Experimental philosophers have used empirical methods to test folk opinions about concepts in philosophy: knowledge, freedom, responsibility, and so on. Philosophers of psychology have used armchair methods to analyze concepts in scientific psychology: self-control, attention, mind-wandering, and so on. We will hear from two speakers who combine these approaches, using empirical methods to test folk opinions about the psychological concepts of (1) mind-wandering and (2) self-control.
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Zachary C. Irving
"Mind-Wandering: Empirical Conceptual Analysis"

Although mind-wandering research is progressing at a rapid rate, stark disagreements are emerging about what exactly the term “mind-wandering” means. According to the four most prominent views, mind-wandering is: 1) task-unrelated thought, 2) stimulus independent thought, 3) unintentional thought, or 4) dynamically unguided thought. Theorists involved in the debate have frequently suggested that their respective views capture the ordinary understanding of mind-wandering, but no systematic studies have assessed these claims. In three large factorial studies, we present participants (n=822) with vignettes that describe a person’s thoughts and ask whether her mind was wandering, while systematically manipulating features relevant to the four major accounts of mind-wandering. We find the dynamic framework explains between four and twenty times more variance in participants’ mind-wandering judgments than the other accounts. A separate set of studies assesses whether the folk believe that we can control and be responsible for the costs of mind-wandering. Philosophers and scientists have long emphasized the costs of mind-wandering in education, driving, and many other contexts. Yet almost no research has assessed whether we are responsible to those costs, or whether they simply happen to us. In a large multifactorial study (400), we find that participants hold others responsible for the costs of mind-wandering and that those judgments are mediated by (a) care, (b) stress, and (c) intuitions about the controllability of thought. In another study, we experimentally manipulate subjects' intuitions about the controllability of thought, and find that doing so increases perceived responsibility for mind-wandering.
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Juan Pablo Bermúdez
"What is Self-Control? A Study of the Folk Concept"

Some scholars consider that exerting self-control consists mainly in inhibiting a prepotent response. Others accept several other possible strategies, like avoiding tempting situations or “tying oneself to the mast”. Which of these strategies are included in the everyday concept of self-control? Some claim their theories align with the pre-theoretical everyday notion, but the issue has not been empirically studied. Here we report a series of pre-registered studies aimed at mapping out the descriptive and evaluative structures of the lay concept of self-control. With respect to the concept’s descriptive aspect (what strategies does the folk concept include?), we find that the folk concept does not neatly match with common theoretical distinctions (cognitive vs. situational strategies; response-focused vs. antecedent-focused strategies). Instead, people tend to distinguish between strategies based solely on internal psychological resources and those relying on ‘external scaffolding’ tools. People tend to ascribe self-control to agents deploying both internal and scaffolded strategies, but they ascribe significantly more self-control to the former. This suggests that internal control is the paradigmatic self-control strategy, but by no means the only one. How are these strategies normatively evaluated? In a series of ongoing studies we assess whether people consider these strategy types to be differentially more effective, desirable or advisable. We expect to find more positive attributions to internal-resource strategies, given their descriptive centrality. Empirical evidence suggests other strategies are more effective, so this would be a key finding: an aspect in which revising the folk concept could have important practical consequences.