On gender and philosophical intuition: Failure of replication and other negative results

Abstract

argue that the intuitions of women and men differ significantly on various types of philosophical questions. Furthermore, men's intuitions, so the authors, are more in line with traditionally accepted solutions of classical problems. This inherent bias, so the argument, is one of the factors that leads more men than women to pursue degrees and careers in philosophy. These findings have received a considerable amount of attention and the paper is to appear in the second edition of Experiment Philosophy edited by Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols, which itself is an influential outlet. Given the exposure of these results, we attempted to replicate three of the classes of questions that Buckwalter & Stich review in their paper and for which they report significant differences. We failed to replicate the results using two different sources for data collection (one being identical to the original procedures). Given our results, we do not believe that the outcomes from Buckwalter & Stich (forthcoming) that we examined are robust. That is, men and women do not seem to differ significantly in their intuitive responses to these philosophical scenarios.!

Armchair‐Friendly Experimental Philosophy

“…The practice of soliciting reports concerning statistically significant gender differences is not a balanced way of finding genuine gender differences; given the threshold for statistical significance in psychology, such differences should emerge in 5% of all studies even if there is no systematic correlation between gender and philosophical intuition, so the fact that some studies turned up differences is meaningless without information on the size of the pool of studies from which they were drawn (which was not supplied). There is some evidence that these reported cases are indeed random rather than robust effects: a direct replication of three of them-the cases concerning Compatibilism, Dualism and Physicalism-found no statistically significant differences between the responses of men and women (Seyedsayamdost 2014 replications of these studies, with two separate data sets, but failed to find a significant gender difference for any case, despite generally greater statistical power; he summarizes his results as yielding "strong evidence that women and men do not differ significantly in their intuitions on the cases examined in this study " (2014, 27).…”

“…The authors of the conference presentation no longer maintain that there is good evidence of gender differences in Gettier case responses; they themselves have been unable to replicate their earlier results, and in their subsequent published work they have reported no variation correlated with gender (Starmans and Friedman 2012). Other researchers have also failed to find gender differences in responses to Gettier cases (Wright 2010, Nagel, San Juan, and Mar 2013, Seyedsayamdost 2014. The practice of soliciting reports concerning statistically significant gender differences is not a balanced way of finding genuine gender differences; given the threshold for statistical significance in psychology, such differences should emerge in 5% of all studies even if there is no systematic correlation between gender and philosophical intuition, so the fact that some studies turned up differences is meaningless without information on the size of the pool of studies from which they were drawn (which was not supplied).…”

Are philosophers good intuition predictors?

“…19 Against this trend, it is encouraging to see recent criticisms of experimental philosophy studies via replications (for example, Adleberg et al 2015;Kim and Yuan 2015;Seyedsayamdost 2015). 20 My suggestion here is that proponents and critics alike can add non-experimental tools like re-analysis and meta-analysis (for example, Feltz and Cova 2014) to their toolbox, in addition to direct and conceptual replications.…”

Religious Disagreement: An Empirical Study Among Academic Philosophers

“…While some authors (e.g., Buckwalter & Stich 2014) have argued gender plays a role in the assessment of philosophical ideas, others have failed to replicate their findings (Seyedsayamdost 2015). I examined whether women and men responded significantly differently from each other.…”