Experiments in Philosophy

The impact of psychological research on life's big questions.

by a Band of Philosophers

Sex and Violence: Male Warriors Revisited

Is male violence innate? The debate rages on. Read More

Why Are Men So Violent?

Are men warriors by nature? A new evolutionary account may be wrong about the source of male violence. Read More

Does Pornography Treat Women as Objects?

A new series of experiments looks at the impact of pornography. When people see a woman in a pornographic image, do they think of her entirely as a body and not as a mind? Or might they neglect only certain parts of her mind but continue to focus on others? Read More

Deepak Chopra Takes on Experimental Philosophy

How do people understand the 'true self'? Recent research has gone after this question with systematic experimental studies. Deepak Chopra has argued that this research is misguided. Read More

Experimental Philosophy Month

If you had to name two things that philosophers are not usually known for, they might be (a) running experimental studies and (b) getting along and working together.

But this month, the world of philosophy is challenging both of these stereotypes by working together to run experimental studies. Read More

Sex on the Bench: Do Women and Men Have Different Moral Values?

Do men and women have different moral values? If so, how will this change the Supreme Court if Elena Kagan is confirmed? Read More

Experimental Philosophy on YouTube

A funny new video in which experimental philosophers take on an ancient conundrum. Read More

Consciousness

How do ordinary people think about their subjective experience? Do they believe in qualia, as many philosophers such as David Chalmers and Ned Block claim? And are we mistaken in believing that our experiences have qualia, as Daniel Dennett asserts?

Justin Sytsma (Pittsurgh, HPS) discusses these issues, in a beautiful talk there. Read More

What Makes an Action Intentional?

A few months ago, I reported on some studies on how people with Asperger think about intentional actions (see my previous post on the topic). Recently, Joshua Knobe and I have been interviewed on the topic of intentional action by Natasha Mitchell in her program All In Mind on the Australian radio ABC. Read More

Are Free-Will Deniers Open to Experience? Are Materialists Extrovert? Help us Find out!

Could it be that people are attracted to different philosophical views because of their temperament? Could it be, for instance, that extroverts tend to be materialists, while people who are open to new experiences tend to deny the reality of free will?

Justin Sytsma, Jonathan Livengood, Adam Feltz, and I are looking at this question, and we'd like to ask you to help us out!

Imagine a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before. So the things that happened at the very beginning of the universe caused the things that happened next, which caused the things that happened after that... Read More

Can an Atheist Believe in Free Will?

Here's an interesting 5 minute video accusing Richard Dawkins of being inconsistent in holding that belief in free will and moral responsibility is justified but that belief in God is unjustified. The argument goes like this. Read More

Apparently I was right about Satoshi Kanazawa, aka the Scientific Fundamentalist.

A few weeks ago I commented to a colleague that PT blogger Satoshi Kanazawa only wrote one of his recent posts so that someone would write a parody of that post. There could be no other explanation. Apparently I was right. The point of that comment was not to single out Satoshi Kanazawa, but exactly the opposite. Read More

Comedian Eugene Mirman Explaining Experimental Philosophy

As Edouard mentioned in his recent post, some of the most fascinating discoveries in experimental philosophy have come from work on people's ordinary understanding of human action.

Oddly enough, YouTube is now displaying a video of comedian Eugene Mirman explaining some of these new discoveries. I've included the video below. Hope you enjoy it.

How do we think about the intentional nature of actions? And how do people with an impaired mindreading capacity thinkg about it? Read More

Do Atheists Pose a Threat to Morality?

Atheism is said to pose a major threat to morality. Some theists claim that disbelief leads to moral relativism and undermines the motivation to do good deeds. Recent research can help us see what is true and false about these anxieties. Read More

Justice and Honor

Avon Barksdale A 2006 Washington Post article profiles a big-time Washington D.C. gang leader known as "A.J." The author reveals that A.J.'s half-brother was recently murdered. The killer then turned himself in and was charged with first degree murder. Here's A.J.'s reaction:

"I would have rather him stayed on the street -- and get some street justice . . . I'm very upset that I can't do nothing about it. I'm very upset that this dude took the sucker way out and turned himself in. I'm mad and angry."

(From "In or Out of the Game" by Kevin Merida. Washington Post, December 31, 2006)

A.J. was upset, mad, angry, and yet it seems like justice was served. The murderer was charged for his crime and is going to be punished according to the gravity of his offense. He will receive his "just-deserts." So why is A.J. so angry and upset? Read More

How to Eliminate Racism Part I

No doubt, racism is one of the most important evils in our pluralistic, open societies need to confront. And various programs are meant to do so. But what are the odds that these programs will work? Psychology can help us answer this question. Read More

Torn Between Left and Right

New research in experimental philosophy explores the psychology behind our political preferences Read More

Know thyself?

Knowledge about our own mental states seems to be the most secure thing in the world, doesn’t it? I certainly know what I feel and think right now and I know it more securely than any other thing I might know. Right? Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel begs to differ. Read More

Can the mentally ill be to blame?

The image “http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Phineas_Gage_CGI.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. Suppose you learned that someone had committed a horrible rape. And now suppose you find out that he is suffering from a neurological condition. Would you still hold him responsible for what he had done? Read More

What’s the matter with a little brother/sister action?

Fellow "Experiments in Philosophy" blogger Jesse Prinz posted about UVA psychologist Jon Haidt's work on political differences. I want to continue exploring the philosophical implications of Haidt's work by asking whether it's all right for Julie and her brother Mark to have sex.

Here's a scenario drawn from a study Haidt conducted: Read More

Would You be Willing to Enter the Matrix?

matrix A new study in experimental philosophy asks whether people would be willing to live a life of illusion. Read More

How Ideology Colors Morality

Do you think members of the opposition party are a bunch or idiots? Or worse, might they bad people deliberately trying to achieve reprehensible ends? The real problem is that liberals and conservatives have different basic values, and political debates are just cross talk. Read More

What's Innate and What's Not? And Should We Care?

Philosophers and psychologists often debate about whether our beliefs, emotions, desires, values, etc., are innate or whether they are learned. But does this type of debate make sense? Paul Griffiths, Stefan Linquist and I have argued that it does not! Read More

No Soul? I Can Live with That. No Free Will? AHHHHH!!!

Imagine a world where no one believed in free will. Life would no longer have meaning, right? We'd be robots, puppets on a string, living a mockery of a real human existence. And why be moral? After all, if we do something bad, we didn't freely choose to do it, and so we cannot be morally responsible for that choice. So why bother? Read More

Does Donating Money Make Us Happy?

As my second official post, I'll point our readers to a finding that recently appeared in Science. Elizabeth Dunn (UBC) and her colleagues demonstrated that giving money to others makes us more happy overall than using that money for ourselves. Read More

What Experimental Philosophy means for Traditional Psychology

I have a confession to make. Although our group of bloggers is described as "a band of philosophers," I'm faking the funk, so to speak. In real life, I'm a psychologist through and through. So I'm thankful to my real-philosopher colleagues for giving me a "pass" to contribute to this blog (and to the field). At the end of the day, I like to think that experimental philosophy is really social psychology with a fresh set of questions to investigate. Read More

Do you need to have a body to have a mind?

Philosophers have long wondered whether the mind depends on the body or whether our thoughts and feelings reside in an immaterial 'soul.' Though intellectuals are still arguing back and forth about the right answer to that question, experimental studies have revealed some surprising facts about how ordinary people think of these issues. Read More

Introducing Experimental Philosophy

It may seem a bit odd that a magazine like Psychology Today is sponsoring a blog by a band of philosophers. After all, isn't philosophy supposed to be something entirely separate from psychology? Aren't philosophers just supposed to sit in their armchairs pondering the great imponderables, while psychologists busy themselves delving into the actual facts of human thought and behavior? Read More

Experiments in Philosophy Bloggers

Joshua Knobe is a professor in the philosophy department at UNC-Chapel Hill.

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Edouard Machery is a philosopher of psychology and an experimental philosopher in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

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David Pizarro is an assistant professor at Cornell University, where he conducts research on moral judgment and emotion in the department of psychology.

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Jesse Prinz is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, Graduate Center and the author of several books on the nature of thought, emotion, and morality.

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