Abstract
Ethical discourse draws upon information from various disciplines to promote normative conclusions. In this chapter, we review one particular method—the contrastive vignette technique (CVT)—that has been fruitfully used as a quantitative means of exploring public attitudes towards ethically challenging issues. The chapter serves as a practical guide to the design and use of CVT in neuroethical inquiry, a technique we term experimental neuroethics.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
I thank Sebastian Sattler and Veljko Dubljević for this excellent suggestion.
References
Aspinwall LG, Brown TR, Tabery J (2012) The double-edged sword: does biomechanism increase or decrease judges’ sentencing of psychopaths? Science 337:846–849. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1219569
Berryessa CM, Chandler JA, Reiner P (2016) Public attitudes toward legally coerced biological treatments of criminals. J Law Biosci 3(3):447–467. https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsw037
Borry P, Schotsmans P, Dierickx K (2005) The birth of the empirical turn in bioethics. Bioethics 19:49–71
Braun V, Clarke V (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qual Res Psychol 3:77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa
Burstin K, Doughtie E, Raphaeli A (1980) Contrastive vignette technique: an indirect methodology designed to address reactive social attitude measurement. J Appl Soc Psychol 10:147–165
Cabrera LY, Fitz NS, Reiner PB (2015a) Reasons for comfort and discomfort with pharmacological enhancement of cognitive, affective, and social domains. Neuroethics 8:93–106. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-014-9222-3
Cabrera LY, Fitz NS, Reiner PB (2015b) Empirical support for the moral salience of the therapy-enhancement distinction in the debate over cognitive, affective and social enhancement. Neuroethics 8:243–256. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-014-9223-2
Cabrera LY, Reiner PB (2018) A novel sequential mixed-method technique for quantification of unscripted narratives: contrastive quantitized content analysis. Sociol Methods Res 47:532–548
Daniels N (1979) Wide reflective equilibrium and theory acceptance in ethics. J Philos 76:256–282
de Brigard F (2010) If you like it, does it matter if it’s real? Philos Psychol 23:43–57
FeldmanHall O, Dalgleish T, Thompson R et al (2012) Differential neural circuitry and self-interest in real vs hypothetical moral decisions. Soc Cogn 7:743–751
Felsen G, Castelo N, Reiner PB (2013) Decisional enhancement and autonomy: public attitudes towards overt and covert nudges. Judgm Decis Mak 8:202–213
Finch J (1987) The vignette technique in survey research. Sociology 21:105–114
Fisher R (1993) Social desirability bias and the validity of indirect questioning. J Consum Res 20:303–315
Fitz NS, Nadler R, Manogaran P et al (2014) Public attitudes toward cognitive enhancement. Neuroethics 7:173–188. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-013-9190-z
Frith L (2010) Empirical ethics: a growing area of bioethics. Clin Ethics 5:51–53. https://doi.org/10.1258/ce.2010.010004
Gervais WM, Norenzayan A (2012) Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. Science 336:493–496. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1215647
Goldenberg MJ (2005) Evidence-based ethics? On evidence-based practice and the “empirical turn” from normative bioethics. BMC Med Ethics 6:E11. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6939-6-11
Hauser DJ, Schwarz N (2016) Attentive Turkers: MTurk participants perform better on online attention checks than do subject pool participants. Behav Res Methods 48:400–407. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-015-0578-z
Hughes J (2009) TechnoProgressive biopolitics and human enhancement. In: Progress in bioethics. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 163–188
Hughes J (2010) Contradictions from the enlightenment roots of transhumanism. J Med Philos 35:622–640. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhq049
Ives J, Draper H (2009) Appropriate methodologies for empirical bioethics: it’s all relative. Bioethics 23:249–258. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8519.2009.01715.x
Knobe J, Buckwalter W, Nichols S et al (2012) Experimental philosophy. Annu Rev Psychol 63:81–99. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100350
Kraft ME, King MF, Furlong SR, Bruner GC (2000) Social desirability bias: a neglected aspect of validity testing. Psychol Mark 17:79–103
Krosnick J (1999) Survey research. Annu Rev Psychol 50:537–567
Krosnick JA, Presser S (2010) Question and questionnaire design. In: Handbook of survey research, 2nd edn. Emerald, Bingley, pp 263–314
Levay KE, Freese J, Druckman JN (2016) The demographic and political composition of Mechanical Turk samples. SAGE Open 6:1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244016636433
Link BG, Phelan JC, Bresnahan M et al (1999) Public conceptions of mental illness: labels, causes, dangerousness, and social distance. Am J Public Health 89:1328–1333
Link BG, Yang LH, Phelan JC, Collins PY (2004) Measuring mental illness stigma. Schizophr Bull 30:511–541
Molewijk B, Stiggelbout AM, Otten W et al (2004) Empirical data and moral theory. A plea for integrated empirical ethics. Med Health Care Philos 7:55–69
Nichols AL, Maner JK (2008) The good-subject effect: investigating participant demand characteristics. J Gen Psychol 135:151–166. https://doi.org/10.3200/GENP.135.2.151-166
Nichols S (2011) Experimental philosophy and the problem of free will. Science 331:1401–1403. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1192931
Onwuegbuzie AJ, Collins KMT (2007) A typology of mixed methods sampling designs in social science research. Qual Rep 12:281–316
Paolacci G, Chandler J (2014) Inside the Turk: understanding Mechanical Turk as a participant pool. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 23:184–188. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414531598
Peer E, Vosgerau J, Acquisti A (2014) Reputation as a sufficient condition for data quality on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Behav Res Methods 46(4):1023–1031. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0434-y
Rand DG, Tarnita CE, Ohtsuki H, Nowak MA (2013) Evolution of fairness in the one-shot anonymous ultimatum game. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 110:2581–2586. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1214167110
Rawls J (1999) A theory of justice, 2nd edn. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Reiner PB (2013) The biopolitics of cognitive enhancement. In: Hildt E, Franke A (eds) Cognitive enhancement: an interdisciplinary perspective. Springer, Berlin, pp 189–200
Roskies A, Nichols S (2008) Bringing moral responsibility down to earth. J Philos 105:371–388
Rouse SV (2015) A reliability analysis of Mechanical Turk data. Comput Hum Behav 43:304–307
Sandelowski M, Voils CI, Knafl G (2009) On Quantitizing. J Mixed Methods Res 3:208–222. https://doi.org/10.1177/1558689809334210
Vohs KD, Schooler JW (2008) The value of believing in free will: encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating. Psychol Sci 19:49–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Reiner, P.B. (2019). Experimental Neuroethics. In: Nagel, S. (eds) Shaping Children. Advances in Neuroethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10677-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10677-5_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-10676-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-10677-5
eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)