Research on intuitions about philosophical thought experiments shows a striking pattern. Often, there are powerful intuitions on one side and also powerful intuitions on the exact opposite side. A question now arises about how to understand this pattern. One possible view would be that it is primarily a matter of different people having different intuitions. I present evidence for the view that this is not the correct understanding. Instead, I suggest, it is primarily a matter of individual people having conflicting intuitions. That is, it is primarily a matter of individual people having an intuition on one side and also having an intuition on the opposite side.

Recent work has proposed that there are symbolic beliefs. These beliefs do not serve primarily to track the facts in the world but rather to express the believer’s own identity. On this view, several disparate features of belief – from whether a belief is important to identity to whether it is sensitive to evidence – would be related to an underlying “symbolicness” dimension. We converted the features potentially related to symbolicness into items and asked people to rate their own beliefs on them. Study 1 found that beliefs which were high on one feature (importance) were rated higher on all the items, except for sensitivity to evidence. Study 2 found that ratings of any beliefs on almost all the items loaded onto a single, symbolicness factor, except again for evidence insensitivity. Study 3 asked participants to rate their own beliefs on all the items in Study 2 and several additional items which got at whether a belief was subjective. We recovered the symbolicness factor, but found it was largely orthogonal to the subjectivity and evidence insensitivity items. These findings suggest that most of the features we tested relate to an underlying symbolicness factor, which corresponds to whether a belief represents identity. But, surprisingly, this factor was not related to items that get at whether a belief represents facts about the world. It would seem that some beliefs express identity and track facts; some beliefs only do one of these things; and some beliefs do neither.

People tend to show greater liking for expressions of sadness when these expressions are described as art. Why does this effect arise? One obvious hypothesis would be that describing something as art makes people more likely to regard it as fictional, and people prefer expressions of sadness that are not real. We contrast this obvious hypothesis with a hypothesis derived from the philosophical literature. In this alternative hypothesis, describing something as art makes people more inclined to appropriate it, that is, to see it as an expression of their own sadness. Study 1 found that describing the exact same sad text as art (e.g., a monologue) as opposed to not-art (e.g., a diary entry) led to increased liking for the work. Study 2 showed that this effect is not mediated by fictionality. Study 3 showed that the effect is mediated by appropriation. Study 4 looked at the impact of a manipulation of fictionality. Describing a work as fictional did lead to increased liking, but this effect was completely mediated by appropriation. These results provide at least some initial support for the appropriation hypothesis.

People attribute purposes in both mundane and profound ways—such as when thinking about the purpose of a knife and the purpose of a life. In three studies (total N = 13,720 observations from N = 3,430 participants), we tested whether these seemingly very different forms of purpose attributions might actually involve the same cognitive processes. We examined the impacts of four factors on purpose attributions in six domains (artifacts, social institutions, animals, body parts, sacred objects, and human lives). Study 1 manipulated what items in each domain were originally created for (original design) and how people currently use them (present practice). Study 2 manipulated whether items are good at achieving a goal (effectiveness) and whether the goal itself is good (morality). We found effects of each factor in every domain. However, whereas morality and effectiveness had remarkably similar effects across domains, the effects of original design and present practice differed substantially. Finally, Study 3 revealed that, within domains, the effects of original design and present practice depend on which entities design and use items. These results reveal striking similarities in purpose attributions across domains and suggest that certain entities are treated as authorities over the purposes of particular items.

People are more inclined to agree with certain causal statements when a person acts intentionally than when a person acts unintentionally or without agency. Most existing research has assumed that this effect is to be explained in terms of the operation of people’s causal cognition. We propose a different explanation which involves a linguistic phenomenon involving the impact of agency on people’s judgments about a broader class of sentences, including non- causal sentences. Study 1 shows that the effect arises for both causal and non-causal sentences. The remaining studies show that the effect arises only when the subject of the sentence is animate (Study 2), that the effect arises both for outcomes with negative valence and outcomes with neutral valence (Study 3) and that the effect is driven by whether or not a person exercises agentive control over her body, rather than whether or not she intends the particular outcome of her action (Study 4). We conclude with a formal linguistic theory that captures these effects.

People sometimes behave differently depending on whether they are interacting online (by email, social media, etc.) vs. interacting in person. Four studies test the hypothesis that when an agent’s behavior is different online vs. in person, people think that the online behavior is less reflective of who the agent truly is deep down. Study 1 found that the very same behavior is regarded as less reflective of the true self when it is performed online. Study 2 showed that this effect is not merely a matter of perceived impression management. Study 3 found that there is a general tendency such that behavior is seen as more reflective of the true self when it is performed in an environment regarded as “natural.” In Study 4, a manipulation that led participants to see online behavior as more natural had a downstream effect on the degree to which this behavior was seen as reflecting the true self. Taken together, these results suggest that people’s judgments about online behavior are not simply a reflection of idiosyncratic facts about the online sphere in particular but are instead driven in part by a far more general psychological process involving perceptions of naturalness.

For many types of behaviors, whether a specific instance of that behavior is blame- or praiseworthy depends on how much of the behavior is done or how people go about doing it. For instance, for a behavior such as "replying to an email in x days," whether a specific reply is perceived as blameworthy or praiseworthy will depend on how many days have elapsed before the reply. Such behaviors lie on a continuum in which part of the continuum is praiseworthy (replying quickly) and another part of the continuum is blameworthy (replying late). In the current paper, we investigate how judgments of blame and praise on such behaviors relate to people's perceptions of the statistical norms surrounding that behavior (i.e., how quickly people usually reply). We find that people do not base judgments of blame and praise on a comparison to the statistically average quantity. Instead, judgments of blame and praise are related to whether the behavior is perceived as frequent or infrequent. Notably, frequency showed an asymmetric relationship with moral judgments: higher frequency was strongly associated with reduced blame but showed a much weaker association with reduced praise.

When children encounter information about the world that is descriptive (e.g., frequency distributions) or prescriptive (e.g., value judgments), can they keep track of both types of information together? Do they, like adults, integrate these two kinds of information to come up with the "first thing that comes to mind"? Can children separate these types of information when needed? In two experiments, we examined how children (N = 397, ages 4-9 years, fluent English speakers mostly from North America, recruited online) and adults (N = 189, U.S. English speakers, recruited online) produce both "first-to-mind" judgments and predictions about random samples. In Experiment 1, providing information about whether being longer or shorter made a fictional tool better or worse led adults to provide first-to-mind judgments that were biased toward the prescriptive ideal, but unbiased random sample predictions. However, 6-9-year-old children provided judgments that were biased by the prescriptive ideal in both cases. In Experiment 2, with 6-9-year-olds and adults, we manipulated whether the prescriptive information focused exclusively on positive (i.e., only "better") or negative (i.e., only "worse") properties. In the positive-focus condition, all age groups showed an effect of prescriptive ideal on first-to-mind judgments, but only 6-7-year-olds showed an effect of prescriptive ideal on random sample predictions. However, in the negative-focus condition, there was no effect of prescriptive information on either type of judgments for any age group, including adults. We discuss what changes in development in the ability to represent different kinds of information and apply the best kind of information to a specific task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Sentences with impersonal pronouns, like You do it like this, seem to make both statistical and prescriptive claims, that a certain way of behaving is common and that it is prescriptively good. We argue that these kinds of sentences are closely related to another kind of sentence, namely, indefinite singular generics, like A person does it like this. We propose that there is a single underlying mechanism that allows both kinds of sentences to express mixed statistical/prescriptive readings. We then provide a compositional semantic analysis of these sentences and explain how, together with this single underlying mechanism, it accounts for this phenomenon.

Much of our thinking focuses on deciding what to do in situations where the space of possible options is too large to evaluate exhaustively. Previous work has found that people do this by learning the general value of different behaviors, and prioritizing thinking about high-value options in new situations. Is this good-action bias always the best strategy, or can thinking about low-value options sometimes become more beneficial? Can people adapt their thinking accordingly based on the situation? And how do we know what to think about in novel events? Here, we developed a block-puzzle paradigm that enabled us to measure people's thinking plans and compare them to a computational model of rational thought. We used two distinct response methods to explore what people think about-a self-report method, in which we asked people explicitly to report what they thought about, and an implicit response time method, in which we used people's decision-making times to reveal what they thought about. Our results suggest that people can quickly estimate the apparent value of different options and use this to decide what to think about. Critically, we find that people can flexibly prioritize whether to think about high-value options (Experiments 1 and 2) or low-value options (Experiments 3, 4, and 5), depending on the problem. Through computational modeling, we show that these thinking strategies are broadly rational, enabling people to maximize the value of long-term decisions. Our results suggest that thinking plans are flexible: What we think about depends on the structure of the problems we are trying to solve.

Many people appear to attach great value to sad music. But why? One way to gain insight into this question is to turn away from music and look instead at why people value sad conversations. In the case of conversations, the answer seems to be that expressing sadness creates a sense of genuine connection. We propose that sad music can also have this type of value. Listening to a sad song can give one a sense of genuine connection. We then explore the nature of this value in two experimental studies. The results suggest a striking relationship between music and conversation. People see something distinctively musical in works that express precisely those emotions that they think most create connection within conversation.

The fifth volume of Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy showcases the growing depth and breadth of the field. The essays here advance debates in several areas of experimental philosophy, including the measurement of beliefs about free will and moral objectivism, as well as methodological issues at the core of both experimental philosophy and philosophy more generally. This volume also includes work on new topics in experimental philosophy: attitudes about time, the auditory characteristics of slurs, children’s understanding of metaphors, and how people think about the problem of evil. The volume concludes with essays reviewing recent work on three central topics: causal judgment, knowledge ascription, and the experimental philosophy of consciousness.

In a recent paper, I argued that philosophical intuitions are surprisingly robust both across demographic groups and across development. Machery and Stich reply by reviewing a series of studies that do show significant differences in philosophical intuition between different demographic groups. This is a helpful point, which gets at precisely the issues that are most relevant here. However, even when one looks at those very studies, one finds truly surprising robustness. In other words, despite the presence of statistically significant differences between demographic groups, a core finding coming out of those studies is that philosophical intuitions are surprisingly robust across demographic groups.

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.

Abstract Within contemporary science, it is common practice to compare data points to the average, i.e. to the statistical mean. Because this practice is so familiar, it might at first appear not to be the sort of thing that requires explanation. But recent research in cognitive science and in the history of science gives us reason to adopt the opposite perspective. Cognitive science research on the ways people ordinarily make sense of the world suggests that, instead of using a purely statistical notion of the average, people tend to use a value-laden notion of the normal. Similarly, historical research on the scientific practices used in other time periods indicates that, prior to the nineteenth century, scientists tended to make use of a notion of the normal that was overtly value-laden. These findings give us reason to rethink certain familiar facts about scientific practice. In particular, they suggest that the fact that scientists so often make use of the statistical average should be seen as a highly surprising fact, the sort of thing that calls out for explanation.