New Work

A couple of things to draw to the attention of gardeners:

A study conducted at my (Australian) university found that subjects gave much shorter sentences to (real) criminals if they had detailed knowledge about the offender. This seems to be in line with the intuitions pumped by Watson's paper on Robert Harris. It's good to have empirical confirmation (for once) that our intuitions are shared. One caveat: though the average sentence members of the public wish to impose is very much shortened by knowledge of the offender, there is a great deal of variation across individuals. Media report here (the study itself is as yet unpublished).

Despite what you might think from JFP, free will is flourishing in the journals, with recent and forthcoming papers in many of the best. I won't bother pointing out isolated papers. But the latest issue of the Journal of Ethics definitely rates a mention. It's entirely devoted to John Fischer's work.

Comments

[Eddy Nahmias]

Hi Neil, fascinating study. Do you know were I can find more details about its methodology, esp. the specific info about the criminals the participants were given? I can't remember if there has been any discussion here about the interesting study by Monteresso et al. on judgments of responsibility (they show such judgments are mitigated if the person's behavior is described as caused by physiological factors, such as genes or brain disorders, but not if it is caused by "experiential" factors, such as child abuse). Paper is here:
http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327019eb1502_4?cookieSet=1&journalCode=eb

[Neil]

Hi Eddy,

A bit more detail here (how does one embed links in comments?): http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/does-the-time-fit-the-crime/2006/09/29/1159337334468.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

In the rape they focus on, it seems to be low IQ that is doing the excusing work, with no reference to causation. Of course, people may assume that low IQ is caused by genes.

[Paul Torek]

To turn the web address
Paul's half-broken website
into a clickable link, I wrote this
(Less than sign)a href="http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ptorek/" target="_blank"(greater)Paul's half-broken website(less)/a(greater)
into my post. Only, for each (Less than sign) or (greater) you use the > or real computer geek, I'd know how to use backslash to cancel the special interpretations, and then I wouldn't have to write "(Less than sign)" out like that. Alas, my clumsy attempts there failed.

Also, (less)B(greater)text(less)/B(greater) makes text bold, and trade B's for i's to get italics.

[Neil]

Thanks Paul. I'm gradually accummulating enough HTML knowledge to hold my head up in the average kindergarten.