Somewhat interesting interactive 'experimental philosophy' video:



I'd be curious how strongly people here agreed that the 4 individuals described were (un)happy, and whether you have any explanation for the average results presented. Personally, I was quite prepared to accept that the party girl was happy, but that's probably because - like a typical utilitarian - I understand 'happiness' as a type of subjective state, so there's no conceptual difficulty with imagining a shallow party girl having it.

PS: Will Wilkinson has a discussion of this experiment where he gives his take.

I think the experiment is too contaminated to be valuable. The video conflates ‘what Maria thinks’ with ‘what Maria tells us she thinks’. Mother1 has a lot of characteristics we can reliably associate with happiness (eg sincere smile, being good at what she does), PartyMaria has characteristics that we quite reliably associate with un- (or at least non-)happiness (unconvincing smile, drug habit, inference from the narrative* and framing** of the video that she’s a bit of a clinger-on rather than a successful socialite). The presenter asserts that we’re looking at psychologically equivalent people but shows us evidence for something very different.

So any inferences we might want to draw about respondents’ biases get drowned by the videos own biases.

*’try to date’ rather than ‘date’; ‘try to become popular’ rather than ‘become popular’; ‘preoccupied with’; ‘no longer nice to her friends’ rather than ‘no longer nice to her friends from her former life’ (implying she doesn’t really have any actual friends now); ‘wants to be like famous people’ rather than ‘is (like) a famous person’; ‘ends up drunk’ rather than ‘enjoys heavy drinking’.

**Standing at a distance, chasing people; doing drugs on her own etc

(presumably the experiment was done with textual or verbal descriptions rather than the video, but just the same sort of problems could creep in, especially if they don't specify what the evidence we have for the Mariae's states of mind is.)

"The presenter asserts that we’re looking at psychologically equivalent people but shows us evidence for something very different." - true. Doubt it'd meet with a proper psychology academics approval...

It's obviously false that the two characters have "exactly the same psychological states" -- e.g., being "excited by life." This is just verbal equivocation. They're excited by life in different ways.

I think the main point of the exercise was to suggest something about society's meaning of happiness vs. unhappiness rather than to demonstrate anything stronger. The claim is just that when people use the word "happiness," they include more normative judgments than when they use "unhappiness." This may follow from the results presented even if we aren't particularly hospitable to the setup.

Sure, I can well believe there is such an effect; I just don't think this provides much evidence for it.

Isn't "experimental philosophy" just science?

I didn't really feel like either was happy. I attribute this to the fact that I wouldn't be happy in those situations (they sound busy). I figured it would be better just to take their word for it.

'Isn't "experimental philosophy" just science?'

In this case (and that of Joshua Knobe) it seems more like psychology which is arguably (though not obviously) relevant to interesting philosophical claims. I've never seen a really worthwhile example of experimental philosophy yet, and it sounds suspiciously like a fad to be, but I haven't looked into it much. There's a long discussion of it at http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/03/experimental_ph.html with some criticism in the comments...

So the impression I get is the argument for XP goes like this:

1) Intuitions give us important information about the world
2) Experimental philosophy improves our knowledge of intuitions
-> Experimental philosophy gives us important information about the world

This seems semi-valid if you accept the premises and squint a bit. If, as I do, you reject 1 (and judging by the tiny bit I've seen so far I'm not convinced of 2...), it doesn't seem like there's much say for the subject. I can certainly see how a lot of intuitionist philosophers would like it, though.

And to the extent that my reasoning would lead you to reject XP, it would also lead you to reject large swathes of other philosophy...

I think experimental philosophy is just psychology focused on philosophy-type questions. It's fun and potentially useful for understanding how people think and feel about various topics. Still, I don't expect it to yield normatively compelling insights at a rate above the usual armchair thought experiments.