Putting your money where your self is: Connecting dimensions of closeness and theories of personal identity

Abstract

Studying personal identity, the continuity and sameness of persons across lifetimes, is notoriously difficult and competing conceptualizations exist within philosophy and psychology. Personal reidentification, linking persons between points in time is a fundamental step in allocating merit and blame and assigning rights and privileges. Based on Nozick's (1981) closest continuer theory we develop a theoretical framework that explicitly invites a meaningful empirical approach and offers a constructive, integrative solution to current disputes about appropriate experiments. Following Nozick, reidentification involves judging continuers on a metric of continuity and choosing the continuer with the highest acceptable value on this metric. We explore both the metric and its implications for personal identity. Since James (1890), academic theories have variously attributed personal identity to the continuity of memories, psychology, bodies, social networks, and possessions. In our experiments, we measure how participants (N = 1, 525) weighted the relative contributions of these five dimensions in hypothetical fission accidents, in which a person was split into two continuers. Participants allocated compensation money (Study 1) or adjudicated inheritance claims (Study 2) and reidentified the original person. Most decided based on the continuity of memory, personality, and psychology, with some consideration given to the body and social relations. Importantly, many participants identified the original with both continuers simultaneously, violating the transitivity of identity relations. We discuss the findings and their relevance for philosophy and psychology and place our approach within the current theoretical and empirical landscape. OPEN ACCESS Citation: Woike JK, Collard P, Hood B (2020) Putting your money where your self is: Connecting dimensions of closeness and theories of personal identity. PLoS ONE 15(2): e0228271. https://doi. Data Availability Statement: The data required to replicate the results of this study for both Study 1 and Study 2 can be accessed in the Harvard Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AN1QF3). The dataset for Study 1 is freely accessible in a Personal identity and reidentificationThis investigation into personal identity starts with a theoretical analysis of reidentification. Reidentification poses an important question concerning personal identity [1,18]: Is y at t 2 one and the same person as x at t 1 ? We recognize and thereby reidentify acquaintances and connect their present state with earlier states, but we are also able to remember or imagine their existence in the past and the future. Furthermore, we each stand in a special relationship Putting your money where your self is PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228271 February 12, 2020 2 / 44 version without demographic information and can be requested via the platform with demographic data by researchers at academic institutions upon reasonable request (the full dataset is uploaded to the platform).

Self-Continuity

“…As James [1950James [ (1890 evocatively put it, the present is "a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time." The first way of defining self-continuity refers to the connection between one's past and present selves (Dunkel et al 2010, Sedikides et al 2016, Woike et al 2020. We refer to this as past-present self-continuity.…”

Consumers prefer natural medicines more when treating psychological than physical conditions

“…Moreover, people are more inclined to allocate more money to others who inherit their memory and personality traits—such inheritance allows for the continuity of personal identity—as opposed to those who do not inherit these features. This allocation pattern does not emerge when it comes to inheriting physical features, such as one's body and appearance (Woike et al, 2020), suggesting that stable psychological features are quintessential to the concept of personal identity.…”

Experimental philosophy of memory

“…There are a number of experimental studies that address memory not in its own right but rather in the context of other philosophical problems, such as personal identity. In this context, the question at issue is most often whether the folk apply the memory criterion of personal identity-that is, whether they think that continuity of memory is what allows a person to persist though time-or whether they instead employ some other criterion, such as bodily continuity or continuity of moral character (Nichols & Bruno, 2010;Strohminger & Nichols, 2014;Tierney, Howard, Kumar, Kvaran, & Nichols, 2014;Berniūnas & Dranseika, 2016;Woike, Collard, & Hood, 2020). The experimental philosophy literature on personal identity tends to provide study participants with stories of people undergoing various types of transformation (Dranseika, Dagys, & Berniūnas, 2020) in an attempt to ascertain the criteria on which people rely in deciding whether the post-transformation individual is 'the same person as' the pre-transformation individual.…”