Perceptions of Undue Influence Shed Light on the Folk Conception of Autonomy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Advances in psychology and neuroscience have elucidated the social aspects of human agency, leading to a broad shift in our thinking about fundamental concepts such as autonomy and responsibility. Here, we address a critical aspect of this inquiry by investigating how people consider the socio-relational nature of their own agency, particularly the influence of others on their perceived control over their decisions and actions. Specifically, in a series of studies using contrastive vignettes, we examine public attitudes about when external influences on everyday decisions are perceived as "undue" - that is, as undermining the control conditions for these decisions to be considered autonomous - vs. when they are perceived as appropriate and even supportive of autonomous decision-making. We found that the influence of preauthorized agents - individuals and institutions with whom we share a worldview - was judged to be less undue than non-preauthorized agents, even after controlling for the familiarity of the agent. These effects persisted irrespective of the extent to which respondents identified as communitarian or individualistic, and were consistent across two distinct scenarios. We also found that external influences that were rational were perceived as less undue than those that were arational. Our study opens new avenues of inquiry into the "folk conception" of autonomy, and we discuss the implications of our findings for the ethics of public policies designed to influence decisions and for information sharing in social networks.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".