Abstract
My presentation will address theoretical basis, methodology and aims of a new interdisciplinary research project (team members from the field of philosophy, psychology and evolutionary psychology) concerning the concept of personal identity. The research project is based on a series of questionnaire experiments conducted by Nina Strohminger and Shaun Nichols (The essential moral self, 2014).
The original research by Strohminger and Nichols included five questionnaire studies in which participants were introduced to various scenarios about persons undergoing certain changes (both mental and physical). Respondents were supposed to decide and rate on a scale change of which features would have the largest impact on preservation of personal identity of the person in question.
The results showed that respondents from American general public view personal identity as closely connected to moral characteristics of a person; more precisely, characteristics that play an important role in interpersonal relationships, e.g. empathy, moral conscience or memories of loved ones. The aim of the follow-up research is both to test the results of the original study on Czech general public and to broaden the research question.
In the original study the number of respondents ranged from 79 to 318, while in the new study we hope to gain thousands of respondents - the study is conducted in cooperation with laboratory of evolutionary biology which has its own large database of respondents. The authors of the original study have noted that the scenarios introduced to the respondents only addressed the change of someone else (3rd person), while it would be very useful to introduce 1st person scenarios and ask how the change in characteristics would influence the respondent's self.
Our questionnaires will include these 1st person versions, which will allow us to test whether the set of features important for preservation of personal identity will change with the 1st person perspective. In the 3rd person scenarios we also plan to include female version in addition to the original male version and test our own hypothesis that respondents will ascribe different essential characteristics to the self of a man and the self of a woman.
Apart from scenarios adapted from the original study and general socio-demographic questions we will include a psychological test of interpersonal values in order to be able to look for correlations between respondent's interpersonal-values system and features they will judge to be crucial for personal identity. The last extra set of questions will concern dualistic intuitions, especially concepts of the mind and the soul.
Our hypothesis is that people's intuitive concept of "the soul" or "non-physical essence" of a person is in relationship with the "essential moral self" of Strohminger and Nichols. The main motivation of the study is to show that methods of experimental philosophy can be very useful in the process deepening our knowledge of a man as a social animal since it enables us to reveal the structure of conceptual system that is essential to effective interpersonal interaction and is very likely to be evolutionarily adaptive.