Goodwin, Geoffrey P

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  • Publication
    Preferences for Enhancement Pharmaceuticals: The Reluctance to Enhance Fundamental Traits
    (2008-10-01) Riis, Jason; Simmons, Joseph P.; Goodwin, Geoffrey P.
    Four studies examined the willingness of young, healthy individuals to take drugs intended to enhance their own social, emotional, and cognitive traits. We found that people were much more reluctant to enhance traits believed to be more fundamental to self‐identity (e.g., social comfort) than traits considered less fundamental to self‐identity (e.g., concentration ability). Moral acceptability of a trait enhancement strongly predicted people’s desire to legalize the enhancement but not their willingness to take the enhancement. Ad taglines that framed enhancements as enabling rather than enhancing the fundamental self increased people’s interest in a fundamental trait enhancement and eliminated the preference for less fundamental over more fundamental trait enhancements.
  • Publication
    The Mind, the Brain, and the Law
    (2013-03-01) Nadelhoffer, Thomas; Gromet, Dena; Goodwin, Geoffrey P; Nahmias, Eddy; Sripada, Chandra; Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter
    In this chapter, we explore the potential influence that advances in neuroscience may have on legal decision makers and present the findings from some recent studies that probe folk intuitions concerning the relationships among neuroscience, agency, responsibility, and mental illness. We first familiarize the reader with some of the early research in experimental philosophy on people's intuitions about agency and responsibility. Then, we focus on a more specific issue—namely, whether people respond to explanations of human behavior framed in neuroscientific terms differently than they respond to explanations framed in more traditional folk psychological terms. Next, we discuss some new findings which suggest that explanations of criminal behavior that are couched in neural terms appear to make people less punitive than explanations couched in mental terms, especially in the context of mental illness. Finally, we offer what we take to be the best explanation of these differences in people's intuitions—namely, when people are presented with neural explanations of human behavior, they tend to think that the agent's “deep self” (the values and beliefs the agent identifies with) is somehow left out of the causal loop or bypassed, which in turn mitigates the agent's responsibility.
  • Publication
    The Perceived Objectivity of Ethical Beliefs: Psychological Findings and Implications for Public Policy
    (2009-12-17) Goodwin, Geoffrey P.; Darley, John M.
    Ethical disputes arise over differences in the content of the ethical beliefs people hold on either side of an issue. One person may believe that it is wrong to have an abortion for financial reasons, whereas another may believe it to be permissible. But, the magnitude and difficulty of such disputes may also depend on other properties of the ethical beliefs in question-in particular, how objective they are perceived to be. As a psychological property of moral belief, objectivity is relatively unexplored, and we argue that it merits more attention. We review recent psychological evidence which demonstrates that individuals differ in the extent to which they perceive ethical beliefs to be objective, that some ethical beliefs are perceived to be more objective than others, and that both these sources of variance are somewhat systematic. This evidence also shows that differences in perceptions of objectivity underpin quite different psychological reactions to ethical disagreement. Apart from reviewing this evidence, our aim in this paper is to draw attention to unanswered psychological questions about moral objectivity, and to discuss the relevance of moral objectivity to two issues of public policy.
  • Publication
    Does Incidental Disgust Amplify Moral Judgment? A Meta-Analytic Review of Experimental Evidence
    (2015-07-01) Landy, Justin F; Goodwin, Geoffrey P
    The role of emotion in moral judgment is currently a topic of much debate in moral psychology. One specific claim made by many researchers is that irrelevant feelings of disgust can amplify the severity of moral condemnation. Numerous studies have found this effect, but there have also been several published failures to replicate this effect. Clarifying this issue would inform important theoretical debates between rival accounts of moral judgment. We meta-analyzed all available studies, published and unpublished, that experimentally manipulated incidental disgust prior to or concurrent with a moral judgment task (k = 50). We found that there is evidence for a small amplification effect of disgust (d = .11), which is strongest for gustatory/olfactory modes of disgust induction. However, there is also some suggestion of publication bias in this literature, and when this is accounted for, the effect disappears entirely (d = -.01). Moreover, prevalent confounds mean that the effect size that we estimate is best interpreted as an upper bound on the size of the amplification effect. The results of this meta-analysis argue against strong claims about the causal role of affect in moral judgment and suggest a need for new, more rigorous research on this topic.