Barry Taylor

I respond to an argument made by Gunnar Björnsson and Ragnar Francén Olinder against motivational internalism. Björnsson and Olinder present a hypothesis in which all of us are selfishly motivated to act in accordance with our moral judgments. The conceivability of such a possibility, they argue, rules out motivational internalism. I argue that this is not the case, and that, according to one dominant view about moral judgments, the agents in the hypothesis do not make genuine moral judgments. One therefore cannot argue decisively against motivational internalism without arguing against this view about moral judgments.     

Judging the Probability of Hypotheses Versus the Impact of Evidence: Which Form of Inductive Inference Is More Accurate and Time‐Consistent?

Inductive reasoning requires exploiting links between evidence and hypotheses. This can be done focusing either on the posterior probability of the hypothesis when updated on the new evidence or on the impact of the new evidence on the credibility of the hypothesis. But are these two cognitive representations equally reliable? This study investigates this question by comparing probability and impact judgments on the same experimental materials. The results indicate that impact judgments are more consistent in time and more accurate than probability judgments. Impact judgments also predict the direction of errors in probability judgments. These findings suggest that human inductive reasoning relies more on estimating evidential impact than on posterior probability.     

National identification and support for discriminatory policies: The mediating role of beliefs about laïcité in France

In France, laïcité is a legal principle enforcing State secularism. However, research indicates that Modern (vs. traditional) beliefs about laïcité (ML) help legitimate prejudice against minorities. From Social Identity Theory, we hypothesized that ML should be positively linked with national identification, stereotyping, prejudice and support for discrimination. Accordingly, we demonstrate that ML independently predicts support for discriminatory policies (Study 1a, N = 241) and Maghrebi IAT scores (Study 1b, N = 242). ML mediates the link between national identification and Generalized Prejudice (Study 2a, N = 215; Study 2d, N = 114) as well as Support for Discriminatory Policies (Study 2b, N = 250). Experimental corroboration of this mediation was provided (Study 2c, N = 100). An exploratory study showed that priming ML led to more support for discrimination through national identification (Study 3, N = 89). These results reveal the important intergroup regulation feature of ML beliefs in France.