Authenticity and the third-person perspective

In this paper, I argue for two claims: first, that authenticity is a property possessed only by those preferences and commitments whose satisfaction contributes to our lives going well; and secondly, that our preferences are authentic just in case they do not have covert explanations, which is to say when the true third-personal explanation of our preferences is necessarily hidden from our first-person perspective

Looking for a psychology for the inner rational agent

Research in psychology and behavioural economics shows that individuals’ choices often depend on ‘irrelevant’ contextual factors. This presents problems for normative economics, which has traditionally used preference-satisfaction as its criterion. A common response is to claim that individuals have context-independent latent preferences which are ‘distorted’ by psychological factors, and that latent preferences should be respected. This response implicitly uses a model of human action in which each human being has an ‘inner rational agent’. I argue that this model is psychologically ungrounded. Although references to latent preferences appear in psychologically-based explanations of context-dependent choice, latent preferences serve no explanatory purpose

Personality Preferences and Pre-Commitment: Behavioral Explanations in Ultimatum Games

This paper uses responder pre-commitment and the Jungian theory of mental activity and psychological type, as measured by the widely-used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), to gain insight into subject behavior in a laboratory ultimatum bargaining experiment. Three experiment design details are noteworthy: (1) one design requires responders to make a nonbinding pre-commitment rejection level prior to seeing the offer, (2) one design requires responders to make a binding pre-commitment rejection level, and (3) one design includes a third person (or “hostage”) who makes no decision, but whose payment depends on the proposal being accepted. In general, we find behavior in our experiment to be consistent with hypotheses based on theoretical underpinnings of the MBTI and its descriptions of psychological type.

When do circumstances excuse? Moral prejudices and beliefs about the true self drive preferences for agency-minimizing explanations

When explaining human actions, people usually focus on a small subset of potential causes. What leads us to prefer certain explanations for valenced actions over others? The present studies indicate that our moral attitudes often predict our explanatory preferences far better than our beliefs about how causally sensitive actions are to features of the actor's environment. Study 1 found that high-prejudice participants were much more likely to endorse non-agential explanations of an erotic same-sex encounter, such as that one of the men endured a stressful event earlier that day. Study 2 manipulated participants' beliefs about how the agent's behavior depended on features of his environment, finding that such beliefs played no clear role in modeling participants' explanatory preferences. This result emerged both with low- and high-prejudice, US and Indian participants, suggesting that these findings probably reflect a species-typical feature of human psychology. Study 3 found that moral attitudes also predicted explanations for a woman's decision to abort her pregnancy (3a) and a person's decision to convert to Islam (3b). Study 4 found that luck in an action's etiology tends to undermine perceptions of blame more readily than perceptions of praise. Finally, Study 5 found that when explaining support for a rival ideology, both Liberals and Conservatives downplay agential causes while emphasizing environmental ones. Taken together, these studies indicate that our explanatory preferences often reflect a powerful tendency to represent agents as possessing virtuous true selves. Consequently, situation-focused explanations often appear salient because people resist attributing negatively valenced actions to the true self. There is a person/situation distinction, but it is normative

Transfers in Cash and In Kind: Theory Meets the Data

We review theoretical explanations for in-kind transfers in light of the limited empirical evidence. After reviewing the traditional paternalistic arguments, we consider explanations based on imperfect information and self-targeting. We then discuss the large literature on in-kind programs as a way of improving the efficiency of the tax system and a range of other possible explanations including the "Samaritan's Dilemma", pecuniary effects, credit constraints, asymmetric information amongst agents, and political economy considerations. Our reading of the evidence suggests that paternalism and interdependent preferences are leading overall explanations for the existence of in-kind transfer programs, but that some of the other arguments may apply to specific cases. Political economy considerations must also be part of the story.

An evaluation of common explanations for the impact of income inequality on life satisfaction

This study explains how income inequality affects life satisfaction in Europe. Although research about the impact of income inequality on life satisfaction is inconclusive, authors suggest several reasons for its potential impact. In the literature section we discuss three types of explanations for the impact of inequality: pure aversion for inequality, aversion for inequality motivated by how an individual is personally affected by inequality and preferences for equality of opportunities. In order to test these explanations, we examine how three corresponding variables, respectively attitude towards redistribution, income and perceived mobility, interact with both actual and perceived income inequality in multilevel analyses using data from the European Values Survey. Our results reveal that there are significant differences between how people are affected by actual income inequality and how they are affected by perceived income inequality. The impact of perceived income inequality on life satisfaction depends on perceived mobility in society and income, while the impact of actual income inequality solely depends on perceived mobility. We conclude that traditional explanations often erroneously assume that people correctly assess income inequality. Moreover these explanations are more capable of clarifying the effect of perceived income inequality on life satisfaction than that of actual inequality

Understanding Consumer Preferences for Explanations Generated by XAI Algorithms

Explaining firm decisions made by algorithms in customer-facing applications is increasingly required by regulators and expected by customers. While the emerging field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has mainly focused on developing algorithms that generate such explanations, there has not yet been sufficient consideration of customers' preferences for various types and formats of explanations. We discuss theoretically and study empirically people's preferences for explanations of algorithmic decisions. We focus on three main attributes that describe automatically-generated explanations from existing XAI algorithms (format, complexity, and specificity), and capture differences across contexts (online targeted advertising vs. loan applications) as well as heterogeneity in users' cognitive styles. Despite their popularity among academics, we find that counterfactual explanations are not popular among users, unless they follow a negative outcome (e.g., loan application was denied). We also find that users are willing to tolerate some complexity in explanations. Finally, our results suggest that preferences for specific (vs. more abstract) explanations are related to the level at which the decision is construed by the user, and to the deliberateness of the user's cognitive style.Comment: 18 pages, 1 appendix, 3 figures, 4 table

Computing Argument Preferences and Explanations in Abstract Argumentation

Financial support from The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for the grant (EP/P011829/1), Supporting Security Policy with Effective Digital Intervention (SSPEDI) is gratefully acknowledged.Postprin