ABSTRACT

The so-called “conciliatory” norm in epistemology and meta-ethics requires that an agent, upon encountering peer disagreement with her judgment, lower her confidence about that judgment. But whether agents actually abide by this norm is unclear. Although confidence is excessively researched in the empirical sciences, possible effects of disagreement on confidence have been understudied. Here, we target this lacuna, reporting a study that measured confidence about moral beliefs before and after exposure to moral discourse about a controversial issue. Our findings indicate that participants do not abide by the conciliatory norm. Neither do they conform to a rival “steadfast” norm that demands their confidence to remain the same. Instead, moral discourse seems to boost confidence. Interestingly, we also find a confidence boost for factual beliefs, and a correlation between the extremity of moral views and confidence. One possible explanation of our findings is that when engaging in moral discourse participants become more extreme in their opinions, which leads them to become more confident about them, or vice versa: they become more confident and in turn more extreme. Although our work provides initial evidence for the former mechanism, further research is needed for a better understanding of confidence and moral discourse.

摘要

认识论和元伦理学中所谓的“和解”规范要求代理人在遇到同伴对其判断的分歧时，降低她对该判断的信心。但代理人是否真的遵守这一规范尚不清楚。尽管在实证科学中对信心的研究过多，但分歧对信心的可能影响尚未得到充分研究。在这里，我们针对这一空白，报告了一项研究，该研究测量了在有关有争议的问题的道德话语之前和之后对道德信念的信心。我们的研究结果表明，参与者不遵守和解规范。他们也不符合要求他们的信心保持不变的竞争对手的“坚定”规范。相反，道德话语似乎增强了信心。有趣的是，我们还发现对事实信念的信心提升，以及道德观点的极端与信心之间的相关性。对我们发现的一种可能的解释是，当参与道德话语时，参与者的观点会变得更加极端，这导致他们对自己更加自信，反之亦然：他们变得更加自信，进而变得更加极端。虽然我们的工作为前一种机制提供了初步证据，但需要进一步研究以更好地理解信心和道德话语。