Abstract
For some reason, participants hold agents more responsible for their actions when a situation is described concretely than when the situation is described abstractly. We present examples of this phenomenon, and survey some attempts to explain it. We divide these attempts into two classes: affective theories and cognitive theories. After criticizing both types of theories we advance our novel hypothesis: that people believe that whenever a norm is violated, someone is responsible for it. This belief, along with the familiar workings of cognitive dissonance theory, is enough to not only explain all of the abstract/concrete paradoxes, but also explains seemingly unrelated effects, like the anthropomorphization of malfunctioning inanimate objects.
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Notes
It might be that more ‘vivid’ stimuli somehow are more effective at creating a mental image (or a proxytype, (Prinz 2004) or some such) which leads to episodic-style rather than semantic-style encoding. But until we have some grip on what vividness is and how it does this work, as well as how mental imagery (or whatever) leads to episodic encoding, our charge of underspecification stands.
We find this very intuitive fact somewhat mystifying. The connection between anger and harsher judgments is not in doubt, but it would be nice if we could explain why this connection arises rather than just note that it does.
Sinnott-Armstrong’s theory is not the only cognitive theory available besides ours; see, for example, Nado (2008) or Uttich and Lombrozo (2010). One could also propose a modular account to explain these effects. It’s not hard to see extending a view like Mikhail’s (e.g., 2007) to a modular system whose input is concrete social situations and which gives responsibility judgments as output. A modular system would still need to pick up on some difference in the stimuli to ‘direct’ the stimuli to different modular processes. If one takes the relevant difference in the stimuli to be an affective difference (i.e. concrete stimuli are affect-laden, abstract are not) then the modular view collapses into an affective view. If one takes the difference in processing to just be the difference between abstract and concrete situations, one would need to explain how the modular processor picks up on this difference (perhaps concrete situations set off agency detection in a way abstract stimuli don’t?). We see no in-principle reason why such a modular view couldn’t work, and perhaps this would be a fruitful avenue for future research. However, since no such modular views have been proffered, we will not pay the potential view any more attention here.
An anonymous reviewer astutely pointed out a third option, one which appears quite tantalizing on first glance. The reviewer suggested that Sinnott-Armstrong could flesh out his view by claiming that abstractly represented cases are judged against previously held heuristics (such as Rule R) while concrete cases are judged by comparison to prototypes of the moral violation that are recruited from memory. This suggestion does mesh well with Sinnott-Armstrong’s overall motivations, and would certainly block our ‘buttering the bread’ objection above. However, the suggestion is of no use to Sinnott-Armstrong, for if he took it on he would be unable to explain some of the cases that he takes to be paradigmatic abstract/concrete effects, such as the Roskies and Nichols case. In that case both the abstract and concrete cases should recruit the same prototypes, for the differences in the cases don’t consist in the level of description, but instead consist in the world under consideration. Additionally, this explanation, we think, would struggle to explain Small and Loewenstein’s results, although Sinnott-Armstrong does not discuss their work.
By ‘agent’ we just mean some being that can act on the basis of their intentional or phenomenological states; that is, some agent that is capable of some minimal forms of practical rationality.
An anonymous referee points out that a number of the benefits of our approach do not strictly depend on supposing that it is a belief involved, and claims that something like a quasi-belief or disposition to believe might do as well (while also bringing along fewer metaphysical and epistemological commitments). As far as we can see, this is indeed possible, depending on just how these other notions are understood. But putting our hypothesis in terms of belief keeps it simple and clear, and helps us derive predictions from it via the familiar mechanisms of cognitive dissonance. Of course, we’re open to finding evidence that might weigh on this issue.
An anonymous referee objects: “The problem here is that “expectation” is ambiguous between prediction (I expect the sun to rise soon) and evaluation (‘I expect you to clean your room’).” But we don’t think this is an ambiguity; we think the single notion of expectation is broad enough to cover both of these cases; it is this broad notion encompassing both prediction and evaluation we’re aiming at.
The ‘bad’ here and below, is broader than morally bad. For example, stubbing your toe is bad, but it isn’t morally bad. Badness is sufficient for norm violation.
It would be interesting to examine the role that ideas of “luck” or “coincidence” play in situations like this, to see if they are being subtly agentified. See also Gray and Wegner (2010).
An anonymous reviewer asks, “What if the case description says only that the act violates a norm without specifying which norm? This description makes it an abstract case but also makes it clear that a norm is violated.” What would happen depends on the specifics of the structural description of NBAR, along with the mechanisms that interact with it. (See also footnote 6.) If the antecedent can be triggered by mere mention of a norm violation, then we’d expect agency detection and attributions of agency to be enhanced in general (because there’d be no specific action to use as the attribution base for the responsibility of the agent). However, it’s an open question exactly what the cognitive instantiation of NBAR looks like—one could instead imagine that what happens is that norm violations are detected by a separate mechanism (e.g., some sort of change detection mechanism) and it’s the detection of the norm violation that immediately sets off the ‘agent responsible’ belief; in this case, NBAR would be more of a process and not a belief, strictly speaking).
What happens when more than one norm is violated, which happens in both conditions of Nichols and Knobe’s follow-up experiment, where the tax cheat is pitted against the rapist? Since both cheating on one’s taxes and raping violate norms, we expect NBAR to come under threat when these actions are done deterministically, and we expect responsibility to be attributed to the agent in both cases, as Nichols and Knobe observed. Further, since rape is worse than cheating on your taxes we expect the dissonance created to be higher, and since rape is more emotionally charged than tax cheating we expect the overall affect to be higher. Moreover, since affect and dissonance interact in predictable ways (with higher negative affect causing higher dissonance, see Cooper 2007) we expect the dissonance created and the overall level in the rape case to be greater, producing a greater response (i.e., the rapist is held more responsible than the tax cheat). This is also what Nichols and Knobe observe.
One could interpret the situation as one where the participants ‘agentify’ the mentally ill. Perhaps what is happening is that participants don’t think that the mentally ill (nor people in deterministic universes) are actually agents. Then when they come to case of a norm violation by the mentally ill (or by a person in a deterministic universe) they reverse their stance and turn the person into an agent. We think that something like this, perhaps best (paradoxically) called the anthropomorphization of people, occurs in normal everyday cases.
A referee objects: “I imagine I am equally implicitly confident gravity holds on other planets, and I can't ascertain this by assessing my level of confidence in the explicit belief.” But this seems quite odd to us. Connolly et al. (2007) seems to show that participants are less confident that at least some of the general beliefs they hold apply in Peru. Alternate universes, it seems natural to think, would do even more to undermine confidence. (Of course, this is a testable hypothesis.) We also want to note that the implicit/explicit distinction may be beside the point here. Since we suppose NBAR to be an unconscious belief, we suppose its effects to be implicit; but we don’t think there has to be anything different in kind between implicit and explicit effects at work here. We expect people to be less confident about unfamiliar situations both implicitly and explicitly. Finally, we don’t mean to imply that there aren’t other factors active in the Nichols and Roskies case (e.g., perhaps participants are also affected by in-group/out-group statuses).
One might object that the negative motivational state created by dissonance is a type of affect; after all, we said as much above. But if it is a type of affect, it is a very different sort than the basic emotions that get blunted in bvFTD patients. For one thing, there is no evidence that bvFTD patients are less susceptible to dissonance (in which case characterizing the negative motivational state as ‘affect’ may be a bit misleading.)
Yet the point in the text doesn’t necessarily speak in favor of the norm violations needing to have a negative valence per se. Contra Morewedge (2009), we do not think that there is a negativity bias in attributions of external agency. Rather, NBAR predicts that attributions of agency will arise even when a norm is broken in a supererogatory way. Just because people wouldn’t say that their car is protected by angels when it starts just fine (when it has always done so in the past), doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t invoke angels to explain when the car breaks a norm in a positive manner. Imagine that as you are driving down the interstate you fall asleep and wake up 45 minutes later to see that your car has just come to gently rest on the shoulder of the interstate, out of harm’s way. Here, it seems quite natural to anthropomorphize the car’s behavior (‘What an angelic car!’) or to invoke mysterious unobservable agents (‘An angel must be watching over my Hyundai!’).
Of course if one were to blame, say, the mechanic for the car trouble, then one would not be inclined to anthropomorphize the car. The operative point is that the harder it is to find an agent the more likely people are to create one (assuming a norm has been broken).
One may see parallels between NBAR and the anthropological work of Shweder and colleagues (e.g., Shweder et al. 1997), where he finds that many non-Western cultures appear to engage in similar agentic attributions in non-normative situations.
We say ‘agentify’ as opposed to ‘personify’ because it is a specific type of personification that happens in these cases: the participants make the objects specifically into agents.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t individual differences between people; nor is it to say that there aren’t performance constraints that could swamp the NBAR effect (for example, if the abstract/concrete studies were run within subjects as opposed to between subjects, we bet that the effect would dissipate because of people’s desire to appear consistent). It is just to say that if we couldn’t find NBAR evidence across the majority of people, then we’d take the theory to be defeated, even if there were some gerrymandered subset of people who held NBAR.
Though the Separate Capacities hypothesis should predict that people will respond faster to abstract than concrete cases, Sinnott-Armstrong in particular would not make such a prediction, for unrelated reasons. Sinnott-Armstrong also holds a ‘moral heuristics’ view, one where simple heuristic rules are at play in abstract reasoning. Sinnott-Armstrong posits that in concrete cases people take specific information into account and reason more, thus presumably increasing their response time. (Sinnott-Armstrong et al. 2010). So he, too, makes this counterintuitive prediction.
To reiterate an earlier point made in footnote 15, norm violations can be either positively or negatively valenced; supererogatory acts may be just as unexpected, thus agency enhancing (though maybe not as attention grabbing) as bad actions.
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Mandelbaum, E., Ripley, D. Explaining the Abstract/Concrete Paradoxes in Moral Psychology: The NBAR Hypothesis. Rev.Phil.Psych. 3, 351–368 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-012-0106-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-012-0106-3