The Coronavirus Disease 2019 pandemic prompted the need for a teleneuropsychology protocol for the cognitive assessment of older adults, who are at increased risk for both COVID-19 and dementia. Prior recommendations for teleneuropsychological assessment did not consider many of the unique challenges posed by COVID-19. The field is still in need of clear guidelines and standards of care for the assessment of older adults under the current circumstances. Advantages of teleneuropsychological assessment during the COVID-19 pandemic include reduced risk of contracting (...) the virus, eliminating travel time and reducing cost, and more rapid access to needed services. Challenges include disparities in technology access among patients, reduced control over the testing environment, impeded ability to make behavioral observations, and limited research on valid and reliable cognitive assessment measures. The aim of this perspective review is to propose a teleneuropsychological protocol to facilitate neuropsychological assessment utilizing a virtual platform. The proposed protocol has been successful with our clinical and research populations and may help neuropsychologists implement teleneuropsychology services without compromising validity or reliability. However, there is increasing need for research on teleneuropsychological assessment options for both clinical and research purposes. (shrink)

This book explores the interconnections between Milton's politics, poetics and prose writings.

ABSTRACT The apparent consistency of Sobel sequences famously motivated David Lewis to defend a variably strict conditional semantics for counterfactuals. If Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro. If Sophie had gone to the parade and had been stuck behind someone tall, she would not have seen Pedro. But if the order of the counterfactuals in a Sobel sequence is reversed—in the example, if is asserted prior to —the second counterfactual asserted no longer rings true. (...) This is the Heim sequence problem. That the order of assertion makes this difference is surprising on the variably strict account. Some argue that this is reason to reject the Lewis-Stalnaker semantics outright. Others argue that the problem motivates a contextualist rendering of counterfactuals. Still others maintain that the explanation for the phenomenon is merely pragmatic. I argue that none of these is right, and I defend a novel way to understand the phenomenon. My proposal avoids the problems faced by the alternative analyses and enjoys independent support. There is, however, a difficulty for my view: it entails that many ordinarily accepted counterfactuals are not true. I argue that this cost is acceptable. (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen's influential Direct Argument (DA) for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and causal determinism makes use of an inference rule he calls "Rule B." Michael McKenna has argued that van Inwagen's defense of this rule is dialectically inappropriate because it is based entirely on alleged “confirming” cases that are not of the right kind to justify the use of Rule B in DA. Here I argue that McKenna’s objection is on the right track but more must be said (...) if we are to see why. To fill in the gaps I consider a recent attempt by Ira M. Schnall and David Widerker to defend DA against McKenna’s objection. I argue that neither prong of their attack is successful against a variation on McKenna’s basic argument. In the course of responding to Schnall and Widerker’s objections to McKenna, I identify what is, as I argue, the real reason DA fails in its purpose to shift the burden of proof. (shrink)

Chater & Loewenstein thoughtfully express their disillusionment with contemporary applied behavioral science, particularly as it pertains to public policy. Although they fault an overemphasis on i-frame approaches, their proposed alternatives leave doubt regarding whether behavioral science has much, if anything, useful to offer policy. We offer two critical principles to guide and motivate more relevant behavioral science.

Chater & Loewenstein (C&L) ignore the long history by which social scientists have developed more nuanced and ultimately more helpful ways to understand the relationship between persons and situations. This tradition is reflected and advanced in a large literature on “wise” social–psychological or mindset interventions, which C&L do not discuss yet mischaracterize.

The zetetic turn in epistemology raises three questions about epistemic and zetetic norms. First, there is the relationship question: what is the relationship between epistemic and zetetic norms? Are some epistemic norms zetetic norms, or are epistemic and zetetic norms distinct? Second, there is the tension question: are traditional epistemic norms in tension with plausible zetetic norms? Third, there is the reaction question: how should theorists react to a tension between epistemic and zetetic norms? Drawing on an analogy to practical (...) philosophy, I develop a focal point view to resolve these motivating questions. On the focal point view, traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms answer different types of normative questions. There is nevertheless a familiar type of evaluative tension between traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms, but this tension is an unavoidable feature of the normative landscape and not a sign that traditional epistemic norms need revision. But if traditional epistemic norms are not zetetic norms, then in what sense is zetetic epistemology a project for epistemologists? I conclude by articulating a sense in which some nontraditional epistemic norms are zetetic norms, and in which zetetic epistemology is an important part of the study of theoretical rationality. (shrink)

I attempt to get as clear as possible on the chain of reasoning by which irreversible macrodynamics is derivable from time-reversible microphysics, and in particular to clarify just what kinds of assumptions about the initial state of the universe, and about the nature of the microdynamics, are needed in these derivations. I conclude that while a “Past Hypothesis” about the early Universe does seem necessary to carry out such derivations, that Hypothesis is not correctly understood as a constraint on the (...) early Universe’s entropy. (shrink)

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on personal identity.

Recently T. M. Scanlon and others have advanced an ostensibly comprehensive theory of moral responsibility—a theory of both being responsible and being held responsible—that best accounts for our moral practices. I argue that both aspects of the Scanlonian theory fail this test. A truly comprehensive theory must incorporate and explain three distinct conceptions of responsibility—attributability, answerability, and accountability—and the Scanlonian view conflates the first two and ignores the importance of the third. To illustrate what a truly comprehensive theory might look (...) like, I investigate what it would say about the difficult case of the psychopath. (shrink)

Hylomorphists hold that substances are, in some sense, composites of matter and form. The form of a substance is typically taken to play a fundamental role in determining the unity or identity of the whole. Staunch hylomorphists think that this role is of a kind that precludes the ontological reduction of form to the physical and thus take their position to be inconsistent with physicalism. Forms, according to staunch hylomorphism, play a fundamental role in grounding their bearers’ proper parts and (...) that, it seems, rules out the physical grounding of form itself. I shall develop a physicalist version of hylomorphism that treats form as geometric structure and which, I shall argue, entails many of the central theses endorsed by staunch hylomorphists. Based on Shoemaker’s notion of conditional powers, I shall argue that the geometric structures of complex wholes are the conditions on at least some of the conditional powers of their bearers’ proper parts, transforming those powers into powers simpliciter. Thus, forms play a fundamental role in the dynamical evolution of the physical world, but without bestowing causal powers themselves and hence without violating the causal closure of the physical domain. If a substance’s proper parts are taken to be individuated by their powers simpliciter, then they derive their identities from their places in the substantial whole, which thus determines the identities of its proper parts without changing their intrinsic natures. (shrink)

Bounded rationality gets a bad rap in epistemology. It is argued that theories of bounded rationality are overly context‐sensitive; conventionalist; or dependent on ordinary language (Carr, 2022; Pasnau, 2013). In this paper, I have three aims. The first is to set out and motivate an approach to bounded rationality in epistemology inspired by traditional theories of bounded rationality in cognitive science. My second aim is to show how this approach can answer recent challenges raised for theories of bounded rationality. My (...) third aim is to clarify the role of rational ideals in bounded rationality. (shrink)

In this article, I develop a general explanatory model of the liability and lesser evil justifications of harm. Despite their respective provenance in consequentialist and deontological ethics, both justifications are, at root, rich forms of the proportionality relationship between a shared set of underlying normative variables. The nature of the proportionality relationship, and the conditions under which it operates, differ between the two forms of justification. The article explores these differences in detail and the implications they have for the justification (...) of self-defense and war. (shrink)

We present five experiments and simulation studies to establish late analogical abstraction as a new psychological phenomenon: Schema abstraction from analogical examples can revive otherwise inert knowledge. We find that comparing two analogous examples of negotiations at recall time promotes retrieving analogical matches stored in memory—a notoriously elusive effect. Another innovation in this research is that we show parallel effects for real‐life autobiographical memory (Experiments 1–3) and for a controlled memory set (Experiments 4 and 5). Simulation studies show that a (...) unified model based on schema abstraction can capture backward (retrieval) effects as well as forward (transfer) effects. (shrink)

The current paper examines whether knowledge of an ethical principle influences moral awareness and ethical decision making. Using hypothetical scenarios and a behavioral task, three experiments examine the effects of deepening people’s knowledge of ethical principles. In each study, an analogical encoding learning intervention led to greater knowledge of an ethical principle, which in turn resulted in a greater likelihood of moral awareness and making ethical decisions. These findings suggest that moral awareness is partly a matter of the depth of (...) individuals’ knowledge of ethical principles. The findings provide further reasons to link work on ethics with work on expertise and knowledge transfer as well as indicate new approaches to ethics training. (shrink)

Since the announcement and establishment of the Oversight Board (OB) by the technology company Meta as an independent institution reviewing Facebook and Instagram’s content moderation decisions, the OB has been subjected to scholarly scrutiny ranging from praise to criticism. However, there is currently no overarching framework for understanding the OB’s various strengths and weaknesses. Consequently, this article analyses, organises, and supplements academic literature, news articles, and Meta and OB documents to understand the OB’s strengths and weaknesses and how it can (...) be improved. Significant strengths include its ability to enhance the transparency of content moderation decisions and processes, to effect reform indirectly through policy recommendations, and its assertiveness in interpreting its jurisdiction and overruling Meta. Significant weaknesses include its limited jurisdiction, limited impact, Meta’s control over the OB’s precedent, and its lack of diversity. The analysis of a recent OB case in Ethiopia shows these strengths and weaknesses in practice. The OB’s relationship with Meta and governments will lead to challenges and opportunities shaping its future development. Reforms to the OB should improve the OB’s control over its precedent, apply OB precedent to currently disputed cases, and clarify the standards for invoking OB precedent. Finally, these reforms provide the foundation for an additional improvement to address the OB’s institutional weaknesses, by involving users in determining whether the OB’s precedent should be applied to decide current content moderation disputes. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Indictment Background Institutions for Distributive Justice A Non‐Capitalist Property‐Owning Democracy Economic Democracy ED Versus POD POD Modified References.

This is the best overview of Foucault's work to date. A principal architect of poststructuralism, Michel Foucault reshaped the varied disciplines of history, philosophy, literary theory, and social science. David Shumway has provided, for the nonspecialist, a systematic analysis of the works of Foucault that is both thorough and accessible. Shumway connects Foucault's various conceptual and linguistic techniques to the basic critical strategies and purpose of his philosophy.

Longtermists have recently argued that it is overwhelmingly important to do what we can to mitigate existential risks to humanity. I consider three mistakes that are often made in calculating the value of existential risk mitigation. I show how correcting these mistakes pushes the value of existential risk mitigation substantially below leading estimates, potentially low enough to threaten the normative case for existential risk mitigation. I use this discussion to draw four positive lessons for the study of existential risk. -/- (...) . (shrink)

Libertarian self-ownership views have traditionally maintained that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against any infringement upon our property. This stringency yields very counter-intuitive results when we consider trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such having planes fly overhead. Maintaining that other people's rights against all infringements are very powerful threatens to undermine our liberty, as Nozick saw. In this paper I consider the most sophisticated attempts to rectify this problem within a libertarian self-ownership framework. (...) I argue that all of these responses are significantly flawed. (shrink)

Recent research finds that people respond more generously to individual victims described in detail than to equivalent statistical victims described in general terms. We propose that this “identified victim effect” is one manifestation of a more general phenomenon: a positive influence of tangible information on generosity. In three experiments, we find evidence for an “identified intervention effect”; providing tangible details about a charity’s interventions significantly increases donations to that charity. Although previous work described sympathy as the primary mediator between tangible (...) information and giving, current mediational analyses show that the influence of tangible details can operate through donors’ perception that their contribution will have impact. Taken together with past work, the results suggest that tangible information of many types promotes generosity and can do so either via sympathy or via perceived impact. The ability of tangible information to increase impact points to new ways for charities to encourage generosity. (shrink)

As neurotechnologies continue to develop and diffuse, this fast-paced field must be guided by robust governance frameworks in order to promote responsible innovation. The article by Bublitz (2024)...

I point out a radical indeterminism in potential-based formulations of Newtonian gravity once we drop the condition that the potential vanishes at infinity. This indeterminism, which is well known in theoretical cosmology but has received little attention in foundational discussions, can be removed only by specifying boundary conditions at all instants of time, which undermines the theory's claim to be fully cosmological, i.e., to apply to the Universe as a whole. A recent alternative formulation of Newtonian gravity due to Saunders (...) pp.22-48) provides a conceptually satisfactory cosmology but fails to reproduce the Newtonian limit of general relativity in homogenous but anisotropic universes. I conclude that Newtonian gravity lacks a fully satisfactory cosmological formulation. (shrink)

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was the premier Jewish thinker of his day and one of the best-known figures of the German Enlightenment, earning the sobriquet 'the Socrates of Berlin'. He was thoroughly involved in the central issue of Enlightenment religious thinking: the inevitable conflict between reason and revelation in an age contending with individual rights and religious toleration. He did not aspire to a comprehensive philosophy of Judaism, since he thought human reason was limited, but he did see Judaism as compatible (...) with toleration and rights. David Sorkin offers a close study of Mendelssohn's complete writings, treating the German, and the often-neglected Hebrew writings, as a single corpus and arguing that Mendelssohn's two spheres of endeavour were entirely consistent. (shrink)

Interpretation -- Introduction -- Interpreting Plato -- The political culture of Plato's early dialogues -- Dialogue -- Character and history -- The mouthpiece principle -- Forms of evidence -- Desire -- Socrates and eros -- The subjectivist conception of desire -- Instrumental and terminal desire -- Rational and irrational desires -- Desire in the critique of Akrasia -- Interpreting Lysis -- The deficiency conception of desire -- Inauthentic friendship -- Platonic desire -- Antiphilosophical desires -- Knowledge -- Excellence as wisdom (...) -- The epistemic unity of excellence -- Dunamis and technê -- Goodness and form -- The epistemological priority of definitional knowledge -- Ordinary ethical knowledge -- Method -- The Socratic fallacy -- Socrates' pursuit of definitions -- Hupothesis -- Two postulates -- The geometrical illustration -- Geometrical analysis -- The method of reasoning from a postulate -- Elenchus and hupothesis -- Knowledge and aitia -- F-conditions -- Cognitive security -- Aporia -- Forms of aporia -- Dramatic aporia -- The example of Charmides -- Charmides as autobiography -- The politics of Sôphrosunê -- Critias' Philotimia -- Self-knowledge and the knowledge of knowledge -- Knowledge of knowledge and knowledge of the good -- Philosophy and the polis. (shrink)

Recent contributions in moral philosophy have raised questions concerning the prevalent assumption that moral judgments are typologically discrete, and thereby distinct from ordinary and/or other types of judgments. This paper adds to this discourse, surveying how attempts at defining what makes moral judgments distinct have serious shortcomings, and it is argued that any typological definition is likely to fail due to certain questionable assumptions about the nature of judgment itself. The paper concludes by raising questions for future investigations into the (...) nature of moral judgment. (shrink)

Epistemology has taken a zetetic turn from the study of belief towards the study of inquiry. Several decades ago, theories of bounded rationality took a procedural turn from attitudes towards the processes of inquiry that produce them. What is the relationship between the zetetic and procedural turns? In this paper, I argue that we should treat the zetetic turn in epistemology as part of a broader procedural turn in the study of bounded rationality. I use this claim to motivate and (...) clarify the zetetic turn in epistemology, as well as to reveal the need for a second zetetic turn within practical philosophy. (shrink)

What kind of hypocrite should voters choose as their next leader? The question seems utterly cynical. But, as David Runciman suggests, it is actually much more cynical to pretend that politics can ever be completely sincere. Political Hypocrisy is a timely, and timeless, book on the problems of sincerity and truth in politics, and how we can deal with them without slipping into hypocrisy ourselves. Runciman draws on the work of some of the great truth-tellers in modern political thought--Hobbes, (...) Mandeville, Jefferson, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Orwell--and applies his ideas to different kinds of hypocritical politicians from Oliver Cromwell to Hillary Clinton. He argues that we should accept hypocrisy as a fact of politics--the most dangerous form of political hypocrisy is to claim to have a politics without hypocrisy. Featuring a new foreword that takes the story up to Donald Trump, this book examines why, instead of vainly searching for authentic politicians, we should try to distinguish between harmless and harmful hypocrisies and worry only about the most damaging varieties. (shrink)

1000 time-travelers travel back in time, each with the intention of killing their own infant-self. If there is no branching time, then on pain of bringing about a logical contradiction, all must fail. But this seems inexplicable: what is to ensure that the time-travelers are stopped? For a time, this inexplicability objection was thought to provide evidence that there is something incoherent about the possibility of backwards time travel in a universe without branching time. There is now near-consensus, however, that (...) the objection has no bite: there is nothing inexplicable about the mass failure. Lewis, Sider and Ismael independently argue that since it is built into the description of the class of cases considered that the time-travelers must fail – and so we consider only unsuccessful attempts – there is no mystery. Smith argues that the absence of possible worlds at which auto-infanticide is committed suffices as a complete explanation for the failures. And Baron and Colyvan maintain that available causal and logical explanations jointly account for everything that needs accounting for. I argue that these are wrong. There is remaining, problematic inexplicability. For backwards time travel not to lead to logical contradiction, something would need to do logic’s bidding, after all. (shrink)

A permanent state of suspension or deferment -- How theory became history -- "Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences" -- "I will teach you differences" -- An assembling of reminders -- ". . . a complicated network of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing" -- Gedankenwegen: on import and interpretation -- "Of which we cannot speak . . .": philosophy and the humanities -- What is (film) philosophy? -- Order out of chaos -- Idea, image, and intuition -- The world, (...) time -- The ordinary necessity of philosophy -- "Art now exists in the condition of philosophy" -- Falling in love with the world -- Ontology and desire, or a moving response to skepticism -- Automatism and the declaration of existence in time -- Ethical practices of the ordinary -- Perfectionism as self-disobedience -- Comedy and community -- A digression on difference and interpretation -- Perfectionism's ironic transport -- An elegy for theory. (shrink)

To explain why, in scientific problem solving, a diagram can be “worth ten thousand words,” Jill Larkin and Herbert Simon (1987) relied on a computer model: two representations can be “informationally” equivalent but differ “computationally,” just as the same data can be encoded in a computer in multiple ways, more or less suited to different kinds of processing. The roots of this proposal lay in cognitive psychology, more precisely in the “imagery debate” of the 1970s on whether there are image-like (...) mental representations. Simon (1972, 1978) hoped to solve this debate by thoroughly reducing the differences between forms of mental representations (e.g., between images and sentences) to differences in computational efficiency; to carry out this reduction, he borrowed from computer science the concepts of data type and of data structure. I argue that, in the end, his account amounted to nothing more than characterizing representations by the fast operations on them. This analysis then allows me to assess what Simon’s approach actually achieves when transported from psychology to the study of scientific representations, as in Larkin and Simon (1987): it allows comparing, not representations in and of themselves, but rather the computational roles they play in particular problem-solving processes—that is, representations together with a particular way of using them. (shrink)

Personal Identity and Ethics provides a lively overview of the relationship between the metaphysics of personal identity and ethics. How does personal identity affect our ethical judgments? It is a commonplace to hold that moral responsibility for past actions requires that the responsible agent is in some relevant respect identical to the agent who performed the action. Is this true? On the other hand, can ethics constrain our account of personal identity? Do the practical requirements of moral theory commit us (...) to holding that persons do remain identical over time? Or is it the case that personal identity is not, in fact, relevant to ethics? -/- Shoemaker provides the first comprehensive examination of these issues for the undergraduate audience. Topics include personal identity and prudential rationality; personal identity's significance for moral responsibility and ethical theory; and the practical consequences of accounts of personal identity for issues such as abortion, stem cell research, cloning, advance directives, populations ethics, multiple personality disorder, and the definition of death. (shrink)

Millennials are a powerful workforce group and are quickly becoming established business leaders, consumers, and investors. Yet, millennials are often described as a uniformly homogeneous generation, despite mounting evidence of variances across their private and workplace behaviors, attitudes and preferences, and personal values. This article examines the personal value orientations of millennials in the Unites States, reporting consistencies, variations, and contrasts based on a large sample drawn from seven diverse universities. Results of this article suggest more similarities across a national (...) population of millennials than differences, suggesting a national identity among American millennials. Practical implications of our findings and future research are discussed. (shrink)

Even among scholars who emphasize Nietzsche’s naturalism (“the naturalists”), what it actually involves is disputed. This article identifies the foundations of Nietzsche’s naturalism and then elaborates on these foundations through a critical analysis of the works of those naturalists who also identify them. Nietzsche is a methodological naturalist, who, epistemically, is a reliabilist, and while he acknowledges the innate limitations of our cognitive inheritance, which is reflected in his perspectivism, he sees no reason to conclude that we cannot grasp the (...) natural world truly. As to the primary issue in scientific explanation, causation, Nietzsche adopts a regularity theory as early as The Gay Science, and, on the basis of this theory, rejects determinism. One consequence of this analysis is that Nietzsche’s naturalism is not as restrictive as the naturalists tend to portray it, and this opens up new possibilities for interpreting many of his other commitments. (shrink)

The article discusses retributive justice and punitive restraint in response to the worst types of crime. I take the Breivik Case as a starting point. Anders Behring Breivik was sentenced to 21 years of preventive detention for killing 69 people, mainly youths, at Utøya and 8 people in Oslo on July 22nd, 2011. Retributivist theories as well as commonly held retributive intuitions suggest that much harsher punishment is required for such crimes. According to some retributivist theories, most notably on the (...) influential theories of Kant and Hegel, the death penalty is warranted for murderers like Breivik. This suggests that the rationale for punitive restraint in a case like the Breivik Case can only be found in forward- looking, consequentialist theories of punishment, or by adding to retributivist theories a side-constraint in the form of a principle of parsimony. However, I argue that if we look closer at the function of punishment in the retributivist theories of Kant and Hegel, they too imply a rationale for punitive restraint, even for such horrific crimes as here discussed. Against Kant and Hegel’s own views on the death penalty, I argue that their broader “freedom theories” of retributive justice do not imply the justice of the death penalty or life imprisonment. In the last part of the article, I explore differences in the concepts of freedom entailed by Kant and Hegel’s theories, and I relate these to some of the background factors relevant to the Breivik Case. (shrink)

In this chapter I consider the narrow and wider benefits of permitting assisted dying in the specific context of organ donation and transplantation. In addition to the commonly used arguments, there are two other neglected reasons for permitting assisted suicide and/or euthanasia: assisted dying enables those who do not wish to remain alive to prolong the lives of those who do, and also allows many more people to fulfill their wish to donate organs after death. In the first part of (...) this chapter I explore the possibility of allowing those who die with assistance to donate their organs and the potential benefits of doing so in countries where some form of assisted dying is legal; in the second part I consider the added force that organ donation considerations bring to the argument in favour of legalizing assisted dying in countries where such practices remain forbidden. (shrink)

I argue that the debate concerning the nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such moral judgments are inherently motivating or whether moral judgments can be made in the absence of motivation, may be founded on a faulty assumption: that moral judgments form a distinct kind that must have some shared, essential features in regards to motivation to act. I argue that there is little reason to suppose that first-person moral judgments form a homogenous class in this respect by considering (...) an ordinary case: student readers of Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Neither internalists nor externalists can provide a satisfying account as to why our students fail to act in this particular case, but are motivated to act by their moral judgments in most cases. I argue that the inability to provide a satisfying account is rooted in this shared assumption about the nature of moral judgments. Once we consider rejecting the notion that first-person moral decision- making forms a distinct kind in the way it is typically assumed, the internalist/externalist debate may be rendered moot. (shrink)

Part of the appeal of the biological approach to personal identity is that it does not have to countenance spatially coincident entities. But if the termination thesis is correct and the organism ceases to exist at death, then it appears that the corpse is a dead body that earlier was a living body and distinct from but spatially coincident with the organism. If the organism is identified with the body, then the unwelcome spatial coincidence could perhaps be avoided. It is (...) argued that such an identification would be a mistake. A living organism has a different part/whole relationship and persistence conditions than the alleged body. A case will be made that the concept ‘human body’ is a conceptual mess, vague in an unprincipled manner, and that an eliminativist stance towards dead bodies is the appropriate response. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

An influential line of thinking in behavioral science, to which the two authors have long subscribed, is that many of society's most pressing problems can be addressed cheaply and effectively at the level of the individual, without modifying the system in which the individual operates. We now believe this was a mistake, along with, we suspect, many colleagues in both the academic and policy communities. Results from such interventions have been disappointingly modest. But more importantly, they have guided many (though (...) by no means all) behavioral scientists to frame policy problems in individual, not systemic, terms: To adopt what we call the “i-frame,” rather than the “s-frame.” The difference may be more consequential than i-frame advocates have realized, by deflecting attention and support away from s-frame policies. Indeed, highlighting the i-frame is a long-established objective of corporate opponents of concerted systemic action such as regulation and taxation. We illustrate our argument briefly for six policy problems, and in depth with the examples of climate change, obesity, retirement savings, and pollution from plastic waste. We argue that the most important way in which behavioral scientists can contribute to public policy is by employing their skills to develop and implement value-creating system-level change. (shrink)