Reasoning and Imagination Lab

An international meeting to honour Juan Garcia-Madruga was held at UNED in Madrid, November 3rd-4th. Isabel Orenes gave a talk on ‘The comprehension of affirmative and negative counterfactual conditionals’ (Orenes, García-Madruga, Espino & Byrne) and Ruth Byrne gave a talk  on ‘The suppression of inferences from counterfactual conditionals’ (Byrne & Espino). The full program is available here.

Dr Orlando Espino from the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain visited the lab in October (9th-13th) to design further experiments on epistemic updating in the mental representation of counterfactual conditionals.

Sergio Moreno from the University of Granada has published experiments he carried out while he was a visiting academic at the lab,  in the following article:

Moreno-Rios, S., & Byrne, R.M.J. (2017). Inferences from disclosures about the truth and falsity of expert testimony. Thinking & Reasoning. In press. doi:10.1080/13546783.2017.1378724

CiMeC celebrated its 10 year anniversary on 19th-20th October in Rovereto, with a set of talks by invited speakers which included one on “Counterfactual Reasoning” by Ruth Byrne. The program is available here.

Shane Timmons presented a poster at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in London in July 2017 on ‘Counterfactual thoughts and judgments about morally good actions’ (Timmons & Byrne).

Mary Parkinson has published a third paper from her PhD:

Parkinson, M., & Byrne, R. M. (2017). Counterfactual and semi-factual thoughts in moral judgements about failed attempts to harm. Thinking & Reasoning, in press. The abstract of the paper is as follows:

People judge that an individual who attempts to harm someone but fails should be blamed and punished more when they imagine how things could have turned out worse, compared to when they imagine how things could have turned out the same, or when they think only about what happened. This moral counterfactual amplification effect occurs when people believe the protagonist had no reason for the attempt to harm, and not when the protagonist had a reason, as Experiment 1 shows. It occurs for intentional failed attempts to harm and also for accidental near-misses, as Experiment 2 shows, but not for failed attempts in which the harm occurs anyway by another cause, for both general judgments about the event and specific judgments about the individual’s actions, as Experiments 3 and 4 show. The implications for understanding the role of counterfactual thoughts in moral judgement are discussed.

Shane Timmons presented a poster at the 43rd annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, at John Hopkins University in Baltimore in Maryland, US in June on ‘Moral fatigue: The effects of depleted cognitive resources on reasoning about moral actions and outcomes’ (Timmons & Byrne). The program of the meeting is available here.

Shane Timmons gave a talk at the London Reasoning Workshop in July 2017 on  ‘Counterfactual and pre-factual thinking about morally elevating memories’ (Timmons & Byrne). Ruth Byrne gave a talk on ‘Counterfactual conditionals and suppression’ (Byrne & Espino). The full programme is here:  LRW2017 Programme

The Australasian society for experimental psychology held its 44th annual conference at Shoal Bay on April 19th-22nd 2017. Ruth Byrne gave a talk on “Moral diminishment: the effects of imagined counterfactual and semi-factual alternatives on moral judgments” (Ruth Byrne, Mary Parkinson, Shane Timmons, & Tiago Almeida).

The Experimental Psychology Society held a meeting in Queen’s University Belfast on the 10th-12th April 2017 which hosted a symposium on Moral Reasoning and Counterfactuals: