Actor-Observer Asymmetries in Judgments of Intentional Actions

Actor-Observer Asymmetries in Judgments of Intentional Actions Sarah Wellen (swellen@andrew.cmu.edu) Department of Philosophy, 135 Baker Hall, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA David Danks (ddanks@cmu.edu) Department of Philosophy, 135 Baker Hall, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA; and Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, 40 S. Alcaniz St. Pensacola, FL 32502 Abstract suggest that the Side-Effect effect is an instance of a much more general pattern of actor-observer biases, rather than a distinct phenomenon in its own right. Much recent empirical research has explored the influence of moral evaluations on judgments about the intentionality of foreseeable side-effects of actions. Research on this ‘Side-Effect effect’ (also called the ‘Knobe effect’) has relied almost exclusively on vignette-based surveys, which have serious limitations when used in isolation. We present a novel behavioral methodology that tests the Side-Effect effect in two previously unexamined contexts: (i) judgments of real (rather than hypothetical) actions, and (ii) judgments about one’s own actions. The results suggest that judgments about one’s own actions tend to show a reverse Side-Effect effect: actors judge that (real) positive side- effects of their own actions are intentional whereas negative ones are not. The use of non-hypothetical situations also appears to attenuate the standard Side-Effect effect, which raises interesting challenges for standard theoretical accounts. These results provide preliminary evidence that the Side-Effect effect is driven by the same mechanisms underlying other asymmetries in causal attribution. The Side-Effect Effect Keywords: Intentional action; Social cognition; Moral psychology; Actor-observer bias; Side-effect effect; Knobe effect; Vignettes Introduction Notions of ‘intentionality’ and ‘causation’ are crucial in the way we understand our own and others’ mental lives, as well as a range of social interactions (e.g. Gergely, Nadasdy, Csibra, & Biro, 1994; Gopnik, et al., 2004; Leslie & Keeble, 1987; Sloman, 2005; Woodward, Sommerville, & Guajardo, 2001). There has recently been a surge in research on folk understandings of these notions, much of it by experimental philosophers (e.g. Adams & Steadman, 2004a, 2004b; Knobe, 2003, 2004, 2006; Machery, 2008; Nadelhoffer, 2006; Nado, 2008; Uttich & Lombrozo, 2010). This research has revealed that folk judgments often display some surprising patterns. Perhaps the canonical example is the so-called ‘Side-Effect effect’ (also called the ‘Knobe effect’): experimental participants judge that a foreseeable side-effect of an action is more intentional when the side- effect is morally bad than when it is morally good. This paper develops a novel experimental method to investigate the Side-Effect effect that avoids some of the limitations of previous methods. Moreover, we report findings that Consider a company chairman who acts to maximize profit, even though that action has the (foreseeable) side-effect of harming the environment. Suppose also that the chairman does not care about the environment; the occurrence of this side-effect is irrelevant (in any way) to his decision. Knobe (2003) found that 85% of participants judged that the chairman had nonetheless intentionally harmed the environment. When the program had the side-effect of helping the environment, though, only 23% of participants judged that the chairman had intentionally helped the environment (Knobe, 2003). In both vignettes, the chairman’s explicit goals (i.e., his explicit intentions) and actions remain the same, yet people’s judgments about whether he intentionally brought about the side-effect change significantly depending on the valence of the side- effect. This influence of outcome valence was present cross- culturally (Knobe & Burra, 2006), in four-year-old children (Leslie, Knobe, & Cohen, 2006), and for a range of mental state ascriptions besides simply intentionality (Pettit & Knobe, 2009). While there is general agreement that the intentions of the actor should influence our moral evaluations, it is less clear why the converse should hold. Moral concerns seemingly ought not to have a pervasive impact on what appear to be straightforward judgments about an actor’s mental states (though see Bratman, 1987 and Uttich & Lombrozo, 2010, for defenses of this influence). Two different types of theories have been offered to explain the Side-Effect effect. Side-effect-centered theories hold that the different responses arise because of properties of the side-effect: some feature of negative or positive side- effects leads the actions to be judged as intentional or unintentional (respectively), or both. For instance, perhaps negative side-effects are always thought to be brought about intentionally (Knobe, 2004, 2006; but see also Pettit & Knobe, 2009, for an updated view), or negative cases require the actor to judge trade-offs (Machery, 2008). Alternately, the fact that an action violates the generalized