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Alicorn comments on Celebrate Trivial Impetuses - Less Wrong
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First of all, congratulations for not writing about gender issues. Welcome back - we missed you :-P.
Second, the effect you are talking about is a well-known one in social psychology. Here is one example from moral cognition and psychology. (I can get the references but I'm at work and hey, I'm not procrastinating... My simulation is running: http://xkcd.com/303/)
In a study on moral behavior, there was a confederate old lady that needed help. In the normal condition, only 17% of the passers-by helped the old lady. In the manipulation condition, subjects were made to find a dime on the ground before coming across the old lady. In this condition, %80 helped the old lady.
Similar effects were observed for asking for change in front of a store with a pleasant smell (i.e. a bakery) versus one with neutral smell (i.e. a shoe store). There are more examples in a paper authored by Joshua Knobe on moral cognition and blameworthiness but I'm too lazy to get the reference. (Why don't you give ma slight impetus in that direction?)
Lastly, in an airport where men were missing the urinals and peeing to the ground, an image of a fly on the urinal substantially decreased this utterly utterly unhygienic and terrible behavior.
There is a book written about such 'nudge's to motivate rational behavior. I haven't read it but here is the reference: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nudge-Improving-Decisions-Health-Happiness/dp/0300122233
And here is a NYT article about the same thing. This is the article from which I got the urinal example: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/business/08nudge.html
(I feel like what candy is to a little kid, social psychology is to me. 8-) ).
This sounds like a cool paper and I'd love to read it - can you track down the citation, please? ;)
It looks like this might be the one: Knobe, Joshua. 2003. "Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language", Analysis 63: 190-194. [PDF]
Thanks.
Basically it seems that people are more likely to call harmful side-effects intentional, compared to beneficial ones.
I'm not sure this really is a bias; the harmful/beneficial cases are not exact counterparts: in the harmful case one could assume that the actor needs to mentally do something -- namely, 'overcoming the moral problem' or 'silence his/her conscience', which makes the harmful case indeed a bit more 'intentional'.
How many spurious accounts are you going to register to upvote me?
Usually, I do things like this for 3 karma points but since you look nice, I'll give it to you for free.
It wasn't actually Knobe but John Doris, who also works in the so-called experimental philosophy paradigm. The exact reference is:
“From My Lai to Abu Ghraib: The Moral Psychology of Atrocity.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXXI: 25-55
Here is the relevant quotation:
"(i) Passersby who had just found a dime were twenty-two times more likely to help a woman who had dropped some papers than passersby who did not find a dime (88% vs. 4%).27 (ii) Passersby not in a hurry were six times more likely to help an unfortunate who appeared to be in significant distress than were passersby in a hurry (63% vs. 10%).28 (iii) Passersby were five times more likely to help an apparently injured man who had dropped some books when ambient noise was at normal levels than they were when a power lawnmower was running nearby (80% vs. 15%).29 (iv) In Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment,” subjects role-playing in a simulated prison rapidly descended to Lord of the Flies barbarism.30 (v) In Milgram’s “obedience experiments,” subjects participating in a study purported to test the effects of punishment on learning would repeatedly punish a screaming “learner” with realistic (but simulated) electric shocks at the polite request of an experimenter."
(I can't use stylistic stuff like linking and quoting... Is there a guide to show how you quote?)
Click "help", to the bottom right of the reply box.
There's a lot of x-phi stuff by Knobe and friends available online - mostly about all the same sorts of topics at the moment. There's also a book called "Experimental Philosophy" edited by Knobe and Nichols... not quite a textbook, more a collection of papers with insufficient attention to detail on methodology... nonetheless, it's a pretty good book for those interested in the field.
Doris doesn't seem to host his stuff online, but here is a good starting place for interest in the field (hosted by Knobe).