The psychology of philosophy: Associating philosophical views with psychological traits in professional philosophers

Abstract

Do psychological traits predict philosophical views? We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (e.g., epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (N = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a number of psychological traits, such as personality, numeracy, wellbeing, lifestyle, and life experiences. We also included nontechnical 'translations' of these views for eventual use in other populations. We found limited to no support for the notion that personality or demographics predict philosophical views. We did, however, find that some psychological traits were predictive of philosophical views, even after strict correction for multiple comparisons. Findings include: higher interest in numeracy predicted physicalism, naturalism, and consequentialism; lower levels of well-being and higher levels of mental illness predicted hard determinism; using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predicted non-realist and subjectivist views of morality and aesthetics; having had a transformative or self-transcendent experience predicted theism and idealism. We discuss whether or not these empirical results have philosophical implications, while noting that 68% of our sample of professional philosophers indicated that such findings would indeed have philosophical value.

Belief changes associated with psychedelic use

“…This shared interpretive framework could affect belief change, producing the patterns documented here. Among professors of philosophy, who subscribe less to such spiritual frameworks, there was no association between psychedelic use and non-physicalist beliefs, suggesting that prior beliefs may impact psychedelic-induced belief change (Yaden and Anderson, 2021).…”

Reflective reasoning & philosophy

“…This led some researchers to look for links between reflection and philosophical judgments among those with advanced training in philosophy. Findings from smaller samples were unable to detect small correlations between philosophers beliefs and reflection test performance (Yaden & Anderson, 2021). However, multiple studies of larger samples that included people with a Ph.D. in philosophy, found that reflection test performance correlated with philosophical beliefs (such as theism) even when controlling for education, gender, personality, and other reasoning tests (Byrd, 2021d).…”

Great Minds do not Think Alike: Philosophers’ Views Predicted by Reflection, Education, Personality, and Other Demographic Differences

“…Descriptive statistics for the responses to the PhilPapers items can be found in Table 1. To limit jargon (Knutsen & Presser, 2010), participants that reported not having or not being a candidate for a Ph.D. in philosophy received jargon-free translations (Table 2; see also Appendix) developed in cooperation with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado (see also Yaden & Anderson, 2021).…”

“…So far only a relatively small study of philosophers and their reflection test performance has been published (Yaden & Anderson, 2021), but this and prior work on the issue used less than optimal reflection tests (Byrd, 2014;Appendix). So there is still a need for a larger conceptual replication and extension of existing findings involving both laypeople and philosophers using both original and state-of-the-art reflection tests as well as measures of both intuitions about particular thought experiments and acceptance of more general philosophical views.…”