What influences approval of #hiring #discrimination against non-Western applicants?

Reliance on #statistics and the accuracy of those statistics made a difference in an experiment on about 2000 people.

Less than 25% approved, on average.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-025-10022-w

How can #language impact #risk perception?

#CIA's Sherman Kent famously attempted to standardize "words of estimative #probability" (1964): https://philpapers.org/rec/KENWOE

Milczarski et al. find many WEPs seem commensurable across #English and #Polish: https://doi.org/10.1017/jdm.2025.3

Do people diagnosed with #autism respond differently to moral dilemmas?

In MINORS, sacrificial harm waned with age, more slowly in the ASD group: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05795-6

In ADULTS, decisions were similar: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2024.112889

Reflecting on our intuitions and principles until they are logically consistent is hard. Can #AI do it?

Ma et al. explicate #ReflectiveEquilibrium (RE) and test how #LLMs iteratively achieve RE on moral scenarios from the #ETHICS benchmark.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3722554

Free annotated #data!

> 5000 #ethics and #psychology decisions, with consequences, principles, reasons, emotions, values, and counterfactuals.

- 200 moral dilemmas
- 2 ethics scales (e.g., MFQ2)
- 6 languages

So much you can do with this!

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2502.14083

"Is p < 0.05 a reasonable threshold?"

Over 500 students and survey workers flipped a coin that never landed on tails.

They recorded how many flips it took to realize the coin was unfair.

On average, it corresponded to p ≈ 0.005.

https://doi.org/10.4473/TPM29.4.2

Is #rationality a normative or descriptive concept?

Kevin Reuter, Lucien Baumgartner, Michael Messerli "present the findings of a #corpusLinguistics study revealing that people commonly perceive the concept of rationality as normative."

https://doi.org/10.5840/tht20253442 #xPhi #bigData

In Religious Studies: Analytic #Atheism & Analytic Apostasy...

Steve Stich, Justin Sytsma, and I studied >70k people across the globe.

Apostates were more reflective thinkers.

That explained links between reflection and #religion.

#Preprint + audio: https://byrdnick.com/archives/28471/upon-reflection-ep-14-analytic-atheism-analytic-apostasy-across-cultures

The final typeset version is also freely available (#openAccess) via #CambridgeUP; https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412525000198

If you lose 50 pounds (23 kg) after being significantly overweight for years, how praiseworthy are you?

Praise varied by #weightLoss method:
A. #diet + #exercise
B. #semaglutide (e.g., #Ozempic)
C. A and B

So did perceived effort ...and identity?

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/a7rqy #xPhi

Some arguments and evidence suggest that intuitions about some philosophical thought experiments are remarkably stable.

Wu et al replicate this for one case (Exp 1), but find arguments changed people's conclusions about 10 cases (Exp 2).

https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2025.2456570

Do people prefer #prison sentence recommendations from humans or from #AI?

Large experiments on people in Japan (N > 3000) found "no preference for deferring to human ...or [to] AI judgments [on] sentencing decisions".

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0318486

Have you ever wondered what makes art art? Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė and Markus Kneer investigated the folk concept of art and wrote about their findings on the X-Phi Blog: https://xphi.net/2025/03/05/the-folk-concept-of-art/ #art #aesthetics #xphi #philosophy

X-phi hypothesis: Social privilege predicts confidence in one's conceptual intuitions.

Does anyone know any #xphi or #psychology study along these lines?

The idea is that, at least in my experience, people from privileged backgrounds have no problem in saying "This is intuitive to me, therefore it is certainly intuitive in general", where as people from less privileged backgrounds are much less prone to argue in such ways and doubt their own intuitions much more. It makes sense that feeling like you are part of the standard way of thinking give you the confidence to think in that direction.

Do people vacillate more before or after they can decide?

In this paper, most vacillations occurred before people could decide about logic or moral problems, except maybe for moral dilemmas.

Check out the #processTracing method: https://doi.org/10.1017/jdm.2024.15

Can people's desire for control undermine the greater good?

Limiting the control people had in a dilemma's outcome seemed to make more of them choose to optimize their control, even though that resulted in saving fewer lives!

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-024-01226-9

Today, our third and last group of students presents their coursework: Read about »The Perception of Civil Disobedience« on the X-Phi Blog! #xphi #experimentalphilosophy #philosophy #civildisobedience https://xphi.net/2025/01/09/teaching-experimental-philosophy-to-beginners-part-4/

Might have made square postcards and stickers for the X-Phi Blog. Hit me up if you want some! #xphi #experimentalphilosophy #philosophy

This week I’m presenting not-yet-published #data in an #xPhi talk and poster at #APAEastern25 in #NYC.

I’ll post about those and the #Philosophy sessions I attend (on #BlueSky or #Mastodon).

And soon I’ll field surveys about online/hybrid #conferencing.

https://www.apaonline.org/mpage/2025eastern

#Psychology publication "transparency increased moderately from 2017 to 2022 [but] continues to be widely neglected" (N = 400 peer-reviewed articles).

#OpenAccess paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459241283477

Today, another group of students presents their coursework. This time, it’s all about Peter Singer and »The Perception of the Moral Obligation to Help Others«. Read all about it on the X-Phi Blog! https://xphi.net/2025/01/03/teaching-experimental-philosophy-to-beginners-part-3/ #xphi #experimentalphilosophy #philosophy