Browsing by Author "Wiegmann, Alex"

In times of what has been coined “post-truth politics,” people are regularly confronted with political actors who intentionally spread false or misleading information. The present article examines (a) to what extent partisans’ judgments of such behaviors as cases of lying are affected by whether the deceiving agent shares their partisanship (actual bias) and (b) to what extent partisans expect the lie judgments of others to be affected by a bias of this kind (perceived bias). In two preregistered experiments ( N = 1,040), we find partisans’ lie judgments to be only weakly affected by the partisanship ascribed to political deceivers, regardless of whether deceivers explicitly communicate or merely insinuate political falsehoods. At the same time, partisans expect their political opponents’ lie judgments to be strongly affected by the deceiving agents’ partisanship. Surprisingly, misperceptions of bias were also present in people’s predictions of bias within their own political camp.

Abstract Previous research has shown that people judge sacrificing a few people to save a larger number to be morally permissible when the intervention targets the threat but not when it targets the victims. We investigated whether this distinction according to the locus of intervention influences people's evaluations of wartime scenarios and whether such evaluations vary according to different types of victims (e.g., civilians vs. soldiers). We observed a significant effect of locus of intervention in situations in which a smaller number of civilians were sacrificed to save a larger number of civilians (Study 1; N  = 142). However, the effect of locus of intervention was less pronounced in scenarios in which soldiers were sacrificed to save civilians (Studies 2 and 3; N  = 173 and N  = 841). A fourth experiment ( N  = 477) explored why participants treated soldiers and civilians differently. Participants believed that it is more permissible to sacrifice soldiers because they consent to being harmed.

In this review we make a simple theoretical argument which is that for theory development, computational modeling, and general frameworks for understanding moral psychology researchers should build on domain-general principles from reasoning, judgment, and decision-making research. Our approach is radical with respect to typical models that exist in moral psychology that tend to propose complex innate moral grammars and even evolutionarily guided moral principles. In support of our argument we show that by using a simple value-based decision model we can capture a range of core moral behaviors. Crucially, the argument we propose is that moral situations per se do not require anything specialized or different from other situations in which we have to make decisions, inferences, and judgments in order to figure out how to act.

Abstract Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed‐false claims, for instance by merely conversationally implicating them. In this paper, we subject this claim to an empirical test. In a preregistered study of 300 participants, we investigate how people judge cases of implicit deceptions that would usually be excluded by the traditional definition of lying (i.e., conversational implicatures, presuppositions, and nonverbal actions). Our results show that people do in fact consider it possible to lie by indirect means, suggesting that people have a broader concept of lying than is usually assumed. Moreover, our findings indicate that lie judgments are closely tied to the extent to which agents are perceived as having committed themselves to the believed‐false claims they have communicated. We discuss the implications of our results for the traditional definition of lying and propose a new commitment‐based definition of lying that can account for the findings of our experiment.

According to the standard definition of lying an utterance counts as a lie if the agent believes the statement to be false. Thus, according to this view it is possible that a lie states something that happens to be true. This subjective view on lying has recently been challenged by Turd and Turd (2015) who presented empirical evidence suggesting that people only consider statements as lies that are objectively false (objective view). We argue that the presented evidence is in fact consistent with the standard subjective view if conversational pragmatics is taken into account. Three experiments are presented that directly test and support the subjective view. An additional experiment backs up our pragmatic hypothesis by using the uncontroversial case of making a promise. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract The present study examines cross-cultural differences in people’s concept of lying with regard to the question of whether lying requires an agent to say something they believe to be false. While prominent philosophical views maintain that lying entails that a person explicitly expresses a believed-false claim, recent research suggests that people’s concept of lying might also include certain kinds of deception that are communicated more indirectly. An important drawback of previous empirical work on this topic is that only few studies have investigated people’s concept of lying in non-Western samples. In the present study, we compare people’s intuitions about lying with indirect deceptions (i.e., presuppositions, conversational implicatures, and non-verbal actions) in a sample of N = 255 participants from Russia and N = 300 participants from the United Kingdom. Our findings show a strong degree of similarity between lie ratings of participants from Russia and the United Kingdom, with both samples holding it possible for agents to lie with deceptive statements and actions that do not involve the agent saying something they believe to be false.

According to the traditional definition of lying, somebody lies if he or she makes a believed-false statement with the intention to deceive. The traditional definition has recently been challenged by non-deceptionists who use bald-faced lies to underpin their view that the intention to deceive is no necessary condition for lying. We conducted two experiments to test whether their assertions are true. First, we presented one of five scenarios that consisted of three different kinds of lies (consistent bald-faced lies, conflicting bald-faced lies, and indifferent lies). Then we asked participants to judge whether the scenario at hand was a lie, whether the speaker intended to deceive somebody, and how they would judge the behavior in terms of morality. As expected, our results indicate that the intention to deceive is not a necessary condition for lying. Participants rated indifferent lies to be lies and judged that no intention to deceive was involved in these cases. In addition, all bald-faced lies were evaluated as lies. However, participants widely ascribed an intention to deceive to bald-faced lies, which thus might not apply as counterexamples against the traditional definition of lying. Besides, lies are judged as morally wrong regardless of an intention to deceive.

Explaining moral intuitions is one of the hot topics of recent cognitive science. In the present article we focus on a factor that attracted surprisingly little attention so far, namely the temporal order in which moral scenarios are presented. We argue that previous research points to a systematic pattern of order effects that has been overlooked until now: only judgments of actions that are normally regarded as morally acceptable are susceptible to be affected by the order of presentation, and this in turn is only the case if the dilemma is immediately preceded by a dilemma in which the proposed action was considered as not morally acceptable. We conducted an experiment that largely confirmed this pattern and allowed us to analyze by what individual level responses it was generated. We argue that investigating order effects is necessary for approaching a complete descriptive moral theory. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of these findings for moral philosophy.

In recent years, a number of philosophers have conducted empirical studies that survey people's intuitions about various subject matters in philosophy. Some have found that intuitions vary accordingly to seemingly irrelevant facts: facts about who is considering the hypothetical case, the presence or absence of certain kinds of content, or the context in which the hypothetical case is being considered. Our research applies this experimental philosophical methodology to Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous Loop Case, which she used to call into question the validity of the intuitively plausible Doctrine of Double Effect. We found that intuitions about the Loop Case vary according to the context in which the case is considered. We contend that this undermines the supposed evidential status of intuitions about the Loop Case. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for philosophers who rely on the Loop Case to make philosophical arguments and for philosophers who use intuitions in general.

Evaluations of analogous situations are an important source for our moral intuitions. A puzzling recent set of findings in experiments exploring transfer effects between intuitions about moral dilemmas has demonstrated a striking asymmetry. Transfer often occurred with a specific ordering of moral dilemmas, but not when the sequence was reversed. In this article we present a new theory of transfer between moral intuitions that focuses on two components of moral dilemmas, namely their causal structure and their default evaluations. According to this theory, transfer effects are expected when the causal models underlying the considered dilemmas allow for a mapping of the highlighted aspect of the first scenario onto the causal structure of the second dilemma, and when the default evaluations of the two dilemmas substantially differ. The theory's key predictions for the occurrence and the direction of transfer effects between two moral dilemmas are tested in five experiments with various variants of moral dilemmas from different domains. A sixth experiment tests the predictions of the theory for how the target action in the moral dilemmas is represented. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.