A devastating critique of the presumed theological basis of the Jewish social justice movement-- the concept of healing the world.

In this concluding chapter, we gather the various contributions of this volume and attempt to extract some of the many key insights and challenges raised when it comes to the project of explaining health across the sciences. These insights were distilled down into a selection of the central concepts and issues defended or discussed by the authors, and were organized into a table to see, at a glance, where the attention was given. Reflecting on these insights will go some way (...) towards addressing the question of whether these explanations can be brought together into a coherent or unifying framework or whether we are simply stuck with mutually exclusive views about the multifaceted phenomenon of ‘health’. (shrink)

'It is going to change the way in which we understand many modern debates about economics, politics, and society' Ha Joon Chang, author of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism Over the past fifty years, the way we value what is 'good' and 'right' has changed dramatically. Behaviour that to our grandparents' generation might have seemed stupid, harmful or simply wicked now seems rational, natural, woven into the very logic of things. And, asserts Jonathan Aldred in this (...) revelatory new book, it's economics that's to blame.Licence to be Bad tells the story of how a group of economics theorists changed our world, and how a handful of key ideas, from free-riding to Nudge, seeped into our decision-making and, indeed, almost all aspects of our lives. Aldred reveals the extraordinary hold of economics on our morals and values. Economics has corrupted us. But if this hidden transformation is so recent, it can be reversed. Licence to be Bad shows us where to begin. (shrink)

Objective correlates—behavioral, functional, and neural—provide essential tools for the scientific study of consciousness. But reliance on these correlates should not lead to the ‘fallacy of misplaced objectivity’: the assumption that only objective properties should and can be accounted for objectively through science. Instead, what needs to be explained scientifically is what experience is intrinsically— its subjective properties—not just what we can do with it extrinsically. And it must be explained; otherwise the way experience feels would turn out to be magical (...) rather than physical. We argue that it is possible to account for subjective properties objectively once we move beyond cognitive functions and realize what experience is and how it is structured. Drawing on integrated information theory, we show how an objective science of the subjective can account, in strictly physical terms, for both the essential properties of every experience and the specific properties that make particular experiences feel the way they do. (shrink)

Although psychologist impairment has received attention from researchers, there is a paucity of empirical data aimed at determining the point at which such impairment necessitates action. The purpose of this study was to provide such empirical data. Members of Division 42 ( n = 285) responded to vignettes describing a psychologist whose symptoms of either depression or substance abuse varied across five levels of severity. Results identified specific levels of impairment at which psychologists were deemed too impaired to practice psychotherapy, (...) as well as significant differences between ratings of increasingly severe impairment. Practical and ethical implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

The law of informed consent to medical treatment has recently been extensively overhauled in England. The 2015 Montgomery judgment has done away with the long-held position that the information to be disclosed by doctors when obtaining valid consent from patients should be determined on the basis of what a reasonable body of medical opinion agree ought to be disclosed in the circumstances. The UK Supreme Court concluded that the information that is material to a patient’s decision should instead be judged (...) by reference to a new two-limbed test founded on the notions of the ‘reasonable person’ and the ‘particular patient’. The rationale outlined in Montgomery for this new test of materiality, and academic comment on the ruling’s significance, has focused on the central ethical importance that the law now accords to respect for patient autonomy in the process of obtaining consent from patients. In this paper, we dispute the claim that the new test of materiality articulated in Montgomery equates with respect for autonomy being given primacy in re-shaping the development of the law in this area. We also defend this position, arguing that our revised interpretation of Montgomery’s significance does not equate with a failure by the courts to give due legal consideration to what is owed to patients as autonomous decision-makers in the consent process. Instead, Montgomery correctly implies that doctors are ethically obliged to attend to a number of relevant ethical considerations in framing decisions about consent to treatment, which include subtle interpretations of the values of autonomy and well-being. Doctors should give appropriate consideration to how these values are fleshed out and balanced in context in order to specify precisely what information ought to be disclosed to a patient as a requirement of obtaining consent, and as a core component of shared decision-making within medical encounters more generally. (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid legal decision making has become prominent. This paper investigates the use of AI in a critical issue in employment law, the determination of a worker’s status—employee vs. independent contractor—in two common law countries (the U.S. and Canada). This legal question has been a contentious labor issue insofar as independent contractors are not eligible for the same benefits as employees. It has become an important societal issue due to the ubiquity of the gig (...) economy and the recent disruptions in employment arrangements. To address this problem, we collected, annotated, and structured the data for all Canadian and Californian court cases related to this legal question between 2002 and 2021, resulting in 538 Canadian cases and 217 U.S. cases. In contrast to legal literature focusing on complex and correlated characteristics of the employment relationship, our statistical analyses of the data show very strong correlations between the worker’s status and a small subset of quantifiable characteristics of the employment relationship. In fact, despite the variety of situations in the case law, we show that simple, off-the-shelf AI models classify the cases with an out-of-sample accuracy of more than 90%. Interestingly, the analysis of misclassified cases reveals consistent misclassification patterns by most algorithms. Legal analyses of these cases led us to identify how equity is ensured by judges in ambiguous situations. Finally, our findings have practical implications for access to legal advice and justice. We deployed our AI model via the open-access platform, https://MyOpenCourt.org/, to help users answer employment legal questions. This platform has already assisted many Canadian users, and we hope it will help democratize access to legal advice to large crowds. (shrink)

It would be very desirable to have an account of the relation between mind and world that sustained the integrity of each. In this paper, we will argue that a theory of cognition which is broadly Thomistic can do just that. Many commentators recognize that cognitio is Aquinas’s basic epistemic concept, and that it designates knowledge in the broadest and most basic sense, as distinguished from scientia, or knowledge in the paradigmatic sense. There are several important consequences of this distinction (...) which are relevant to a proper understanding of the way in which a theory of knowledge which is in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition approaches the issue of the relation between the mind and the world. First and foremost, knowledge cannot be construed as a univocal concept in the A/t context. There are different senses of knowledge and we should not expect there to be a theory which supplies necessary and sufficient conditions for “S knows that p” that satisfies all the different senses of knowledge. It is perplexing that the contemporary discussion seems to miss this point, for the same sort of systematic ambiguity of the term ‘knowledge’ seems to hold in English. Second, the A/t theory of knowledge is not an epistemological theory in the modern sense, if by “epistemological” we mean one which is clearly demarcated from a metaphysical, psychological, or even semantical theory. The A/t theory is a metaphysics of knowledge. Third, a Thomistic theory of knowledge begins with a theory of cognition which provides the grounds of knowledge across the board, including even that of scientia. (shrink)

When two agents engage in a joint action, such as rowing together, they exercise joint know-how. But what is the relationship between the joint know-how of the two agents and the know-how each agent possesses individually? I construct an “active mutual enablement” account of this relationship, according to which joint know-how arises when each agent knows how to predict, monitor, and make failure-averting adjustments in response to the behaviour of the other agent, while actively enabling the other to make such (...) adjustments. I defend the AME account from three objections, and I then use this account as the platform for an examination of the reducibility of joint know-how to joint propositional knowledge. A summative account of joint propositional knowledge is incompatible with the reduction of joint know-how to joint propositional knowledge, whereas a distributive account is not. I close by highlighting some open questions the AME account brings into view concerning the evolutionary origin and scaling up of joint know-how. (shrink)

This editorial introduces the Journal of Consciousness Studies special issue on "Animal Consciousness". The 15 contributors and co-editors answer the question "How should we study animal consciousness scientifically?" in 500 words or fewer.

The story of the preceding article continues….

We propose a new account of calibration according to which calibrating a technique shows that the technique does what it is supposed to do. To motivate our account, we examine an early twentieth-century debate about chlorophyll chemistry and Mikhail Tswett’s use of chromatographic adsorption analysis to study it. We argue that Tswett’s experiments established that his technique was reliable in the special case of chlorophyll without relying on either a theory or a standard calibration experiment. We suggest that Tswett broke (...) the experimenters’ regress by appealing to material facts in the common ground for chemists at the time. (shrink)

I am justified in believing that my lottery ticket—call it t1—will not win, on statistical grounds. Those grounds apply equally to any other ticket, so I am justified in believing of any other ticket ti (let i take values from 2 to 1000000) that it will not win. I am not, however, justified in believing the giant conjunctive proposition that t1 will not win & t2 will not win & . . . & t1,000,000 will not win. On the contrary, (...) I am justified in believing that some ticket will win, hence that one of those conjuncts is false. Suggested solution: justified belief is not closed under conjunction. It does not follow from the fact that I am justified in believing p and justified in believing q that I am justified in believing p & q. (shrink)

McTaggart’s original arguments have been interpreted and reinterpreted in a series of highly complex and, oft times, original ways. In this introductory paper I will offer a brief exposition of the original argument that McTaggart first gave and note a number of different ways in which philosophers have seen fit to respond. In doing so I hope to offer little more than an introduction to the topic that will pave the way for the papers that follow. It should also be (...) noted that many of the criticisms that I very tentatively suggest are not as developed as they should be were they to be taken to represent serious and insurmountable problems. All that I do here is to provide a very general overview of the philosophical terrain and point to some features that may turn out to be problematic if we attempt to navigate the terrain in any particular way. (shrink)

In this article we scrutinize what can be called an "experimentalist dogma" presupposed in Pablo Melogno's analysis of empirical incommensurability in the chemical revolution. According to Melogno, the fact that experimental methods were preserved throughout the chemical revolution was an indication that there were no relevant perceptual differences between Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier. In order to refine Melogno's general analysis, we will present a taxonomy of varieties of empirical incommensurability and discuss their relationships. To exemplify this categorization, and to (...) show its metatheoretical adequacy, we will apply it to the neuronist revolution, that is, to the process of discovery of the neuron in the late 19th and early 20th centuries within neuroanatomy, taking as our main case study the controversy between Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal. From the analysis of the controversies regarding dendritic spines and stellate cells of the cerebellum, in particular, we question the experimentalist dogma, highlighting how, in these controversies, the conservation of experimental practices does not guarantee the similarity of perceptual contents. Moreover, we will argue that, all other experimental conditions being equal, differences in experiential content between Golgi and Cajal are best explained by differences in their commitments to incompatible conceptual schemes. (shrink)

Using empirical evidence to attack intuitions can be epistemically dangerous, because various of the complaints that one might raise against them (e.g., that they are fallible; that we possess no non-circular defense of their reliability) can be raised just as easily against perception itself. But the opponents of intuition wish to challenge intuitions without at the same time challenging the rest of our epistemic apparatus. How might this be done? Let us use the term “hopefulness” to refer to the extent (...) to which we possess a good capacity for the detection and correction of the errors of any fallible source of evidence. I argue that we should not trust putative sources of evidence that are substantially lacking in hopefulness (even if they are basically reliable), and that we are indeed already operating under such a norm in our ordinary and scientific practices. I argue further that the philosophical practice of the appeal to intuitions is, in these terms, badly hopeless... (shrink)

How does philosophy learn to speak a new language? That is, how does some particular language come to serve as the means for the expression of philosophical ideas? In this paper, I present an answer grounded in four historical case studies and suggest that this answer has broad implications for contemporary philosophy. I begin with Jonathan Rée’s account of philosophical translation into English in the sixteenth century, and the debate between philosopher-translators who wanted to acquire – wholesale or with (...) modifications – foreign terms, and those who wished to take existing words and transform them from their ordinary to a philosophical use. I sketch how these twin processes of ‘acquisition’ and ‘transformation’ manifested themselves in philosophical translations from Greek to Latin, Greek to Arabic and both Greek and Arabic to Gə’əz and argue that comparative work in this vein could yield interesting and significant results. I suggest that not only is Rée’s approach useful for thinking about philosophical translation historically, but that philosophical translation between very different languages is important for contemporary philosophy insofar as it reveals the linguistic presuppositions of philosophical theories expressed in some particular language, and that this constitutes an argument against the prevailing monolingualism in philosophy. (shrink)

It’s easy to experience a slight vertigo effect when viewing a chart displaying the Holocene era of climate history. The striking isolation of the past 10,000 years of stable and accommodating aver...

Jonathan L. Kvanvig presents a new account of rationality, Perspectivalism, which both avoids elevating rationality so that only the most reflective of us are capable of rational beliefs, and avoids reducing it to the level of beasts. He defends optionality about what it is reasonable to think, and provides a framework for rational disagreement.

I start by examining Robert Audi's positive suggestions about moral perception, and then attempt to point out some challengeable assumptions that he seems to make, and to consider how things might look if those assumptions are abandoned.

In the fourth book of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke hints that he could explain how God may have created matter ex nihilo, but refrains from doing so. Leibniz, when he came upon this passage, pricked up his ears. There ensued a sequence of personal events which are not without charm and piquancy, and a sequence of philosophical events which are of some interest. In this paper we tell the tale.

Introduction: Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are an important source of justification for clinical decisions in modern evidence-based practice. Yet, we have given little attention to how they argue their evidence. In particular, how do CPGs argue for treatment with long-term medications that are increasingly prescribed to older patients? Approach and rationale: I selected six disease-specific guidelines recommending treatment with five of the medication classes most commonly prescribed for seniors in Ontario, Canada. I considered the stated aims of these CPGs and (...) the techniques employed towards those aims. Finally, I reconstructed and logically analysed the arguments supporting recommendations for pharmacotherapy. Analysis: The primary function of CPGs is rhetorical, or persuasive, and their means of persuasion include both a display of their credibility and their argumentation. Arguments supporting pharmacotherapy recommendations for the target population follow a common inductive pattern: statistical generalization from randomized controlled trial (RCT) and meta-analysis evidence. Two of the CPGs also argue their treatment recommendations for older patients in this style, while three fail to justify pharmacotherapy specifically for the older population. Discussion: The arguments analysed lack the auxiliary assumptions that would warrant making a generalization about the clinical effectiveness of medications for the older population. Guidelines reason using simple induction, while ignoring important inferential gaps. Future guidelines should aspire to be well-reasoned rather than simply evidence-based; argue from a plurality of evidence; be wary of hasty inductions; appropriately limit the scope of their recommendations; and avoid making law-like, prescriptive generalizations. (shrink)

Jonathan Dancy aims to establish the possibility of reasoning to action, by showing how similar it is to reasoning to belief. He offers a general theory of reasoning, which smoothly admits the differences there may be between the two types, while also considering the possibility of reasoning to hope, to fear, to doubt, and to intention.

ABSTRACT Numerous attempts have been made recently to argue from premises about ‘human nature’ to conclusions about social policy. This essay offers a critique of one such attempt, Melvin Konner's argument from the fact that women are more nurturing and less aggressive than men, to the claim that the world would be safer if women rather than men had control over the world's armaments, especially nuclear weapons (and thus they ought to occupy positions of power). I claim that the argument (...) is badly flawed at several points, and that as such, it does not advance but impedes the movement towards equal access to governmental positions. (shrink)

Mammalian placental pregnancy is a neglected problem case for theories of organismality. This example is closer to home than those typically discussed within philosophy of biology. I apply evolutio...

I claim that a whole is identical to its parts. Many find this claim incredible: it seems that a whole and its parts must be distinct, for the whole is one thing while its parts are many things. Byeong-uk Yi has developed a version of this argument which exploits the resources of plural logic. Yi provides logical analyses of the predicates ‘one’ and ‘many’ which seem to show that nothing can satisfy them both. But there are two senses of the (...) word ‘one’. One of these senses is not captured by Yi’s analysis, and in this sense of the word, it is logically possible for many things to be one. Moreover, we should only believe that a whole is one thing in this sense, not that it is one thing in the sense Yi has analysed. Thus, we can identify wholes with their parts without contradiction. (shrink)

Practical Reality is a lucid original study of the relation between the reasons why we do things and the reasons why we should. Jonathan Dancy maintains that current philosophical orthodoxy bowdlerizes this relation, making it impossible to understand how anyone can act for a good reason. By giving a fresh account of values and reasons, he finds a place for normativity in philosophy of mind and action, and strengthens the connection between these areas and ethics.

Jonathan Harrison teases our minds with two short stories ….

Jonathan Harrison teases our minds with two short stories ….

A major intellectual history of the American Revolution and its influence on later revolutions in Europe and the Americas The Expanding Blaze is a sweeping history of how the American Revolution inspired revolutions throughout Europe and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Israel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Enlightenment, shows how the radical ideas of American founders such as Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Monroe set the pattern for democratic revolutions, movements, and (...) constitutions in France, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Canada, Haiti, Brazil, and Spanish America. The Expanding Blaze reminds us that the American Revolution was an astonishingly radical event—and that it didn’t end with the transformation and independence of America. Rather, the Revolution continued to reverberate in Europe and the Americas for the next three-quarters of a century. This comprehensive history of the Revolution’s international influence traces how American efforts to implement Radical Enlightenment ideas—including the destruction of the old regime and the promotion of democratic republicanism, self-government, and liberty—helped drive revolutions abroad, as foreign leaders explicitly followed the American example and espoused American democratic values. The first major new intellectual history of the age of democratic revolution in decades, The Expanding Blaze returns the American Revolution to its global context. (shrink)

Possible worlds, concrete or abstract as you like, are irrelevant to the truthmakers for modality—or so I shall argue in this paper. First, I present the neo-Humean picture of modality, and explain why those who accept it deny a common sense view of modality. Second, I present what I take to be the most pressing objection to the neo-Humean account, one that, I argue, applies equally well to any theory that grounds modality in possible worlds. Third, I present an alternative, (...) properties-based theory of modality and explore several specific ways to flesh the general proposal out, including my favored version, the powers theory. And, fourth, I offer a powers semantics for counterfactuals that each version of the properties-based theory of modality can accept, mutatis mutandis. Together with a definition of possibility and necessity in terms of counterfactuals, the powers semantics of counterfactuals generates a semantics for modality that appeals to causal powers and not possible worlds. (shrink)

Western society today is less unified by a set of core values than ever before. Undoubtedly, the concept of moral consensus is a difficult one in a liberal, democratic and pluralistic society. But it is imperative to avoid a rigid majoritarianism where sensitive personal values are at stake, as in bioethics. Bioethics has become an influential part of public and professional discussions of health care. It has helped frame issues of moral values and medicine as part of a more general (...) effort to find consensus about some of the most perplexing questions of our time. But why is it thought that a moral consensus is important or that it deserves respect? How does moral consensus acquire legitimacy in a society that includes diverse value systems? How is moral consensus possible and how do small groups help create or distort consensus processes? Written by a medical school professor trained in philosophy, this timely work tackles these questions from philosophical, historical, and social scientific standpoints. It begins by describing the traditional ambivalence about consensus in Western culture as well as the uncertain relationship in modernity between consensus and expertise. After outlining the current bioethical consensus, the book gives philosophical and political analyses of the idea of consensus, then assesses the role of consensus in national ethics commissions and in the ethics committee movement. Moreno constructs an original, naturalistic philosophy of moral consensus, referred to as "bioethical naturalism", and then applies sociology and social psychology to actual consensus processes. The book concludes with an account of bioethics as a consensus-oriented social reform movement. This insightful volume will be essential reading for bioethicists, philosophers, physicians, members of ethics committees, and all those concerned with ethical and social issues in health care. (shrink)

Much of the literature on the epistemology of disagreement focuses on the rational responses to disagreement, and to disagreement with an epistemic peer in particular. The Equal Weight View claims that in cases of peer disagreement each dissenting peer opinion is to be given equal weight and, in a case of two opposing equally-weighted opinions, each party should adopt the attitude which ‘splits the difference’. The Equal Weight View has been taken by both its critics and its proponents to have (...) quite drastic skeptical ramifications given contingent empirical facts that we are aware of regarding disagreements in philosophy, religion, science, and politics. In this paper,we begin by clarifying the central claims of the Equal Weight View (Section 2) and then examine two routes from the Equal Weight View to skepticism about such matters that have been explored in the literature. The first claims that our awareness of peers or experts who disagree with us about such issues requires that we abandon our beliefs on these issues (Section 3). The second claims that our awareness of merely possible peers or experts who disagree with us requires us to abandon our beliefs (Section 4). We find both routes from the Equal Weight View to a form of skepticism defective. However, there are nearby considerations, explored in Sections 5 and 6,which (for better or worse) do lead to at least some skeptical consequences for the Equal WeightView, albeit for different reasons. (shrink)

Nutrition is a complex and contested area in biomedicine, which requires diverse evidence sources. Nonhuman primate models are considered an important biomedical research tool because of their biological similarities to humans, but they are typically used with little explicit consideration of their ecology and evolution. Using the rhesus macaque (RM), we consider the potential of nutritional ecology for enriching the use of primates as models for human nutrition. We introduce some relevant aspects of RM evolutionary and social ecology and discuss (...) two examples where they have been used in biomedical research: obesity and aging. We next consider how insights from nutritional ecology can help inform and direct the use of RM as a biomedical model. We conclude by illustrating how conceptual tools might inform the use of RM as a model for human nutrition and extracting insights from RM that might be relevant to broader theoretical considerations around animal model systems. (shrink)

We examined the relationship between political affiliation, perceptual estimates, and subjective judgements of disease prevalence and mortality across three chart types. An online survey exposed separate groups of participants to charts displaying COVID-19 data or COVID-19 data labeled ‘Influenza ’. Block 1 examined responses to cross-sectional mortality data ; results revealed that perceptual estimates comparing mortality in two countries were similar across political affiliations and chart types, while subjective judgements revealed a disease x political party interaction. Although Democrats and Republicans (...) provided similar proportion estimates, Democrats interpreted mortality to be higher than Republicans; Democrats also interpreted mortality to be higher for COVID-19 than Influenza. Block 2 examined responses to time series ; Democrats and Republicans estimated greater slopes for COVID-19 trend lines than Influenza lines ; subjective judgements revealed a disease x political party interaction. Democrats and Republicans indicated similar subjective rates of change for COVID-19 trends, and Democrats indicated lower subjective rates of change for Influenza than in any other condition. Thus, while Democrats and Republicans saw the graphs similarly in terms of percentages and line slopes, their subjective interpretations diverged. While we may see graphs of infectious disease data similarly from a purely mathematical or geometric perspective, our political affiliations may moderate how we subjectively interpret the data. (shrink)

Intracellular NLR (Nucleotide‐binding domain and Leucine‐rich Repeat‐containing) receptors are sensitive monitors that detect pathogen invasion of both plant and animal cells. NLRs confer recognition of diverse molecules associated with pathogen invasion. NLRs must exhibit strict intramolecular controls to avoid harmful ectopic activation in the absence of pathogens. Recent discoveries have elucidated the assembly and structure of oligomeric NLR signalling complexes in animals, and provided insights into how these complexes act as scaffolds for signal transduction. In plants, recent advances have provided (...) novel insights into signalling‐competent NLRs, and into the myriad strategies that diverse plant NLRs use to recognise pathogens. Here, we review recent insights into the NLR biology of both animals and plants. By assessing commonalities and differences between kingdoms, we are able to develop a more complete understanding of NLR function. (shrink)

How can one Jewish thinker's natural law theory explain morality, divine commandments, and human ordinances; and how do we assess the consistency of that theory when it is mentioned in connection with such diverse areas? The answer lies in the changing meaning of reason in Novak's writings.

We present the first neurophysiological signatures showing distinctive effects of group social context and emotional arousal on cultural perceptions, such as the efficacy of religious rituals. Using a novel protocol, EEG data were simultaneously recorded from ethnic Chinese religious believers in group and individual settings as they rated the perceived efficacy of low, medium, and high arousal spirit-medium rituals presented as video clips. Neural oscillatory patterns were then analyzed for these perceptual judgements, categorized as low, medium, and high efficacy. The (...) results revealed distinct neural signatures and behavioral patterns between the experimental conditions. Arousal levels predicted ratings of ritual efficacy. Increased efficacy was marked by suppressed alpha and beta power, regardless of group or individual setting. In groups, efficacy ratings converged. Individual setting showed increased within-participant phase synchronization in alpha and beta bands, while group setting enhanced between-participant theta phase synchronization. This reflected group participants' orientation toward a common perspective and social coordination. These findings suggest that co-presence in groups leads to a social-tuning effect supported by between-participant theta phase synchrony. Together these neural synchrony patterns reveal how collective rituals have both individual and communal dimensions. The emotionality of spirit-medium rituals drives individual perceptions of efficacy, while co-presence in groups signals the significance of an event and socially tunes enhanced agreement in perceptual ratings. In other words, mass gatherings may foster social cohesion without necessarily requiring group-size scaling limitations of direct face-to-face interaction. This could have implications for the scaling computability of synchrony in large groups as well as for humanistic studies in areas such as symbolic interactionism. (shrink)

When we hear about a transgression, we may consider whether the perpetrator’s individual circumstances make their transgression more understandable or excusable. Mitigating circumstances may reduce the severity of punishment that is deemed appropriate, both intuitively and legally. But importantly, in courts of public opinion and of law, mitigating information is typically presented only after information about a perpetrator’s transgression. We explore whether this sequence influences the force of mitigating evidence. Specifically, in two studies, we examined whether presenting evidence about a (...) perpetrator’s background before or after evidence of their violation influenced how severely U.S. participants punished perpetrators. In Study 1 (N = 132), evidence about the perpetrator’s mitigating circumstances reduced punishment only when it was presented before evidence about the perpetrator’s violation. Study 2 (N = 316) additionally revealed this moderating effect of presentation order across a variety of premeditated and impulsive violations. These findings are consistent with person-centered theories of punishment and with the Story Model of adjudication. (shrink)