Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Kiichi Inarimori and Kengo Miyazono at Hokkaido University on their recent paper “ Empathy, Altruism, and Group Identification ” (2021, Frontiers in Psychology ). Kiichi Inarimori Empathy causes helping behavior. When your best friend in the same college is in financial trouble and has been evicted from her apartment, for example, you might empathize with her (e.g., feel sorry for her) and decide to let her stay in your apartment for a while (e.g., Batson et al., 1981 ).  Is empathy-induced helping behavior altruistic? Are you genuinely altruistic when your empathy causes you to let your friend stay in your apartment? According to “the empathy altruism hypothesis” (Batson 1991 , 2011 , 2018 ), empathy causes genuinely altruistic motivation for helping others. According to “the self-other merging hypothesis” ( Cialdini et al. 1997 ), in contrast, empathic helping is due to the “merging” between the helping agent and the helped agent. When the helping agent ...

In this post Alessandro Salice (UCC) and Kengo Miyazono (Hiroshima) summarise their new paper “ Being one of us. Group identification, joint actions, and collective intentionality ”, in which they defend a minimalistic account of joint actions that is based on a theory of group identification.  In the relevant literature it is generally assumed that, in order to explain joint actions (in contradistinction to actions in strategic equilibrium), one needs to appeal to shared intentions. To use Margaret Gilbert’s famous example, if Pam and Sam are walking together (rather than walking in parallel), then Pam and Sam’s collective action is explained by the fact that they share the intention of walking together ( Gilbert 1990 ). However, the question immediately arises as to what it means for several individuals to share intentions. One way of understanding shared intentions is by identifying the conditions under which standard individual intentions (intentions in the I-form: “...