Self-Deception: A Case Study in Folk Conceptual Structure
Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítemEditorial
Springer Nature
Materia
Folk psychology Categorization Experimental philosophy
Fecha
2024-08-15Referencia bibliográfica
Isern-Mas, C., Hannikainen, I.R. Self-Deception: A Case Study in Folk Conceptual Structure. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-024-00743-y
Patrocinador
Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature; Grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2020.119791RA.I00); Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral grant funded by MCN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTRResumen
Theoretical debates around the concept of self-deception revolve around identifying the conditions for a behavior to qualify as self-deception. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that various candidate features—such as intent, belief change, and motive—are treated as sufficient, but non-necessary, conditions according to the lay concept of self-deception. This led us to ask whether there are multiple lay concepts, such that different participants endorse competing theories (the disagreement view), or whether individual participants assign partial weight to various features and consequently waver in cases of middling similarity (the conflict view). In Experiment 3, by-participant regression models uncovered that most participants additively consider multiple characteristics of the prototype of self-deception, while only a minority of participants treat a characteristic (or a combination thereof) as necessary and sufficient. In sum, by disambiguating interpersonal disagreement and intrapersonal conflict in a within-subjects design, the present experiments indicate that the lay concept may primarily exhibit a prototype structure. In closing, we suggest that future research deploying this method may help to explain why experimental research on philosophical concepts often engenders partial support for competing theories.