Ivar R Hannikainen
Biographic Data
| ID | 1218642 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ivar R Hannikainen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ivar R |
| FAMILY NAME | Hannikainen |
| SIGNATURE | HANNIKAINEN I R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universidad de Granada |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0623-357X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
A qualitative study of true self judgments, epistemic access, and medical decision-making
BACKGROUND: (2024) found that US participants were more likely to follow a medical treatment preference-expressed after substantial cognitive decline-of a third person rather than their own future self. This correlated with a greater tendency to see the third person as still their true self. We hypothesised that the greater epistemic access one has to one's own true self as opposed to others might drive this difference. METHODS: 's study were cod…
Is Consent-GPT valid? Public attitudes to generative AI use in surgical consent
Healthcare systems often delegate surgical consent-seeking to members of the treating team other than the surgeon (e.g., junior doctors in the UK and Australia). Yet, little is known about public attitudes toward this practice compared to emerging AI-supported options. This first large-scale empirical study examines how laypeople evaluate the validity and liability risks of using an AI-supported surgical consent system ( Consent-GPT ). We randoml…
Self-Deception: A Case Study in Folk Conceptual Structure
Theoretical debates around the concept of self-deception revolve around identifying the conditions for a behavior to qualify as self-deception. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that various candidate features—such as intent, belief change, and motive—are treated as sufficient, but non-necessary, conditions according to the lay concept of self-deception. This led us to ask whether there are multiple lay concepts, such that different participants endor…
Sacrificing objects instead of persons: Order effects without emotional engagement
In this paper we develop test cases to adjudicate between dual-process and the causal mapping explanations of order effects. Using dilemmas with minimized emotional force, we explore new conditions for order effects to occur. Overall, the results support causal model theory. We produced novel evidence that order effects extend not only to cases with low emotional engagement, but also to specialized judgments about whether an action violates a rul…
Psychedelics beyond medicine: Treatment, enhancement, hype, consent, and the limits of medicalization
The current revival of interest in classic psychedelics and other psychoactives such as ketamine and MDMA, coupled with changes to their regulatory status in many jurisdictions, necessitates rigorous ethical guidelines both within and beyond clinical and scientific contexts. This paper examines crucial ethical, philosophical, and policy considerations needed to ensure psychedelic use across various settings remains equitable, beneficial, consensu…
Scientifically Together, Politically Apart: Epistemological Literacy Predicts Updating on Contested Science Issues
Science education is generally perceived as a key facilitator in cultivating a scientifically literate society. In the last decade, however, this conventional wisdom has been challenged by evidence that greater scientific literacy and critical thinking skills may in fact inadvertently aggravate polarization on scientific matters in the public sphere. Supporting an alternative “scientific update hypothesis,” in a series of studies (total N = 2087)…
Agency, desire, and the conceptual representation of consent
Advances in the protection of human rights have placed the notion of autonomous consent in the spotlight of ethical and legal thought. Nowadays, the moral demand for consent governs a range of everyday interactions, from medical care and third-party use of personal data to sexual relationships. Recently, however, scholars have called into question the suitability of consent as a moral ideal in the sexual domain. To contribute to this debate, we a…
Integration gaps persist despite immigrants’ value assimilation: Evidence from the European Social Survey
In Europe, although integration of the immigrant population is acknowledged as a multidimensional challenge, the precise dimensions of integration have varied considerably throughout the past decades and between nations. Nowadays, most states have adopted 'civic integration' programmes to some extent, thereby placing weight on the acquisition of 'national moral values', implying that successful integration requires the assimilation of certain cor…
Trait empathy predicts a preference for the spirit of the law: Nationally representative survey evidence
Personalizing AI art boosts credit, not beauty
Even with diet and exercise, Ozempic use reduces perceived effort and praiseworthiness of resulting weight loss
The injectable medication Ozempic (semaglutide) has demonstrated unprecedented effectiveness in promoting significant weight loss. However, its use has sparked moral debates, with critics dismissing it as a mere "shortcut" compared to traditional methods like diet and exercise. This study investigates how weight loss method-Ozempic, diet/exercise, or a combination of both-impacts perceptions of effort, praiseworthiness, and identity/value change.…
Justice before Expediency: Robust Intuitive Concern for Rights Protection in Criminalization Decisions
The notion that a false positive (false conviction) is worse than a false negative (false acquittal) is a deep-seated commitment in the theory of criminal law. Its most illustrious formulation, the so-called Blackstone’s ratio, affirms that “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”. Are people’s evaluations of criminal statutes consitent with this tenet of the Western legal tradition? To answer this question, we …
Broad, subjective, relative: The surprising folk concept of basic needs
Some normative theorists appeal to the concept of basic needs. They argue that when it comes to issues such as global justice, intergenerational justice, human rights or sustainable development our first priority should be that everybody is able to meet these needs. But what are basic needs? We attempt to inform discussions about this question by gathering evidence of ordinary English speakers’ intuitions on the concept of basic needs. First, we …
Does moral valence influence the construal of alternative possibilities
It is often thought that an agent may be held morally responsible for bringing about a negative outcome only if they could have done otherwise. Inspired by previous research linking moral judgment to free will ascriptions and representations of possibility, we probe the reverse link: Does learning about a morally undesirable outcome make preferable alternatives appear more possible? We find modest evidence that this could be the case. In a prereg…
Purposes in Law and in Life: An Experimental Investigation of Purpose Attribution
There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purpo…
Moral appraisals guide intuitive legal determinations
OBJECTIVES: We sought to understand how basic competencies in moral reasoning influence the application of private, institutional, and legal rules. HYPOTHESES: We predicted that moral appraisals, implicating both outcome-based and mental state reasoning, would shape participants' interpretation of rules and statutes-and asked whether these effects arise differentially under intuitive and reflective reasoning conditions. METHOD: In six vignette-ba…
Rule is a dual character concept
Individual attitudes towards moral costs and benefits drive responses to moral dilemmas
We review some processing assumptions that underlie the currently used measures of moral judgement with moral dilemmas, contrasting them with the overlooked possibility that the primary mechanism consists in assessing a net balance of the costs versus benefits of the sacrificial action. Different dilemmas scenarios present different net balances of cost versus benefits, and participants usually change between them from disapproval to approval mot…
Innocence over utilitarianism: Heightened moral standards for robots in rescue dilemmas
Research in moral psychology has found that robots, more than humans, are expected to make utilitarian decisions. This expectation is found specifically when contrasting utilitarian action to deontological inaction. In a series of eight experiments (total N = 3752), we compared judgments about robots’ and humans’ decisions in a rescue dilemma with no possibility of deontological inaction. A robot's decision to rescue an innocent victim of an acci…
Guilt Without Fault: Accidental Agency in the Era of Autonomous Vehicles
Do Formalist Judges Abide By Their Abstract Principles? A Two-Country Study in Adjudication
Recent literature in experimental philosophy has postulated the existence of the abstract/concrete paradox (ACP): the tendency to activate inconsistent intuitions (and generate inconsistent judgment) depending on whether a problem to be analyzed is framed in abstract terms or is described as a concrete case. One recent study supports the thesis that this effect influences judicial decision-making, including decision-making by professional judges,…
Trolleys, triage and Covid-19: The role of psychological realism in sacrificial dilemmas
2298), we examined people's moral attitudes toward the triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not stem from period change in moral attitudes relative to pre-pandemic levels-but rather, from the heightened realism of triage dilemmas. Participants favoured utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas when compared to structurally analogous, non-medical …
Whose Words Hurt? Contextual Determinants of Offensive Speech
Tracing the boundaries of freedom of expression is a matter of wide societal and academic import—especially, as these boundaries encroach on the politics of inclusion. Yet, the elements that constitute offensive speech and determine its legal status remain poorly defined. In two studies, we examined how lay judges evaluate the offensiveness of apparently descriptive statements. Replicating prior work, we found that non-linguistic features (includ…
The Folk Concept of Law: Law Is Intrinsically Moral
Most theorists agree that our social order includes a distinctive legal dimension. A fundamental question is that of whether reference to specific legal phenomena always involves a commitment to a particular moral view. Whereas many philosophers advance the ‘positivist’ claim that any correspondence between morality and the law is just a function of political circumstance, natural law theorists insist that law is intrinsically moral. Each school …
New Findings on Unconsented Intimate Exams Suggest Racial Bias and Gender Parity
Testimony from hundreds of medical students and numerous physicians and scholars suggests that unconsented intimate exams (UIEs) are unlikely to be rare, isolated incidents. However, much is unknown about the frequency of these exams and the circumstances in which they take place. The Community Bioethics Forum, founded and chaired by one of the authors of this commentary, is a consultative group of diverse community members who provide insights o…
A deterministic worldview promotes approval of state paternalism
The typicality effect in basic needs
According to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be more typical than others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this ‘typicality effect’ holds for the conc…
Gender stereotypes underlie child custody decisions
Using hypothetical divorce cases we examine the role of gender stereotypes in decisions about child custody. Good mothers received greater custody allocations than did good fathers across a tightly matched pair of vignettes in three culturally distinct samples: Argentina, Brazil, and the United States (Study 1). Two follow‐up studies indicated that the warmth dimension of stereotype content partly accounted for the asymmetry in custody awards: Th…
Diet-ética: Consumo Local O Comercio Justo
En su libro The Way We Eat, Peter Singer pretende concienciarnos sobre la ética del comer y los gastos ocultos, para el medioambiente y para los más pobres, de la dieta típica del primer mundo. A partir del análisis crítico de la industria alimentaria, presenta tres propuestas para el lector concienciado: el consumo local, el comercio justo y el vegetarianismo. A pesar de los beneficios ecológicos del consumo local, otras vías para proteger el me…
Bad actions or bad outcomes? Differentiating affective contributions to the moral condemnation of harm
Moral condemnation of harmful behavior is influenced by both cognitive and affective processes. However, despite much recent research, the proximate source of affect remains unclear. One obvious contender is empathy; simulating the victim's pain could lead one to judge an action as wrong ("outcome aversion"). An alternative, less obvious source is one's own aversion to performing the action itself ("action aversion"). To dissociate these alternat…
A deterministic worldview promotes approval of state paternalism
Ideology Between the Lines: Lay Inferences About Scientists’ Values and Motives
While philosophers emphasize the distinction between description and prescription, in practice people’s beliefs about contentious issues seem to reflect their normative commitments. Less is known about the way that people infer others’ ideology from their reports about matters of fact. In the context of scientific research on the heritability of intelligence, scientists’ normative views (Study 1a) and motives (Study 2) are inferred from the evide…
Gender stereotypes underlie child custody decisions
Using hypothetical divorce cases we examine the role of gender stereotypes in decisions about child custody. Good mothers received greater custody allocations than did good fathers across a tightly matched pair of vignettes in three culturally distinct samples: Argentina, Brazil, and the United States (Study 1). Two follow‐up studies indicated that the warmth dimension of stereotype content partly accounted for the asymmetry in custody awards: Th…
Liberdade de expressão e direito à honra: Medindo atitudes e prevendo decisões
Os conflitos entre liberdade de expressão e direito à honra e à imagem no Brasil são regulados por meio de padrões vagos. Essa vagueza é muitas vezes defendida em nome de posições particularistas. No presente artigo, propomos uma escala que permite medir as atitudes que as pessoas têm a respeito desses conflitos. Ao longo de 4 estudos, desenvolvemos, validamos e aplicamos esse instrumento de pesquisa para testar hipóteses específicas. Nossos resu…
How do people use ‘killing’, ‘letting die’ and related bioethical concepts? Contrasting descriptive and normative hypotheses
Bioethicists involved in end‐of‐life debates routinely distinguish between ‘killing’ and ‘letting die’. Meanwhile, previous work in cognitive science has revealed that when people characterize behaviour as either actively ‘doing’ or passively ‘allowing’, they do so not purely on descriptive grounds, but also as a function of the behaviour’s perceived morality. In the present report, we extend this line of research by examining how medical student…
Legal decision-making and the abstract/concrete paradox
Moral migration: Desires to become more empathic predict changes in moral foundations
Experimental philosophical bioethics and normative inference
This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy, which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (bioxphi). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people’s moral judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioet…
How pills undermine skills: Moralization of cognitive enhancement and causal selection
Guilt Without Fault: Accidental Agency in the Era of Autonomous Vehicles
Do Formalist Judges Abide By Their Abstract Principles? A Two-Country Study in Adjudication
Recent literature in experimental philosophy has postulated the existence of the abstract/concrete paradox (ACP): the tendency to activate inconsistent intuitions (and generate inconsistent judgment) depending on whether a problem to be analyzed is framed in abstract terms or is described as a concrete case. One recent study supports the thesis that this effect influences judicial decision-making, including decision-making by professional judges,…
Trolleys, triage and Covid-19: The role of psychological realism in sacrificial dilemmas
2298), we examined people's moral attitudes toward the triage of acute coronavirus patients, and found elevated support for utilitarian triage policies. These utilitarian tendencies did not stem from period change in moral attitudes relative to pre-pandemic levels-but rather, from the heightened realism of triage dilemmas. Participants favoured utilitarian resolutions of critical care dilemmas when compared to structurally analogous, non-medical …
Whose Words Hurt? Contextual Determinants of Offensive Speech
Tracing the boundaries of freedom of expression is a matter of wide societal and academic import—especially, as these boundaries encroach on the politics of inclusion. Yet, the elements that constitute offensive speech and determine its legal status remain poorly defined. In two studies, we examined how lay judges evaluate the offensiveness of apparently descriptive statements. Replicating prior work, we found that non-linguistic features (includ…
The Folk Concept of Law: Law Is Intrinsically Moral
Most theorists agree that our social order includes a distinctive legal dimension. A fundamental question is that of whether reference to specific legal phenomena always involves a commitment to a particular moral view. Whereas many philosophers advance the ‘positivist’ claim that any correspondence between morality and the law is just a function of political circumstance, natural law theorists insist that law is intrinsically moral. Each school …
New Findings on Unconsented Intimate Exams Suggest Racial Bias and Gender Parity
Testimony from hundreds of medical students and numerous physicians and scholars suggests that unconsented intimate exams (UIEs) are unlikely to be rare, isolated incidents. However, much is unknown about the frequency of these exams and the circumstances in which they take place. The Community Bioethics Forum, founded and chaired by one of the authors of this commentary, is a consultative group of diverse community members who provide insights o…
Attitudes of European students towards family decision-making and the harmonisation of consent systems in deceased organ donation: A cross-national survey
There is overall division on whether families should have a surrogate role, and substantial opposition to granting them sole authority over decision-making. If European countries were to harmonise their policies on consent for organ donation, an opt-out system that grants families a surrogate decision-making role may enjoy the widest public support
The typicality effect in basic needs
According to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be more typical than others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this ‘typicality effect’ holds for the conc…
Treatments approved, boosts eschewed: Moral limits of neurotechnological enhancement
In six vignette-based experiments, we assessed people's moral reactions towards various cognition-enhancing brain implants, including their overall approval and perceived fairness, as well as the dehumanization of brain-implanted agents. Across the domains of memory (Studies 1–4, 6), general intelligence (Study 5A), and emotional stability (Study 5B), people in general approved of alleviating ailments, and even of attaining optimal human performa…
Purposes in Law and in Life: An Experimental Investigation of Purpose Attribution
There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purpo…
Moral appraisals guide intuitive legal determinations
OBJECTIVES: We sought to understand how basic competencies in moral reasoning influence the application of private, institutional, and legal rules. HYPOTHESES: We predicted that moral appraisals, implicating both outcome-based and mental state reasoning, would shape participants' interpretation of rules and statutes-and asked whether these effects arise differentially under intuitive and reflective reasoning conditions. METHOD: In six vignette-ba…
Rule is a dual character concept
Individual attitudes towards moral costs and benefits drive responses to moral dilemmas
We review some processing assumptions that underlie the currently used measures of moral judgement with moral dilemmas, contrasting them with the overlooked possibility that the primary mechanism consists in assessing a net balance of the costs versus benefits of the sacrificial action. Different dilemmas scenarios present different net balances of cost versus benefits, and participants usually change between them from disapproval to approval mot…
Innocence over utilitarianism: Heightened moral standards for robots in rescue dilemmas
Research in moral psychology has found that robots, more than humans, are expected to make utilitarian decisions. This expectation is found specifically when contrasting utilitarian action to deontological inaction. In a series of eight experiments (total N = 3752), we compared judgments about robots’ and humans’ decisions in a rescue dilemma with no possibility of deontological inaction. A robot's decision to rescue an innocent victim of an acci…
Psychology (28 works) · Social Psychology (26 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (21 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Cognition (7 works)