Tag: Beliefs

Hot Off The Press: “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Edited by Paul Henne and Samuel Murray, “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action,” a new entry into Bloomsbury’s “Advances in Experimental Philosophy” series, has recently been published. See below for the table of contents.

  • Justin Sytsma and Melissa Snater: “Consciousness, Phenomenal Consciousness, and Free Will”
  • Myrto Mylopoulos: “Skilled Action and Metacognitive Control”
  • Samuel Murray: “Bringing Self-Control into the Future”
  • Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: “Who is Responsible? Split Brains, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and Implicit Attitudes”
  • Paul Noordhof and Ema Sullivan-Bissett: “The Everyday Irrationality of Monothematic Delusion”
  • John Turri: “Truth, Perspective, and Norms of Assertion – New Findings and Theoretical Advances”
  • Joanna Korman: “The Distinct Functions of Belief and Desire in Intentional Action Explanation”
  • Cory J. Clark, Heather M. Maranges, Brian B. Boutwell, and Roy F. Baumeister: “Free Enough – Human Cognition (and Cultural Interests) Warrant Responsibility”
  • Edouard Machery, Markus Kneer, Pascale Willemsen, and Albert Newen: “Beyond the Courtroom – Agency and the Perception of Free Will”
  • Katrina L. Sifferd: “Do Rape Cases Sit in a Moral Blindspot? The Dual Process Theory of Moral Judgment and Rape”
  • Shane Timmons and Ruth M. J. Byrne: “How People Think About Moral Excellence – The Role of Counterfactual Thoughts in Reasoning about Morally Good Actions”
  • Caroline T. Arruda and Daniel J. Povinelli Index: “Why Idealized Agency Gets Animal (and Human) Agency Wrong”

Literature

Henne, Paul, and Samuel Murray (eds.) (2024): Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action, London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury. (Link)

The Power of Norms

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

In many communities, there is a shared sense that if someone disses you, it is pretty normal to react by punching them. But academia is not like that. In academia, if someone disses your research, it would be considered wildly abnormal to react by punching them. This shared understanding then has a very large impact on behavior. If you understand how academia works, you almost certainly will not react to someone who disses your research by punching them. This is an example of the power of norms.

One common view about the power of norms is that they operate by having an impact on people’s beliefs. For example, one might think that people observe that academics never never punch each other and therefore conclude that punching people is bad (or that punching people would lead to negative social consequences, or some other belief of this sort). I don’t think that this is the right way to understand the power of norms, and I want to sketch a very different approach.

To begin with, let’s note an obvious but deeply important fact about how people make decisions. Typically, when we face a choice, there are an enormous number of possible options, but we only consider a small subset of these options. For example, suppose someone points out a problem in my research, and I am trying to figure out how to respond. Perhaps I would consider three possible options: address the issue by doing further empirical work, or by doing further computational work, or just don’t do anything. As for all other possible options, I simply would not think about them at all. Take the possible of trying to learn some organic chemistry in the hopes that this will give me a valuable insight into the problem. Most likely, this option just would not occur to me.

Now let’s note a second key fact. When it comes to the options that people don’t consider, people might not form any belief about whether those options are good or bad. Thus, suppose someone says: “I notice that he did not respond to this problem by learning organic chemistry. Is that because he believes that learning organic chemistry wouldn’t be a good way to address it?” The correct answer would be: “No! He hasn’t formed any beliefs at all about whether learning organic chemistry would be a good way to address this problem. The whole possibility has not occurred to him.”

This is where we see the power of norms. When an option violates a norm, people tend not to think about it all. (For experimental evidence, see this paper.) So if there is a norm in academia that you can’t respond to disses by punching people, the usual upshot would be that people who are dissed just don’t even consider the possibility of responding to disses with punches. The whole idea just never occurs to them. My point is that this is the power of norms: they completely transform our lives by having an impact on which possibilities occur to us and which do not.

This phenomenon is not a matter of existing norms leading people to conclude that certain options are bad. It is something much more fundamental. Indeed, if someone does form the belief that a particular option is bad, this would show that the norm was not exerting the sort of power one might have expected it to have. Consider an academic who thinks: “Well, there are clear disadvantages to punching this person.” The very fact that an academic is thinking this at all should make us think that the norm does not have the kind of grip on them we would expect it to have.

So let’s distinguish the ways that norms can impact beliefs vs. the ways that norms can truly have a power over you and transform your whole way of thinking about life. To begin with, it’s clear that norms can indeed change your beliefs. If I ask you what you think about responding to a particular academic criticism by starting a fistfight, you might think about that option and go through a process in which you infer something from the fact that you never observe anyone performing this behavior. But this is not an example of the power of norms! On the contrary, it is an example of a case in which norms are not able to exert their full power. When we are truly in the grip of a norm, it’s not just that the norm impacts what we think of an option – it’s that it impacts which options we even think of at all.

Changing Explanatory Theories vs. Changing Norms

Posted on by Joshua Knobe

Suppose you want to do something to decrease the amount of sexist behavior in the world. One thing you might do is try to change people’s explanatory theories. Perhaps you think that sexism is caused in part by people seeing certain outcomes as the result of a biological essence. You might then try an intervention in which you change people’s beliefs about gender and biology. A very different strategy would be to try to change prevailing norms. Some overtly sexist things were considered normal in the America of fifty years ago but are considered highly abnormal in America right now. So in a culture like today’s America, there might be certain sexist behaviors that almost never even come to mind as possible options.

The difference between these two approaches (theories vs. norms) is a very fundamental one. In this quick post, I want to focus on bringing out just one of the key differences. Changing people’s theories is the kind of thing one might be able to do in, say, 10 minutes. But changing norms is not like that. If you want to change the norms in a community, you can’t do it in 10 minutes. It’s the sort of thing you would hope to accomplish over the course of 10 years.

First, consider the point about theories. We are all familiar with times where we are wondering why something is happening, we read something that tells us the answer, and then we immediately adjust our explanatory theory. That’s just how theories work. The same point then arises for theories about social issues. At the moment, I have no idea why it is that such a high percentage of chess grandmasters are male. So if you presented me with a magazine article that provided strong evidence for a particular explanation, there’s a very good chance you could convince me. Over the course of 10 minutes or so, I might go from a state of having no idea why this happens to a state of being convinced by your explanatory theory. One might wonder whether this intervention would have any deep effect on my behavior, but at a minimum, it would successfully change my beliefs.

Changing norms is a fundamentally different type of process. If a given community has a norm of telling lots of sexist jokes, there’s no way you could possibly change that norm through a 10 minute intervention. That’s just not the way norms work. The process of changing a norm requires much more time and effort. As a simple illustration, there has recently been a change of norms that led to the use of preregistration, open data and open code, but that change took around a decade or so.

Of course, one might think it could be possible to have a quick intervention that led to a big change in people’s perceptions of the norms in their community, but studies indicate that this hope is also not warranted. There has been a lot of research about interventions that briefly tell people about the percentage of folks in their community who perform a particular behavior, but research finds that this sort of quick intervention rarely works. Presumably, the reason is that quickly telling people about certain percentages is not something that can change their representation of the community norm in the relevant sense.

With all this in the background, let’s now consider a very general hypothesis. I’m not sure whether the hypothesis is true, but I do think it is very much worth considering.

The hypothesis is that quick interventions like changing people’s explanatory theories just fundamentally do not work. If you want to do something that changes someone’s psychological states in a way that would lead that person to engage in less sexist behavior, there is no way you can do that through an intervention that lasts 10 minutes. The only things that work are large interventions like changing the norms within a community, which typically take years to complete.

Before the replication crisis, it certainly seemed as though we had lots of evidence that quick interventions on explanatory theories could yield large effects on behavior – but most of that evidence seems to be evaporating. Growth mindset interventions designed to change people’s explanatory theories about achievement don’t seem to lead to higher achievement. Interventions designed to change beliefs about free will don’t seem to impact cheating behavior. Interventions designed to change beliefs about genetics don’t seem to have much impact on judgments about punishment. Some recent studies indicate that interventions designed to reduce genetic essentialism don’t have any impact on prejudice.

One possible reaction to all of this would be that we haven’t yet found the exact right interventions on explanatory theories or the exact right downstream behaviors to measure… but another possible reaction would be that we are just fundamentally not looking in the right place.