Theoretical debates around the concept of self-deception revolve around identifying the conditions for a behavior to qualify as self-deception. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that various candidate features—such as intent, belief change, and motive—are treated as sufficient, but non-necessary, conditions according to the lay concept of self-deception. This led us to ask whether there are multiple lay concepts, such that different participants endorse competing theories (the disagreement view), or whether individual participants assign partial weight to various features and consequently waver in cases of middling similarity (the conflict view). In Experiment 3, by-participant regression models uncovered that most participants additively consider multiple characteristics of the prototype of self-deception, while only a minority of participants treat a characteristic (or a combination thereof) as necessary and sufficient. In sum, by disambiguating interpersonal disagreement and intrapersonal conflict in a within-subjects design, the present experiments indicate that the lay concept may primarily exhibit a prototype structure. In closing, we suggest that future research deploying this method may help to explain why experimental research on philosophical concepts often engenders partial support for competing theories.

In characterizing the nature of law and its proper interpretation, philosophers of law often appeal to empirical assumptions about the mind and language. However, psychological research has emphasized social norms (sustained through personal interaction) while comparatively neglecting positive rules (introduced by an authority). Addressing this imbalance, recent empirical work has begun to tackle foundational questions in jurisprudence, such as the connection between law and morality, the extent and origin of cultural variability in legal concepts, and the overlap between ordinary and expert concepts in this domain. This chapter provides an overview of ongoing research in the nascent field of experimental jurisprudence and takes stock of its implications for the concept of law. This preliminary sketch of legal cognition raises deeper questions that only a more diverse research program could answer. In closing, we advocate that research in experimental jurisprudence ought to investigate proximate and ultimate questions in parallel so as to paint a more detailed portrait of the 'legal mind'.

Science education is generally perceived as a key facilitator in cultivating a scientifically literate society. In the last decade, however, this conventional wisdom has been challenged by evidence that greater scientific literacy and critical thinking skills may in fact inadvertently aggravate polarization on scientific matters in the public sphere. Supporting an alternative “scientific update hypothesis,” in a series of studies (total N = 2087), we show that increased science’s epistemology literacy might have consequential population-level effects on the public’s alignment with scientific results. In one exploratory study and a pre-registered national online survey, we first show that understanding scientific epistemology predicts refusal of pseudoscientific beliefs and higher scores in a methodology of science test. We also find and replicate a propensity for epistemologically literate citizens to endorse the norm of belief updating and the communicated scientific consensus following both ideologically congruent and incongruent scientific results. Notably, after 2 months of first being presented with scientific results on politically controversial issues, a one standard deviation higher score in epistemological literacy is associated with a 14

Advance healthcare decision-making presumes that a prior treatment preference expressed with sufficient mental capacity (“T1 preference”) should trump a contrary preference expressed after significant cognitive decline (“T2 preference”). This assumption is much debated in normative bioethics, but little is known about lay judgments in this domain. This study (N = 1445 US Americans; gender-balanced sample) investigated participants’ judgments about which preference should be followed, and whether these judgments differed depending on a first-person (deciding for one’s future self) versus third-person (deciding for a friend or stranger) perspective. We found that participants were more likely to defer to the incapacitated T2 preference of a third-party, while being more likely to insist on following their own T1 capacitated preference. Further, participants were more likely to conclude that others with substantial cognitive decline were still their “true selves,” which correlated with increased deference to their T2 preferences. These findings add to the growing evidence that lay intuitions concerning the ethical entitlement to have decisions respected is more a function of the relationship between the decision and the decision-maker’s true self, and less a function of the cognitive threshold of mental capacity, as in traditional bioethical accounts.

In recent decades, many jurisdictions have moved toward legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide, alongside a near-universal increase in public acceptance of medical aid in dying. Here, we draw on a comprehensive quantitative review of current laws on assisted dying, experimental survey evidence, and four decades of time-series data to explore the relationship between these legislative transitions and change in moral attitudes. Our analyses reveal that existing laws on medical aid in dying impose a common set of eligibility restrictions, based on the patient’s age, decision-making capacity, prognosis, and the nature of their illness. Fulfillment of these eligibility criteria elevates public moral approval of physician-assisted death, equally in countries with (i.e., Spain) and without (i.e., the United Kingdom) assisted dying laws. Finally, historical records of public attitudes toward euthanasia across numerous countries uncovered anticipatory growth in moral approval leading up to legalization, but no accelerated growth thereafter. Taken together, our findings suggest that the enactment of medical aid in dying laws, and their specific provisions, crystallize patterns in moral intuition.

It is often thought that an agent may be held morally responsible for bringing about a negative outcome only if they could have done otherwise. Inspired by previous research linking moral judgment to free will ascriptions and representations of possibility, we probe the reverse link: Does learning about a morally undesirable outcome make preferable alternatives appear more possible? We find modest evidence that this could be the case. In a preregistered experiment, we presented 317 participants with animated footage of a traffic accident in which two bystanders fail to intervene as a third person gets run over by bus, and manipulated whether the victim was evil, virtuous, or neutral. Judging from the same visual input, people indicate that saving an evil victim would have been slightly less possible than saving a virtuous or neutral victim, and arriving at the conclusion that it would have been possible demanded more time. Using drift-diffusion modeling to better understand the underlying cognitive processes, we found that participants were biased against counterfactual attempts to save the evil victim’s life, but then gathered evidence toward their decisions at the same rate regardless of the victim’s morality.

Many bioliberals endorse broadly consequentialist frameworks in normative ethics, implying that a progressive stance on matters of bioethical controversy could stem from outcome-based reasoning. This raises an intriguing empirical prediction: encouraging outcome-based reflection could yield a shift toward bioliberal views among nonexperts as well. To evaluate this hypothesis, we identified empirical premises that underlie moral disagreements on seven divisive issues (e.g., vaccines, abortion, or genetically modified organisms). In exploratory and confirmatory experiments, we assessed whether people spontaneously engage in outcome-based reasoning by asking how their moral views change after momentarily reflecting on the underlying empirical questions. Our findings indicate that momentary reflection had no overall treatment effect on the central tendency or the dispersion in moral attitudes when compared to prereflection measures collected 1 week prior. Autoregressive models provided evidence that participants engaged in consequentialist moral reasoning, but this self-guided reflection produced neither moral "progress" (shifts in the distributions' central tendency) nor moral "consensus" (reductions in their dispersion). These results imply that flexibility in people's search for empirical answers may limit the potential for outcome-based reflection to foster moral consensus.

Some normative theorists appeal to the concept of basic needs. They argue that when it comes to issues such as global justice, intergenerational justice, human rights or sustainable development our first priority should be that everybody is able to meet these needs. But what are basic needs? We attempt to inform discussions about this question by gathering evidence of ordinary English speakers’ intuitions on the concept of basic needs. First, we defend our empirical approach to analyzing this concept and identify a number of its potential features. Then we present three preregistered empirical studies that were conducted to investigate the extent to which ordinary speakers endorse these features. The studies yield convergent evidence for the following three claims: (1) ordinary speakers sometimes apply the concept of basic needs to necessities for a flourishing (not just a minimally decent) life, (2) most ordinary speakers attribute at least some degree of subjectivity to the concept, and (3) most ordinary speakers attribute at least some degree of relativity to the concept. We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical analyses of basic needs .

The psychedelic psilocybin has shown promise both as treatment for psychiatric conditions and as a means of improving well-being in healthy individuals. In some jurisdictions (e.g., Oregon, USA), psilocybin use for both purposes is or will soon be allowed and yet, public attitudes toward this shift are understudied. We asked a nationally representative sample of 795 US Americans to evaluate the moral status of psilocybin use in an appropriately licensed setting for either treatment of a psychiatric condition or well-being enhancement. Showing strong bipartisan support, participants rated the individual's decision as morally positive in both contexts. These results can inform effective policy-making decisions around supervised psilocybin use, given robust public attitudes as elicited in the context of an innovative regulatory model. We did not explore attitudes to psilocybin use in unsupervised or non-licensed community or social settings.

What should judges do when faced with immoral laws? Should they apply them without exception, since "the law is the law?" Or can exceptions be made for grossly immoral laws, such as historically, Nazi law? Surveying laypeople (N = 167) and people with some legal training (N = 141) on these matters, we find a surprisingly strong, monotonic relationship between people's subjective moral evaluation of laws and their judgments that these laws should be applied in concrete cases. This tendency is most pronounced among individuals who endorse natural law (i.e., the legal-philosophical view that immoral laws are not valid laws at all), and is attenuated when disagreement about the moral status of a law is considered reasonable. The relationship is equally strong for laypeople and for those with legal training. We situate our findings within the broader context of morality's influence on legal reasoning that experimental jurisprudence has uncovered in recent years, and consider normative implications.

There is little debate regarding the acceptability of providing medical care to restore physical or mental health that has deteriorated below what is considered typical due to disease or disorder (i.e., providing "treatment"-for example, administering psychostimulant medication to sustain attention in the case of attention deficit disorder). When asked whether a healthy individual may undergo the same intervention for the purpose of enhancing their capacities (i.e., "enhancement"-for example, use of a psychostimulant as a "study drug"), people often express greater hesitation. Building on prior research in moral philosophy and cognitive science, in this work, we ask why people draw a moral distinction between treatment and enhancement. In two experiments, we provide evidence that the accessibility of health-related interventions determines their perceived descriptive or statistical normality (Experiment 1), and that gains in descriptive normality for such interventions weaken the moral distinction between treatment and enhancement (Experiment 2). In short, our findings suggest that the tendency to draw a moral distinction between treatment and enhancement is driven, in part, by assumptions about descriptive abnormality; and raise the possibility that normalizing novel biomedical interventions by promoting access could undermine people's selective opposition toward enhancement, rendering it morally comparable to treatment.

IntroductionThere is a discrepancy in the literature as to whether authorising or refusing the recovery of organs for transplantation is of direct benefit to families in their subsequent grieving process. This study aims to explore the impact of the family interview to pose the option of posthumous donation and the decision to authorise or refuse organ recovery on the grieving process of potential donors’ relatives.Methods and analysisA protocol for mixed methods, prospective cohort longitudinal study is proposed. Researchers do not randomly assign participants to groups. Instead, participants are considered to belong to one of three groups based on factors related to their experiences at the hospital. In this regard, families in G1, G2 and G3 would be those who authorised organ donation, declined organ donation or were not asked about organ donation, respectively. Their grieving process is monitored at three points in time: 1 month after the patient’s death, when a semistructured interview focused on the lived experience during the donation process is carried out, 3 months and 9 months after the death. At the second and third time points, relatives’ grieving process is assessed using six psychometric tests: State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Beck Depression Inventory-II, Inventory of Complicated Grief, The Impact of Event Scale: Revised, Posttraumatic Growth Inventory and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale. Descriptive statistics (means, SDs and frequencies) are computed for each group and time point. Through a series of regression models, differences between groups in the evolution of bereavement are estimated. Additionally, qualitative analyses of the semistructured interviews are conducted using the ATLAS.ti software.Ethics and disseminationThis study involves human participants and was approved by Comité Coordinador de Ética de la Investigación Biomédica de Andalucía (CCEIBA) ID:1052-N-21. The results will be disseminated at congresses and ordinary academic forums. Participants gave informed consent to participate in the study before taking part.

OBJECTIVESWe sought to understand how basic competencies in moral reasoning influence the application of private, institutional, and legal rules.HYPOTHESESWe predicted that moral appraisals, implicating both outcome-based and mental state reasoning, would shape participants' interpretation of rules and statutes-and asked whether these effects arise differentially under intuitive and reflective reasoning conditions.METHODIn six vignette-based experiments (total N = 2,473; 293 university law students [67% women; age bracket mode: 18-22 years] and 2,180 online workers [60% women; mean age = 31.9 years]), participants considered a wide range of written rules and laws and determined whether a protagonist had violated the rule in question. We manipulated morally relevant aspects of each incident-including the valence of the rule's purpose (Study 1) and of the outcomes that ensued (Studies 2 and 3), as well as the protagonist's accompanying mental state (Studies 5 and 6). In two studies, we simultaneously varied whether participants decided under time pressure or following a forced delay (Studies 4 and 6).RESULTSMoral appraisals of the rule's purpose, the agent's extraneous blameworthiness, and the agent's epistemic state impacted legal determinations and helped to explain participants' departure from rules' literal interpretation. Counter-literal verdicts were stronger under time pressure and were weakened by the opportunity to reflect.CONCLUSIONSUnder intuitive reasoning conditions, legal determinations draw on core competencies in moral cognition, such as outcome-based and mental state reasoning. In turn, cognitive reflection dampens these effects on statutory interpretation, allowing text to play a more influential role. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purposes to physical objects and to rules. In both cases, purpose attributions appear to be governed not so much by original intention or by moral value as by current practice. We argue that these findings in the cognitive science of purpose attribution have implications for jurisprudential questions involving purposivist legal interpretation.

In this paper we develop test cases to adjudicate between dual-process and the causal mapping explanations of order effects. Using dilemmas with minimized emotional force, we explore new conditions for order effects to occur. Overall, the results support causal model theory. We produced novel evidence that order effects extend not only to cases with low emotional engagement, but also to specialized judgements about whether an action violates a rule. However, when objects are sacrificed instead of persons the order effect either disappears orbecomes symmetrical, contrary to previous theorizing that it is an asymmetrical transfer effect.Causal model theory needs to be developed to include interplays between the moral status of sacrificed entities and computational models of causal mapping. Symmetric order effects remain a puzzle, motivating future research. Though we do not know how to explain them yet, we discuss how symmetric order effects can influence policy decision making.

Willful Ignorance (WI) is a term in Anglo-American law to refer to circumstances in which a defendant remains intentionally unaware of a fact that would render them liable. These cases pose a unique problem for the law, as it is uncertain whether deliberate ignorance can be viewed as a form of knowledge and, therefore, whether they satisfy the mens rea requirement for culpability. In this chapter, we report two experimental studies modeled on Unites States vs. Jewell, a case in which Jewell aided an international drug trafficking operation by transporting a suitcase which he deliberately avoided inspecting. We manipulated various features of the defendant's epistemic state, relating to their suspicion, its reasonableness and its specificity. Our results showed that WI partially satisfies the mens rea requirement, though not to the extent of genuine knowledge. Participants considered willful ignorance incriminating, as long as the defendant suspected that they were involved in criminal activity, and regardless of whether their suspicion was reasonable or even true. Additionally, our studies suggested that judgments of culpability are related to broader inferences about the defendant's antisocial tendencies — in line with theories that conceptualise WI as a demonstration of 'ill will'. In closing, we elaborate on the implications of our findings for the broader legal-theoretical debate around the normative propriety of the willful ignorance doctrine.