{"title":"Is personal identity intransitive?","authors":"Julian De Freitas, Lance J Rips","doi":"10.1037/xge0001711","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There has been a call for a potentially revolutionary change to our existing understanding of the psychological concept of personal identity. Apparently, people can psychologically represent people, including themselves, as multiple individuals at the same time. Here, we ask whether the intransitive <i>judgments</i> found in these studies truly reflect the operation of an intransitive <i>concept</i> of personal identity. We manipulate several factors that arbitrate between transitivity and intransitivity and find most support for transitivity: In contrast to the prior work, most participants do not make intransitive judgments when there is any reason to favor one individual over another. People change which single individual they personally identify with, depending on which individual competes more strongly or weakly for identity, rather than identifying with both individuals. Even when two individuals are identical and therefore both entitled to be the same person, we find that people make more transitive judgments once they understand the practical commitments of their responses (Experiment 4) and report not being able to actually imagine two perspectives simultaneously when reasoning about the scenario (Experiment 5). In short, we suggest that while people may make intransitive judgments, these do not reflect that they psychologically represent identity in an intransitive manner. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.7000,"publicationDate":"2024-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001711","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
摘要
有一种呼声要求我们对个人身份这一心理学概念的现有理解进行潜在的革命性变革。显然,人们可以在心理上将包括自己在内的人同时表述为多个个体。在这里,我们要问的是,这些研究中发现的非互易判断是否真正反映了个人身份非互易概念的运作。我们操纵了几个在易变性和非易变性之间进行仲裁的因素,发现大多数因素支持易变性:与之前的研究不同的是,当有任何理由让一个人优于另一个人时,大多数参与者都不会做出不传递性判断。人们会根据哪一个人在身份认同上的竞争更激烈或更微弱而改变他们个人认同的单一个体,而不是同时认同两个个体。即使当两个个体完全相同,因此都有权成为同一个人时,我们也会发现,一旦人们理解了他们的反应的实际承诺(实验 4),他们就会做出更多的反向判断,并且报告说在推理情景时实际上无法同时想象两个视角(实验 5)。总之,我们认为,虽然人们可能会做出不传递性判断,但这并不反映他们在心理上以不传递性的方式代表身份。(PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA,保留所有权利)。
There has been a call for a potentially revolutionary change to our existing understanding of the psychological concept of personal identity. Apparently, people can psychologically represent people, including themselves, as multiple individuals at the same time. Here, we ask whether the intransitive judgments found in these studies truly reflect the operation of an intransitive concept of personal identity. We manipulate several factors that arbitrate between transitivity and intransitivity and find most support for transitivity: In contrast to the prior work, most participants do not make intransitive judgments when there is any reason to favor one individual over another. People change which single individual they personally identify with, depending on which individual competes more strongly or weakly for identity, rather than identifying with both individuals. Even when two individuals are identical and therefore both entitled to be the same person, we find that people make more transitive judgments once they understand the practical commitments of their responses (Experiment 4) and report not being able to actually imagine two perspectives simultaneously when reasoning about the scenario (Experiment 5). In short, we suggest that while people may make intransitive judgments, these do not reflect that they psychologically represent identity in an intransitive manner. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General publishes articles describing empirical work that bridges the traditional interests of two or more communities of psychology. The work may touch on issues dealt with in JEP: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, JEP: Human Perception and Performance, JEP: Animal Behavior Processes, or JEP: Applied, but may also concern issues in other subdisciplines of psychology, including social processes, developmental processes, psychopathology, neuroscience, or computational modeling. Articles in JEP: General may be longer than the usual journal publication if necessary, but shorter articles that bridge subdisciplines will also be considered.