#902 Joshua Knobe: How Morality Influences People's Philosophical and Scientific Intuitions

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Decent. I'm your host as always Ricard Loops. And today I'm joined by Doctor Joshua Nobi. He is Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and Psychology at Yale University. A lot of his recent research has been concerned with the impact of people's moral judgments on their intuitions about questions that might initially appear to be entirely independent of morality. But as we're going to talk about today, apparently they are not. So Josh, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:34 Joshua Knobe: Thanks Ricardo. It's really good to be here.

00:37 Ricardo Lopes: So I would like to start by asking you about experimental philosophy. So what is experimental philosophy? Really? And how does it differ from, let's say armchair philosophy?

00:54 Joshua Knobe: Yeah. Awesome question. So experimental philosophy is the field that started around 20 years ago in the beginning of the 21st century. And it's a field that really is the merger of two different things. So on one hand, it uses these methods that are the methods we see all the time in psychology. So we run experiments that very much look like psychology experiments and use the same statistics, the same kinds of experimental designs that you see all the time in the field of psychology. But at a kind of theoretical level, it's really very closely connected to philosophy. So there's this tradition in philosophy, going back thousands of years of thinking about, for example, thought experiments where if you open up some work from Plato, you'll see him thinking. OK, let's talk about the concept of justice. Um Now consider this case, would you say that's justice? Now, what about this, this justice and gradually trying to understand what justice is by considering thought experiments of that type. So experimental philosophy is a field that kind of merges those two things. So it's a field that's drawing on this very long tradition within philosophy of trying to understand these concepts using this particular kind of approach to understanding them and the methods that we see in psychology of just running systematic experiments, analyzing them using data and so forth. So what you see in an experimental philosophy study is something that might look a little bit like what Plato is doing in some sense except for that instead of um just seeing well, consider this case surely. In that case, people would say this, it's we say consider this, we recruited 1000 participants, they were randomly assigned to conditions in a three by two design. We analyzed what their responses were and we can see that people's responses are affected by these factors. Now we're trying to develop a deeper understanding of what's going on within people's minds that shapes those judgments, what's going on in human cognition that makes them have the judgments they do.

02:49 Ricardo Lopes: But how does it differ from science? I mean, if in terms of methodology, it seems so similar to what we see across several different sciences, then why isn't it uh also science? Why is it still philosophy?

03:07 Joshua Knobe: That's a great question. And I think that the answer is that we should all think less about that. So if you, if you look at what's actually happening with this field of the experimental philosphy experimental philosophy studies are just being published in the same journals that or every other cognitive science um kind of paper is being published in. So for example, the journal Cognition, which is one of the leading journals in the field of cognitive science, a quantitative study of where experimental philosophy papers get published, showed that one of the most common places to publish them is cognition. And when you send a paper to cognition, they don't do some special philosophy way of thinking about it. They're just thinking about it as a contribution to cognitive science. So it's not as though there's some kind of sharp divide that we really want to say we are not scientists, we're philosophers and the things we're doing are not contributions to science, they are contributions to philosophy, which is something separate. But although there's no sharp divide like that, I really feel like there is an important difference that there really is something different about what's going on. So if you think about, for example, this field that's at the intersection of psychology and economics in which people are trying to study what's going on in people's minds that affects their economic decision making. And there are people working in that field who are psychologists and there are people working in that field who are economists. I mean, it's not like there are two separate fields. I mean, there is a field of studying this but still there's a difference that when an economist studies those questions, it's different than when a psychologist studies, those questions that economists are drawing this whole theoretical tradition that they, when they were um grad students, they were like studying real analysis and like um microeconomic theory and and then they're bringing to bear that whole tradition on these questions. I mean, you think about what's going on in experimental philosophy, I feel like you see something really similar that it it might not be a rigid dichotomy between what we're doing and what people outside of philosophy are doing. But there's something really clear if you open up one of these papers, you can tell it's written by a philosopher that it's drawing on this kind of really rich theoretical tradition that all of us in philosophy have been steeped in from our undergraduate to graduate school through all of the um interactions we're having now in philosophy departments and the research we're doing is really coming out of that, that we've been thinking about Aristotle for decades. And the study we're doing is very much influenced by that whole tradition,

05:33 Ricardo Lopes: right? But I mean, I guess that this also puts into perspective, the relationship between science and philosophy because in many ways there, there's not and uh there's uh there should, there should necessarily be a strict division between the, let's say two fields of knowledge. I mean, historically speaking, of course, science even derived from philosophy. But nowadays, even when people try to make a strict division and say that philosophy is from the humanities, and then we have the sciences which are two separate things. Uh It doesn't have to be like that,

06:17 Joshua Knobe: right? We I really strongly agree that a lot of times experimental philosophy is presented as something new as the it's kind of rebelling against the tradition of philosophy. But I completely agree with what you just said, it should be seen instead as something old that if you look at um what was going on in the 19th century in philosophy. When you think about these figures like Karl Marx Friedrich, Nietzsche Jon Stewart Mill, these people were very concerned with empirical questions, questions about what human beings are really like. And then they were trying to explore all those empirical questions using all the methods that were available at that time to explore those questions and then there was kind of this new fangled revolution against all of that, that people start to say all that stuff that people traditionally did in philosophy. That's not even philosophy, that's just science, philosophy. Is this other thing that you can do from your armchair without even um engaging with empirical data. And I think that that revolution against the traditional way of doing philosophy was just totally mistaken. There was never anything wrong with the traditional way of doing philosophy, that what those people were doing in the 19th century was just totally right. And we should just go back. It was the exactly the right approach that we should have this met mode of inquiry where we're not um distinguishing really strictly between these different things. We're trying to go after these questions with all the methods at our disposal. And we're exploring questions that are kind of recognizably philosophical. But we're exploring those questions by engaging with all the empirical data we can get that will help us answer them.

07:59 Ricardo Lopes: So after that introduction, let's get into some of the topics you explore in your work. So first of all, what is belief,

08:11 Joshua Knobe: what is belief? But in the work that we've done on this topic, what we're concerned with is how ordinary people figure out what other people believe. So, um there's something in our minds that allows us to figure out what other people believe about. So if I um am uh thinking about another person, I might think. Um Even though I'm right here in my office, she doesn't know that she thinks that I'm at home. So she believes that I'm at home. I know a question arises like, uh about how to understand the concept how people think about. So, here's what we thought about that. Here's what we argue for, with regard to that question that are more basic way of that human beings make sense of why other people do the things they do is not in terms of what they believe in terms of what they know. So the normal way of thinking about things is that I would just think, ok, you know, I'm right now, I'm in my office. Does she know that or not? And that way of thinking about things, thinking about what other people know is something that's really fundamental and so fundamental that it's very much shared with our other, with other primates and presumably with our common ancestor, with those other primates and something that's just totally automatic. It, it as soon as you see someone else and you're seeing like what they're looking at and what they're not looking at, you immediately are aware of which things they know and which things they don't know. And then the suggestion we had is that this ability that human beings have to think that other people could believe something that's not true. That should be seen as this fancy extra ability like something that only human beings have, other primates don't have it. So this suggestion, we're making a sort of a reversal of the way cognitive scientists have often thought about this. The cognitive scientists have often thought the most basic aspect of how we make sense of other people's minds is by thinking about what they believe and what they want. And then we're suggesting, no, it's the most basic way of thinking about it is in terms of what people know and what they want and then what they believe is when you're doing that you're doing, like, just a very sophisticated thing that goes beyond the way people normally understand each other.

10:23 Ricardo Lopes: But how should we go about distinguishing between belief and knowledge? I mean, what does really count as knowledge?

10:34 Joshua Knobe: Oh. So, um, maybe a helpful thing to think about in terms of what things really come to his knowledge is to understand that what knowledge is, is not just the same thing as beliefs that happen to be true. Mhm. So, suppose there's an object and it's aimed at particular place and then the object is like moving all around while I'm not looking at it, it's moving all, it's moving here, it's moving there and then just randomly it happens to move back to the exact place that it was when I was, when I was looking at it, then if I hadn't been looking at it this whole time, I might believe it's in this place and it really is in this place. But I don't know, it's in this place. It's just, I was just lucky. So, in a case like that, you might think, I believe it. And it's true, but I don't actually know it. So, the, the key idea now that we were introducing is that, um, that this ability to figure out which things people know and which they don't know, this is something shared with our, with other primates and this ability to figure out what things people believe is not. So suppose you do it um this task now with a chimpanzee. So um I put something in this, in this place and you're watching me put it in this place and then you look away. So just try it out so our viewers can see. OK. Can you look away for a second? Yeah. OK. So now while you're looking at it just stays in this place and now it's in this place, you can't, you can't see it. Now turn back. OK. Now once you turn back, I as the other, um as a chimpanzee would expect that when you're trying to get it, say it's a piece of food that you'd look here and you wouldn't look here but not consider a different kind of case. So suppose I put the object in this place and then you look away. Now, while you're looking late, let's try, can you demonstrate while you're looking at the object moves all around, it's moving, it's moving, it's here, it's here. Ok. Now, look back. So now just by chance it happened to end up in the same place that it was when you looked away. Another question is where does the chimpanzee expect you to go when you're trying to find it? And the answer is chimpanzees are just completely a chance. They think it's totally random which place you go. So that seems to indicate chimpanzees can figure out which things you know, but they can't figure out which things you believe, you believe it's here, but you don't know it's here. So they have no idea where you think it is.

13:00 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. And from the perspective of cognitive science, what is more basic representations of knowledge or representations of

13:11 Joshua Knobe: belief? And that at least what we suggest. And this is in a paper that's where the lead author is, Jonathan Phillips is that the more basic thing is knowledge. And in that way, we're sort of going against what a lot of cognitive scientists have traditionally thought like that. A lot of cognitive scientists traditionally thought if you want to understand basically how I make sense of your mind, the most basic thing to understand is how I figure out what you think. And then our suggestion is people can figure out what you think, but that's not the thing they're using most generally. Maybe they use that in cases where something weird is happening. And so they can't use their more basic approach and the more basic approach is to figure out what, you know. So I don't know if this will be a helpful example. But um, I, if we're going to your home and we're just walking on the street, I immediately have this sense that, you know, where your home is and then my ability to think about the fact that you know, where your home is. So we're gonna go to the right place, doesn't rely in any way on my ability to attribute beliefs to you, right?

14:21 Ricardo Lopes: So, uh uh and le let's now talk a little bit about uh causal judgments and norm violations because you've done some work on that. So do norm violations interact with causal judgments. And if so

14:37 Joshua Knobe: how, yeah, so a lot of studies show that um when you're judging whether one thing caused another thing, then people tend to think that people's judgments about whether this cause that depend on whether they think that this thing is right or wrong or good or bad. So you, I'll just give an example to explain it. So imagine that you're in the philosophy department and the receptionist has a, has some pens on her desk. So now, um the there are like two pens on her desk and the rule of the department is that administrative assistants are allowed to take the pens, but professors are not supposed to take pens from the desk, they're just supposed to bring their own pens. So I mentioned one day the administrative assistant and Professor Smith are walking by the desk and they just each take a pen. So the administrative assistant takes a pen just like she's supposed to. And Professor Smith also takes a pen even though she's totally not supposed to and she's just completely violating this rule. Now, after they've both done that, um, there's no pens on the desk. And so when the receptionist gets a call, she has a problem, she has no pen to like, take down the message to know who caused the problem. In that case, participants overwhelmingly to say that the recept that the Professor Smith caused the problem, but the administrative assistant did not cause the problem. And then in that case, they're making a causal judgment. They're just judging whether one thing caused another, but their judgment about whether something caused something else seems to be shaped in some way by their judgments of which things are right or wrong to do. And then over the past few years, we've been doing all these different kinds of research to explain why that's happened

16:15 Ricardo Lopes: and why does that happen?

16:18 Joshua Knobe: Well, there are a number of different theories and um it could turn out that our theory is wrong, but the theory that we adopt is that it depends is that people's moral judgments are shaping which possibilities they think of. So in the case that I just described what happened in the actual world was that the administrative assistant took a pen and Professor Smith took a pen. But you could imagine other possibilities, what we call counter factuals. You could just imagine other things that could have happened. So one thing you could imagine is the administrative assistant could have just not taken a pen, even though there was no reason for her to do that. And the professor could have taken a pen. And then in that case, the problem wouldn't have occurred. But you would tend not to think about that possibility because why would the administrative system of not taking that? And then another possibility you could consider is, for example, the administrative system takes a pen and the professor doesn't take a pen. In that case, also, the problem wouldn't have occurred, but there's just a much higher probability that you think of that possibility, the possibility in which people do what they're supposed to do. And so we developed this theory according to that, which is science probabilities to different thoughts. So if you mentioned different things, you could possibly think, then there's a probability of thinking certain things and a probability of other thinking other things and they're different, there are different potential probabilities and then the degree to which you end up regarding certain things as causes can be defined in it mathematically in terms of those probabilities. So in the case that I just told you given the exact way it works because there was a higher probability of thinking about cases in which the professor doesn't take a pen and in the case in which the administrative assistant doesn't take a pen, you would more say the professor across the public. Mhm. Uh,

18:04 Ricardo Lopes: SO, uh, we're going to talk more about the work you've been doing on, uh, how morality and moral appraisals affect or at least influence how we think. Uh, BUT, uh, I, I mean, let me ask you another question to introduce a topic that also we sort of related to that. So people have this idea or concept of the true self. So, what is that? What does that mean? Exactly.

18:37 Joshua Knobe: Oh, yeah, it's a, it's a really good question. Try to understand what it really is. So there's a very straightforward sense of which it seems like people have it though. Like, so for example, um, suppose that, uh, you are faced with this conflict, which is that you want to have, you, you're, um, addicted to heroin and you want to have some heroin, but also at the very time you want to get clean and then there's this conflict between you. Now suppose you end up yielding to the temptation to do more heroin and then you abandon the desire to get clean. A lot of people would think that decision that you did chose, it doesn't reflect what you really want deep down inside something like you're betraying your true self. And then by contrast, if you chose the opposite option, if you said I'm going to, um, uh, just not do this heroin, I'm gonna get clean and I get a jug and I get back with, if you did that, no one would say you're betraying your true self because deep down inside what you really wanted to do was to have no heroin. So in that case, people have a very clear intuition about which one is the thing that your true self is calling you to it. And then there's a much more difficult question, which is what does that mean? Like what, what is it that makes us think that one is the one that's your true self,

19:55 Ricardo Lopes: right? Uh And I, and I mean, is it that there are any universals when it comes to how people think about the true self?

20:07 Joshua Knobe: Well, we do find actually that there's something strikingly systematic that you see across many different people and many different cultures. And that is that when there's a conflict between two different things. So part of you is drawn toward one thing and part of you is drawn to the other people show a very striking tendency to think that the one person you really are deep down inside the real you is the thing that's to the thing that they think is good. So in the case that I just described, if you think that during heroin is bad, you'd be less likely to think that that's, that your real self. So if different people have totally opposite views about what is good, then those different people will have totally opposite views about who you really are deep down inside. Like if, if you're caught between A and B and some people think A is the good thing and some people think B is the good thing, the people who think A is the good thing will say deep down inside the real Ricardo is struggling toward A and the other people who think B is the good thing will think deep down in his true self. The real Ricardo is the thing that's been drawing him to be.

21:14 Ricardo Lopes: And what about the misanthrope specifically? Do they also think that the true self is uh is good or not?

21:24 Joshua Knobe: Yeah. So some people have this tendency that they think people are bad. So if you just ask them on um explicit questions, like, do you agree with the following statement? You just can't really trust people, they're gonna do bad stuff to you, then they say, yeah, people are terrible. So now the question is they still think that the true self is good. So in um some research that was led by Julian Deres, we, we looked at that question and what we did was um we told, told participants about a story about someone who's caught between two things. So they have a desire to do the morally good thing and they have a desire to do the morally bad thing. And then participants were randomly assigned to one of two questions. So one question is given that people are copying these two things. Which one do you predict they'll actually do if someone's copying these two things, you know, what do you think he's gonna do? And then it's pretty unsurprising the people who are very low in misanthropy say he's gonna do the good thing. And the people who are high in misanthropy say he's gonna do the bad thing. But then by contrast, we say, um OK, there are these two things I'm not asking you which one he's gonna do. I'm asking you which one is his true self. Then the people who are low in misanthropy and the people who are high in misanthropy both say the true self is the one drawing him toward what's good. So misanthropes think you're, they, they still think deep down you're good. They just think you're not gonna do the thing that your true self is calling you to do.

22:55 Ricardo Lopes: But do we know why? That's the case? I mean, why, even though they still think that the true self is good, uh they don't expect that people will behave in a good way. Why is that?

23:10 Joshua Knobe: That's really fascinating question. And it really gets to a deep question of what this thing even is like, what, what is it to say that someone has a true self. It doesn't seem to be something that we're using to predict what they're actually going to do. It seems to be something else. I think maybe this won't answer your question, but maybe just to give a sense of what this judgment is, it would be helpful to give an example one of our studies. So this is a study that was led by George Newman. And in this study, participants were told about this guy Mark and there were two different conditions in one condition. Participants were told Mark as an evangelical preacher and he travels around the world brings people this message that homosexuality is a sin and you can be redeemed from that sin through the power of Jesus. If you pray, you can like rid yourself of homosexuality. And then marcus' problem, which is that he himself is actually gay. And so he himself is really drawn to other men. And then he describes this in his speeches and acknowledges it as part of his own personal struggle. So there's a struggle within Mark. Um He has desire to be with other man and he's a belief that it's morally wrong. So which part is his true self? In that case, I just described liberal participants to tend to say Marx, true yourself is the part that um is being drawn to other men. And the conservatives tend to say Mars yourself is the part that believes that it's morally wrong. I know if you can kind of feel that intuitively. But now suppose we switch it. So now we're gonna say America is this person who travels all around the world, bringing to people this message that people of all sexual orientations should be treated equally. And then he teaches people techniques that they can use to treat gay people with respect. But Mark himself has a problem and the problem is that he himself finds himself feeling disgusted by gay people. And then he acknowledges this fully and just recognized it as a part of his own personal struggle. So now again, his emotions and his moral beliefs are are out of um fighting against each other, but now in the opposite direction. So this time, which do people think it's, is his true self? Here, it's reversed. The liberals tend to say is more a belief that you should treat people with all sexual orientations equally. That's his true self. If you could just get rid of this disgust, then he'd be able to more fully express the person, he was all alone. And then the conservatives tend to say that emotion of disgust, that is his true self. And if you could get rid of the moral belief, then you'd be able to express the person he really is all about. So now we face this question, which is the question that you just posed, you know, how do we make sense of what this thing is? It doesn't seem to be something that people are using to predict what Mark is going to do. It seems to be playing some other role in their way of thinking about who Mark really is.

26:01 Ricardo Lopes: But then, uh, people's own moral values influence how they think about the true self. And what they say is the true self of someone they are evaluating.

26:17 Joshua Knobe: Yeah, exactly. And people's moral beliefs affect that and then it doesn't seem to be that they only affects judgments about the true self, let's say of a human being, they seem to also affect judgments about the essence of other things other than human beings. So say, there's some band you like and now suppose the band has different albums over time. See, their first album was really amazing. And then by the third album they've, like, totally sold out and then the, the band is just like, doing some, like, corporate schlock to sell more records. Yeah. I thought you could ask the question, like all those different albums, which one reflects, like what this band is really all about. Like the true essence of this band. Then you get the same effect that people say, whichever is the best one that's what affects like the real essence of the band. No one ever thinks, um, the schlocky corporate stuff. That's what the band was really all about. And then they were betraying their true essence in their first album when they created this amazing music, we're supposed to think about the essence of the United States. So the United States has done various different things. For example, there's maybe a lot of freedom, but there's also a lot of racism. And then you might ask the question, you know, what's the real essence of the United States? What's the United States really all about? And then different people have different views about which things about the United States are the good ones and which are the bad ones. But people seem to think whichever is the good thing about the United States. That's what the United States is really all about. So this thing that we see for judgments about the true self, it seems like it arises for judgments about the self, arises for like what you are really all about, but not just because you're because of you, because you're a human being, it also arises for nations, for bands, for all sorts of different things. Like if I write a philosophy paper and it has different sections and some are good and some are bad, whichever section you think is the good one, you'll think that's the real heart of what my paper is really all about.

28:22 Ricardo Lopes: And, uh, I mean, I asked you if uh moral beliefs influence the way people think about the true self of a particular somebody. So, but uh, does it work also the other way around? I mean, do beliefs about the true self influence moral judgment. That's

28:43 Joshua Knobe: a great question. We, we have some evidence in recent work with Michael printing that seems to suggest that, that they do. So, the basic idea would be, um, suppose, for example, that, um someone is, um, he's caught between two different kind of romantic interests like a woman is trying to choose between two different men. And then suppose you learn, she's drawn to one and she's also drawn to the other, but deep down in her truest heart, she's more drawn to this one and less to that one that makes people think that this one is actually the good person that people think the thing that your true self is drawing you toward. Probably that thing is good. And it feels like a, like a really fundamental kind of heuristic that people use sometimes in their own decision making that, that when they're trying to figure out what's right, they seem to be drawn to the thought that whatever their truest deepest self is pulling them toward, that must really be the right thing. Mhm.

29:52 Ricardo Lopes: And I mean, do judgments moral judgments regarding uh the goodness or the badness of someone's behavior, have any influence in how we think about them being happy or not, or if they deserve praise or blame, that is uh thinking about a particular agent's behavior in moral terms, also influence how we think about it in terms of some other psychological dimensions like happiness, praise blame. And so on,

30:29 Joshua Knobe: we, we get these very strong effects for happiness. So an obvious thought you might have about what it is to be happy. Is it being happy? It just means feeling really good all the time, not feeling bad. And I don't know, thinking your life is going well, this is about his mental states that you have. But for some reason, we're finding that people's moral judgments affect whether you see someone's happy or not. So imagine two different cases. So imagine this person who feels really good all the time, doesn't feel bad and thinks her life is going great. And the reason is she's like a high school student who is um really uh has close friends in her high school and is like working to help the disadvantaged, like on her spare time and it's a good relationship with her parents and so forth. Then people think she's truly happy but not consider a different person I met with someone who's more like Regina George, the character from mean girls. So she feels really good and she doesn't feel bad and she thinks her life is going great. And the reason is because she's the most popular kid in the class. And whenever anyone else tries to challenge her or something, she just like insults them and demeans them and just dominates everyone. She has no real friends, no real interests doesn't really care about anything. And it's just trying to like, get to the top of this popularity contest, then people feel when you give that case a little, I much more torn about whether the person is happy. So a lot of people seem to have this feeling like, well, there's clearly a sense in which she's happy. You just said she feels good. But on the other hand, they feel like no, but there's some deeper sense of when she doesn't feel happy at all in some sense, what she has is not true happiness where true happiness seems to be something that you can laugh even if you're feeling pretty great.

32:15 Ricardo Lopes: Uh But uh I mean, when it comes to happiness, this is, I guess a complicated concept, isn't it the case that conceptions of happiness vary cross culturally.

32:28 Joshua Knobe: We don't find that in the studies that we've done. So you work with Yang, we um why we and she translated all of this into Chinese and then just ran all these cases in um in China with Chinese people. And then we find exactly the same thing arising that people say the person who's morally bad isn't really happy. And then, and then tried it with Children. So um if you imagine like just asking the same kind of question to a four year old, and then we find again the same thing, Children also show the same effect. So overall, it seems like what, what's going on is that this effect seems to be not something that's just arising I don't know because of certain weird idiosyncrasies of what's going on in western culture, in the 20 twenties. It's something that is in very young Children before they've had the chance to kind of learn all the subtleties of exactly how words are used. And it's something that arises across very different cultures. It's a very good question why it's happening, but it doesn't seem to be happening because it's something more like about, um kind of just uh certain books we happen to have read or certain ways we happen to use this one word.

33:46 Ricardo Lopes: Uh And I, I would like to ask you now about uh folk morality. Do, do people, for example, tend to believe in objective moral truths?

33:58 Joshua Knobe: Yeah, that's a great question. So in, in philosophy, there's been a really long and profound question uh inquiry into the question are their moral truths objective? Could there really be a fact of the matter about some moral question? And within philosophy, there's some people who think the answer is yes and some people who think the answer is no. But typically people on both sides of that dispute say that ordinary folks think the answer is definitely yes. So the people who say that the answer is yes, they were defending the ordinary view and the people who say the answer is no, say the ordinary view is wrong. There aren't objective well truths in the way people think they ordinarily are. But why do people say that just try asking a few people around you. And you'll find immediately that people don't always say that their objective moral is pe different people you ask will give you different answers and different questions, the ways of asking the question will give you different answers. It seems like what's happening and you could see this. I think immediately if you just asked a few friends is that people regard this as a confusing question that they think it's a difficult question to answer and they're kind of drawn in competing directions. So we ran a whole series of studies and that's what they seem to show that um people are confused about this. It's like difficult and de depending on various things that you do, you can kind of push people in very different directions.

35:22 Ricardo Lopes: But uh I, I mean, o of course, I don't know if you controlled for these in those studies but uh the way people think about morality and moral proofs as being objective or not, this, is it influence or do you know if it's influenced in any way by uh political beliefs? For example, I mean, beca because the there's this, sometimes we hear this idea that uh conservative people when compared to liberal people would believe more in objective moral truths. But I, I don't know if that has any scientific or experimental philosophical support to it or

36:09 Joshua Knobe: not. Yeah, that is true. So in studies by this is not my own work. But in studies by Louis SS, he finds this correlation that more conservative people more believe in objective moral truths and more liberal people less believe in objective moral truths. So that's just a correlation. It doesn't mean that the political beliefs are affecting the, um, the beliefs about the nature of normality. It could be a different way where there's some deeper fact about a person and that affects your political beliefs and it also just affects your beliefs about morality. But in any case, you're totally right, though different people with different political beliefs tend to have different beliefs about whether they're objective morals.

36:54 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, AND so, but when it comes to moral relativism, do we have any idea about how prevalent it is among people and, uh, across different cultures? I mean, is it that it's very common or

37:10 Joshua Knobe: not? Yes. So in studies to address this question, we try, um, uh, to test whether people are moral relatives by giving them the, the following kind of cases. So they're gonna be three different conditions. And so imagine there's some person in, I don't know, New Jersey and this person does something like, for example, he murders his own child. And now suppose that you say that what he did was morally wrong. And then I say what he did is totally fine. And then participants are asked the question given that Ricardo and Josh said, opposite things about this does one of them have to be wrong, Ricardo or Josh or could it be that neither of them is wrong? And then in that case, participants overwhelmingly say one of us has to be wrong. Ok. Now consider a different case, suppose there's discrepancies in New Jersey, then he murders his own child. And then I say that, um, what that, what he did is morally wrong. And then there's someone else in a completely different culture, say this is the hunter gatherer living in the Amazon. And then that person says what this person did isn't wrong at all. It's totally fine. Then given that I said this thing and this other person from his other cultures said the opposite. Does one of us have to be wrong? Or could we both be right on that case, people are right about at the midpoint of the scale. So in that case, participants don't say definitely one of you has to be wrong or definitely could be that you're neither of you is wrong. They're kind of like neither here nor there. Now consider a third condition. That's like an even more distinct culture. So ma that there are these extraterrestrial beings, they're called the PS and the P tars don't have any of the interest that we have. They're not, they don't care about like love and friendship and like um helping others. None of that, all they care about is maximizing the total number of Pentagons in the universe. And then, for example, if one of them becomes too old and tired and sick to accomplish this task, they just kill that and just turn him into a Pentagon and then none of them see anything wrong with that. No, I mentioned that this person in New Jersey kills his own child and I say that's really morally bad. And one of the panthers says, no, it's totally fine. There's nothing bad about it at all. Then in that case, does one of us have to be wrong me or the Panther or could it be that neither of us is wrong in that kind of case, participants tend to say neither of you has to be wrong. So it's a little bit unclear what to make of this and different um philosophers have had very different thoughts about it, but it seems to at least suggest there, there's something that draws us toward thinking in a relativist way as we start thinking about um judges who are more and more different from each other. Mhm.

39:51 Ricardo Lopes: Uh So it seems that also that uh people consistently make sense of moral events in terms of agents and patients do, do we know why? That's the case?

40:06 Joshua Knobe: So right there, there's really important work, not, not by me, that's indicating it a really fundamental aspect of how people think about moral situations is that there is kind of true rules, there's the role of the agent and the role of the patient So I don't know if um if the Russian army killed some innocent people in a Ukrainian town, then the Russian army would be the agent and the innocent people who got killed will be the patient. And then uh research on this topic has explored these two rules, these fundamental rules and morality and uh how things like that work. Like, for example, some research seems to suggest that it's very hard to see someone as occupying bulls ws like in two different events. They, they would be hard in the case. I just described to think that for example, the um people would tend not to think that those people were the victims of the Russian army, but also they themselves are perpetrators who harm other people within their towns, right? So then the question arises, why does morality work like that? Why do we have these two fundamental rules? And one possible answer you could give is that it's just because it's something about morality, morality is like that. But at least what we suggested was may, maybe it's not, maybe the reason that things work that way is because it's something much more general about human cognition, how the human mind works. There people tend to think about agents and patients or sometimes they're called agents and themes in general. And some evidence from that comes from like the structure of human language that if you think about um which thing goes in the subject position of a sentence and which thing goes in the object position of the sentence? It it's, it's not random. It always seems to be the agent and the patient. So just to give you a sense of what I mean, you know how we have the word, for example. Um Great. So you couldn't say like I broke his bone and that would mean like that I was the one who caused the bone to break or like John broke Fred's bone or we could have like um hurt like John hurt Fred. But no, I imagine we tried to create a verb that's like the reverse of hurt. It's called a Schmidt. And then John Schmidt uh Fred Schmit did um John just means the same thing as John hurt. Fred that no language has a word that works like that and you can kind of feel it immediately like that we could never have that, that verb could never exist. So it feels like there's this very basic connection we have uh idea we have about agency and patient is such that we're always gonna put the agent and subject position and the patient or in this is sometimes called the theme in the object position.

42:50 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm uh And since we're talking here about uh folk philosophy, what tend to be people's ideas about free will, I mean, is the belief in free will, a human universal.

43:05 Joshua Knobe: Well, it, it, it's really interesting that what you find if you ask people in the United States about free, well, like say we just looked around here is that people find it confusing. So um if you ask like folks right around here, if I ask them certain kinds of questions, what I get is that people would immediately recognize that that's like a really confusing question and then they're like torn in different directions. Some people would say one thing, some people say another thing, a lot of people would just openly admit that that's like a really hard problem. So that like you said about universality, a really question now is um is is why why do people find it confusing around here? And when I was um first starting to work on this issue, uh what I thought the answer was is that it's due in part certain very specific kind of talks about Western culture that make us find it confusing. But also, I mean, people in Western culture and then, and then I was totally wrong. So I um started researching this topic with um my colleague Sean Nichols who had the opposite guess about what was right? And I just got completely owned it is in no way. Did that turn out to be true? What happened instead was that this kind of intuition that we, these kind of intuitions that we have in in Western culture that are pulling us in opposite directions and confusing us and making the question seem like a really puzzling one those arise really universally. So in in a beautiful recent study where the first author was Ivar Henkin, um participants were recruited from all different places across the world and given questions about free will. And if you look at the Western culture, what you find is that people are very divided. Some people say one thing, some people say the other, it's obviously a really confusing question. And then that exact same confusion arose in every world region that they looked at every different continent showed the same confusion with the same kind of percentage of people saying one thing and saying the other thing. So it's really like this feeling we have that but it's confusing that it's puzzling that there's something going wrong when we think about free will. It's not because of something about our weird culture. It's because of something about human way of understanding action.

45:25 Ricardo Lopes: But I I mean when you mentioned there that uh when you ask people certain questions, you get the sense that they are a bit confused about free will. Could you give us examples of some of those questions just for us to get a better sense of what we're talking about here?

45:44 Joshua Knobe: Absolutely. So in one of the early studies we did about this, we were interested in the question, what do people think when I think about this kind of question abstractly just like theoretically? And what did you think about this question? And the thing about individual cases with individual behaviors. OK. So to address this question, we told people about this imaginary universe, we called it universe a and we said like, OK, imagine in this, this imaginary universe is totally deterministic. So what that means is everything that happens was completely caused by the thing that happened before, which was completely caused by the thing that happened before that it's clearly caused by the thing that happened before that all the way back to the very beginning of the universe. So if you consider how things were, you know, one second after the universe first began, that completely caused the thing that would happen next and next and next. So that given the way things were at the very beginning of the universe and given the laws of physics in this universe, you and I would have to be having this conversation right now. It could be like in principle predicted from the 1st, 2nd after the universe we have. So OK, do you understand this idea of the universe? All right, people get this. I got. Yeah. And then we said no, um here's a question and then were split into two conditions in one condition. They got an abstract question. The abstract question was, can anyone in this universe ever be morally responsible for anything they ever do? And an overwhelmingly participant saying no in this universe that you described universe, a no one can ever be more responsible for anything. It's just not possible. Determinist the universe. That's what philosophers call incompatible with. It's called incompatible because it's saying moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. Then in the other people got a very different question. It was a concrete question. So participants, which will imagine one guy in that universe, a guy in universe a he falls in love with his secretary and he wants to like leave his wife and family for a secretary. So he sets up an inn device in his basement that burns down the house and kills his own wife and Children. Is that guy more than responsible that guy in universe A is he morally responsible for what he did? And their participants overwhelmingly say yes. So these are obviously like logically inconsistent participants are saying in universe A in the abstract, no one can ever be more responsible for anything they do. But they're also saying that one guy who was in universe A is totally more responsible for this one thing that he did.

48:08 Ricardo Lopes: So, a and since we've been talking about moral judgments and how they affect or influence, uh thinking about different topics, uh The uh what uh is it the case that what you just mentioned there points to uh moral judgment also influencing how we think about free will. I mean, in that particular case, uh is, should we conclude that if people want to blame someone, they tend to attribute free will to their actions?

48:45 Joshua Knobe: Yeah. At first I thought that was right. The thing that you just said and then in, in a really beautiful series of studies, Florent Cage showed that it, it's not right. So there really is a difference between concrete things and abstract things. So when it's concrete, people think it's due to um to your um uh when it's concrete, they think that you, you're, you're responsible for it and you do it freely and when it's abstract, I think you don't, but it's not due to, for example, you being really upset about the thing the person did and really wanting to blame them. So for example, if you start dialing down how bad it is to something that's just kind of like feels bad in the kind of a technical sense, but isn't really like something that people would be outraged by like in my example, people still think the person is more the responsible and then coal looked at people who have frontal temporal dementia. And so as a result of this um disorder, they don't feel angry at people in the same way they normally would in cases like this and those people have been shown to have very different judgments about certain kinds of matters. But unless they show the exact same pattern of judgments. So if things like it's really something about the concreteness, it's about thinking about an individual, human being doing an individual thing and it's not something about um the rage that you feel against this person who killed his own Children

50:14 Ricardo Lopes: but OK, whatever it is behind it, uh we see these occurring cross culturally. I mean, do people tend to, when they are presented with abstract or concrete scenarios, do they tend to think about them in similar ways? Cross culturally.

50:35 Joshua Knobe: We, we do. Yeah, it looks like we do. So we do find in one study that participants in the abstract think about these things in, in a similar way cross culturally. And then we also find in the um this isn't, so that was in the um uh Sarkissian Nicholson, I did. And then in the study that I just mentioned from Heine Kanen, participants are given like a little concrete vignette that's designed in such a way that, that it's confusing, you know, different people say different things in the United States. People are very divided, you know, half the people say one thing and half the people say another thing. And then if you look at China, people are also very divided. If you look at different countries in Africa, people are also very divided there. It feels like that division is itself something that's called that we're seeing across many different cultures. I find they're quite striking like that. If you think about what you might expect to be the same across cultures, you might think there are these things that are really fundamental to just being able to survive in our world. Like things like, for example, judgments about how it's appropriate to treat your own Children or something like that, that you could imagine in no culture would people think it's OK to do certain terrible things to their Children? And that would be a universal thought. What we're seeing here is these very obscure seeming like metaphysical questions about free will. Judgments on these questions seem to be universal. And that, that seems like a really puzzling phenomenon that it's the kind of thing you might have thought would vary considerably and that there would be no reason to expect that you kind of be built to the nature of our cognition to give similar judgments on questions like those.

52:24 Ricardo Lopes: So uh and I mean, when it comes to finding these universals, these human universals, when it comes to philosophical intuitions and we're going to get into some more of them, we talked about free will here. Uh Do you also, are you also interested in trying to understand where do those universals come from? If for example, they are the result of evolution by natural selection operating on a cognitive level or some other thing?

53:02 Joshua Knobe: Yeah. A absolutely. So we, we would absolutely want to know why these things seem to arise across cultures. So maybe it's too much to say these things are universal. It's not that we would really have evidence for that, you know, from any study. But I think that they're surprisingly stable and you know, a really difficult question arises as to why they would be so stable. So maybe it would be helpful to give an example of the kind of thing that just feels like super weird and kind of like just a very strange quirk, but turns out to be surprisingly stable across cultures. So this is an effect that was first discovered by um Wesley Buck Walter and James Beanie. And then these cross cultural studies were done by um mj Kim and Yuan, y So what we Lee Buchalter and James BB were just interested in when people think, you know, something versus just really something, it turns out to be true, like in the case that I just described before, you know, so they had the idea that maybe mortality affects it. So here's the kind of study that they ran in one condition, someone's the mayor of a town and um he gets some uh has a meeting with someone who's like, you know, one of his employees and the employee says, ok, we've got this new policy that we're considering and this new policy is going to really increase campaign contributions to you. So you're gonna make tons of money and it's also going to bring jobs to people from the town. And then he says, I don't really care about bringing jobs to people in this town. All I want to do is just get as much money as possible for myself. So he says, to um sign this contract that's going to adopt the policy. So he goes in to sign the contract and then as he's just about to sign it, the corporation switches it for a completely different contract. So the contract he signed is not at all the one that he thought he was gonna sign. But then it turned out that that other contract, the one he really did sign, ends up bringing jobs to people in this town. So he believed he would bring jobs to people in town and he did bring jobs to the people in town. Did he know that he was gonna bring jobs to the people in town. In that case, most people say no, ok. Now consider another case. The assistant comes to the mayor and says, we've got this new policy. It's gonna make huge amounts of money for you. So you'll get all these campaign contributions, but it's also gonna cut jobs for people in the town. So people in the town are gonna really be hurt by this policy. And the they says, I don't care about the people in the town. I know they're gonna cut, you know, it's gonna cut their jobs, but I don't care about that. Let's just go ahead and, and do this. So he goes to sign the contract and then the corporation, he's gonna sign the contract to it switches out for a different contract. So the one he's signing has all different provisions says all different stuff. But that other country does end up cutting jobs to the town. Did he know that he was going to cut jobs to people in the town? In that case, people say yes, that just feels like a really weird, like quirky thing about our way of understanding knowledge. And then um Kim and um Yuan studied that same thing by translating all of these vignettes. I just gave you into Korean and Chinese and then running them on Korean and Chinese people. And the same thing happens among participants in South Korea and China. So why would that be? It? It feels like this weird thing I just told you, it doesn't feel like we would have evolved to have that exact quality, this quality of making knowledge judgments based on morality. It, I don't know if it, if it's somehow in some way built into us innately, it must be that somehow just the side effect or byproduct's of other cognitive capacities we have that serve some other use. It's very hard to see what might be going on here. I feel like it's very puzzling why these things we're seeing are happening across different cultures.

56:44 Ricardo Lopes: OK. So they could still be the result or a by-product of certain uh cognitive adaptations, but they are not necessarily adaptations themselves or are not necessarily evolved themselves.

57:01 Joshua Knobe: It feels very unlikely in the case that I just told you that human beings there was selective pressure for making knowledge judgments in a way that's infused by morality. I mean, that one thing doesn't seem like it was really being selected for. It could be that our judgments about that one thing are the product of these cognitive processes and those processes were selected for in some way. But those processes also do other things that seems like it could make sense. It could be that there's convergent cultural evolution. It's a very complex problem to understand why these things are so stable across cultures.

57:42 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm But uh I asked you as an example about uh free will but have you or some of your other colleagues in experimental philosophy uh studied uh people's philosophical intuitions in general? I mean, and if so do they tend to vary a lot or are they stable across, for example, demographic groups and situations?

58:12 Joshua Knobe: Well, that's a wonderful question. So first of all, obviously, the answer is that in some ways they're stable and in some ways they're different. I mean, we could have known that before we ran any studies there. It's not that there's no differences ever between cultures on anything and there's no differences I don't know between genders on anything. And it's also not that every single thing is totally different between cultures and between genders and then different people have different opinions about how to understand what, what we actually discovered. I mean, given that we found that some things differ and some things stay the same. You know, what should we be struck by my own opinion? And this is certainly a matter of debate. Is that what we should really be struck by is just how similar everything is that it's not that everything stayed the same, it's not that everything was different, but overall things were just amazingly amazingly similar. So just to give an example, there was a really nice paper by Edelberg Thompson and Nus that looked at a whole bunch of different things that people thought might differ across genders. So these were all um uh effects that someone had actually said in existing literature. I said this is going to differ between men and women. And then for all of them, I think it was maybe 21 different things or 18 different things. Some of them like that, that they checked whether there was a difference and it's not that they found no differences, it's that they found one difference. So approximately what they found is one intuitions on one thing did differ between men and women and on the other, you know, around 19, all of those were the same. So that doesn't mean there are no differences, there are differences. But overall, the message seems to be, these things are really, really similar. And then I feel like what, what we're seeing especially is um if you consider certain kinds of um moral judgments, for example, or judgments about religious things are, are explicitly transmitted to people. Like people, like your parents tell you about morality. Yeah. Then obviously we get cross cultural differences on those things. So. Mhm. So, if you grew up in Iowa or you grew up in Brazil, you're gonna have different judgments about morality and it's really obvious why it's like, people are just explicitly telling you about morality. But most things that philosophers study are things that no one ever tells you about. Like when you're growing up, no one ever says, you know, I just really want you to understand that whether someone has knowledge depends in part on whether something is morally good or morally bad. Like then you just kind of pick stuff up but no one ever talks about it and on those things, the things that no one ever talks about, we really seem to be getting amazing degrees of sonari.

1:01:05 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, that, that's very interesting. And I, and I mean, another interesting question, I guess about all of these that we've been talk about we've been talking about is so this is about folk philosophy. But I mean, philosophers themselves are also people. So I mean, when it comes to uh the variation, specifically, the variation we find across different groups of people, do you think that by having an understanding of what's behind that variation, we could also have a better understanding of why professional philosophers differ in their views of different philosophical topics? You

1:01:52 Joshua Knobe: mean why different philosophers have different views, maybe we can understand it. Yeah, that's a great question. So, um the, the first answer is, I, I don't know, I don't know the answer to the question. And then, um there, there has been some research that tries to get out why different philosophers have different views and whether it has to do with differences between the, the different philosophers and then I'll just talk a little bit about what has been found. So, in a really nice study by Yaden, the result was that one result was that demographic factors don't predict it. So different philosophers think different stuff. I don't know about free will, about whether morality is objective and so forth. And then different philosophers are, you know, themselves from, from different cultures. And so some are men, some are women, some are non-binary like that doesn't predict their judgments. Then a separate question was for example, whether facts but their personalities affect their, their judgments about these things. And overall, I would say um in the study of philosophers, they mostly didn't. So, so facts about like what kind of person you are have overall, I would say very little impact on, on what your philosophical views were but not exclusively. So for example, if you ask professional philosophers, whether they do drugs, so do you use recreational drugs? And then you ask them, are there objective truths about art like which art is better and which art is worse? Those two things are correlated. So the more drugs you use, the less you think there is like objective truths about art and that seems to be totally real. So there is no, in just in that case, for example, certain kinds of correlations between your personality or the kind of life you're living in your philosophical. And then in a series of studies that feel really funny to me, Nick Bird was looking at um the relationship between uh like being reflective in the sense that for example, you can solve certain logical problems correctly and um and having certain answers to philosophical questions, but then this might not seem very surprising. But um if you ask ordinary folks say, you, you just go into like a classroom and you give everyone like a bunch of logic puzzles and you can see who's better, who gets the best right answer and who gets the wrong answer. Then what you find is that um that predicts uh judgments about certain philosophical questions. So just as an example, um in the case that I gave you earlier where I was seeing like um imagine that this person who kills his wife and family, the, the more you um get logic, right, the more you think he's not more responsible for what he did. OK. So this is the weird thing that Bird discovered if you know, run it on philosophers. So you're running it on or philosophy professors. It still happens that the philosophy professors who get the logic problems, right? Tend to have different answers than the philosophy professors who don't. So that feels like a very strange fact. But he did find it. I, I think that the, the, the broader answer to your question is that I, I think as a philosopher, when I consider these questions, like the age old questions of philosophy that people have been discussing for thousands of years, I feel torn, like I feel drawn in one direction and drawn in another. And then eventually I might make up my mind like maybe I'm torn. But I decided on this. I think one question you could ask is do these theories explain why I eventually decided on this? And someone else decides on that another question you ask, you could ask is do these theories explain why both of us are torn in the first place? I think it's definitely the second, but at the very least we're really getting some explanation of, of why people feel confused, if not an explanation of why different people resolve the confusion in different ways. Mhm

1:05:54 Ricardo Lopes: But I mean, do you think we should at least expect that individual differences in cognition wherever they stem from, would have an impact on uh philosopher's views or not? Yeah.

1:06:12 Joshua Knobe: Well, this in the street that I was just talking about, it's sort of a mixed band in that. What the study did is it looks at a very large number of different philosophical views and a very large number of um individual differences in human cognition and overwhelmingly, the individual difference, variables don't predict their philosophical views. So if you could consider all the possible pairs, just overwhelmingly, there's no prediction. And then if you look at most of the philosophical views, what you find is that none of the individual, different variables predict them. But, but even though that's true, um we do find that some philosophical views are predicted by some individual differences. And the one example that I just gave was um beliefs about what their objective truths about what's artistically good really are predicted by something. I, I think we might find other similar things like it, it might be that there are some things going on. It doesn't feel like that's gonna be like this overwhelming thing that there's like a kind of personality that draws you toward something or something else. Maybe there's personalities that draw you towards certain methods. I don't know what it will turn out to be true.

1:07:27 Ricardo Lopes: Ok. So, uh now to also try to get into the production of scientific knowledge and since we've been talking about moral judgment a lot, uh do we know if uh people's moral judgments also influence the intuitions they hold uh in folk psychology and moral cognition, for example. Oh,

1:07:50 Joshua Knobe: yeah. Well, a really surprising result that we get again and again is that um moral intuitions affect what's called folk psychology. So, folk psychology is the ability to just figure out what's going on in other people's minds, like what people are. So, the example I gave before was about the true self that, um, when you're, whether you, what you think is morally good or morally bad affects what you think is going on deep down in the other percent. But maybe the most well known, um, uh, result I have along those lines is not, not about the true self. It's about just whether someone did something intentionally like did they do it on purpose? So I'll just give you two different cases and they're just gonna do for morally. So here's the first case. So imagine the vice president of a company goes to the CEO. It's OK. We've got this new policy. It's gonna make huge amounts of money for our company, but it's also gonna harm the environment. And the CEO says, look, I know it's gonna harm the environment. I don't care at all about that. All I care about is just making as much money as we possibly can. So let's implement the policy. So they implement the policy and then sure enough, it harms the environment and the participants are asked, did the CEO do it on purpose? Did this CEO do it intentionally? And there are people overwhelmingly say yes, the CEO did it intentionally if you ask them why most participants say something like, well, he totally knew that he was gonna harm the environment and then he did it anyway. But we thought maybe there's something more going on. It's not just about the knowledge. So suppose you just changed the word harm to help. So we're gonna leave everything else the same. Ok. The vice president goes to the CEO and says we've got this new policy, it's gonna make huge amounts of money for our company and it's also gonna help the environment. And the CEO says, look, you know, it's gonna help the environment, but I don't care at all about that. All I care about is just making as much money as we possibly can. So let's implement the policy so they implement the policy and then sure enough, it helps the environment. Did he help the environment? Intentionally? Other participants overwhelmingly saying no. So thinking about those two cases, it feels like this really weird thing is going on that the only difference between them is that one is about doing something bad and one is about doing something good. The question people are being asked isn't about like whether they deserve blame or praise or anything like that. It's just being asked, did they do it on purpose and judgments of whether it's bad or good or somehow affecting judgments about whether you did it on purpose.

1:10:13 Ricardo Lopes: And so I if moral judgments influence the intuitions people hold when it comes to psychology, can that also translate into the production of scientific knowledge? I mean, can moral judgments also affect the scientists themselves.

1:10:35 Joshua Knobe: Oh, yeah. So you mean when scientists are trying to answer these questions, maybe they themselves are kind of being driven. Yeah, that's a really wonderful question. And, um, what, what we really want to know to answer your question is like something like when you, if you look at the actual evolution of research programs are those research programs being driven by, by these moral judgments? And it's very hard for us to do that to study that question. And the reason is it is hard to run an experiment. Like you'd want to be like, OK, we randomly sign different scientific research programs to different moral statuses. But we can't do anything like that scientific research programs just happen. However they happen, then we can just study them. Mhm The thing that we did and I'm not sure if this is this might really not help to in a deeper way, answer your question. You should just run experiments where we ask scientists questions. So we, we um we just had scientists and then we're asking them like, consider this case, can you apply this concept to this case? And then we do get effects of morality. So I'll just give you one of these things. So we ask people about the concept of being innate. And then, um and then, uh we said, um we give them different questions and then we asked these scientists like biologists, linguists, psychologists in these different cases is this thing in it. And then what we do see is the effect of morality. So, um, well, here's an example, participants were told, imagine there's this trait, it's called trait X. And now imagine people's genes are such that if any, if their parents ever treat them with kindness, then um they're gonna develop trade X. But everyone's parents treat them with kindness at least sometimes. So everyone develops trade X is trade X in it and their participants tend to say yes. And now, I mean, the person was in the other condition were given the sy case, they were told, imagine there's trait, it's called trade X. And people's genes are such that if their parents are ever mean to them, they'll develop trade act, but everyone's parents are mean to them at least sometimes. So everyone develops trade X is trade act in the and their participants seem to say no about participants. I don't mean like um just, you know, random people on the street. I mean, these are psychologists, linguists, biologists, people who are using this concept. So at least in their answers to these questions, these scientists judgments are being affected by immorality.

1:13:04 Ricardo Lopes: So I, I mean, at uh can we at least say that um scientists are not immune to their own moral judgments when they are producing knowledge?

1:13:21 Joshua Knobe: Right. Yeah. Well, we can definitely say that there's not something within the minds of the individual scientists that makes this not have an effect. And then the key question that we would face if we really wanted to answer your question. And I'm not sure if our data speak to your larger question is not a question about what's going on in the mind of each individual scientist, but a question about the larger kind of social structures that allow scientific research to progress. So it's not like um when you're trained as a scientist, you develop some special thing in your brain that allows you to not have morality influence it, that is not happening. So if there was some way that morality would not influence things or not influence it in quite the same way or, or have a decreased influence or anything like that, it, it wouldn't be something in the mind of the individual scientists. It would have to be something in the whole way that science is structured. Like for example, the fact that that um you're not just seeing stuff, you're trying to get it um published in a journal and the peer reviewers on that journal might have different moral judgments than you. And so you're the way that you're gonna paper is gonna eventually turn out is not going to be just a pure reflection of your own moral judgments, but also of this larger um interpersonal structure that involves people with very different moral judgments, all kind of working together to eventually create a series of publications that actually get published in journals.

1:14:54 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. No, I also asked you about that because people today are discussing a lot, the potential effects that, uh, moral values and political values more specifically of, of course, the relationship between morality and politics is not, uh, completely well under, I mean, I've talked with political scientists and political psychologists on the show and it's complicated to really understand what's the real relationship between morality and politics or moral values and political values. But anyway, people uh now uh nowadays are discussing a lot uh the potential negative impacts of uh certain political ideologies within academia and so on. And I mean, I was trying to understand if some of your work when it comes in this case, not necessarily having to do with politics, but more with moral judgment if it would tell us something or have something to perhaps add to depth discussion and to what extent we should or shouldn't be worried about uh people's beliefs

1:16:16 Joshua Knobe: basically. Yeah, our, our work con the work some of the work that we've done recently contributes to that question in a very small way. So if you will be disappointed with a very small contribution, we may maybe it will be helpful, maybe be interesting. So um one question that people have often um been troubled by is the question about the influence of essentialism on prejudice. So the thought is um uh people have certain kind of scientific beliefs um by, by scientifically I don't mean, um, beliefs of people who are scientists. I meant, like, if you're just an ordinary person you have scientific beliefs because I don't know, you go to high school, you just start to develop, like, beliefs about scientific questions. Mhm. One kind of belief that you could have is what people sometimes call an essentialist belief. So you could think. Um, I don't know. For example, I, I'm Jewish and some people think, um, there's some sort of like, um, Jewish essence that's sort of like biological, that all Jewish people have and differentiates them from not Jewish people. And then it's been a real concern in our field that, um, those beliefs, essentialist beliefs might give rise to prejudice. The, the more you centralize a certain group, like, for example, the more you think there's like a Jewish essence, the more you'll be prejudiced against that group, for example, the more you'll be anti-semitic. So, thought that was right. Then you might think instead of just seeing whatever we think is true about these kind of questions regarding genetic basis of racial groups or something like that. We have a real reason, a, a moral reason to not say certain things because seeing those things might increase prejudice, increase discrimination, which I find it to be a very plausible view. So, um, April Ba and I, we thought that view was right. And so we, um, we wanted to, uh, sort of build on it and extend it in certain ways. And so we ran a whole series of studies in which we have manipulated the degree to which people thought there was kind of a genetic essence of a particular social group. And then we checked to see whether there was a downstream effect on, on prejudice or stereotyping. And in all of the studies, again and again, we found the same result. So here's what the result is. First of all, there is a correlation between those two things. So the more people centralize, the more they think, the more they are prejudiced against those other groups. So in my example, Judaism idea would be um if you looked across a whole bunch of different people and you measured whether they think there's like a genetic basis of being Jewish, though the person, people who more think there is are gonna be more anti Semitic than the people who less think there is. The second thing we found is that if you change people's essentialism, like for example, we make people more essentialist or make them less essentialist that has no effect at all on how prejudiced they are. So what those two things together seem to suggest is that the causal arrow is going the other way. So if you think about, I don't know, Hitler was very anti Semitic and also thought there was like this essential, essential aspect of Judi. So what I say you could think is just for whatever reason she just happened to think there's like this, um, heritable genetic thing and then that caused him to be anti Semitic. But maybe it's the other way, it's that for whatever reason, he hated this group of people and then he hitting this group of people led him to think this weird stuff. Like, so then if we could somehow make him stop believing all of that weird stuff, like about heritability or something, it, it wouldn't make him be less an anti Semitic. It's only, it's the other way. If we could make him less anti-semitic, then it would make him less involved in this weird stuff. So this one thing seemed to suggest it's really going the other way. It's not that people's scientific beliefs are having these downstream impacts on their moral judgments. It's that people's moral judgments are having these downstream impacts on their scientific beliefs.

1:20:24 Ricardo Lopes: That, that's, that's really fascinating. So, uh I mean, uh yeah, because we tend to have this idea that if people are essentialist, then that cause that causes their uh beliefs, their discriminatory or hateful be beliefs. But then what you're saying there is that it could be the other way around that people already have those beliefs and then uh that would cause them to be essentially sort, we centralize certain groups of people.

1:21:03 Joshua Knobe: Yeah, that's the result we're getting, we very much expected it to be the other way, the way that you said. But I don't confirm what we thought, like, it really feels like. Yeah, if, if we took some very racist people and all we did was say, um, you know, here's some interesting results about genetics or something like that and then suppose that they were very convinced they were like, oh, yeah, I really appreciate all this genetic information. Sound. That sounds totally right. That wouldn't make them less racist. It's just, it's, it's like, that's not the thing that would actually change the, the degree to which they're doing racist things.

1:21:36 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, that's very interesting. So, uh I have a couple of more questions uh now regarding how people understand truth itself, so does the way people interact socially? I mean, if they are cooperating or competing, more influence how they comes through truth in terms of subjectivity or objectivity.

1:22:02 Joshua Knobe: Yeah, this really relates to the topic we were talking about a really long time ago, we were talking about whether people think there even is an objective, the right answer to a question. So in these studies with Matthew Fisher, we had participants randomly assigned to two groups. So in one group, they were told, OK, you're gonna talk with someone who has the opposite opinion of you on some, on this topic. So um for example, if you're pro choice, this other person will be pro-life or if you're in favor of the death penalty, this other person will be opposed to the death penalty. And then, and they really are talking, they really are engaged in this discussion with this other person. They're doing it on the internet, like through this kind of chat service. And then in one group we said, um, so what you have to do is like, win the argument. Like, um this other person is gonna argue, say for the pro life position, you have to like beat them and, and win for the um pro choice position. But in the other condition, he said, um this other person has the opposite view of you. And we want you to like, try to understand this other person and for you and this other person to kind of corporate to each understand where the other one is coming from. Like why do they think the things they do? Like what's their perspective and so forth? So then participants um are just like having a conversation where they're like writing back and forth to each other in this way, either to defeat the other or to um understand the other. And then after silver, then we ask the kind of question we talked about earlier, is there really a truth about this question? So say about the abortion question, is there really a right answer between pro life and portraits? And what we find is that the more you're in a competitive interaction where you're trying to like defeat the other person, the more you think there is an objective answer. And when you're in a co-operative interaction. We're trying to understand the other person, the more you think there isn't even a correct.

1:23:54 Ricardo Lopes: And so with that in mind, uh my last question will be then can politics and specifically political polarization change our understanding of truth?

1:24:08 Joshua Knobe: That's a great question. I, I don't know the answer to your question, but I'm even though I don't know, I'm just gonna make a, make a guess. So, um right now, what we find is that um uh well, there's a correlation that the, the more people are divided about some question, the more people think there's no objectively right answer to it. So, um if you ask, is there a right answer about whether murder is morally wrong? People think there is, if you ask is the right answer about whether abortion is morally wrong. People tend to think that there's not. And then, although we don't have any data to suggest this, my guess is that that effect arises because people are able to think about people on the opposite side of this issue in a certain way, they're able to like kind of take the perspective of the that person and care about that person and so forth. But if polarization continues to grow, so that we're really forming almost like two nations where people never interact with each other and never talk with each other. They don't even care whether the other person likes them and they're just each talking with people on their own side of the aisle and not connecting with people. Not yet. My guess would be that it will gradually change. And this tendency that we see right now, if people say maybe that person isn't actually wrong, maybe there's no truth of the matter that will decrease and then people will start to see there's only one truth and it's our truth. We're the ones who are right and most people are.

1:25:31 Ricardo Lopes: Ok, great. So, uh Josh, just before we go, would you like to tell people where they can find you and your work on the internet?

1:25:40 Joshua Knobe: Oh, I don't know. I mean, uh wait, that's a great question. You, I guess maybe you, I mean, you could just go to my website but that might not be much fun. Maybe a fun thing to do would be if you look up experimental philosophy on, on youtube, you can find uh videos of that are explaining different experimental philosophy studies and that's sort of where people are acting out these little stories that I just told you and that might be much more enjoyable.

1:26:08 Ricardo Lopes: OK, great. So, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been real fun to talk

1:26:14 Joshua Knobe: to you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate

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