Defensive emotions and evaluative judgements: Sensitivity to anger and fear predicts moral judgements,whereas sensitivity to disgust predicts aesthetic judgements

Aesthetic and moral evaluations engage appetitive and defensive emotions. While the role played by pleasure in positive aesthetic and moral judgements has been extensively researched, little is known about how defensive emotions influence negative aesthetic and moral judgements. Specifically, it is unknown which defensive emotions such judgements tap into, and whether both kinds of judgement share a common emotional root. Here, we investigated how participants' individual sensitivity to disgust, fear, anger and sadness predicted subjective judgements of aesthetic and moral stimuli. Bayesian modelling revealed that participants who were more sensitive to anger and fear found conventional and moral transgressions more wrong. In contrast, participants who were more sensitive to disgust disliked asymmetrical geometric patterns and untidy rooms more. These findings suggest that aesthetic and moral evaluations engage multiple defensive emotions, not just disgust, and that they may rely on different defensive emotions as part of their computational mechanism.     

The Problem of Counterfactuals in Substituted Judgement Decision‐Making

The standard by which we apply decision‐making for those unable to do so for themselves is an important practical ethical issue with substantial implications for the treatment and welfare of such individuals. The approach to proxy or surrogate decision‐making based upon substituted judgement is often seen as the ideal standard to aim for but suffers from a need to provide a clear account of how to determine the validity of the proxy's judgements. Proponents have responded to this demand by providing the truth‐conditions for the substituted judgement in terms of counterfactual reasoning using a possible worlds semantics. In this paper, I show how these underpinnings fail to support the substituted judgement approach as a reasonable standard for decision‐making. Firstly, I show how this counterfactual element has been poorly interpreted. I then explain how various accounts have failed to reflect problems and limitations associated with providing an interpretation of their truth‐conditions using counterfactuals. Finally, I argue that, even when we attend to the initial problems of providing a counterfactual analysis, it still deeply problematic as a means of determining the validity of substituted judgements for two main reasons. Firstly, making determinate judgements as to the truth‐value of these judgements will often not be possible and, secondly, there is a strong requirement when interpreting many counterfactual claims to charitably accede to their being true. I conclude that substituted judgements, as interpreted through counterfactual reasoning and possible worlds semantics, do not therefore provide an adequate standard for surrogate decision‐making.     

Effects of stimulus order on discrimination processes in comparative and equality judgements: Data and models

In typical discrimination experiments, participants are presented with a constant standard and a variable comparison stimulus and their task is to judge which of these two stimuli is larger (comparative judgement). In these experiments, discrimination sensitivity depends on the temporal order of these stimuli (Type B effect) and is usually higher when the standard precedes rather than follows the comparison. Here, we outline how two models of stimulus discrimination can account for the Type B effect, namely the weighted difference model (or basic Sensation Weighting model) and the Internal Reference Model. For both models, the predicted psychometric functions for comparative judgements as well as for equality judgements, in which participants indicate whether they perceived the two stimuli to be equal or not equal, are derived and it is shown that the models also predict a Type B effect for equality judgements. In the empirical part, the models' predictions are evaluated. To this end, participants performed a duration discrimination task with comparative judgements and with equality judgements. In line with the models' predictions, a Type B effect was observed for both judgement types. In addition, a time-order error, as indicated by shifts of the psychometric functions, and differences in response times were observed only for the equality judgement. Since both models entail distinct additional predictions, it seems worthwhile for future research to unite the two models into one conceptual framework.     

Is attention necessary for perceiving gaze direction? It depends on how you look at it: Evidence from the locus-of-slack method

Several researchers have studied how we process and perceive gaze direction. However, it is still unclear at which perceptual stage of gaze processing (encoding or/and categorization), attention is required to judge gaze direction. We report a study in which we manipulated the difficulty of gaze perceptual judgements (easy vs. difficult) and used the locus-of-slack method to test the role of different types of attention (spatial and central) in the encoding and categorization of gaze direction. In Experiment 1 we used the spatial cueing paradigm to investigate if gaze direction judgements can be carried out while spatial attention is diverted. In Experiment 2 we used the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm to determine whether judgement of gaze direction involves central attention processes. The findings demonstrate that gaze judgements require input attention (both for the encoding and categorization stage) but not central attention. The implications of the results are discussed.     

Will the most informative object stand? Determining the impact of structural context on informativeness judgements

A fundamental unsolved problem in the cognitive sciences concerns why, how, and to what extent humans judge object stimuli as conveying different amounts of information. Central to this problem is how the notion of informativeness is conceptualised by humans in the first place. In this paper, we investigate this question from the standpoint of how the structure of categories of objects influences informativeness judgements about their members. Results from our two experiments show that the structural or relational context surrounding single-object cues from a categorical stimulus largely determines such informativeness judgements. Moreover, we found that object cues elicit absolute magnitude judgements about their associated concept that are not consistent with the prototype interpretation of the concept. We were able to account for over 90% of the variance in the data from our two judgement experiments with a general theory and measure of information referred to as Representational Information.     

Fast and frugal versus regression models of human judgement

Following Brunswik (1952), social judgement theorists have long relied on regression models to describe both an individual's judgements and the environment about which such judgements are made. However, social judgement theory is not synonymous with these compensatory, static, structural models. We compared the characterisations of physicians' judgements using a regression model with that of a non-compensatory process model (called fast and frugal). We found that both models fit the data equally well. Both models suggest that physicians use few cues, that they disagree among themselves, and that their stated cue use is discrepant with the models' stated cue use. However, the fast and frugal model is easier to convey to physicians and is also more psychologically plausible. Implications for how social judgement theorists conceptualise the process of vicarious functioning are discussed.     

Is there a special association between self judgements and conscious recollection?

Dual‐process models of recognition memory posit a rapid retrieval process that produces a general sense of familiarity and a slower retrieval process that produces conscious recollections of prior experience. The Remember–Know paradigm has been used to study the subjective correlates of these two processes with Remember judgements assumed to index conscious recollection and Know judgements assumed to index familiarity. In this paper we examine Conway and Dewhurst's recent finding that judgements of self during encoding produce more Remember responses than alternative semantic judgements. While one might interpret this result to suggest a special association between self judgement and conscious recollection, we consider the possibility that it occurs because of greater discriminability in this condition. The results of four experiments demonstrate that a self judgement condition produces more, fewer, or an equal number of Remember responses relative to a control condition depending on whether overall discriminability in the self judgement condition is greater than, less than, or equal to that in the control condition. The implications of these results for conceptions of self judgement and the use of the Remember–Know paradigm are detailed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Educated intuitions. Automaticity and rationality in moral judgement

Moral judgements are based on automatic processes. Moral judgements are based on reason. In this paper, I argue that both of these claims are true, and show how they can be reconciled. Neither the automaticity of moral judgement nor the post hoc nature of conscious moral reasoning pose a threat to rationalist models of moral cognition. The relation moral reasoning bears to our moral judgements is not primarily mediated by episodes of conscious reasoning, but by the acquisition, formation and maintenance – in short: education – of our moral intuitions.     

Factors that affect action possibility judgements: recent experience with the action and the current body state

It has been suggested that action possibility judgements are formed through a covert simulation of the to-be-executed action. We sought to determine whether the motor system (via a common coding mechanism) influences this simulation, by investigating whether action possibility judgements are influenced by experience with the movement task (Experiments 1 and 2) and current body states (Experiment 3). The judgement task in each experiment involved judging whether it was possible for a person's hand to accurately move between two targets at presented speeds. In Experiment 1, participants completed the action judgements before and after executing the movement they were required to judge. Results were that judged movement times after execution were closer to the actual execution time than those prior to execution. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that the effects of execution on judgements were not due to motor activation or perceptual task experience-alternative explanations of the execution-mediated judgement effects. Experiment 3 examined how judged movement times were influenced by participants wearing weights. Results revealed that wearing weights increased judged movement times. These results suggest that the simulation underlying the judgement process is connected to the motor system, and that simulations are dynamically generated, taking into account recent experience and current body state.     

Factors that affect action possibility judgements: Recent experience with the action and the current body state

It has been suggested that action possibility judgements are formed through a covert simulation of the to-be-executed action. We sought to determine whether the motor system (via a common coding mechanism) influences this simulation, by investigating whether action possibility judgements are influenced by experience with the movement task (Experiments 1 and 2) and current body states (Experiment 3). The judgement task in each experiment involved judging whether it was possible for a person's hand to accurately move between two targets at presented speeds. In Experiment 1, participants completed the action judgements before and after executing the movement they were required to judge. Results were that judged movement times after execution were closer to the actual execution time than those prior to execution. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that the effects of execution on judgements were not due to motor activation or perceptual task experience—alternative explanations of the execution-mediated judgement effects. Experiment 3 examined how judged movement times were influenced by participants wearing weights. Results revealed that wearing weights increased judged movement times. These results suggest that the simulation underlying the judgement process is connected to the motor system, and that simulations are dynamically generated, taking into account recent experience and current body state.     

Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice

Most theories of affective influences on judgement and choice take a valence-based approach, contrasting the effects of positive versus negative feeling states. These approaches have not specified if and when distinct emotions of the same valence have different effects on judgement. In this article, we propose a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. We posit that each emotion is defined by a tendency to perceive new events and objects in ways that are consistent with the original cognitive-appraisal dimensions of the emotion. To pit the valence and appraisal-tendency approaches against one another, we present a study that addresses whether two emotions of the same valence but differing appraisals—anger and fear—relate in different ways to risk perception. Consistent with the appraisal-tendency hypothesis, fearful people made pessimistic judgements of future events whereas angry people made optimistic judgements. In the Discussion we expand the proposed model and review evidence supporting two social moderators of appraisal-tendency processes.     

Does interaction matter? Testing whether a confidence heuristic can replace interaction in collective decision-making

In a range of contexts, individuals arrive at collective decisions by sharing confidence in their judgements. This tendency to evaluate the reliability of information by the confidence with which it is expressed has been termed the ‘confidence heuristic’. We tested two ways of implementing the confidence heuristic in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task: either directly, by opting for the judgement made with higher confidence, or indirectly, by opting for the faster judgement, exploiting an inverse correlation between confidence and reaction time. We found that the success of these heuristics depends on how similar individuals are in terms of the reliability of their judgements and, more importantly, that for dissimilar individuals such heuristics are dramatically inferior to interaction. Interaction allows individuals to alleviate, but not fully resolve, differences in the reliability of their judgements. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of confidence and collective decision-making.     

Logic of artistic development: the case of Mondrian

In this article I show how we can give a formal representation and analysis of evolutions in artistic style, using the work of the painter Mondrian as an example. Capitalising on the idea that radical change in thought implies related changes in judgement criteria, we can in a “logic of development” specify the relations within, and between, those different sets of artistic judgement criteria that are considered typical of successive stages in artistic development. I discuss some of the problems involved in dealing with post-conventional thinking and judgement. Then I propose five major steps in Mondrian's artistic quest, showing how it is different—and how different it is—from other kinds of (e.g. moral or aesthetic) judgement development. Whereas many kinds of conceptual development lead to (various types of) criterion expansion, this form of entirely postconventional development goes in the opposite direction of a most stringent criterion reduction.     

Set-size and Frequency-of-occurrence Judgements in Young and Older Adults: The Role of the Availability Heuristic

Two experiments examined the cognitive processes underlying judgements of set size and judgements of frequency of occurrence in young (Experiments 1 and 2) and older (Experiment 2) adults. Previous research has implicated the availability heuristic in set-size judgements, whereas an automatic processing mechanism has been implicated in judgements of frequency of occurrence. In the current experiments, path analysis was employed to investigate the role of an availability bias in performance on the judgement tasks. In Experiments 1 and 2, both types of judgement were influenced by repetition frequency of words independent of the availability (recall) of specific exemplars. Experiment 2 extended the investigation to include age differences. Although older adults' recall performance was poorer overall, the availability bias was age invariant, and there were no age differences in either set-size or frequency-of-occurrence judgements. Our results indicate that both set-size and frequency-of-occurrence judgements are independent of the availability bias evident in recall, and they support the notion that an automatic processing mechanism underlies both types of judgement.     

Kierkegaard and the Search for Self‐Knowledge

Abstract: In the first part of this essay (Sections I and II), I argue that Kierkegaard's work helps us to articulate and defend two basic requirements on searching for knowledge of one's own judgements: first, that searching for knowledge whether one judges that P requires trying to make a judgement whether P; and second that, in an important range of cases, searching for knowledge of one's own judgements requires attending to how one's acts of judging are performed. In the second part of the essay (Sections III and IV), I consider two prima facie problems regarding this conception of searching for knowledge of one's own judgements. The first problem concerns how in general one can coherently try to meet both these requirements at once; the second, how in particular one can try to attend to one's own acts of judging. I show how Kierkegaard's work is alive to both these problems, and helps us to see how they can be resolved.     

“Logic of artistic development: the case of Mondrian” [New Ideas in Psychology 21 (2003) 221-246]

In this article I show how we can give a formal representation and analysis of evolutions in artistic style, using the work of the painter Mondrian as an example. Capitalising on the idea that radical change in thought implies related changes in judgement criteria, we can in a ‘‘logic of development’’ specify the relations within, and between, those different sets of artistic judgement criteria that are considered typical of successive stages in artistic development. I discuss some of the problems involved in dealing with post-conventional thinking and judgement. Then I propose five major steps in Mondrian's artistic quest, showing how it is different—and how different it is—from other kinds of (e.g. moral or aesthetic) judgement development. Whereas many kinds of conceptual development lead to (various types of) criterion expansion, this form of entirely postconventional development goes in the opposite direction of a most stringent criterion reduction.     

Paying attention to distress: What's wrong with rumination?

We explored the notion—derived from conceptualisations of mindfulness—that what makes attention to distress harmful is negative judgement about it. In Study 1 we examined factors of Nolen-Hoeksema's Ruminative Response Scale (RRS). A “Brooding” scale included items describing negative judgements of experience, and a “Reflection” scale, comprised items describing analysis of thoughts and feelings without obvious judgement. Correlations of Reflection with depression and thought suppression were lower than those for Brooding, but still significant, perhaps because all items implied some judgement. In Study 2, items were reworded to de-emphasise evaluative judgements (RRS-nonjudging) and compared to the original RRS. Although the factor structures of the original and RRS-nonjudging versions were essentially identical, the RRS-nonjudging Reflection scale was uncorrelated with depression and thought suppression, and was more highly correlated with emotional processing than was the original Reflection scale.     

Moral Cognitivism and Character

It may seem to follow from Peter Winch's claim in ‘The Universalizability of Moral Judgements’ that a certain class of first‐person moral judgments are not universalizable that such judgments cannot be given a cognitivist interpretation. But Winch's argument does not involve the denial of moral cognitivism and in this paper I show how such judgements may be cognitively determined yet not universalizable. Drawing on an example from James Joyce's The Dead, I suggest that in the kind of situation Winch envisages where we properly return a different moral judgement to another agent it may be that we accept their judgement is right for them because we recognise that it is determined by values that, simply because of the particular people we are, we could never know or understand in just the same way.     

NATURAL GOODNESS AND NATURAL EVIL

In Natural Goodness Philippa Foot gives an analysis of the concepts we use to describe the characteristics of living things. She suggests that we describe them in functional terms, and this allows us to judge organisms as good or defective depending on how well they perform their distinctive functions. Foot claims that we can judge intentional human actions in the same way: the virtues contribute in obvious ways to good human functioning, and this provides us with grounds for making moral judgements. This paper criticises Foot’s argument by challenging her notion of function. I argue that the type of judgement she makes about living things requires an evolutionary biological account of function. However, such an account would render her meta‐ethical claims implausible, since it is unlikely that human beings are adapted to be maximally virtuous. I conclude that Foot is wrong about the logical structure of our judgements of human action.