Everyday Judgments Research Articles

Side effects and asymmetry in act-type attribution

Joshua Knobe's work has marshaled considerable support for the hypothesis that everyday judgments of whether an action is intentional are systematically influenced by evaluations of the action or agent. The main source of evidence for this hypothesis is a series of surveys that involve an agent either helping or harming something as a side effect. Respondents are much more likely to judge the side effect intentional if harm is involved. It is a remarkable feature of the discussion so far that it assumes without scrutiny that the substitution of one act-type for another could not, taken alone, explain the difference in responses that the two scenarios yield. This paper presents evidence, both experimental and conceptual, that it is precisely this difference that explains the asymmetry in responses. Briefly, agents who token the act-type help must fulfill certain psychological conditions that they don't have to fulfill if they are to token the act-type harm. Harming, unlike helping, does not require the fulfillment of such conditions. Consequently, it can be freely attributed to the well-intentioned and ill-intentioned, the knowing and the naive, just as long as they cause damage. The hypothesis also has important methodological implications: The widely held assumption that Knobe's CEO scenario is a good way to test for intentionality judgments is challenged.

A-24 * Difference between Patients with AD and Patients with FTD on a Test of Practical Judgment

Objective: Poor judgment is a hallmark of FTD, and sometimes occurs in AD. There are very few objective tests of judgment. In our clinic, we use the Test of Practical Judgment (TOPJ). Given that impaired judgment can occur in FTD and AD; the current study assesses group differences between patients with FTD and AD on the TOPJ. Method: The TOPJ is an objective measure of everyday judgment. Patients have a hypothetical scenario presented to them and they are asked to explain what they would do in that situation. The TOPJ was administered in a clinical setting during a standardized neuropsychology battery. At the time of testing the patients did not have a clinical diagnosis. Later, nine patients diagnosed with probable FTD were matched with nine patients with suspected AD based on overall MOCA scores. Results: Correlation analysis was conducted to compare the scores of the FTD patients and AD patients. FTD patients had a mean score of 15.89, AD patients had a mean score of 20.89 (cut off for “normal” scores is 19.4). It was found that a statistically significant difference exists in the TOPJ scores of the two groups (p = .027). Conclusion(s): The results demonstrate that although judgment is affected in both groups poor decision making, as measured by the TOPJ, is more pronounced in patients with FTD. Given that poor judgment is a known feature of FTD, this suggests that the TOPJ might represent a useful way to assess judgment objectively.

Phenomenological Time, Historical Time, and The Writing of History

Abstract Contrary to Paul Ricoeur’s claim that there is an unbridgeable chasm between phenomenological time and historical time, my studies have shown me that the former is the cognitive foundation for the latter. The temporality formed in each sentential judgment can be discerned through a stylistic analysis of its grammar. This grammatical foundation which is established at the pre-reflective level of sentence formation becomes a basis in the maturing individual for conceptual preferences. How experience is organized informally and consequently reflected upon in the everyday judgment, or more formally in the writing of history, are outcomes of this grammatical logic. What I term one’s ‘historical logic’ differs in categorically interesting ways in each person; for each person it is an invariant grammatical organization that guides attended experience informing a person’s sense of ‘history’ and its meaning over a career of thought. The grammatical organization itself stems from varying part-whole organizations that perceptually provide the form grammar then instantiates. The epistemological basis of my approach is developed from Kant and Edmund Husserl insofar as their conceptions of temporal generation in judgment. My grammatical analyses rely upon the transformational grammar of Noam Chomsky. In this essay, I show the invariant character of two distinct historical logics through the careers of thought of two Tudor-Stuart historians, G.R. Elton and his student Arthur Joseph Slavin, and two Tudor-Stuart personalities, Edward Coke and Francis Bacon. I have found historical logics to be intergenerational. Forms of historical logic are more than likely psycho-genetic, recurring in every generation. I have provided evidence for this claim in studies I have made of adolescents who have first come to master the well-formed sentence in personal expression. Among the implications of the findings here are that ‘objectivity’ as well as ‘historical objectivity’ are better understood as ‘multiply valid’ among the judgments of equally informed and keen observers and interpreters. There is an unbridgeable foundation that differentiates one person’s conception of temporal organization from another. Synthetically, we are separated in our judgments, even when we can arrive at analytical understandings of these differences.

An error theory for compatibilist intuitions

One debate in the experimental exploration of everyday judgments about free will is whether most people are compatibilists or incompatibilists. Some recent research suggests that many people who have incompatibilist intuitions are making a mistake; as such, they do not have genuine incompatibilist intuitions. Another worry is whether most people appropriately understand determinism or confuse it with similar, but different, notions such as fatalism. In five studies we demonstrate people distinguish determinism from fatalism. While people overall make this distinction, a large percentage of people still judge that a person who is fated to perform an action is both free and morally responsible for that action. Those who thought that one freely performs and is morally responsible for a fated action had much stronger compatibilist judgments. These data suggest that a substantial percentage of people have “free will no matter what” intuitions. As a result, even though many people may appear to be compatibilists, they are not.

The Common Currency of Psychological Distance

People’s thoughts often go beyond what is right in front of them. In so doing, they mentally traverse psychological distance: They think about the past or the future, other places, other people, and wonder about the impossible. These four dimensions all tap into the same common construct of distancing from immediate experience. As a result, people associate each type of distance with the others and infer that anything far in one way will be far in all the other ways. Furthermore, distance causes further distance to shrink in the mind’s eye, even if in a different form than the first. We consider potential differences whereby certain distances might be understood in terms of other distances, and then we evaluate additional contenders that might qualify as distinct dimensions of distance in their own right. Throughout, we highlight implications of these principles for everyday judgment and decision making.

Encountering Asia

This article explores the narratives of Filipino medical workers on their encounters with other Asians during their migrant journeys to Singapore. Migrants speak of their encounters with regional cultural diversity and the everyday manifestations of regional political-economic power configurations and inequalities. The narratives show that beyond merely responding to state discourses on how migrants ought to represent the nation-state abroad, migrants attempt, on their own terms, to understand their place in Asia, and the world. Their journeys take place at a moment of social and demographic change as many Filipino medical workers travel across borders to care for aging populations in other Asian countries. The field of care raises complex moral dilemmas for Asians of different ethnic and national backgrounds, and this complicates any simple notion of Asian values. Moments of pan-Asian solidarity, in which friendships are cultivated across national boundaries, are often overridden by experiences of racial and cultural prejudice. Among diverse Asians in Singapore, divisive and hierarchical notions of first world and third world, modern and backward, caring and uncaring are prevalent in everyday judgments of others. Filipino migrants assert their global aspirations and their moral reflections on how to live and care for others; simultaneously they create distance from those who they believe do not share such aspirations and moral views. This article illuminates the transformations in migrant subjectivities as migrants experience and evaluate a range of cultural encounters as medical carers in the region.

Quantum principles in psychology: The debate, the evidence, and the future

The attempt to employ quantum principles for modeling cognition has enabled the introduction of several new concepts in psychology, such as the uncertainty principle, incompatibility, entanglement, and superposition. For many commentators, this is an exciting opportunity to question existing formal frameworks (notably classical probability theory) and explore what is to be gained by employing these novel conceptual tools. This is not to say that major empirical challenges are not there. For example, can we definitely prove the necessity for quantum, as opposed to classical, models? Can the distinction between compatibility and incompatibility inform our understanding of differences between human and nonhuman cognition? Are quantum models less constrained than classical ones? Does incompatibility arise as a limitation, to avoid the requirements from the principle of unicity, or is it an inherent (or essential?) characteristic of intelligent thought? For everyday judgments, do quantum principles allow more accurate prediction than classical ones? Some questions can be confidently addressed within existing quantum models. A definitive resolution of others will have to anticipate further work. What is clear is that the consideration of quantum cognitive models has enabled a new focus on a range of debates about fundamental aspects of cognition.

The Precision Effect: How Numerical Precision Influences Everyday Judgments

Numerical precision – unusually precise or sharp numbers – can trigger heuristic processing and influence judgments. Numerical precision triggers heuristic processing because it causes computational difficulty or encoding difficulty. The authors propose that the discrepancy attribution model can offer a parsimonious explanation for the effects of numerical precision on everyday judgments.

Emotion and moral judgment.

Research in psychology and cognitive science has consistently demonstrated the importance of emotion in a wide range of everyday judgments, including moral judgment. Most current accounts of moral judgment hold that emotion plays an important role, but the nature and extent of this role are still debated. We outline three increasingly strong claims about the role of emotion in moral judgment and assess the evidence for each. According to the first and least controversial claim, emotions follow from moral judgments, such that witnessing immorality can lead to negative emotions and witnessing moral virtue can lead to positive ones. According to the second claim, emotions amplify moral judgments, for instance, by making immoral acts seem even more immoral. Finally, on the last claim, emotions can actually moralize nonmoral behaviors-that is, they give nonmoral acts a moral status. Although this claim seems to be the most intriguing one theoretically, empirical support for it is still very limited. In this review, we discuss research findings that are in line with each of these views, we highlight recurring themes across these three categories of evidence, and we identify some open questions and areas for future research. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:169-178. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1216 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Local dominance in health risk perception

Local comparisons with a few people displace the influence of general comparisons with many people during self-evaluation of performance and ability. The current research examined whether this local dominance effect obtains in the domain of health risk perception, an outcome of critical importance given its direct relation to preventative health behaviours. Participants received manipulated feedback indicating that their risk of diabetes (Study 1) or a serious car accident (Study 2) ranked above average or below average relative to numerous peers. Additionally, some participants were told that their risk ranked highest or lowest relative to a few peers. Participants evaluated their risk as significantly higher when they only knew that it ranked above average than below average. However, this effect was eliminated among participants who received additional local comparison information. These findings highlight the potential biasing influence of local comparison on everyday health judgment and behaviour.

Homicide Defendants with Intellectual Disabilities: Issues in Diagnosis in Capital Cases

This article explores the many issues involved in establishing the diagnosis of intellectual disability in a so-called Atkins (death penalty exemption) hearing. Among the issues addressed are the need to go beyond IQ scores in establishing intellectual deficits, the need to go beyond rating scores in establishing adaptive behavior deficits, the need to clarify the target age at which intellectual disability is to be established, and the need to expand the Atkins umbrella to include a broader universe of people with brain-based impairments of everyday judgment and functioning. The purpose of these improvements would be to base legal protections for impaired defendants more on actual social vulnerability and less on artificial and indirect statistical criteria.

A Model of Authoritarianism, Social Norms, and Personal Values: Implications for Arizona Law Enforcement and Immigration Policy

The enforcement of Arizona's new immigration law (Senate Bill 1070) requires police officers to make countless everyday judgments about whether individuals they encounter might be illegal immigrants. Understanding officers’ attitudes about immigrants, therefore, as well as the social and personal factors that influence these attitudes, will be important to predicting the consequences of enforcing this new law. Our program of research examines the role of authoritarianism, personal values, and descriptive social norms in determining attitudes about immigrants. Given the current social and political climate, as reflected in recent Arizona and national-level polls, coupled with research on psychological predispositions, our model suggests that Arizona police officers are likely to hold negative attitudes about immigrants, and that these negative attitudes may in turn influence how officers choose to enforce Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070). To reduce improper enforcement of SB 1070, our model suggests that police training interventions would be better informed by taking into consideration (1) the general ambiguity surrounding Americans' attitudes toward immigrants, and (2) the American tradition of egalitarianism.

Blaming, praising, and protecting our humanity: The implications of everyday dehumanization for judgments of moral status

Being human implies a particular moral status: having moral value, agency, and responsibility. However, people are not seen as equally human. Across two studies, we examine the consequences that subtle variations in the perceived humanness of actors or groups have for their perceived moral status. Drawing on Haslam's two-dimensional model of humanness and focusing on three ways people may be considered to have moral status - moral patiency (value), agency, or responsibility - we demonstrate that subtly denying humanness to others has implications for whether they are blamed, praised, or considered worthy of moral concern and rehabilitation. Moreover, we show that distinct human characteristics are linked to specific judgments of moral status. This work demonstrates that everyday judgments of moral status are influenced by perceptions of humanness.

Affect Heuristic with “Good-Bad” Criterion and Linguistic Representation in Risk Judgments

Rational and normative risk judgments are made based on information on a risk object’s advantages and disadvantages, although many studies show that everyday heuristic risk judgment tends to be made based on limited information. I focused on the fact that affective heuristic (Slovic et al., 2004), one of the heuristic risk judgments, was affective judgment under “good-bad” criterion due to a trade-off in the perception of dangers and benefits, and showed by a social survey that female undergraduates in Japan and Eastern and Western Europe used the affect heuristic for various risk objects. In other words, an analysis of survey results on risk types perceived by female undergraduates inOsaka, London, Ljubljana, and Budapest showed that risk objects such as automobile driving, airplane travel, nuclear power plant, extremist group, and tobacco smoking were perceived as high-risk and low-return (Type 2) or low-risk and high-return (Type 3) [Study 1]. According to a tobacco smoking linguistic representation mail survey among university graduates of 24 to 71 years old in Japan, nonsmokers had relatively many adjectival and verbal linguistic representatives for tobacco smoking. This shows that affective risk judgment with a “good-bad” criterion was made by persons who perceived the risk object useless and the risk was taken involuntarily. [Study 2].

Failing American Indian Languages

T his article examines the interdiscursive constitutiveness and permeations of a logic of “expectations” in relation to American Indian language practices and American Indian languages. Beginning with a reflection on my own grandfather’s experiences, this article explores popular, everyday, and institutional reflexes of a logic of expectations that mediates and is mediated by concepts of American Indianness and evaluations of linguistic practice. That is, such reflexes emerge through the “bundling” of such normative, conventionalized concepts in the process of evaluation; they become the rationale or justification for the evaluation and, ultimately, reproduce the logic of expectations that mediates everyday judgments of practice.1 Through the lens of my grandfather’s life, the following reflection illustrates the mutual conceptualization of success and failure as a logic of “expectations.” My grandfather, an amazingly gifted yet very stubborn man, spent his life challenging expectations and never wavered in this quest. From driving one hundred miles to attend an Elks Lodge meeting because the one in Madras didn’t allow Indians, to driving several hundreds of miles back to Oklahoma every summer for social gatherings, he engaged in a range of expected and unexpected Indian practices. A product of Haskell, my grandpa also had acquired a range of skills, from baking bread and boxing to playing wood and horn instruments and golf. Playing clarinet every Friday night with the Macy “boys” at Warm Springs, my grandfather was still an “unexpected” Indian, a Comanche surrounded by Wascos, Paiutes, and Warm Springs Indians. This

Can negative affect eliminate the power of first impressions? Affective influences on primacy and recency effects in impression formation

Can good or bad mood influence the common tendency for people to form judgments based on first impressions? Based on research on impression formation and recent work on affect and social cognition, this experiment predicted and found that positive mood increased, and negative mood eliminated the primacy effect. After an autobiographical mood induction (recalling happy or sad past events), participants (N=284) formed impressions about a character, Jim described either in an introvert–extrovert, or an extrovert–introvert sequence (Luchins, 1958). Impression formation judgments revealed clear mood and primacy main effects, as well as a mood by primacy interaction. Primacy effects were increased by positive mood, consistent with the more assimilative, holistic processing style associated with positive affect. Negative mood in turn eliminated primacy effects, consistent with a more accommodative, externally focused processing style. The relevance of these findings for first impressions in everyday judgments is considered, and their implications for recent affect-cognition theories are discussed.

The “organic” path to obesity? Organic claims influence calorie judgments and exercise recommendations

Abstract Labeling a food as “organic” entails a claim about its production but is silent on its calorie content. Nevertheless, people infer that organic cookies are lower in calories and can be eaten more often than conventional cookies (Study 1). These inferences are observed even when the nutrition label conveys identical calorie content and are more pronounced among perceivers high on pro-environmentalism. Moreover, when evaluating a person with a weight-loss goal, forgoing exercise is deemed more acceptable when the person has just chosen organic rather than conventional dessert (Study 2). These results reflect an “organic/natural”-“healthy” association that is capable of biasing everyday judgments about diet and exercise.

Biohistorical approaches to “race” in the United States: Biological distances among African Americans, European Americans, and their ancestors

Folk taxonomies of race are the categorizations used by people in their everyday judgments concerning the persons around them. As cultural traditions, folk taxonomies may shape gene flow so that it is unequal among groups sharing geography. The history of the United States is one of disparate people being brought together from around the globe, and provides a natural experiment for exploring the relationship between culture and gene flow. The biohistories of African Americans and European Americans were compared to examine whether population histories are shaped by culture when geography and language are shared. Dental morphological data were used to indicate phenotypic similarity, allowing diachronic change through United States history to be considered. Samples represented contemporary and historic African Americans and European Americans and their West African and European ancestral populations (N = 1445). Modified Mahalanobis' D(2) and Mean Measure of Divergence statistics examined how biological distances change through time among the samples. Results suggest the social acceptance for mating between descendents of Western Europeans and Eastern and Southern European migrants to the United States produced relatively rapid gene flow between the groups. Although African Americans have been in the United States much longer than most Eastern and Southern Europeans, social barriers have been historically stronger between them and European Americans. These results indicate that gene flow is in part shaped by cultural factors such as folk taxonomies of race, and have implications for understanding contemporary human variation, relationships among prehistoric populations, and forensic anthropology.

Aging and everyday judgments: the impact of motivational and processing resource factors.

It has been hypothesized that reductions in cognitive resources might result in older adults engaging in less systematic processing than young adults when making everyday judgments. In 2 experiments, the authors tested individuals aged from 24 to 89 years to examine the degree to which task-related information associated with more superficial versus complex processing differentially influenced performance. They also examined the hypothesis that motivational factors would moderate age differences in processing complexity. In both studies, there were no age differences in the use of simple versus complex processing. Increasing age was, however, associated with increasing selectivity in cognitive resource engagement.

Anchoring on the "here" and "now" in time and distance judgments.

Time and distance estimates were elicited with either unit-based (e.g., "How many days until...") or end-based (e.g., "On what date...") questions. For intervals of uncertain extent, unit-based estimates were consistently lower than were the corresponding end-based estimates. The observed patterns are consistent with an anchoring and adjustment process: When people generate unit-based estimates of uncertain dates or distances, they may anchor on the "here" or "now" and adjust incrementally by the unit; such adjustment, however, is often insufficient and yields systematic underestimation. Although this anchoring and adjustment cannot be directly observed, consistent with the hypothesized process, reliance on larger units yielded higher estimates and warning about insufficient adjustment reduced the effect. Implications for research on anchoring, the planning fallacy, and everyday judgment are discussed.