Elqayam Shira, Thompson Valerie A, Wilkinson Meredith R, Evans Jonathan St B T, Over David E
School of Applied Social Sciences, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, De Montfort University.
Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2015 Sep;41(5):1516-32. doi: 10.1037/a0038686. Epub 2015 Feb 2.
Humans have a unique ability to generate novel norms. Faced with the knowledge that there are hungry children in Somalia, we easily and naturally infer that we ought to donate to famine relief charities. Although a contentious and lively issue in metaethics, such inference from "is" to "ought" has not been systematically studied in the psychology of reasoning. We propose that deontic introduction is the result of a rich chain of pragmatic inference, most of it implicit; specifically, when an action is causally linked to a valenced goal, valence transfers to the action and bridges into a deontic conclusion. Participants in 5 experiments were presented with utility conditionals in which an action results in a benefit, a cost, or neutral outcome (e.g., "If Lisa buys the booklet, she will pass the exam") and asked to evaluate how strongly deontic conclusions (e.g., "Lisa should buy the booklet") follow from the premises. Findings show that the direction of the conclusions was determined by outcome valence (Experiments 1a and 1b), whereas their strength was determined by the strength of the causal link between action and outcome (Experiments 1, 2a, and 2b). We also found that deontic introduction is defeasible and can be suppressed by additional premises that interfere with any of the links in the implicit chain of inference (Experiments 2a, 2b, and 3). We propose that deontic introduction is a species-specific generative capacity whose function is to regulate future behavior.
人类具有产生新规范的独特能力。当得知索马里有饥饿儿童时，我们很容易且自然地推断出我们应该向饥荒救济慈善机构捐款。尽管这在元伦理学中是一个有争议且活跃的问题，但这种从“是”到“应该”的推理在推理心理学中尚未得到系统研究。我们提出，道义引入是一系列丰富的语用推理的结果，其中大部分是隐含的；具体而言，当一个行为与一个有价值的目标存在因果联系时，价值就会转移到该行为上，并进而得出一个道义结论。在5个实验中，向参与者呈现了效用条件句，其中一个行为会导致一个益处、一个代价或中性结果（例如，“如果丽莎买了这本小册子，她就会通过考试”），并要求他们评估从前提中得出道义结论（例如，“丽莎应该买这本小册子”）的强烈程度。研究结果表明，结论的方向由结果的价值决定（实验1a和1b），而结论的强度则由行为与结果之间因果联系的强度决定（实验1、2a和2b）。我们还发现，道义引入是可废止的，并且可以被干扰隐含推理链中任何环节的额外前提所抑制（实验2a、2b和3）。我们提出，道义引入是一种特定物种的生成能力，其功能是规范未来的行为。
