture that emerges not from social psychology but rather from very traditional work in philosophy. This picture says that people often have a collection of different intuitions that are mutually inconsistent. These intuitions need not be unstable in any way. It might be that each individual intuition is completely stable; it’s just that the different intuitions contradict each other.

To illustrate, consider intuitions about free will. I might find myself having the following three intuitions: (a) All human behavior is completely explained by genes and environment, (b) If a person’s behavior is completely explained by genes and environment, that person’s behavior is not performed with free will, (c) Some human behaviors are performed with free will. These three intuitions are mutually inconsistent, so they cannot all be right. However, this does not mean that people’s free will intuitions have to be unstable in any way.

On the contrary, a single individual could easily have all three intuitions at the same time. For example, as a philosopher, I might start out a paper by explaining that each of these three claims seems intuitively to be true, that they are mutually inconsistent and hence cannot all be right, and that we therefore face an interesting philosophical problem. Alternatively, someone might simply have each of these three intuitions, but without noticing that they contradict each other. In such a case, the person would be failing to notice something important, but that would not mean that the person’s intuitions were unstable. Each of the three intuitions might be perfectly stable; it’s just that the three intuitions are not consistent.

Some philosophical problems seem to have very much the structure we see in framing effects. Consider the philosophical problem of moral luck. The problem starts with three intuitions: (a) An agent who doesn’t bring about any bad outcomes deserves relatively little blame, (b) An agent who performs the exact same behavior but who ends up bringing about a bad outcome deserves a lot of blame, (c) If the agent performs the exact same behavior in two cases and the only difference is in the outcome that ends up occurring, that difference by itself cannot be relevant to how much blame the agent deserves. I myself have all three of these intuitions. Since the intuitions are mutually inconsistent, they cannot all be right, but that does not mean that my intuitions are unstable. Each of the three intuitions is completely stable and emerges in all situations; it’s just that the three intuitions are in tension with each other.

Let’s now return to framing effects. In the days when it seemed like priming was real, I totally see why researchers would think that framing was a lot like priming. But in light of subsequent studies, maybe we should see it in a completely different way. Framing does not involve people’s judgments being unstable; it instead involves people having different intuitions that are mutually inconsistent.

Take the example described above. Looking at that example, I have the following three intuitions: (a) The correct answer in the first case is to take the non-risky option, (b) The correct answer in the second case is to take the risky option, and (c) It cannot possibly be the case that the correct answer in the first case is different from the correct answer in the second case. These three intuitions are mutually inconsistent, so they cannot all be right. However, each individual intuition can be perfectly stable. In fact, thinking about the problem right now, I find myself having all three intuitions at the same time.

Turning the traditional view about framing effects upside down, one might even see framing effects as an extreme case of stability. Just as we continue to experience a visual illusion even when we know that it is illusory, we continue to have the inconsistent intuitions that together constitute a framing effect even when we know that they cannot all be right.

[I discuss this issue in this paper, but please feel free to respond to this blog post even if you haven’t looked at the full paper.]

Hot Off The Press: “The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Recently, “The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence,” a new entry in the “Cambridge Law Handbooks” series, has been published. It was edited by Kevin Tobia and contains no fewer than 38 chapters. See below for the table of contents.

Part 1 – Foundations and Theory

  • Kevin Tobia: “Introduction”
  • Barbara A. Spellman, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, Janice Nadler, and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan: “Psychology and Jurisprudence Across the Curriculum”
  • John Mikhail: “Holmes, Legal Realism, and Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Frederick Schauer: “The Empirical Component of Analytic Jurisprudence”
  • Felipe Jiménez: “The Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Jonathan Lewis: “Competing Conceptual Inferences and the Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Joseph Avery, Alissa del Riego, and Patricia Sánchez Abril: “The Contours of Bias in Experimental Jurisprudence”
  • Christoph Bublitz: “Experimental Jurisprudence and Doctrinal Reasoning – A View from German Criminal Law”
  • Bert I. Huang: “Law and Morality”
  • Brian Sheppard: “Legal Constraint”

Part 2 – Introductions

  • Guilherme da Franca Couto Fernandes de Almeida, Noel Struchiner, and Ivar Hannikainen: “Rules”
  • James A. Macleod: “Surveys and Experiments in Statutory Interpretation”
  • Thomas R. Lee and Stephen C. Mouritsen: “Corpus Linguistics and Armchair Jurisprudence”
  • Meirav Furth-Matzkin: “Using Experiments to Inform the Regulation of Consumer Contracts”
  • Doron Dorfman: “Experimental Jurisprudence of Health and Disability Law”
  • Jessica Bregant, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, and Verity Winship: “Studying Public Perceptions of Settlement”
  • Benedikt Pirker, Izabela Skoczeń, and Veronika Fikfak: “Experimental Jurisprudence in International Law”
  • Heidi H. Liu: “The Law and Psychology of Gender Stereotyping”
  • Christian Mott: “The Experimental Jurisprudence of Persistence through Time”
  • Lukas Holste and Holger Spamann: “Experimental Investigations of Judicial Decision-Making”
  • Christoph Engel and Rima-Maria Rahal: “Eye-Tracking as a Method for Legal Research”
  • Jessica Bregant: “Intuitive Jurisprudence – What Experimental Jurisprudence Can Learn from Developmental Science”

Part 3 – Applications

  • Corey H. Allen, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Jason Shepard, and Eyal Aharoni: “Moral Judgments about Retributive Vigilantism”
  • Karolina M. Prochownik, Romy D. Feiertag, Joachim Horvath, and Alex Wiegmann: “How Much Harm Does It Take? An Experimental Study on Legal Expertise, the Severity Effect, and Intentionality Ascriptions”
  • Gabriel Lima and Meeyoung Cha: “Human Perceptions of AI-Caused Harm”
  • Christopher Brett Jaeger: “Reasonableness from an Experimental Jurisprudence Perspective”
  • Lucien Baumgartner and Markus Kneer: “The Meaning of ‘Reasonable’ – Evidence from a Corpus-Linguistic Study”
  • Roseanna Sommers: “Commonsense Consent and Action Representation – What is ‘Essential’ to Consent?”
  • Neele Engelmann and Lara Kirfel: “Who Caused It? Different Effects of Statistical and Prescriptive Abnormality on Causal Selection in Chains”
  • Ori Friedman: “Ownership for and Against Control”
  • Andrew Higgins and Inbar Levy: “Examining the Foundations of the Law of Judicial Bias – Expert versus Lay Perspectives on Judicial Recusal”
  • Jacqueline M. Chen and Teneille R. Brown: “The Promise and the Pitfalls of Mock Jury Studies – Testing the Psychology of Character Assessments”
  • Piotr Bystranowski, Ivar Hannikainen, and Kevin Tobia: “Legal Interpretation as Coordination”
  • Janet Randall and Lawrence Solan: “Legal Ambiguities – What Can Psycholinguistics Tell Us?”
  • Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter: “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Rights for Future Generations”
  • Austin A. Baker and J. Remy Green: “The Right to Transgender Identity”
  • Enrique Cáceres, Christopher Stephens, Azalea Reyes-Aguilar, Daniel Atilano, Manuel García, Rosa Lidia López-Bejarano, Susana González, Carmen Patricia López-Olvera, Octavio Salvador-Ginez, and Margarita Palacios: “The Legal Conductome – The Complexity Behind Decisions”
  • Neil C. Thompson, Brian Flanagan, Edana Richardson, Brian McKenzie, and Xueyun Luo: “Trial by Internet – A Randomized Field Experiment on Wikipedia’s Influence on Judges’ Legal Reasoning”

Literature

Tobia, Kevin (ed.) (2025): The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. (Link)

Do People Think That Free Will Is Incompatible with Determinism?

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

Imagine a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by the things that happened before. Suppose, for example, that Mia has a bagel for breakfast. Her act of having a bagel for breakfast would be caused by the way things were right before that, which would be caused by the way things were right before that… all the way back to the very beginning of the universe. In this universe, can anyone ever be morally responsible for anything they do?

If you just ask people this question, the overwhelming majority say “No.” This answer seems to align with the philosophical view called incompatibilism – the view that no one can ever be morally responsible for anything they do in a deterministic universe. So the most straightforward way of understanding this result is that people have an incompatibilist intuition.

But some of my fellow experimental philosophers reject this straightforward interpretation. They say that what’s really going on in this case is that people are misunderstanding the question. On this view, when people get a little story about a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by what happened before, they don’t correctly understand what is going on in the story. So the take-home message is not that people have incompatibilist intuitions; it is that we need to change our experimental materials so that people understand them better.

The experimental philosophers who argue for this claim have conducted an impressive program of research. Basically, the key findings come from studies in which researchers present participants with a story about a deterministic universe and then ask questions about what life would be like in the universe. If you do this, you find that people give very extreme answers. People say that life in a deterministic universe would be radically different in all sorts of ways. Most philosophers think that these extreme answers are not true, meaning that people are going wrong in some important respect here.

Okay, so far, so good. If you give people a story about a deterministic universe and ask them what life would be like in that universe, they say some very extreme things that we have good reason to regard as false. But what does that show when it comes to the question about what people really think?

In my opinion, it does not show that we should switch over to different experimental materials. Instead, it suggests that people genuinely do have very extreme views about determinism. If we found a way to switch over to different materials that did not yield these extreme views, we would be switching over to materials that were less accurate in giving us an understanding of what people really think.

Let’s consider an analogy. Suppose we are running studies to understand people’s attitudes about abortion. Now suppose some of our participants say that abortion results in the fetus’s soul going straight to hell, to be tortured for all eternity. We might think that this is a catastrophically false understanding of what abortion is like, but we should not change our study materials to make people stop giving this response. This response is accurately revealing what some people believe about abortion. My point is that the results we get in studies about free will and determinism should be understood in much the same way.

Looking at the actual experimental results, what one sees is that when people are given a story about a deterministic universe, they think that nothing even approaching normal human agency would be possible in this universe. Most strikingly, if you ask them whether the actions of people in this universe depend on their beliefs and values, they explicitly say “No.” In other words, they seem to have a sense that a person living in a deterministic universe would do exactly the same thing even if she had different beliefs and values. (This is such an interesting result! It was first uncovered in the classic paper by Murray and Nahmias linked above, but it has subsequently been replicated in tons of further research.)

Importantly, people only apply this intuition to human actions and not to other types of objects. For example, suppose you instead tell them about a computer and ask whether the computer’s output depends on its data and code. You then get the opposite response. Although people say that a human being’s actions would not depend on her beliefs and values, they say that a computer’s output would depend on its data and code.

The most natural way to interpret this result is that people think that the processes underlying human action are radically different from the processes underlying a computer’s output. If everything were determined, the computer could still work fine, but human action would be fundamentally disrupted.

Further studies suggest that people think certain kinds of actions would be possible in a deterministic universe while others would not. For example, people think it would be possible in a deterministic universe for someone to have a craving for ice cream and then give into it and buy some ice cream, but people think it wouldn’t be possible for someone to have a craving but then resist it and not buy the ice cream.

The most natural way to understand this pattern of judgments is that people have a very extreme incompatibilist view. Not only do they think that determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility, they think that determinism is incompatible with the ordinary sort of human agency you might show in resisting a craving for ice cream. To really get to the bottom of this, we should be running further studies that help us understand why people see human agency in this way.

In saying this, I am departing from the usual view within my field. That usual view is that if we find people saying stuff like this, we must be making some kind of error in the way we are designing our studies. So the thought is that we should keep adjusting our experimental materials until we can get people to espouse a view about them that seems more philosophically kosher.

This reaction seems so mistaken to me! We are finding something super interesting here. It might not be what we expected to find when we first started working on these issues, but that just makes it all the more intriguing.