Affect influences false memories at encoding: evidence from recognition data

Memory is susceptible to illusions in the form of false memories. Prior research found, however, that sad moods reduce false memories. The current experiment had two goals: (1) to determine whether affect influences retrieval processes, and (2) to determine whether affect influences the strength and the persistence of false memories. Happy or sad moods were induced either before or after learning word lists designed to produce false memories. Control groups did not experience a mood induction. We found that sad moods reduced false memories only when induced before learning. Signal detection analyses confirmed that sad moods induced prior to learning reduced activation of nonpresented critical lures suggesting that they came to mind less often. Affective states, however, did not influence retrieval effects. We conclude that negative affective states promote item-specific processing, which reduces false memories in a similar way as using an explicitly guided cognitive control strategy.     

“Internally Wicked”: Investigating How and Why Essentialism Influences Punitiveness and Moral Condemnation

Kant argued that individuals should be punished “proportional to their internal wickedness,” and recent work has demonstrated that essentialism—the notion that observable characteristics reflect internal, biological, unchanging “essences”—influences moral judgment. However, these efforts have yielded conflicting results: essentialism sometimes increases and sometimes decreases moral condemnation. To resolve these discrepancies, we investigated the mechanisms by which essentialism influences moral judgment, focusing on perceptions of actors’ control over their behavior, the target of essentialism (particular behaviors vs. actors’ character), and the component of essentialism (biology vs. immutability). Participants punished people described as having a criminal essence more than those with a non-criminal essence or no essence. Probing potential mechanisms underlying this effect, we found a mediating role for perceptions of control and weak influences of essentialism focus (behavior vs. character) and component of essentialism (biology vs. immutability). These results extend prior work on essentialism and moral cognition, demonstrating a causal link between perceptions of “internal wickedness” and moral judgment. Our findings also resolve discrepancies in past work on the influence of essentialism on moral judgment, highlighting the role that perceptions of actors’ control over their behavior play in moral condemnation.     

Symposium on Justin Remhof’s Nietzsche’s Constructivism: a Metaphysics of Material Objects (Routledge, 2018)

Philosophia - Like Kant, the German Idealists, and many neo-Kantian philosophers before him, Nietzsche was persistently concerned with metaphysical questions about the nature of objects. His texts...     

Colour, world and archimedean metaphysics: stroud and the quest for reality

This paper proposes a fundamentally opposite conception of the possibility of metaphysics to that of Barry Stroud in The Quest for Reality and other writings. I discuss Stroud’s views on everyday ‚truth’ and metaphysics (Section 1), on interpretation (Section 2 – replying with a theory of ‚quasi-understanding’), and his ‚no threat’ claim (Section 3). But the main argument (Section 4) is a response to Stroud’s claim that we have no right either to affirm or to deny the metaphysical reality of colours. Stroud’s view resembles Carnap’s (1950, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4, 20–40), that experience can in some sense never settle the metaphysical issue between e.g. materialism, idealism and phenomenalism; though we can allow everyday ‚knowledge’ e.g. that there is a fallen tree in the garden outside, as something available on all three views. (Carnap takes the undecidability as a sign that the metaphysical issue is a pseudo-question; Stroud insists it is factual, but places it beyond our ken, ‚external’.) I argue, instead, that metaphysical argument is possible from within our conceptual scheme and epistemic situation (as in Gareth Evans’s arguments for realism over phenomenalism); that ‚external’ and ‚internal’ questions cannot be separated as Stroud wishes; and that if we really were denied knowledge on ‚metaphysical’ matters, that would infect our right to claim knowledge of ‚observational’ matters too. And I sketch a theory of colour that would allow us to conclude (at once ‚metaphysically’ and ‚internally’) that things are indeed ‚really’ coloured. For all his expressions of sympathy for Wittgenstein, Stroud’s metaphysics is remarkably Cartesian.     

Process Reliabilism,Virtue Reliabilism,and the Value of Knowledge

The value problem for knowledge is the problem of explaining why knowledge is cognitively more valuable than mere true belief. If an account of the nature of knowledge is unable to solve the value problem for knowledge, this provides a pro tanto reason to reject that account. Recent literature argues that process reliabilism is unable to solve the value problem because it succumbs to an objection known as the swamping objection. Virtue reliabilism (i.e., agent reliabilism), on the other hand, is able to solve the value problem because it can avoid the swamping objection. I argue that virtue reliabilism escapes the swamping objection only by employing what I call an entailment strategy. Furthermore, since an entailment strategy is open to the process reliabilist (in two different forms), I argue that the process reliabilist is also able to escape the swamping objection and thereby solve the value problem for knowledge.     

On the genesis of inflated (and deflated) judgments of responsibility

Prior research has found that people tend to overestimate their relative contribution to joint tasks [e.g., Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,37, 322–336]. The present research investigates one source of this bias, and in doing so, identifies an important moderator of the effect. Three studies demonstrate that when people estimate their relative contribution to collective endeavors they focus on their own contribution and give less consideration to the contribution of their collaborators. This can cause overestimation for tasks in which total contributions are plentiful, but underestimation for tasks in which total contributions are few—despite the fact that both tasks reflect positively on the person who performs them. These results extend Ross and Sicoly’s (1979) original analysis of bias in responsibility judgments, but also suggest that the tendency to overestimate one’s relative contribution to collaborations is not as ubiquitous as once thought.