Category: Ethics and Morals

Faces of X-Phi: Ivar Rodríguez Hannikainen

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

In our “Faces of X-Phi” series, experimental philosophers from all around the globe answer nine questions about the past, present, and future of themselves and the field. Who would you like to see here in the future? Just leave a suggestion in the comments! Today, we present Ivar Rodríguez Hannikainen.

The Past

(1) How did you get into philosophy in the first place?

I started out studying music as an undergrad. I loved playing guitar but then quickly became disillusioned with the prospect of a career in music. Then I took a couple of philosophy classes and found myself really enjoying them. But the kind of philosophy I was attracted to then was pretty different from what I most enjoy now: It involved diagnosing the ills of present-day capitalism and calling for a radical ontological/metaphysical shift to uproot the cause of all social and political evils.

(2) And how did you end up doing experimental philosophy?

I had been doing theoretical metaethics during my MA in Madrid, writing about whether moral judgments are inherently motivating or not. Then, in my first week as a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, I was extremely lucky that Stephen Laurence had organized a conference with a line-up of excellent philosophers, psychologists, and economists. I asked Fiery Cushman a few questions after his talk, and that developed into the opportunity to visit the Moral Psychology Research Lab at Harvard. I had no experience whatsoever running experiments, but Fiery was the best mentor you could possibly ask for. Then, back in Sheffield, Steve would get me thinking about how the empirical work we were doing brought to bear on questions in philosophy. So, it was a combination of luck and Steve and Fiery’s diligence and mentorship.

(3) Which teachers or authors have influenced you the most on your philosophy journey – and how?

Besides Steve and Fiery, Blanca Rodríguez López and Noel Struchiner had a huge influence on me. Blanca turned me on to empirically-informed ethics when I was an MA student in Madrid and I wasn’t sure whether there was a place for me in philosophy. Years later, Noel proposed many of the ideas about how moral psychology underpins the law that have become a focus of my research and helped to establish what we now call experimental jurisprudence.

The Present

(4) Why do you consider experimental philosophy in its present form important?

For two reasons.

The first has to do with communication and understanding. We all know the disappointing feeling of sitting through a talk (or being halfway through a paper) thinking, “I have no idea what this is about,” and being unable to engage. Then there is its mirror image: the frustration at the end of your own talk as you realize that, despite your best efforts, you did not make yourself understood. It’s sad because we all devote so much time and energy to carrying out this work, and a big reason to do so is so we can share it with our peers. In my opinion, experimental philosophy helps overcome this problem (as do many other disciplines) by establishing a regimented language. This language allows people to convey hours upon hours of intellectual labor in a 20-minute talk pretty effectively. It’s kind of miraculous and very rewarding to participate in that kind of exchange.

The second reason is the democratizing aspect of experimental philosophy. There are many influential publications authored by scholars from underrepresented countries and lower-ranking institutions – and I suspect this is because there is less weight placed on the name tag and the institution, and more on the ideas and the work themselves. Though, of course, things could always be better in this regard.

(5) Do you have any critical points to make about experimental philosophy in its current state?

My criticisms are along the lines of this, this, and this. These are criticisms I direct at my own research, and I think many experimental philosophers are already acutely aware of these issues. But maybe it’s worth saying anyway.

Experimental philosophy grew out of a concern about the limitations of the introspective (N = 1) method of elaborating on one’s own philosophical intuitions. As experimental philosophers, most of us probably rehash this concern over and over again when we introduce students to experimental philosophy or answer questions about what X-Phi is. That’s all well and good, but what are the limitations of that study you or I are working on right now in 2024? For the field to continue to develop, we should remain vigilant in this sense.

Here are just three examples of how people are doing this already:

  1. There is the concern that our experiments may not accurately capture how people use concepts spontaneously, which has led to an uptick in natural language processing research (see the work of Lucien Baumgartner or Piotr Bystranowski).
  2. There is the concern that what we have learned about folk morality, for example, based on people’s self-reports, may not have much to do with their actual behavior. Work by Kathryn Francis and Eric Schwitzgebel, among others, has contributed greatly to this question.
  3. And, of course, the concern that existing studies, most of which nowadays are conducted in English on Prolific, may not represent people’s intuitions and philosophical concepts in other languages or in non-Western cultures. As everyone knows, the cross-cultural work of Steve Stich and Edouard Machery (together with dozens of collaborators around the world) has been extremely fruitful in this regard.

(6) Which philosophical tradition, group, or individual do you think is most underrated by present-day philosophy?

Possibly every philosophical tradition that developed outside the mainstream European and English-speaking countries. There has to be so much neglected philosophy throughout history simply because it was written in a minority language. The Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy draw attention to a related problem that affects contemporary scholars. It also impacts up-and-coming students of philosophy who may be discouraged from going into academia by the thought that they won’t be able to convey their ideas as eloquently as they’d like.

The Future

(7) How do you think philosophy as a whole will develop in the future?

That is a hard question, so my answer is probably wrong, but I can offer some wild speculation: Philosophy will shift from being thought of as a discipline with a proprietary set of topics to being thought of as an approach or as a set of questions that can arise about many other existing academic disciplines and non-academic pursuits.

If we think of philosophy in the first way, it is tempting to give in to the idea that science is intruding in philosophy and philosophy is receding and surrendering its intellectual terrain. But when thinking of philosophy as an approach to existing disciplines or even specific phenomena, there is no reason to think that we will need less philosophy in the future: within artificial intelligence, a philosophy of artificial intelligence or a theory of personhood; within sustainability studies, an environmental or moral philosophy, and so on.

(8) What do you wish for the future of experimental philosophy?

Most of all, I would like to avoid The Bleak Future. The bleak future I’m thinking of is one where philosophy has been swept into the downward spiral of the humanities and plays an ever-smaller role in public affairs. The few remaining philosophers watch from the sidelines as teams of computer scientists and engineers – with the help of a few natural and social scientists – shape the future, generate awesome knowledge, and improve society.

So, my wish for the future is for experimental philosophers to help establish the value of philosophy within academia and beyond. I’m hopeful that this can be done; we have good exemplars already!

(9) Do you have any interesting upcoming projects?

Together with colleagues in the Psychology Department in Granada, Neele Engelmann and I are studying how people apply rules using the letter vs. spirit framework, asking whether participants’ decisions can be modeled using the same tools that cognitive psychologists use to explain behavior on simple visual interference tasks like the Stroop or Flanker test.

I’m also excited about the research a group of us at the University of Granada is doing on how law and morality mutually influence each other by triangulating legal corpora, experiments, and time-series data. So far, we have focused specifically on euthanasia, but the long-term goal is to pursue this question in a more general way.

A third, early-stage project is inspired by research on action understanding as inverse planning. We know that when people do something bad, we quite naturally want to infer whether they did so intentionally (“Given that they did x, did they have bad intentions?”), perhaps as a step in deciding whether they are to blame. Applying the “inverse planning” idea, we are examining whether these intentionality inferences are themselves carried out by spontaneously inverting the conditional probability and asking oneself, “Supposing they did have bad intentions, would they do x?” as a form of Bayesian reasoning.

Hot Off The Press: “Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

“Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy,” a new entry into the “Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory” series, edited by Hugo Viciana, Antonio Gaitán, and Fernando Aguiar, comprises 17 chapters. See below for the table of contents.

  • Antonio Gaitán, Fernando Aguiar, and Hugo Viciana: “The Experimental Turn in Moral and Political Philosophy”

Part 1 – Methods and Foundations

  • Ivar R. Hannikainen, Brian Flanagan, and Karolina Prochownik: “The Natural Law Thesis Under Empirical Scrutiny”
  • Philipp Schoenegger and Ben Grodeck: “Concrete Over Abstract – Experimental Evidence of Reflective Equilibrium in Population Ethics”
  • Dana Kay Nelkin, Craig R. M. McKenzie, Samuel C. Rickless, and Arseny Ryazanov: “Trolley Problems Reimagined – Sensitivity to Ratio, Risk, and Comparisons”
  • Lieuwe Zijlstra: “The Psychology of Metaethics – Evidence For and Against Folk Moral Objectivism”
  • Thomas Pölzler: “The Explanatory Redundancy Challenge to Moral Properties”
  • Cuizhu Wang: “Belief Distributions and the Measure of Social Norms”
  • Mariìa Jimeìnez Buedo: “Coming Full Circle – Incentives, Reactivity, and the Experimental Turn”

Part 2 – Normative Ethics and Legal and Political Philosophy

  • Stefan Schubert and Lucius Caviola: “Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians”
  • Aurélien Allard and Florian Cova: “What Experiments Can Teach Us About Justice and Impartiality – Vindicating Experimental Political Philosophy”
  • Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg and Yuval Feldman: “A Behavioral Ethics Perspective on the Theory of Criminal Law and Punishment”
  • Douglas Husak: “Behavioral Ethics and the Extent of Responsibility”
  • François Jaquet: “Against Moorean Defences of Speciesism”

Part 3: Applied Issues

  • Blanca Rodrìguez: “Experimental Bioethics and the Case for Human Enhancement”
  • Norbert Paulo, Leonie Alina Möck, and Lando Kirchmair: “The Use and Abuse of Moral Preferences in the Ethics of Self-Driving Cars”
  • Urna Chakrabarty, Romy Feiertag, Anne-Marie McCallion, Brain McNiff, Jesse Prinz, Montaque Reynolds, Sukhvinder Shahi, Maya von Ziegesar, and Angella Yamamoto: “Adaptive Preferences – An Empirical Investigation of Feminist Perspectives”
  • Anastasia Chan, Marinus Ferreira, and Mark Alfano: “Reactionary Attitudes – Strawson, Twitter, and the Black Lives Matter Movement”

Literature

Viciana, Hugo, Antonio Gaitán, and Fernando Aguiar (eds.) (2023): Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy, New York: Routledge. (Link)

The Folk Concept of Luck

Posted on by Mario Attie-Picker

This text was first published at xphiblog.com on February 28, 2019.

Discussions of moral luck usually start by presenting a pair of agents who engage in the same behavior but bring about very different outcomes. Drunk driving is the usual example. One driver – the lucky driver – arrives home without harming anyone. The second driver – the unlucky driver – hits a passerby. The question is then posed: are they equally blameworthy? Much ink has been spilled on that question (and rightly so). But an interesting issue arises even before we get there, namely, what’s going on with our attributions of luck. It seems odd to call the second driver unlucky. An accident caused by drunk driving seems to be the very opposite of a case in which a bad outcome is simply due to luck. What drives this intuition?

Philosophical accounts of luck often point to features such as lack of control, modal fragility and low probabilities as central to luck attributions. We can fill in the details in the case above in such a way as to have all three features present. And yet, it still seems unintuitive to claim that the accident was due to (bad) luck.

In a new paper, I argue that this is because the folk concept of luck is sensitive to normative considerations. In particular, it is influenced by a normative evaluation of an agent’s action and its relation to the ensuing outcome. Roughly, luck attributions are sensitive to whether the valence of the action matches the valence of the outcome. The idea is that when the valences do not match, we are more inclined to attribute luck (explaining why it seems fitting to describe the first driver as lucky, for it’s a case of bad action/good outcome). And similarly, we are less likely to attribute luck when the valences do match (e.g., bad action/bad outcome, as with the “unlucky” driver).

I tested this hypothesis across five different studies. In one study, I manipulated both the valence of the action and the valence of the outcome, and measured luck attributions. Here is an example of one vignette.

Negligent Action

About to perform a complicated procedure, a surgeon forgets to wash his hands. As a result, the chances of a failed [successful] procedure rise [drop] to about 30%.

As a matter of fact, the procedure fails [succeeds].

Virtuous Action

About to perform a complicated procedure, a surgeon takes special precautions, reviewing each part of the procedure carefully. As a result, the chances of a successful [failed] procedure rise [drop] to about 30%.

As a matter of fact, the procedure succeeds [fails].

Participants indicated their agreement with the following statement, “It was due to luck that the procedure failed [succeeded]” using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from “disagree” to “agree”.

Here are the results:

The results followed the predicted pattern: luck attributions were highly sensitive to whether the valence of the outcome matched the valence of the action. (It’s worth saying that this effect remained significant after controlling for judgments about subjective probabilities, modal fragility, causality, and lack of control).

In a different study, the perceived valence of the action was not manipulated across conditions but rather depended on the moral views of the participants themselves. Participants read a story about a university president faced with the task of deciding whether or not to cancel an upcoming talk by a controversial speaker. The perceived valence of the president’s action, and hence the normative relation to the outcome (success or failure at creating a positive environment at the university), thus varied with individual differences in judgments about what the president should do.

Here are the results:

Luck attributions differed significantly among participants with different moral views responding to the same scenario. For example, when the president decided to let the speaker give the talk and the decision led to a good outcome, participants who disagreed with the decision judged the outcome as lucky. Those who judged the president’s action as morally right, however, did not attribute the success to luck.

It thus seems that normative considerations are an important element in our folk notion of luck. That is to say, describing the first driver as lucky already involves a normative evaluation of her action and the ensuing outcome. And our refusal to attribute luck to the second driver can be partly explained by the fact that we are not inclined to attribute luck when bad actions bring about bad outcomes.

Any thoughts you might have would be very much appreciated!

Literature

Attie-Picker, Mario (2021): “Is the Folk Concept of Luck Normative?,” Synthese 198, 1481–1515. (Link)

Hot Off The Press: “Priority of Needs?”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Members of the interdisciplinary research group “Need-Based Justice and Distribution Procedures,” funded by the German Research Foundation, have summarized the results of more than six years of research in the volume “Priority of Needs? An Informed Theory of Need-Based Justice,” edited by Bernhard Kittel and Stefan Traub. The research group’s mission statement reads:

The objective of the research group “Need-Based Justice and Distribution Procedures” is to empirically contribute to establishing a positive and informed normative theory of need-based justice. This theory should provide answers to four questions: (i) How do individuals identify their needs and which distributions are considered sufficient for those needs? (ii) On the collective level, what is considered need-based justice and which processes lead to acceptance of those needs? (iii) Which collective dynamics unfold during this acceptance process in the context of (un-)stable political compromises? (iv) Which incentive-based effects of the collective level can be observed on the individual level, and is a need-based redistribution sustainable?

See below for the table of contents.

Part 1 – Identification of Needs

Part 2 – Structures and Processes of the Recognition of Needs

Part 3 – Welfare Consequences of Prioritizing Need-Based Distributions

Part 4 – Differentiation

Literature

Kittel, Bernhard, and Stefan Traub (eds.) (2024): Priority of Needs? An Informed Theory of Need-Based Justice, Cham: Springer. (Link)

Hot Off The Press: “Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Volume 5 of the “Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy,” edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, just hit the shelves! It comprises a total of 16 chapters on no less than 480 pages. See below for the table of contents.

  • Alexander Max Bauer and Jan Romann: “Equal Deeds, Different Needs”
  • John Bronsteen, Brian Leiter, Jonathan Masur, and Kevin Tobia: “The Folk Theory of Well-Being”
  • Shannon Brick: “Deference to Moral Testimony and (In)Authenticity”
  • Florian Cova: “Calibrating Measures of Folk Objectivism”
  • Justin Sytsma: “Resituating the Influence of Relevant Alternatives”
  • Samuel Murray, Elise Dykhuis, and Thomas Nadelhoffer: “Do People Understand Determinism? The Tracking Problem for Measuring Free Will Beliefs”
  • Natalja Deng, Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller, and James Norton: “Investing the Three Ts of Present-Bias – Telic Attitudes, Temporal Preferences and Temporal Ontology”
  • Blake McAllister, Ian Church, Paul Rezkalla, and Long Nguyen: “Empirical Challenges to the Evidential Problem of Evil”
  • Eric Mandelbaum, Jennifer Ware, and Steven Young: “The Sound of Slurs – Bad Sounds for Bad Words”
  • Rebecca Zhu, Mariel Goddu, and Alison Gopnik: “Providing Explanations Shifts Preschoolers’ Metaphor Preferences”
  • Adrian Ziólkowski and Tomasz Zyglewicz: “Truth-Conditional Variability of Color Ascriptions”
  • Joshua Alexander and Jonathan M. Weinberg: “Practices Make Perfect – On Minding Methodology When Mooting Metaphilosophy”
  • Nat Hansen, Kathryn Francis, and Hamish Greening: “Socratic Questionnaires”
  • N. Ángel Pinillos: “Bank Cases, Stakes and Normative Facts”
  • Jon Bebb and Helen Beebee: “Causal Selection and Egalitarianism”
  • Kevin Reuter: “Experimental Philosophy of Consciousness”

Literature

Knobe, Joshua, and Shaun Nichols (eds.) (2024): Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, volume 5, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Link)

Talk: “In Praise of Praise” (Pascale Willemsen)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, June 10, from 18:00–20:00 (UTC+2), Pascale Willemsen will be talking about “In Praise of Praise” at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Pascale writes:

Philosophers claim that an agent’s moral responsibility can come in two variations: A blameworthy agent deserves blame, and a praiseworthy agent deserves praise. It is also widely accepted that a central question in moral philosophy concerns the conditions under which an agent is or is appropriately held morally responsible for their behaviour. In contrast, a central topic in moral psychology concerns the conditions under which an agent is judged to be morally responsible for their behaviour and blamed for its negative consequences. While blame and praise are seen as two sides of the same coin, considerably more attention has been paid to blame. In general, moral responsibility researchers have mainly focused on understanding negatively-valenced moral phenomena. In contrast, the positive side of moral responsibility has only played a minor role in the research programmes of moral philosophers, psychologists, and experimental philosophers. As a result, we understand relatively little about what praise is, when it is ascribed, and how it is verbally expressed. This is surprising, as researchers strive to tell a story about human morality and moral responsibility as a whole, not merely half of it.

In this talk, I will do three things: First, I summarize the relatively scarce psychological literature which strongly suggests various asymmetries between blame and praise. Second, presenting a series of my own experiments, I demonstrate that blame and praise may differ in another important respect, namely in the way it is verbally expressed by negative and positive evaluative concepts. As a result of all this evidence, I conclude that praise is a unique moral judgment that deserves closer attention. Finally, taking a first stab at the linguistic dimension of praise, I show some pilot corpus studies which explore praise vocabulary.

Conference: “Experimental Philosophy – Beyond Armchair Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 32nd “Philosophy Conference” of the University of Valladolid’s Department of Philosophy, organized by José V. Hernández-Conde, will take place from May 16 to 17 in Valladolid, Spain. This year’s instalment is all about experimental philosophy.

May 16, 9:00–18:30 (UTC+2)

  • Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “No Luck for Moral Luck”
  • María Jiménez-Buedo (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia): “What do we Measure in the Dictator Game? Constructs, Validity and the Threat of Methodological Artifacts”
  • Mikel Asteinza (University of the Basque Country): “Epistemic Determinants of Scientific Disclosure and Their Impact on the Legal Audience – The Case of De-Extinction”
  • Andrei Moldovan and Obdulia Torres (University of Salamanca): “Expertisia as a Contextual Property”
  • Fernando Aguiar (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Would You Hire a Person With an Intellectual Disability? An Experimental Study on Action and Compassion”
  • Francisco Calvo (University of Murcia): “Of Seahorses and Plants – An Experimental Journey out of Ignorance”
  • Fernando Sanantonio (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): “External Sanctions, Compliance and Avoidance in Vegetarianism as a Normative System”
  • Daniel Martín (University of Granada): “Attitudes Toward Moral Improvement Based on Virtual Assistance”

May 17, 9:15–14:00 (UTC+2)

  • Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “The Geography of Wisdom”
  • Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada): “What is ‘Consenting’?”
  • Javier Anta (University of Salamanca): “An Experimental Approach to the Ordinary Meaning of ‘Information’”
  • Rodrigo Díaz (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Describing (Erroneously) Recalcitrant Emotions”
  • David Rodríguez-Arias (University of Granada): “Contemporary End-of-Life Bioethics – Empirical and Experimental Contributions”

For more information about the conference, visit https://keama.uva.es/xxxii-philosophy-conference/.

Workshop: “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Today, the “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, starts. They write:

We are delighted to announce the next series of our monthly online workshop devoted to discussion of work in progress in experimental philosophy. The worshop is held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. The link to the Teams meetings is below.

February 14, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Renato Turco (University of Genoa): “An Experimental Approach to Empty Definite Descriptions”
  • Lucien Baumgartner (University of Zurich), Paul Rehren (Utrecht University), and Krzysztof Sękowski (University of Warsaw): “Measuring (Un)Intentional Conceptual Change in Philosophy – A Corpus Study”

March 13, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Isabelle Keßels (University of Düsseldorf), Paul Hasselkuß (University of Düsseldorf), and Daian Bica (University of Düsseldorf): “The Safety Dilemma Put to the Test”
  • José V. Hernández-Conde (University of Valladolid) and Agustín Vicente (University of the Basque Country; Ikerbasque): “A Comparative Analysis of the Knobe Effect – Assessing Moral, Aesthetic, and Alethic Reasoning in Autistic and Neurotypical Populations”

April 10, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Tingting Sui (Peking University), Sebastian Sunday (Peking University): “A Confucian Algorithm for Autonomous Vehicles”
  • Ryan Doran (University of Barcelona; University of Cambridge): “True Beauty”

May 8, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • William Gopal (University of Glasgow): “Identifying & Rectifying the Instrumentalist Bias in Analytic Social Epistemology”
  • Giuseppe Ricciardi (Harvard University) and Kevin Reuter (University of Zurich): “Exploring the Agent-Relativity of Truth”

June 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Federico Burdman (Alberto Hurtado University), Gino Marttelo Carmona Díaz (University of the Andes), and María Fernanda Rangel Carrillo (University of the Andes): “Lay Perceptions of Control and Moral Responsibility in Addiction”
  • Phuc Nguyen (German Cancer Research Center), Andrea Quint (German Cancer Research Center), María Alejandra Petino Zappala (German Cancer Research Center), and Nora Heinzelmann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): “A Cross-Cultural Study on the Ethics and Moral Psychology of HPV Vaccination”

Sessions can be joined using Microsoft Teams via https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NDdiNDRjNmQtMzI4Yi00MWM2LWFiYjMtYzE4YzE1ZTY2ODcz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22c152cb07-614e-4abb-818a-f035cfa91a77%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22680c6cfa-4e43-4962-9569-4828023e7f78%22%7d.

Hot Off The Press: “Empirische Studien zu Fragen der Bedarfsgerechtigkeit”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Needs are something that fundamentally defines us as human beings. In “Empirische Studien zu Fragen der Bedarfsgerechtigkeit” (Empirical Studies on Questions of Need-Based Distributive Justice), I recap a series of vignette studies that examine the role that needs play in dealing with problems of distributive justice. While needs are often underrepresented in discussions of distributive justice, they are shown to have a fundamental importance in people’s thinking.

Among other things, the following becomes clear:

  1. Impartial observers make gradual assessments of the fairness of distributions.
  2. These assessments depend on how well an individual is supplied with a relevant good.
  3. If information on a need threshold is given, these assessments are made relative to this reference point. (Bauer et al. 2023a)
  4. Impartial decision-makers consider need, productivity, and accountability when making hypothetical distribution decisions.
  5. If an individual’s productivity is not sufficient to cover their needs, these higher needs are partially compensated for (at the expense of other individuals who are not so badly off)
  6. Willingness to compensate decreases if an individual is accountable for having produced less or for needing more. (Bauer et al. 2022)
  7. Both impartial observers and impartial decision-makers attribute different levels of importance to different kinds of needs.
  8. This reveals a hierarchy of needs in the following order: Survival, Decency, Belonging, Autonomy. (Bauer et al. 2023b)

Literature

Bauer, Alexander Max, Frauke Meyer, Jan Romann, Mark Siebel, and Stefan Traub (2022): “Need, Equity, and Accountability. Evidence on Third-Party Distribution Decisions from a Vignette Study,” Social Choice and Welfare 59, 769–814. (Link)

Bauer, Alexander Max, Adele Diederich, Stefan Traub, and Arne Robert Weiss (2023a): “When the Poorest Are Neglected. A Vignette Experiment on Need-Based Distributive Justice,” SSRN Working Paper 4503209. (Link)

Bauer, Alexander Max, Jan Romann, Mark Siebel, and Stefan Traub (2023b): “Winter is Coming. How Laypeople Think About Different Kinds of Needs,” PLoS ONE 18 (11), e0294572. (Link)

Bauer, Alexander Max (2024): Empirische Studien zu Fragen der Bedarfsgerechtigkeit, Oldenburg: University of Oldenburg Press. (Link)

Who Complies With Pandemic Health Recommendations?

Posted on by Rodrigo Díaz

This text was first published at xphiblog.com on August 8, 2021. It has been slightly updated.

Compliance with health recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic is a divisive topic. Some readily accept measures such as social distancing and mask-wearing, while others frontally reject them. What separates those who comply from those who don’t? Is it trust in science and official organizations? Concern about others vs. liberty? Fear? Aversion to germs?

In March 2020, the WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. That month, I was supposed to go on a ski trip with some friends. As the dates were approaching, the ski trip’s group chat was a succession of moral arguments for cancelling the trip, and pragmatic arguments for carrying on with the plan. In the end, we didn’t go. But as a geek that likes to scrutinize human behavior, I started wondering: Were we convinced by the arguments? Or just confused and scared?

Soon after that, I saw on Twitter that Florian Cova had run a study investigating the relationship between conspiracist mentality and compliance with health recommendations. Brilliant! Instead of just speculating, I should get some data too. I ran a small study and found an effect of moral beliefs regarding care on participant’s efforts to comply with health recommendations, but no effect of anxiety. I showed the results to Florian, and we decided to join forces to get a wider picture of the individual differences associated with adopting health behaviors during the pandemic.

In a first study, we included a total of 17 individual differences measures, which can be classified into three categories: Epistemic (beliefs in pseudoscience / conspiracy theories / political truth, faith in intuition, narcissism), Moral (moral foundations, perspective-taking), and Affective (fear, disgust, empathy, reactance). All these seemed plausible candidates. Those who tend to mistrust science and official organizations are likely to disregard health recommendations. But so is the case for those who think that preserving liberty is morally imperative, or react negatively to attempts to restrict of freedom. Conversely, those who think that caring about others is a very important moral value, tend to take other’s perspective, or share others’ pain, are likely to follow health recommendations to avoid harming others. And those who are prone to fear or disgust will probably adopt health behaviors to avoid getting the virus. What did the results show?

None of the epistemic / conspiracist items significantly correlated with efforts to comply with health recommendations, nor did fear. Regression analyses showed that the best predictors of compliance were care values and disgust sensitivity. Participants who think caring about others is specially important or are easily disgusted reported more efforts to comply with health recommendations. These results replicated in a representative sample of the US population.

In a second set of studies (conducted in late 2020), we used French participants and an indirect measure of compliance with health recommendations: decisions to go voting in the municipal elections that were taking place at that time in France. Arguably, those who follow health recommendations would avoid to go voting (but, as the results suggest, the issue might be more complicated).

This time, regression analyses showed that pathogen disgust and reactance were the best predictors of efforts to follow health recommendations. Both variables also showed a significant effect on voting behavior, with reactance predicting decisions to go voting, and pathogen disgust predicting decisions to not vote. However, and in contrast to previous studies, care values showed no significant effects.

Because the results were somewhat heterogeneous across studies, we conducted (actually, Florian did) a mini-metanalysis to ensure the robustness of our (partial) correlation effects on reported compliance with health recommendations. Results showed a significant effect of reactance, disgust, and care values, hence the title of the paper.1

I still don’t know what made me and my friends not go skiing in March 2020, but it seems that individual differences in moral beliefs, disgust sensitivity, and psychological reactance are more important than conspiracist mentality or fear in driving (lack of) compliance with health recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This might be surprising to some, unsurprising to others. Maybe we should run a study on this divide next!

Endnotes

  1. Díaz, Rodrigo, and Florian Cova (2022): “Reactance, Morality, and Disgust. The Relationship Between Affective Dispositions and Compliance With Official Health Recommendations During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Cognition and Emotion 36 (1), 120–136. (Link) ↩︎