News - Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics - Faculty of Philosophy

19th of June 2020: Online research seminar - Dries H. Bostyn (Ghent University) - The Shape of Blame

We have the pleasure to invite you for a research seminar in the ‘BIOUNCERTAINTY’ research project. The subject of the seminar is 'The Shape of Blame' and it will be delivered by Dries H. Bostyn (Ghent University). The seminar will take place on Friday, 19th of June, at 4:00pm on Skype.

Join the meeting HERE

Dries H. Bostyn is a Junior postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University. His work focusses on Moral Psychology, but he has been exploring many topics from the intersection of philosophy and psychology. He published in several influential journals, such as 'Psychological Science', 'Judgment and decision making', 'Social Psychological and Personality Science', 'Thinking and Reasoning', among others.

Abstract: For many types of behaviors, whether a specific instance of that behavior is either blame or praiseworthy depends on how much of the behavior is done or how people go about doing it. For instance, for a behavior such as “replying quickly to emails”, whether a specific reply is blame or praiseworthy will depend on the timeliness of that reply. Such behaviors lie on a continuum in which part of the continuum is praiseworthy (replying quickly) and another part of the continuum is blameworthy (replying late). As praise shifts towards blame along such behavioral continua, the resulting blame-praise curve must have a specific shape. What determines the shape of that curve? We explore this issue across seven studies, focusing specifically on the impact of statistical information.

You may read the preprint version of the paper at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340900656_The_Shape_of_Blame

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