The Knobe Effect

Knobe is arguably most widely known for what has come to be called "the Knobe effect" or the "Side-Effect Effect". According to Jones (2009):
Rather than consulting his own philosophical intuitions, Knobe set out to find out how ordinary people think about intentional action. In a study published in 2003, Knobe presented passers-by in a Manhattan park with the following scenario. The CEO of a company is sitting in his office when his Vice President of R&D comes in and says, ‘We are thinking of starting a new programme. It will help us increase profits, but it will also harm the environment.’ The CEO responds that he doesn’t care about harming the environment and just wants to make as much profit as possible. The programme is carried out, profits are made and the environment is harmed.
Did the CEO intentionally harm the environment? The vast majority of people Knobe quizzed – 82 per cent – said he did. But what if the scenario is changed such that the word ‘harm’ is replaced with ‘help’? In this case the CEO doesn’t care about helping the environment, and still just wants to make a profit – and his actions result in both outcomes. Now faced with the question ‘Did the CEO intentionally help the environment?’, just 23 per cent of Knobe’s participants said ‘yes’ (Knobe, 2003a).
This asymmetry in responses between the ‘harm’ and ‘help’ scenarios, now known as the Knobe effect, provides a direct challenge to the idea of a one-way flow of judgments from the factual or non-moral domain to the moral sphere. ‘These data show that the process is actually much more complex,’ argues Knobe. Instead, the moral character of an action’s consequences also seems to influence how non-moral aspects of the action – in this case, whether someone did something intentionally or not – are judged.


The Epistemic Side-Effect Effect
James Beebe and Wesley Buckwalter
*
(University at Buffalo)
Knobe (2003a, 2003b, 2004b) and others have demonstrated the surprising fact
that the valence of a side-effect action can affect intuitions about whether that
action was performed intentionally. Here we report the results of an experiment
that extends these findings by testing for an analogous effect regarding knowledge
attributions. Our results suggest that subjects are less likely to find that an agent
knows an action will bring about a side-effect when the effect is good than when
it is bad. It is further argued that these findings, while preliminary, have
important implications for recent debates within epistemology about the
relationship between knowledge and action.
Introduction
The ‘side-effect effect’ is one of the most widely discussed results of recent experimental
philosophy. Using experimental survey methods, Joshua Knobe (2003a, 2003b, 2004b) and
others have demonstrated that subjects are more inclined to say that an agent has intentionally
performed a side-effect action if that action is bad than if it is good. This asymmetry in the
intuitions of ordinary subjects challenges the bit of conventional wisdom in action theory that
holds that assessments of intentionality are prior to assessments of blame. Epistemic Side-Effect Effect 2
We extend these findings from the intentionality literature by demonstrating an analogous
effect involving the concept of knowledge. We show that subjects are more likely to say that
agents know their actions will bring about certain side-effects, if the effects are bad than if they
are good. Our results challenge the bit of conventional wisdom about knowledge attribution that
holds that the moral significance of an action undertaken in light of or on the basis of a belief
should have no effect on whether that belief counts as knowledge. Our results are thus relevant
to recent debates within epistemology about whether non-epistemic factors affect knowledge
attributions and about the relationship between knowledge and action.
In section 1 we introduce the original side-effect effect and the findings that constitute the
epistemic side-effect effect. In the following section we briefly compare our findings to other
results in the literature. In section 3 we survey the primary explanations of the side-effect effect
that have been offered in the literature and suggest how extensions of those explanations might
be applied to our own results. A final section (sec. 4) spells out some implications of our
findings for epistemology and action theory and suggests avenues for future research.