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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)

Hot Off The Press: “The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

“The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy,” a new entry into the “De Gruyter Reference” series, brings together experimental philosophers from around the globe to provide interested readers with insights into many topics currently researched in X-Phi. See below for the table of contents.

Part 1 – The Philosophy of Experimental Philosophy

Part 2 – Topics from Theoretical Philosophy

Part 3 – Topics from Practical Philosophy

Literature

Bauer, Alexander Max, and Stephan Kornmesser (eds.) (2023): The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter. (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) ↩︎

The Revolver Case Revisited

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

This text was first published at xphiblog.com on June 22, 2021. It has been slightly updated.

I still remember how I sat on the porch last year, somewhen around April, reading Jonathan’s and Justin’s “Actual Causation and Compositionality” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020) for an upcoming session of X-Phi Under Quarantine, when suddenly – halfway through it – this idea struck me: There is something odd about the way subjects were asked by Jonathan and Justin, I thought.

But first things first. For those of you unfamiliar with the paper, I will give you a little rundown. Jonathan and Justin argue that theories of actual causation often endorse the Compositionality Constraint of Actual Causation (CCAC): For a series of individual events – say, c, d, and e – the CCAC states that if c caused e, then it did so either directly or it did so indirectly via at least one intermediary d. This intermediary then is itself an effect of c and a cause of e.

The CCAC’s validity does not solely rest upon experts’ intuitions. With the “Folk Attribution Desideratum” (FAD) (Livengood, Sytsma, and Rose 2017), it can be demanded “that what a theory of actual causation says about concrete, everyday cases [has to] accord with ordinary causal attributions” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 48).

Now, research has already shown that causal attributions can be influenced by normative judgements. This gives reasonable doubt that ordinary causal attributions accord with concrete cases. Jonathan and Justin hypothesize that, thus, “ordinary causal attributions will tend to violate the compositionality constraint for cases in which someone or something is responsible for an effect by way of an intermediary that does not share in the responsibility” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 48). To investigate whether this was the case, they conducted a series of vignette studies. One of them, the Revolver Case (RC), introduces subjects to the following story:

Trent has decided to kill his father, Brad. He aims his loaded revolver at Brad and pulls the trigger, releasing the hammer. The hammer strikes the cartridge, igniting the gun powder. The gun powder explodes, driving the bullet from the gun. The bullet hits Brad in the head. He dies instantly.

(Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 59)

After being introduced to this vignette, subjects had to state their agreement or disagreement with the four statements (1) “Trent caused Brad’s death,” (2)“The hammer caused Brad’s death,” (3) “The gun powder caused Brad’s death,” and (4) “The bullet caused Brad’s death” on a seven-point scale from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 7 (“strongly agree”).

Now, in case the causal attributions of laypeople would comply with the CCAC, subjects should agree to all statements of the RC: Not only was Brad’s death caused by Trent, but also by the hammer, the gun powder, and the bullet.

Here comes the first twist: In this study (and the remaining studies reported in their paper), subjects tended to rate statements about intermediaries as rather low. In the RC, responses indicate that Trent caused Brad’s death, while the hammer and the gun powder did not. Hence, the CCAC is clearly violated and does not meet the FAD.

Now, back to the beginning: What struck me as odd here was that there are a whole lot of statements about causation to be made from the vignettes used. But every time, Jonathan and Justin picked out only a small handful of them.

Take for example the RV, above. We can easily split the vignette up into eight events:

  • Event A: “pulling the trigger”
  • Event B: “releasing the hammer”
  • Event C: “striking the cartridge”
  • Event D: “igniting the gun powder”
  • Event E: “the gun powder exploding”
  • Event F: “driving the bullet from the gun”
  • Event G: “the bullet hitting Brad in the head”
  • Event H: “the death of Brad”

Next, we can combine those events to statements of the form “X caused Y.” Including all reasonable combinations of events to be made therefrom, this results in a total of 28 different items, including statements like, e.g., “Pulling the trigger caused the release of the hammer,” “Striking the cartridge caused the ignition of the gun powder,” or “The bullet being driven from the gun caused the bullet to hit Brad in the head.”

This is exactly what Jan Romann and I did in a small-scale study: First, subjects were presented the RV. Then, they were shown the 28 causal statements (in an ordered sequence). As in the original study, subjects had to state their agreement on a seven-point scale from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 7 (“strongly agree”).

52 non-native English speakers completed the survey. And here comes the second twist: This time (and in stark contrast to Jonathan’s and Justin’s data), an (oftentimes overwhelming) majority of subjects chose to “strongly agree” that “X caused Y” for every item, including those that are analogues to the four statements from Jonathan’s and Justin’s study, as can be seen in the Figure below.

White bars represent data from Jonathan and Justin (1 = “Trent caused Brad’s death,” 2 = “The hammer caused Brad’s death,” 3 = “The gun powder caused Brad’s death,” 4 = “The bullet caused Brad’s death”), black bars represent our data (A/H = “Pull- ing the trigger caused the death of Brad,” B/H = “Releasing the hammer caused the death of Brad,” D/H = “Igniting the gun powder caused the death of Brad,” E/H = “The explosion of the gun powder caused the death of Brad,” F/H = “The bullet being driven from the gun caused the death of Brad,” G/H = “The bullet hitting Brad in the head caused the death of Brad”). We assume that cases 1 and A/H, 2 and B/H, 3 and D/H, 3 and E/H, 4 and F/H, as well as 4 and G/H are analogous.

Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank tests (with p-values corrected) reject the hypothesis that the central tendency for any of the 28 combinations is smaller than or equal to the “neutral” answer of 4 on the scale.

I think that, first and foremost, this teaches us that when questioning people, we must be very careful not only in choosing our words but also in choosing our set of questions. The story they tell us, it seems, depends not only on our question’s wording but also on the catalogue of questions that we put together in the first place.

This study, I’m afraid, doesn’t tell us anything about the origin of this difference yet. This clearly must be addressed in future research. To be honest, I am not even sure what – of all the available attempts – might be the best (or my favourite) explanation.

Jonathan and Justin state that “even philosophers, such as Lewis and Menzies, explicitly giving analyses of the ordinary concept of causation have offered theories that entail the compositionality constraint.” They ask: “How could they have gotten things so wrong?” (Livengood and Sytsma 2020, 64f.) What I am sure about, now, is this: Their conclusion seems a bit hasty.

Our small study has been published as a discussion note in Philosophy of Science. You can find it here. And stay tuned: Of course, a more fleshed-out study – first reproducing the findings from Justin and Jonathan for their different vignettes and then applying various variations of the task – is already on its way!

Literature

Bauer, Alexander Max, and Jan Romann (2022): “Answers at Gunpoint. On Livengood and Sytsma’s Revolver Case,” Philosophy of Science 89 (1), 180–192. (Link)

Livengood, Jonathan, and Justin Sytsma (2020): “Actual Causation and Compositionality,” Philosophy of Science 87 (1), 43–69. (Link)

Livengood, Jonathan, Justin Sytsma, and David Rose (2019): “Following the FAD. Folk Attributions and Theories of Actual Causation,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8, 273–294. (Link)