Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide

Societies must make collective decisions even when citizens disagree, and they use many different political processes to do so. But how do people choose one way to make a group decision over another? We propose that the human mind contains an intuitive political theory about how to make collective decisions, analogous to people's intuitive theories about language, physics, number, minds, and morality. We outline a simple method for studying people's intuitive political theory using scenarios about group decisions, and we begin to apply this approach in three experiments. Participants read scenarios in which individuals in a group have conflicting information (Experiment 1), conflicting interests (Experiment 2), and conflicting interests between a majority and a vulnerable minority who have more at stake (Experiment 3). Participants judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. Overall, we find that participants prefer majority‐rule voting over consensus, leadership, and chance when a group has conflicting interests or information. However, participants' support for voting is considerably diminished when the group includes a vulnerable minority. Hence, participants showed an intuitive understanding of Madison's concerns about tyranny of the majority.     

How to share a mind: Reconsidering the group mind thesis

Standard accounts in social ontology and the group cognition debate have typically focused on how collective modes, types, and contents of intentions or representational states must be construed so as to constitute the jointness of the respective agents, cognizers, and their engagements. However, if we take intentions, beliefs, or mental representations all to instantiate some mental properties, then the more basic issue regarding such collective engagements is what it is for groups of individual minds to share a mind. Somewhat surprisingly, this very issue has not received much attention in the respective debates and when it has, typically the outlook has been skeptical or outright negative. In this paper, I argue that it is epistemologically possible for a group of individuals to literally share a single mental unit. In particular, I will put forward and defend what I shall call the zombie conception of group minds.     

The face‐mind link: Why we see minds behind faces,and how others' minds change how we see their face

Understanding others' minds has puzzled philosophers for centuries. Psychologists, too, have recently begun asking questions about what causes us to see another person as having complex or simple mental faculties. Here, we review recent evidence linking how we perceive others' faces with how we perceive others' minds—the face‐mind link. We first discuss research demonstrating a face‐to‐mind effect, showing that both certain facial features (e.g., eyes) and face perception processes (e.g., configural processing) can trigger the perception that a face has a mind. We then discuss recent evidence demonstrating a mind‐to‐face effect, showing that believing a person is inhumane (i.e., their mind) leads their face to be processed less like a face and more like an object. Finally, we consider both the consequences of this bidirectional face‐mind link, and what the next steps may be in understanding how and why we infer minds from faces, and how and why beliefs about others' minds affects how we see their face.     

社会距离对成败行为性别归因偏差的影响

在陌生人和熟人两种社会距离下,让被试对同、异性成败行为进行归因,考查性别归因偏差现象(对异性美化、对同性贬损的归因)在社会距离上的变化。结果发现:(1)对于成功行为:被试对陌生异性做出的美化归因(能力-运气)显著高于陌生同性,出现性别归因偏差;被试对同、异性好友做出的美化归因差异不显著。(2)对于失败行为:被试对陌生同、异性做出的美化归因(运气-能力)差异不显著;被试对异性好友做出的美化归因显著高于同性,出现性别归因偏差。结论:性别归因偏差,在远社会距离他人表现成功时出现,表现失败时消失;在近社会距离他人表现成功时消失,表现失败时出现。结合相关研究和进化理论对结果进行了讨论。     

Perceiving personal discrimination: the role of group status and legitimizing ideology

It was hypothesized that relative group status and endorsement of ideologies that legitimize group status differences moderate attributions to discrimination in intergroup encounters. According to the status-legitimacy hypothesis, the more members of low-status groups endorse the ideology of individual mobility, the less likely they are to attribute negative outcomes from higher status group members to discrimination. In contrast, the more members of high-status groups endorse individual mobility, the more likely they are to attribute negative outcomes from lower status group members to discrimination. Results from 3 studies using 2 different methodologies provide support for this hypothesis among members of different high-status (European Americans and men) and low-status (African Americans, Latino Americans, and women) groups.     

Couples’ Attributions for Work Function Changes in Prodromal Huntington Disease

People who have tested positive for the expanded Huntington disease (HD) gene who are not yet diagnosed (pre-HD) and their companions report subtle changes in ability of people with pre-HD to do their jobs. However, it is not known whether they attribute these changes to HD. Semi-structured telephone interviews were analyzed from seven persons with pre-HD at different estimated points from diagnosis and six companions. Data were analyzed using qualitative analysis methods. Participants made attributions related to health, work, and temperament. Only one participant attributed a change to HD. The process of forming attributions was demonstrated through symptom monitoring and comparison of participants with pre-HD to others with and without HD. Participants also expressed uncertainty regarding how to make attributions. Attributions influence coping procedures, including whether to seek and accept medical treatment. In persons with prodromal HD the relationship between attributions and use of coping strategies for symptoms that interfere with job functioning is unknown.     

Moral objectivism across the lifespan

We report the results of two studies that examine folk metaethical judgments about the objectivity of morality. We found that participants attributed almost as much objectivity to ethical statements as they did to statements of physical fact and significantly more objectivity to ethical statements than to statements about preferences or tastes. In both studies, younger participants attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than older participants. Females were observed to attribute slightly less objectivity to ethical statements than males, and we found important interactions between attributions of objectivity and other factors, such as how strong participants’ moral opinions were and how much disagreement about the issue they perceived to exist within society. We believe our results have significant implications for debates about the nature of folk morality and about the nature of morality in general.     

Plans or Outcomes: How Do We Attribute Intelligence to Others?

Humans routinely make inferences about both the contents and the workings of other minds based on observed actions. People consider what others want or know, but also how intelligent, rational, or attentive they might be. Here, we introduce a new methodology for quantitatively studying the mechanisms people use to attribute intelligence to others based on their behavior. We focus on two key judgments previously proposed in the literature: judgments based on observed outcomes (you're smart if you won the game) and judgments based on evaluating the quality of an agent's planning that led to their outcomes (you're smart if you made the right choice, even if you didn't succeed). We present a novel task, the maze search task (MST), in which participants rate the intelligence of agents searching a maze for a hidden goal. We model outcome-based attributions based on the observed utility of the agent upon achieving a goal, with higher utilities indicating higher intelligence, and model planning-based attributions by measuring the proximity of the observed actions to an ideal planner, such that agents who produce closer approximations of optimal plans are seen as more intelligent. We examine human attributions of intelligence in three experiments that use MST and find that participants used both outcome and planning as indicators of intelligence. However, observing the outcome was not necessary, and participants still made planning-based attributions of intelligence when the outcome was not observed. We also found that the weights individuals placed on plans and on outcome correlated with an individual's ability to engage in cognitive reflection. Our results suggest that people attribute intelligence based on plans given sufficient context and cognitive resources and rely on the outcome when computational resources or context are limited.     

Lost in the crowd: Entitative group membership reduces mind attribution

This research examined how and why group membership diminishes the attribution of mind to individuals. We found that mind attribution was inversely related to the size of the group to which an individual belonged (Experiment 1). Mind attribution was affected by group membership rather than the total number of entities perceived at once (Experiment 2). Moreover, mind attribution to an individual varied with the perception that the individual was a group member. Participants attributed more mind to an individual that appeared distinct or distant from other group members than to an individual that was perceived to be similar or proximal to a cohesive group (Experiments 3 and 4). This effect occurred for both human and nonhuman targets, and was driven by the perception of the target as an entitative group member rather than by the knowledge that the target was an entitative group member (Experiment 5).     

On Being Responsible and Holding Responsible

A number of philosophers have recently argued that we should interpret the debate over moral responsibility as a debate over the conditions under which it would be “fair” to blame a person for her attitudes or conduct. What is distinctive about these accounts is that they begin with the stance of the moral judge, rather than that of the agent who is judged, and make attributions of responsibility dependent upon whether it would be fair or appropriate for a moral judge to react to the agent in various (negative) ways. This is problematic, I argue, because our intuitions about whether and when it would be fair to react negatively to another are sensitive to a host of considerations that appear to have little or nothing to do with an agent’s responsibility or culpability for her attitudes or behavior. If this is correct, then theories which make attributions of responsibility dependent upon the appropriateness of our reactions as moral judges will turn out to be fundamentally misguided. I am grateful to Barbara Herman, T. M. Scanlon, and two anonymous reviewers for The Journal of Ethics for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Pamela Hieronymi and the members of her Fall 2201 graduate seminar on moral responsibility at UCLA, and to the audience members at Simon Fraser University, for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this material. My biggest debt of gratitude goes to Jean Roberts, for stimulating discussion and insightful commentary on multiple drafts of this paper.     

Phenomenal consciousness,collective mentality,and collective moral responsibility

Are corporations and other complex groups ever morally responsible in ways that do not reduce to the moral responsibility of their members? Christian List, Phillip Pettit, Kendy Hess, and David Copp have recently defended the idea that they can be. For them, complex groups (sometimes called collectives) can be irreducibly morally responsible because they satisfy the conditions for morally responsible agency; and this view is made more plausible by the claim (made by Theiner) that collectives can have minds. In this paper I give a new argument that they are wrong. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of mind (what Uriah Kriegel calls “the phenomenal intentionality research program”) and moral theory (David Shoemaker’s tripartite theory of moral responsibility), I argue that for something to have a mind, it must be phenomenally conscious, and that the fact that collectives lack phenomenal consciousness implies that they are incapable of accountability, an important form of moral responsibility.     

Utilizing usernames for sex categorization in computer-mediated communication: examining perceptions and accuracy.

As more interpersonal interactions move online, people increasingly get to know and recognize one another by their self-selected identifiers called usernames. Early research predicted that the lack of available cues in text based computer-mediated communication (CMC) would make primitive categories such as biological sex irrelevant in online interactions. Little is known about the types of perceptions people make about one another based on this information, but some limited research has shown that questions about gender are the first to be asked in online interactions and sex categorization has maintained salience. The current project was designed to examine the extent to which individuals might include obvious gender information in their usernames, as well as how easily gender could be attributed from usernames. Seventy-five coders were asked whether or not they could assign 298 people to a sex category based only on their username, and then to rate how confident they were in making the attribution. Results indicated that coders were fairly inaccurate in making these attributions, but moderately confident. Additionally, the results indicated that neither women nor men were more accurate in attributing gender from usernames, and that neither women nor men tended to use more obvious gender markers in their usernames. Additionally, those who did use obvious gender markers in their username tended to have less experience with computer chat. The results are discussed in conjunction with the limitations of the present investigation, and possibilities for future research.     

Solving the (Real) Other Minds Problem

People care about others’ thoughts, feelings, and intentions but can have considerable difficulty reading others’ minds accurately. Recent advances in understanding how people make such inferences provide significant insight into when people are likely to be reasonably accurate mind readers and when they are not. People tend to reason about others’ mental states by starting with their own and only subsequently adjusting that egocentric default to accommodate differences between themselves and others. Such adjustments tend to be insufficient, rendering final estimates egocentrically biased. When more information about others is available, people tend to rely on existing stereotypes or other expectations to intuit others’ mental states. Systematic errors resulting either from excessive egocentrism or inaccurate expectations can lead to miscommunication, misunderstanding, and social conflict, but these biases also suggest useful strategies for improving mind reading in everyday life.     

Impression (Mis) Management When Communicating Success

People routinely engage in impression management, for example, by highlighting successes. It is not yet known how people attribute their success (to talent vs. effort) to give a positive impression. Three experiments explore this question and test whether people’s attributions of success receive favor from their audience. The findings show that, in impression management situations (e.g., job interview or date), people communicate their effort less than audiences would prefer. Thus, success alone may not be enough to make a positive impression on others; emphasizing effort as the cause for success also matters.     

A test of whether attributions provide for self-enhancement or self-defense

It is well known that people often make attributions in a way that is favorable to their self-concepts (see R. L. Collins, 1996, for a review). However, it is less clear whether the primary effect is to enhance self-esteem or to defend against the possible loss of self-esteem. The authors performed an experiment to test these possibilities against each other. In a completely between-participants design, participants recalled either a positive behavior or a negative behavior that was performed by themselves or others. They then judged the positivity or negativity of the behavior and made trait attributions about the actor (i.e., himself, herself, or others). The results indicated that although judgments and trait attributions for positive behaviors were similar for the self and for others, judgments and trait attributions for negative behaviors were less negative for the self than they were for others. The authors interpreted these and other findings as supporting a defensive strategy rather than an enhancive strategy.     

Group Status and Hierarchy Legitimacy Effects on Effort Versus Ability Attributions for Ingroup and Outgroup Failures

Previous research has shown that people have a tendency to explain various outcomes in ways that favour their ingroup. However, there is also some evidence that this tendency may be moderated by perceptions of group status and hierarchy legitimacy. In this study, we experimentally test the combined effects of group status and hierarchy legitimacy on effort and ability attributions for ingroup and outgroup failures. It was predicted that participants assigned to an illegitimately low status condition would attribute ingroup but not outgroup failure more to a lack of effort than ability. Conversely, participants assigned to a legitimately high status group were expected to attribute ingroup but not outgroup failure more to a lack of effort than ability. Results supported these predictions and also showed outgroup failure was attributed more to a lack of effort than ability when ingroup status was either legitimately low or illegitimately high. We conclude that intergroup attributions are constrained by perceptions about relative group status and the legitimacy of the status hierarchy.     

Identifying living and sentient kinds from dynamic information: the case of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement in conceptual change

To reason competently about novel entities, people must discover whether the entity is alive and/or sentient. Exactly how people make this discovery is unknown, although past researchers have proposed that young children--unlike adults--rely chiefly on whether the object can move itself. This study examined the effect of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement on children's and adults' attributions of biological and psychological capacities in an effort to test whether goal-directedness affects inferences across documented periods of change in biological reasoning. Half of the participants (adults, and 4-, 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds; Ns=32) were shown videos of unfamiliar blobs moving independently and aimlessly, and the other half were shown videos of identical blobs moving identically but toward a goal. No age group was likely to attribute biological or psychological capacities to the aimless self-moving blobs. However, for 5-year-olds through adults, goal-directed movement reliably elicited life judgments, and it elicited more biological and psychological attributions overall. Adults differed from children in that goal-directed movement affected their attributions of biological properties more than their attributions of psychological properties. The results suggest that both young children and adults consider the capacity for goal-directed movement to be a decisive factor in determining whether something unfamiliar is alive, though other factors may be important in deciding whether the thing is sentient.     

When fiends become friends: the need to belong and perceptions of personal and group discrimination

The present article examines the role that the need to belong (NTB) plays in people's judgments of personal and group discrimination and in the attributions people make for potentially discriminatory evaluations. The authors hypothesized that the NTB motivates people to conclude that (a) whereas they rarely experience personal discrimination, (b) their fellow in-group members do experience discrimination. In Study 1, people high in the NTB reported experiencing lower than average levels of personal and higher than average levels of group discrimination. In Study 2, an experimental manipulation of the NTB yielded similar results. In Study 3, women who were motivated to be accepted by a bogus male participant were less likely to attribute his negative evaluations of their work to prejudice.