Bear Adam, Knobe Joshua
Department of Psychology, Yale University.
Program in Cognitive Science, Yale University.
Cogn Sci. 2016 Nov;40(8):2025-2049. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12314. Epub 2015 Oct 21.
Four studies explored people's judgments about whether particular types of behavior are compatible with determinism. Participants read a passage describing a deterministic universe, in which everything that happens is fully caused by whatever happened before it. They then assessed the degree to which different behaviors were possible in such a universe. Other participants evaluated the extent to which each of these behaviors had various features (e.g., requiring reasoning). We assessed the extent to which these features predicted judgments about whether the behaviors were possible in a deterministic universe. Experiments 1 and 2 found that people's judgments about whether a behavior was compatible with determinism were not predicted by their judgments about whether that behavior relies on physical processes in the brain and body, is uniquely human, is unpredictable, or involves reasoning. Experiment 3, however, found that a distinction between what we call "active" and "passive" behaviors can explain people's judgments. Experiment 4 extended these findings, showing that we can measure this distinction in several ways and that it is robustly predicted by two different cues. Taken together, these results suggest that people carve up mentally guided behavior into two distinct types-understanding one type to be compatible with determinism, but another type to be fundamentally incompatible with determinism.
四项研究探讨了人们对于特定类型行为是否与决定论相容的判断。参与者阅读一段描述决定论宇宙的文字，在这个宇宙中，发生的一切都完全由其之前发生的事情所导致。然后，他们评估在这样一个宇宙中不同行为的可能性程度。其他参与者则评估这些行为各自具有各种特征（例如需要推理）的程度。我们评估了这些特征在多大程度上能预测关于这些行为在决定论宇宙中是否可能的判断。实验1和实验2发现，人们对于一种行为是否与决定论相容的判断，并非由他们对于该行为是否依赖大脑和身体的物理过程、是否是人类独有的、是否不可预测或是否涉及推理的判断所预测。然而，实验3发现，我们所谓的“主动”行为和“被动”行为之间的区别可以解释人们的判断。实验4扩展了这些发现，表明我们可以通过几种方式来衡量这种区别，并且它能由两种不同的线索有力地预测。综合来看，这些结果表明，人们将受心理引导的行为划分为两种不同类型——认为一种类型与决定论相容，但另一种类型则与决定论根本不相容。
