Imperfect Cognitions

Sometimes, agents should not be held responsible for what they have done, for example because they lacked relevant information when acting, their reasoning was impaired or because they had insufficient control over their actions. However, it is controversial under which conditions we should refrain from attributing full responsibility. On May 18, we looked at some such hard cases in a one day workshop. In the morning, speakers focused on non-clinical cases, in the afternoon, the focus was on impaired responsibility in individuals suffering from mental disorders. In the first talk of the day, Philip Robichaud asked whether the presence of behavioural nudges make the nudged agent less praise- or blameworthy for what she has done under the influence of nudging. He argued that the extent to which agents' decisions are influenced does not differ fundamentally from other familiar cases where situational factors affect agents’ decisions. The main problem Philip identified for...

My name is Peter Pantelis . I study “theory of mind”—our ability to reason about other people’s mental states. Years ago, I became interested in an economic game called the Beauty Contest, because I think it taps into theory of mind very elegantly: You are going to play a game (against 250 undergraduate psychology students). Each player will submit a whole number from 0 to 100. The winner will be the player whose number is closest to 2/3 of the mean number selected by all the players. What number do you submit? (I’ll wait for you to think about it for a moment) What number should you submit, and why? Game theory says the rational strategy is for you to say 0—and so should everyone else. That’s what economists call the Nash equilibrium. [1] But in practice, virtually nobody submits the “rational” choice of 0. The average number selection is usually something like 25-35. People also give a wide variety of responses, and interpreting this (non-normative) pattern is where th...