Semester 2, 2023-2024
Type of courseTheory-oriented Workshops
DateJune 4, 2024
LocationUtrecht University
1 day
Maximum number of participants25
ECTS0.5 EC will be appointed for participation in the complete course
StaffLucas Molleman (UvA), Thorsten Erle (TiU), Guest speaker: Paul Conway (University of Southampton)
KLI Social Cognition track meeting: workshop
When? Tuesday 4 June 2024, 11:00 – 18:00, dinner afterwards
Where? Utrecht University, Faculty of Law: Drift 13, 3512 BR, Utrecht, room 003
Who? Paul Conway – University of Southampton
What? Beyond deontology and utilitarianism: Process dissociation reveals virtue ethics in sacrificial dilemmas – Sacrificial dilemmas entail deciding whether to cause harm that maximizes overall outcomes. For decades, theorists have described decisions to reject such harm as consistent with deontological ethics that judge the morality of actions by their intrinsic nature, and decisions to accept sacrificial harm as consistent with utilitarian ethics that judge the morality of actions by their outcomes. However, such approaches ignore virtue ethics, centered on achieving moral personhood through balancing multiple concerns. Using a process dissociation approach to assess harm-rejection and outcome-maximization responses independently, results suggest that people who embody virtue ethics ideals—e.g., moral identity, self-control, sensitivity to moral principles, self-sacrifice—aim to balance multiple moral concerns, both avoid causing harm and maximize overall outcomes. Conversely, antisocial tendencies traits—e.g., egoism, psychopathy, ethical violations, investment in sin stocks—often predict ignoring both concerns, accepting causing harm without striving to maximize outcomes. These findings suggest that sacrificial dilemmas may be better understood in terms of virtue ethics instead of utilitarian or deontological ethics, and demonstrate the importance of process dissociation for clarifying the psychological mechanisms involved in moral decision-making.
After his talk, the speaker will conduct a workshop going through the details of process dissociation calculations and analyses and relationships with multinomial modelling approaches.
Literature for preparation
Background information to the workshop
Participants will get the most out of this workshop if they arrive with a potential paradigm in mind for developing their own process model. However, our guest will also take time to think along with students who do not have that in mind yet (e.g., early PhD candidates).
Modelling techniques are suited for cases where more than one process may contribute to the same response on an outcome. For example, people may engage in prosocial behaviour either because they care about other people or they are engaging in self-presentation to look good.
Outcomes must be dichotomous. For example, give or don't give, note the presence or absence of a stimulus, deciding that an action is acceptable or not, categorizing someone as an in-group or outgroup member, accepting or rejecting a certain action, or performing an action versus refraining from it.
The key to modelling is to test cases both where theorized processes should lead to the same outcome and then parallel cases where they should in theory lead to different outcomes. It can be easier to start with cases where they conflict and then we can build parallel cases where they do not. So a good starting place is to think of situations where two processes might conflict. The lecture by our guest will elaborate on these steps using a concrete example.
We recommend contemplating how you might employ modelling approaches to your own work. During the workshop, we will work with you to develop stimulus materials, processing trees, and modelling equations that you will need to run a study using this paradigm. The more of a head start you have in terms of thinking about a specific topic, the more you will gain from this workshop.
That said, do not stress if you don't yet have a specific plan in mind. There may be opportunities to collaborate with other participants or to develop projects on the fly. So please come even if you don't have a clear project idea in mind. But do start thinking ahead about what a priority project might be for you that would benefit from modelling.