Evidence Relationship: Supports
Vote on whether "Endorsement differences between physical-contact and lever variants vanish under a 90-second forced-deliberation delay (Petrossian, 2022)" is good evidence that supports the claim "Verdicts on Footbridge shift 18 points when the victim is described as 'a large man' versus 'a person wearing a heavy backpack', despite causal structure being identical"
Evidence Claim
Endorsement differences between physical-contact and lever variants vanish under a 90-second forced-deliberation delay (Petrossian, 2022)
Participants (N=1,455) randomized to answer immediately versus after a 90-second enforced pause with a written justification prompt. In the immediate condition the contact/lever gap was 26 points; under forced deliberation it narrowed to 5 points (non-significant). Justification texts in the delay condition overwhelmingly cited numbers of lives rather than mode of causation.
Main Claim
Verdicts on Footbridge shift 18 points when the victim is described as 'a large man' versus 'a person wearing a heavy backpack', despite causal structure being identical
Halloran and Ntumba (2021) ran a 2x2 vignette study (N=2,600) holding the causal role of the victim's mass constant while varying whether the mass was intrinsic or carried. Endorsement of pushing rose from 14% to 32% in the backpack condition. Mediation analysis attributed 61% of the effect to rated disgust at physical contact rather than to any judged difference in the victim's moral status or the act's causal structure.
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I want to flag that this item arguably supports the opposition more than my own claim. Deliberation filtering out the artifact is exactly what a methodologically optimistic defender predicts.
That's how I read my own data, for what it's worth. The debunking reading requires the extra premise that deliberation is also just producing a different artifact.