Experimental Philosophy Meets Developmental Psychology

Of all the many topics explored by experimental philosophers, the one that has received perhaps the most attention in the meta-philosophical literature is the issue of demographic effects. Work on this topic asks whether people’s intuitions about philosophical questions differ across demographic variables such as culture, gender and age.

As many of you will already know, there has been rather dramatic shift in research on this topic over the past few years. A number of highly publicized early studies suggested that people’s philosophical intuitions did differ across demographic variables.  However, more recent work has pointed in a very different direction.  Although some of the early studies have successfully replicated (most notably this one), the majority of them have failed to replicate, and a growing body of evidence suggests that  most of the demographic effects we were trying to understand a decade ago actually do not exist (see here, here, here, here, and here). Thus, it seems that philosophical work on demographic effects needs to shift focus a bit, turning its attention away from the effects we used to believe existed  and moving instead to the effects that genuinely do appear to exist in light of the latest evidence.

One striking development in this regard has been the growing body of experimental findings that go in exactly the opposite direction, revealing the shocking degree to which certain philosophical intuitions do not differ across demographic variables. For example, there has been a raft of recent studies exploring the ways in which people’s intuitions about philosophical questions can be surprisingly similar across cultures (see here, here, here and here).

I worry, however, that one type of research  in this vein has been a bit underappreciated, and that is the work at the intersection of experimental philosophy and developmental psychology. Such work asks whether the effects that experimental philosophers have found in adults also emerge among children. So far, the key result coming out of this research is the surprising robustness of the findings. Of course, we all know that four year old children do not not have precisely the same intuitions about philosophical questions that adults do. Still, it is hard not to be at least a little bit struck by some of the results.

  • Like adults, children show a tendency to have ‘deontological’ intuitions in footbridge-style cases (e.g., Pellizzoni et al.).
  • Like adults, children show an interaction of valence and domain in intuitions about generics (Tasimi et al.).
  • Like adults, children show a tendency to believe in libertarian free will  (Nichols).
  • Like adults, children show an impact of norms on causal judgments (Samland et al.).

Existing work has mostly just focused on trying to understand each of these separate effects. This is surely an important task, but it also seems that it might be helpful to try to understand the larger pattern. There seems to be a quite striking tendency whereby the philosophical intuitions we find in adults are also emerging in young children.

I would be curious to hear any thoughts people might have about why this is happening. Does it indicate that people’s philosophical intuitions have an innate basis? Or is there some other explanation of why we find so much similarity across a demographic variable that one might have expected to make a huge difference?

13 Comments

  1. My view: damn, kids are smart.

    Early competence doesn’t necessarily show innateness, it could be just that kids have learned a lot by the time they know enough to respond to these probes. Incidentally, and just for what it’s worth, on your one example of a successfully replicating experiment of demographic variation, there is some push-back, originally from Barry Lam (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027709003114) and more recently from Yu Izumi and colleagues (https://61b364a6-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/yuizumi/definite_descriptions_east_west.pdf).

  2. Joshua Knobe

    Hi Jennifer!

    Yes, you are completely right. It’s striking that even in the one case I picked out as demonstrating the existence of a real effect, there are a bunch of studies pushing in the opposite direction. Still, my sense is that the evidence as a whole suggests that this one effect really does exist (see the list of replications at https://experimental-philosophy.yale.edu/xphipage/Experimental%20Philosophy-Replications.html).

    You are also right to say that the mere fact that an effect emerges early in development does not prove that it has an innate basis. Still, it does seem like there is something here that cries out for explanation. I am especially struck by the combination of

    (a) a growing body of evidence suggesting that these effects emerge in a variety of different cultures

    (b) a growing body of evidence suggesting that they emerge early in development

    I don’t mean that nativism is the only possible explanation for these phenomena, but it does seem like we need to say something about how to explain this surprising robustness.

  3. Interesting post, Josh! I’ve thought about developmental evidence in moral judgment and action, but I hadn’t really thought about the status of philosophical intuitions and childhood generally.

    I expect the explanation won’t be the same for all of these findings. But one that might cover a good deal of them is that children just share their culture’s conceptual framework. Much philosophical work on intuitions aims to get at concepts. And maybe it should be expected that kids will pick up on the same concepts at some age, perhaps even before they become native speakers?

    I’m not sure the pattern of findings suggests anything about innateness. Kids can quickly and unconsciously pick up on environmental patterns. So it’s hard to say the intuitions or concepts are innate. Maybe we’d need at least a poverty of the stimulus argument for each case? And maybe some evolutionary story about each?

  4. Hi Josh, here is a pair of flat-footed questions. 1. How does the similarity across ages and cultures of philosophical intuitions compare to the similarity of intuitions about folk physics and folk psychology? And 2. what are the reasons — beyond, perhaps, a bald anti-realism about the moral or philosophical domains — for finding such similarities more surprising in the former cases than the latter ones? Truly there is nothing hidden behind these questions — I have no view of the matter, but it strikes me as worth thinking through.

  5. Hi John,

    This is a really excellent point, which gets right to the heart of the issue. Existing work suggests that core features of folk physics and theory of mind emerge early and are shared across cultures. So one way to capture what is surprising about these new results is that they suggest that the effects uncovered by experimental philosopherslook in some ways like core features of folk physics or theory of mind.

    To bring out what is surprising here, consider the Gettierized Epistemic Side Effect Effect (GESEE). This effect – first discovered by Wesley Buckwalter and by James Beebe – is a tendency whereby people are willing to attribute knowledge in Gettier cases to the extent that such cases involve morally bad acts in a certain way.

    Now, one might think at first that this sort of effect involves something radically different from what we find in, e.g., people’s ability to attribute false beliefs. After all, it doesn’t seem to be an important aspect of people’s way of successfully achieving practical goals. Instead, it seems like the kind of thing that would be of interest primarily to philosophers with a serious background in post-Gettier epistemology.

    Yet, in a recent paper, MJ Kim and Yuan Yuan show that this effect actually arises in participants from three different cultures speaking three different languages (https://philpapers.org/archive/YUACUO.pdf). Perhaps others will not find this surprising, but speaking just for myself, I have to say that I would not have been able to predict it beforehand. Given the lack of direct practical relevance of an effect like this one, it strikes me as quite surprising that it should be so robust across cultures.

    • Thanks, Josh. That is super interesting!

      I wonder what you’d think of the following story. It’s part of commonsense (and true!) morality that people are responsible for the bad consequences of their actions in a way that they’re not responsible for the good consequences. This suggests that to the extent that people are rational they will be more disposed to keep track of bad consequences than good ones. People (including children) understand this at an intuitive level, and this is why the ESEE arises.

      Of course this still leaves the question of how the heck children are smart enough to figure all of this out. But it does give the intuition some practical relevance. Does the story seem at all plausible, at least in outline?

      • James Beebe

        John, the idea that bad consequences of actions are more worthy of attention is something that Mark Alfano, Brian Robinson, and I explore in our explanation of the Knobe effect and the ESEE: https://philpapers.org/rec/ALFTCO-5. Other explanations of the phenomena don’t give as central a place to attention and memory as ours does. Also, I have some unpublished data I hope to get around to publishing later this year that demonstrates the Knobe effect’s ability to impact memory. These findings fit with certain theories of memory in psychology that postulate we are better at remembering things if they are relevant to survival. Given the way that humans have evolved in cooperative groups with abilities to detect and punish cheaters, it seems plausible that we would have developed capacities that were especially fine tuned to track bad consequences.

      • Joshua Knobe

        Hi James,

        This new memory study sounds really fascinating. Could you say just a little bit more about what you actually found?

        More generally, this certainly does seem like a promising way of explaining the striking robustness of your effect. If it is byproduct of more general facts about the way memory works, it seems like we have at least the beginnings of an explanation for the fact that it emerges in a variety of different cultures.

        • James Beebe

          Josh, I found that harmful or norm-violating actions were remembered better than neutral or good actions. This should be unsurprising to some degree, given the many domains in which we find that valence affects dependent variables in XPhi and psych. studies. But hopefully it fills out the picture a bit more. And the fact that it connects up with important research on memory should help as well. I don’t have a draft just yet.

      • Joshua Knobe

        James,

        Very interesting! It seems like this approach offers a different *kind* of explanation of the cross-cultural robustness from the one John was
        exploring (in his comment above.)

        Broadly speaking, John’s explanation has to do with the idea that there is something about this pattern of intuitions that is genuinely rational or correct, meaning that people from different cultures would tend to converge on it. This seems like a very plausible approach, but yours seems to be importantly different. At least as I understand it from this brief comment, the idea seems to be that the pattern of intuitions you uncovered is best understood as a natural byproduct of a more general fact about the way memory works. Definitely a topic worth exploring further!

        • James Beebe

          Josh, yes there are differences between the two explanations. However, if particular aspects of memory were selected precisely it is in our best interests for memory to work in just those ways, then the story about the evolution of characteristics of memory and the story about what it is rational to pay most attention to would converge in a certain way.

      • Joshua Knobe

        James,

        Yes, this is exactly right. All I meant was that, on this sort of explanation, the thing that is adaptive is not the pattern of intuitions per se but rather the way human memory works.

  6. Joshua Knobe

    Hi Josh,

    You are definitely right to say that we don’t need to find a single explanation that works for all cases. It could definitely turn out that we need to explain different facts about the earlier emergence of philosophical intuitions in completely different ways. I would be really excited to hear more about how one might pursue this research program, i.e., what kinds of different explanations one might offer in the different cases.

    In any case, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that nativism was the only possible explanation. Basically, I was just curious to hear more about what people thought could be explaining these results.

    At the broadest level, what the results show is that the tendency adults have to get these intuitions does not depend on anything about adults that is not also shared by children (complex capacities for reasoning, long exposure to processes of cultural learning, or anything else that is unique to the adult mind).

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