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  1. (1 other version)Personality and Philosophical Bias.Adam Feltz & Edward T. Cokely - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 578–589.
    Heritable personality traits often predict fundamental philosophical disagreement. This conclusion is based on studies of more than 15,000 people sampled from diverse cultures and educational backgrounds, including verifiable experts. In this chapter, we review some of this research showing links between personality and philosophical bias in free will, intentional action, and ethics. Our discussion focuses on serious challenges that these philosophical biases pose (e.g., limits on the use of philosophical intuitions as evidence). We close with discussion of the Philosophical Personality (...)
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  • A simple definition of ‘intentionally’.Tadeg Quillien & Tamsin C. German - 2021 - Cognition 214 (C):104806.
    Cognitive scientists have been debating how the folk concept of intentional action works. We suggest a simple account: people consider that an agent did X intentionally to the extent that X was causally dependent on how much the agent wanted X to happen (or not to happen). Combined with recent models of human causal cognition, this definition provides a good account of the way people use the concept of intentional action, and offers natural explanations for puzzling phenomena such as the (...)
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  • Is there a confidence condition in the concept of intention?John McGuire - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (5):705-730.
    The concept of intention is widely thought to involve a confidence condition of some sort, a condition that specifies certain beliefs that one must either have or lack if one intends to do something. Two of the most common formulations of this condition are the following: (i) A intends to X only if A believes that they (probably) will X; and (ii) A intends to X only if A does not believe that they (probably) will not X. A third, much (...)
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  • Experimental Philosophy, Ethnomethodology, and Intentional Action: A Textual Analysis of the Knobe Effect.Gustav Lymer & Olle Blomberg - 2019 - Human Studies 42 (4):673-694.
    In “Intentional action and side-effects in ordinary language” (2003), Joshua Knobe reported an asymmetry in test subjects’ responses to a question about intentionality: subjects are more likely to judge that a side effect of an agent’s intended action is intentional if they think the side effect is morally bad than if they think it is morally good. This result has been taken to suggest that the concept of intentionality is an inherently moral concept. In this paper, we draw attention to (...)
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  • How to cancel the Knobe effect: the role of sufficiently strong moral censure.Matthew Lindauer & Nicholas Southwood - 2021 - American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2):181-186.
    Empirical support is offered for the claim that the original Knobe effect, whereby our intentional action ascriptions exhibit certain asymmetries in light of our moral attitudes, can be successfully cancelled. This is predicted by the view that the Knobe effect can be explained in purely pragmatic terms (Adams and Steadman 2004a, 2004b, 2007). However, previous cancelling studies (Adams and Steadman 2007; Nichols and Ulatowski 2007) have failed to identify evidence of cancellability. The key to the successful cancelling strategy presented here (...)
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  • How Much Should the People Know? Implications of Methodological Choices in The Study of Intentionality and Blame Ascriptions,.Maria Botero - 2016 - Applied Psychology in Criminal Justice 2 (12):101-113.
    Several studies have shown that people are more likely to attribute intentionality and blame to agents who perform actions that have harmful consequences. This kind of bias has problematic implications for jury decisions because it predicts that judgment in juries will malfunction if an action has a blameworthy effect. Most of these studies include in their design a vignette in which it is clear that agents have foreknowledge of the effects of their actions. This kind of design fails to replicate (...)
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  • Cold Side-Effect Effect: Affect Does Not Mediate the Influence of Moral Considerations in Intentionality Judgments.Rodrigo Díaz - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8:295.
    Research has consistently shown that people consider harmful side effects of an action more intentional than helpful side effects. This phenomenon is known as the side- effect effect (SEE), which refers to the influence of moral considerations in judgments of intentionality and other non-moral concepts. There is an ongoing debate about how to explain this asymmetric pattern of judgment and the psychological factors involved in it. It has been posited that affective reactions to agents that bring about harmful side- effects (...)
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  • Mens rea ascription, expertise and outcome effects: Professional judges surveyed.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer & Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde - 2017 - Cognition 169 (C):139-146.
    A coherent practice of mens rea (‘guilty mind’) ascription in criminal law presupposes a concept of mens rea which is insensitive to the moral valence of an action’s outcome. For instance, an assessment of whether an agent harmed another person intentionally should be unaffected by the severity of harm done. Ascriptions of intentionality made by laypeople, however, are subject to a strong outcome bias. As demonstrated by the Knobe effect, a knowingly incurred negative side effect is standardly judged intentional, whereas (...)
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  • Perspective and Epistemic State Ascriptions.Markus Kneer - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (2):313-341.
    This article explores whether perspective taking has an impact on the ascription of epistemic states. To do so, a new method is introduced which incites participants to imagine themselves in the position of the protagonist of a short vignette and to judge from her perspective. In a series of experiments, perspective proves to have a significant impact on belief ascriptions, but not on knowledge ascriptions. For belief, perspective is further found to moderate the epistemic side-effect effect significantly. It is hypothesized (...)
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  • Evaluative Effects on Knowledge Attributions.James R. Beebe - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 359-367.
    Experimental philosophers have investigated various ways in which non‐epistemic evaluations can affect knowledge attributions. For example, several teams of researchers (Beebe and Buckwalter 2010; Beebe and Jensen 2012; Schaffer and Knobe 2012; Beebe and Shea 2013; Buckwalter 2014b; Turri 2014) report that the goodness or badness of an agent’s action can affect whether the agent is taken to have certain kinds of knowledge. These findings raise important questions about how patterns of folk knowledge attributions should influence philosophical theorizing about knowledge.
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  • Intentional action and the frame-of-mind argument: new experimental challenges to Hindriks.Florian Cova - 2017 - Philosophical Explorations 20 (1):35-53.
    Based on a puzzling pattern in our judgements about intentional action, Knobe [. “Intentional Action and Side-Effects in Ordinary Language.” Analysis 63: 190–194] has claimed that these judgements are shaped by our moral judgements and evaluations. However, this claim goes directly against a key conceptual intuition about intentional action – the “frame-of-mind condition”, according to which judgements about intentional action are about the agent’s frame-of-mind and not about the moral value of his action. To preserve this intuition Hindriks [. “Intentional (...)
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  • The Folk Concept of Intentional Action: Empirical approaches.Florian Cova - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
    This paper provides a comprehensive review of the experimental philosophy of action, focusing on the various different accounts of the Knobe Effect.
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  • The Relevance of Folk Intuitions to Philosophical Debates.Adam Feltz - 2008 - Dissertation, Florida State University
    A large portion of philosophy done in the Western analytic tradition attempts to provide conceptual analyses which are tested by examples that elicit intuitions. These intuitions are, in turn, used as evidence either for or against a given analysis. In recent years, there has been much discussion of the uses of intuitions from empirically minded philosophers and psychologists. The basic strategy is to discover empirically how “normal” folks think about certain topics in philosophy. This application of folk intuitions to philosophy (...)
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  • On Doing Things Intentionally.Pierre Jacob, Cova Florian & Dupoux Emmanuel - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (4):378-409.
    Recent empirical and conceptual research has shown that moral considerations have an influence on the way we use the adverb 'intentionally'. Here we propose our own account of these phenomena, according to which they arise from the fact that the adverb 'intentionally' has three different meanings that are differently selected by contextual factors, including normative expectations. We argue that our hypotheses can account for most available data and present some new results that support this. We end by discussing the implications (...)
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  • Explaining the Effect of Morality on Intentionality of Lucky Actions: The Role of Underlying Questions.Kate Falkenstien - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (2):293-308.
    People’s moral judgments affect their judgments of intentionality for actions that succeeded by luck. This article aimed to explain that phenomenon by suggesting that people’s judgments of intentionality are driven by the underlying questions they have considered. We examined two types of questions: questions about why people act, and questions about how they succeed in acting. In a series of experiments, we found that people prefer different questions for neutral and immoral actions (Studies 1 and 2) and that asking them (...)
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  • A Knobe Effect for Belief Ascriptions.James R. Beebe - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (2):235-258.
    Knobe (Analysis 63:190-193, 2003a, Philosophical Psychology 16:309-324, 2003b, Analysis 64:181-187, 2004b) found that people are more likely to attribute intentionality to agents whose actions resulted in negative side-effects that to agents whose actions resulted in positive ones. Subsequent investigation has extended this result to a variety of other folk psychological attributions. The present article reports experimental findings that demonstrate an analogous effect for belief ascriptions. Participants were found to be more likely to ascribe belief, higher degrees of belief, higher degrees (...)
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  • Normativity in Action: How to Explain the Knobe Effect and its Relatives.Frank Hindriks - 2014 - Mind and Language 29 (1):51-72.
    Intuitions about intentional action have turned out to be sensitive to normative factors: most people say that an indifferent agent brings about an effect of her action intentionally when it is harmful, but unintentionally when it is beneficial. Joshua Knobe explains this asymmetry, which is known as ‘the Knobe effect’, in terms of the moral valence of the effect, arguing that this explanation generalizes to other asymmetries concerning notions as diverse as deciding and being free. I present an alternative explanation (...)
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  • Unconsidered Intentional Actions. An Assessment of Scaife and Webber’s ‘Consideration Hypothesis’.Florian Cova - 2013 - Journal of Moral Philosophy (1):1-22.
    The ‘Knobe effect’ is the name given to the empirical finding that judgments about whether an action is intentional or not seems to depend on the moral valence of this action. To account for this phenomenon, Scaife and Webber have recently advanced the ‘Consideration Hypothesis’, according to which people’s ascriptions of intentionality are driven by whether they think the agent took the outcome in consideration when taking his decision. In this paper, I examine Scaife and Webber’s hypothesis and conclude that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Folk Moral Relativism.Hagop Sarkissian, John Park, David Tien, Jennifer Cole Wright & Joshua Knobe - 2011 - Mind and Language 26 (4):482-505.
    It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions considering individuals from increasingly different cultures or ways of life. The authors hypothesize that people do not have a fixed commitment to moral objectivism but instead tend (...)
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  • Enough skill to kill: Intentionality judgments and the moral valence of action.Steve Guglielmo & Bertram F. Malle - 2010 - Cognition 117 (2):139-150.
    Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action’s intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people’s intentionality judgments. His and other researchers’ studies suggested that blameworthy actions are considered intentional even when the agent lacks skill (e.g., killing somebody with a lucky shot) whereas equivalent neutral actions are not (e.g., luckily hitting a bull’s-eye). The present five studies offer an (...)
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  • Three-and-a-half folk concepts of intentional action.Alessandro Lanteri - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 158 (1):17-30.
    Fiery Cushman and Alfred Mele recently proposed a ‘two-and-a-half rules’ theory of folk intentionality. They suggested that laypersons attribute intentionality employing: one rule based on desire, one based on belief, and another principle based on moral judgment, which may either reflect a folk concept (and so count as a third rule) or a bias (and so not count as a rule proper) and which they provisionally count as ‘half a rule’. In this article, I discuss some cases in which an (...)
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  • Folk concepts of intentional action in the contexts of amoral and immoral luck.Paulo Sousa & Colin Holbrook - 2010 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3):351-370.
    This paper concerns a recently discovered, puzzling asymmetry in judgments of whether an action is intentional or not (Knobe, Philosophical Psychology 16:309–324, 2003a ; Analysis 63:190–193, b ). We report new data replicating the asymmetry in the context of scenarios wherein an agent achieves an amoral or immoral goal due to luck. Participants’ justifications of their judgments of the intentionality of the agent’s action indicate that two distinct folk concepts of intentional action played a role in their judgments. When viewed (...)
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  • The Knobe effect: A brief overview.Adam Feltz - 2007 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 28 (3-4):265-277.
    Joshua Knobe (2003a) has discovered that the perceived goodness or badness of side effects of actions influences people's ascriptions of intentionality to those side effects. I present the paradigmatic cases that elicit what has been called the Knobe effect and offer some explanations of the Knobe effect. I put these explanations into two broad groups. One explains the Knobe effect by referring to our concept of intentional action. The other explains the Knobe effect without referring to our concept of intentional (...)
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  • The Pervasive Impact of Moral Judgment.Dean Pettit & Joshua Knobe - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (5):586-604.
    Shows that the very same asymmetries that arise for intentionally also arise from deciding, desiring, in favor of, opposed to, and advocating. It seems that the phenomenon is not due to anything about the concept of intentional action in particular. Rather, the effects observed for the concept of intentional action should be regarded as just one manifestation of the pervasive impact of moral judgment.
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  • A New Angle on the Knobe Effect: Intentionality Correlates with Blame, not with Praise.Frank Hindriks, Igor Douven & Henrik Singmann - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (2):204-220.
    In a celebrated experiment, Joshua Knobe showed that people are much more prone to attribute intentionality to an agent for a side effect of a given act when that side effect is harmful than when it is beneficial. This asymmetry has become known as ‘the Knobe Effect’. According to Knobe's Moral Valence Explanation, bad effects trigger the attributions of intentionality, whereas good effects do not. Many others believe that the Knobe Effect is best explained in terms of the high amount (...)
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  • Knowledge and Luck.John Turri, Wesley Buckwalter & Peter Blouw - 2015 - Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 22 (2):378-390.
    Nearly all success is due to some mix of ability and luck. But some successes we attribute to the agent’s ability, whereas others we attribute to luck. To better understand the criteria distinguishing credit from luck, we conducted a series of four studies on knowledge attributions. Knowledge is an achievement that involves reaching the truth. But many factors affecting the truth are beyond our control and reaching the truth is often partly due to luck. Which sorts of luck are compatible (...)
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  • Chairmen, Cocaine, and Car Crashes: The Knobe Effect as an Attribution Error.Hanno Sauer & Tom Bates - 2013 - The Journal of Ethics 17 (4):305-330.
    In this paper, we argue that the so-called Knobe-Effect constitutes an error. There is now a wealth of data confirming that people are highly prone to what has also come to be known as the ‘side-effect effect’. That is, when attributing psychological states—such as intentionality, foreknowledge, and desiring—as well as other agential features—such as causal control—people typically do so to a greater extent when the action under consideration is evaluated negatively. There are a plethora of models attempting to account for (...)
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  • Surprising connections between knowledge and action: The robustness of the epistemic side-effect effect.James R. Beebe & Mark Jensen - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (5):689 - 715.
    A number of researchers have begun to demonstrate that the widely discussed ?Knobe effect? (wherein participants are more likely to think that actions with bad side-effects are brought about intentionally than actions with good or neutral side-effects) can be found in theory of mind judgments that do not involve the concept of intentional action. In this article we report experimental results that show that attributions of knowledge can be influenced by the kinds of (non-epistemic) concerns that drive the Knobe effect. (...)
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  • Problems with the appeal to intuition in epistemology.Adam Feltz - 2008 - Philosophical Explorations 11 (2):131 – 141.
    George Bealer argues that intuitions are not only reliable indicators of truth, they are necessary to the philosophical endeavor. Specifically, he thinks that intuitions are essential sources of evidence for epistemic justification. I argue that Bealer's defense of intuitions either (1) is insufficient to show that actual human beings are in a position to use intuitions for epistemic justification, or (2) begs the question. The growing empirical data about our intuitions support the view that humans are not creatures appropriately positioned (...)
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  • Intentional action and intending: Recent empirical studies.Hugh J. McCann - 2005 - Philosophical Psychology 18 (6):737-748.
    Recent empirical work calls into question the so-called Simple View that an agent who A’s intentionally intends to A. In experimental studies, ordinary speakers frequently assent to claims that, in certain cases, agents who knowingly behave wrongly intentionally bring about the harm they do; yet the speakers tend to deny that it was the intention of those agents to cause the harm. This paper reports two additional studies that at first appear to support the original ones, but argues that in (...)
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  • Delimiting Legal Interpretation: The Problem of Moral Bias and Political Distortion—the Case of Criminal Intention.Izabela Skoczeń & Francesca Poggi - 2022 - Ratio Juris 35 (2):191-222.
    Ratio Juris, Volume 35, Issue 2, Page 191-222, June 2022.
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  • Control, intentional action, and moral responsibility.Frank Hindriks - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (6):787 - 801.
    Skill or control is commonly regarded as a necessary condition for intentional action. This received wisdom is challenged by experiments conducted by Joshua Knobe and Thomas Nadelhoffer, which suggest that moral considerations sometimes trump considerations of skill and control. I argue that this effect (as well as the Knobe effect) can be explained in terms of the role normative reasons play in the concept of intentional action. This explanation has significant advantages over its rivals. It involves at most a conservative (...)
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  • Deep trouble for the deep self.David Rose, Jonathan Livengood, Justin Sytsma & Edouard Machery - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (5):629 - 646.
    Chandra Sripada's (2010) Deep Self Concordance Account aims to explain various asymmetries in people's judgments of intentional action. On this account, people distinguish between an agent's active and deep self; attitude attributions to the agent's deep self are then presumed to play a causal role in people's intentionality ascriptions. Two judgments are supposed to play a role in these attributions?a judgment that specifies the attitude at issue and one that indicates that the attitude is robust (Sripada & Konrath, 2011). In (...)
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  • Rhetoric, Experimental Philosophy, and Irrelevance.Daniel Lim - 2018 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 9 (3):160-162.
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  • Moral asymmetries in judgments of agency withstand ludicrous causal deviance.Paulo Sousa, Colin Holbrook & Lauren Swiney - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6.
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  • Norms Inform Mental State Ascriptions: A Rational Explanation for the Side-Effect Effect.Kevin Uttich & Tania Lombrozo - 2010 - Cognition 116 (1):87–100.
    Theory of mind, the capacity to understand and ascribe mental states, has traditionally been conceptualized as analogous to a scientific theory. However, recent work in philosophy and psychology has documented a "side-effect effect" suggesting that moral evaluations influence mental state ascriptions, and in particular whether a behavior is described as having been performed 'intentionally.' This evidence challenges the idea that theory of mind is analogous to scientific psychology in serving the function of predicting and explaining, rather than evaluating, behavior. In (...)
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  • Intentionality attribution and emotion: The Knobe Effect in alexithymia.Micaela Maria Zucchelli, Francesca Starita, Caterina Bertini, Fiorella Giusberti & Elisa Ciaramelli - 2019 - Cognition 191 (C):103978.
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  • Folk conceptions of intentional action.Alfred R. Mele - 2012 - Philosophical Issues 22 (1):281-297.
    Studies designed to help us understand how nonspecialists conceive of intentional action have generated some widely discussed results. To what extent are the results accounted for by the existence of different folk conceptions of intentional action? That is my guiding question in this article. I am not in a position to offer a full answer, but I do hope to make some progress.
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  • Action, Attitude, and the Knobe Effect: Another Asymmetry.Joshua Shepherd - 2012 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (2):171-185.
    A majority of people regard the harmful side-effects of an agent’s behavior as much more intentional than an agent’s helpful side-effects. In this paper, I present evidence for a related asymmetry. When a side- effect action is an instance of harming, folk ascriptions are significantly impacted by the relative badness of either an agent’s main goal or her side- effect action, but not her attitude. Yet when a side- effect action is an instance of helping, folk ascriptions are sensitive to (...)
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  • Do bad people know more? Interactions between attributions of knowledge and blame.James R. Beebe - 2016 - Synthese 193 (8):2633–2657.
    A central topic in experimental epistemology has been the ways that non-epistemic evaluations of an agent’s actions can affect whether the agent is taken to have certain kinds of knowledge. Several scholars have found that the positive or negative valence of an action can influence attributions of knowledge to the agent. These evaluative effects on knowledge attributions are commonly seen as performance errors, failing to reflect individuals’ genuine conceptual competence with knows. In the present article, I report the results of (...)
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  • Individual differences in theory-of-mind judgments: Order effects and side effects.Adam Feltz & Edward T. Cokely - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (3):343 - 355.
    We explore and provide an account for a recently identified judgment anomaly, i.e., an order effect that changes the strength of intentionality ascriptions for some side effects (e.g., when a chairman's pursuit of profits has the foreseen but unintended consequence of harming the environment). Experiment 1 replicated the previously unanticipated order effect anomaly controlling for general individual differences. Experiment 2 revealed that the order effect was multiply determined and influenced by factors such as beliefs (i.e., that the same actor was (...)
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