Selected Publications
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C. Brozzo, & J. Michael (2023). A Sense of Commitment to Activity on Facebook: Evidence from a web-based paradigm. PLoS ONE 18(4), e0271798.
The present study was designed to test whether actions on Facebook such as commenting on others’ posts can create a sense of commitment to continue performing similar actions in the future. Across four online experiments, we found evidence that regularly commenting on others’ Facebook posts generates a sense of commitment to commenting on similar posts in the future, leading people to feel worse about not commenting on a post if they have done so regularly in the past than if they have not done so, and leading them to expect a Facebook friend to be more disappointed if they do not comment when there has been this previous history of commenting. These findings may contribute to illuminating the feelings associated with social media use, including its compulsive aspects and its effects on well-being.
C. Brozzo (2022). Ascribing Proto-Intentions: Action Understanding as Minimal Mindreading. Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 22(66), 371-387.
How do we understand other individuals’ actions? Answers to this question cluster around two extremes: either by ascribing to the observed individual mental states such as intentions, or without ascribing any mental states. Thus, action understanding is either full-blown mindreading, or not mindreading. An intermediate option is lacking, but would be desirable for interpreting some experimental findings. I provide this intermediate option: actions may be understood by ascribing to the observed individual proto-intentions. Unlike intentions, proto-intentions are subject to context-bound normative constraints, therefore being more widely available across development. Action understanding, when it consists in proto-intention ascription, can be a minimal form of mindreading.
C. Brozzo (2022). Perfumes and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature. In Keller, A. & B. Young (eds.), Theoretical Perspectives on Smell. Routledge.
I will argue that aesthetically appreciating some perfumes and aesthetically appreciating nature can interact in intriguing ways. I shall identify three such ways, meant to be instructive rather than exhaustive. First, one can appreciate a natural scent, such as that of jasmine, through a perfume, that is, by means of its incorporation in a perfume. Second, in the case in which a natural scent (such as that of rose, or of fig) is artificially reproduced within the context of a perfume, the full aesthetic appreciation of this perfume as an instance of clever design presupposes the aesthetic appreciation of nature—specifically, the aesthetic appreciation of the natural scent that is being artificially reproduced. Third, nature-inspired perfumes can provide stories that can usefully inform subsequent encounters with nature.
S. Bonicalzi, E. Kulakova, C. Brozzo, S. Gilbert, & P. Haggard (2022). The Dynamics of Responsibility Judgment: Joint Role of Dependence and Transference Causal Explanations. Philosophical Psychology, 35(6), 911-939.
Reasoning about underlying causal relations drives responsibility judgments: agents are held responsible for the outcomes they cause through their behaviors. Two main causal reasoning approaches exist: dependence theories emphasize statistical relations between causes and effects, while transference theories emphasize mechanical transmission of energy. Recently, pluralistic or hybrid models, combining both approaches, have emerged as promising psychological frameworks. In this paper, we focus on causal reasoning as involved in third-party judgements of responsibility and on related judgments of intention and control. In particular, we used a novel visual paradigm to investigate the combined effects of two well-known causal manipulations, namely omission and pre-emption, on these evaluations. Our findings support the view that people apply a pluralistic causal reasoning when evaluating individual responsibility for negative outcomes. In particular, we observed diminished responsibility when dependence, transference, or both fail, compared to when these mechanisms are upheld. Responsibility judgement involves a cognitive hybrid of multiple aspects of causal reasoning. However, important differences exist at the interindividual level, with most people weighting transference more than dependence.
C. Brozzo (2021). Against the Distinction between Intentions for the Future and Intentions for the Present. American Philosophical Quarterly, 58(4), 333-346.
How should we account for the planning and performance of a bodily action in terms of the agent’s intentions? An influential answer invokes two distinct kinds of intention: intentions for the future (also known as prior intentions or distal intentions), responsible for action planning, and intentions for the present (also known as intentions in action or proximal intentions), responsible for action performance. I argue that there is something wrong with this influential answer: the notion of intention for the present is either superfluous (because intentions for the future can exercise functions associated both with action planning and with action performance) or ambiguous (because it conflates temporal, functional, and content-related aspects). Developing this criticism will lead to an alternative account of action planning and performance based on intentions of just one kind.
C. Brozzo (2021). A Role for Conscious Accessibility in Skilled Action. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 12, 683-697.
Skilled sportsmen or musicians—more generally, skilled agents—often fill us with awe with the way they perform their actions. One question we may ask ourselves is whether they intended to perform some awe-inspiring aspects of their actions. This question becomes all the more pressing as it often turns out that these agents were not conscious of some of those aspects at the time of performance. As I shall argue, there are reasons for suspecting lack of conscious access to an aspect of one’s action to be incompatible with the idea that the agent intended to perform that aspect of their action. Subsequently, though,I will also argue that, in some cases, the incompatibility is only prima facie, and can be dispelled by drawing the following distinction: that between aspects of one’s action that are merely temporarily not consciously accessed, versus aspects of one’s action that are permanently inaccessible to consciousness. I will thus remove an obstacle towards saying that skilled agents intended to perform certain aspects of their actions, despite lack of conscious access to those aspects at the time of performance.
C. Brozzo (2020). Are Some Perfumes Works of Art? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 78(1), 21-32.
What more do we need to fully appreciate perfumes, beyond considering them objects for aesthetic appreciation? My contention is that our appreciation of some perfumes would be largely incomplete, unless we acknowledged them as works of art. I defend the claim that some perfumes are works of art from the point of view of different definitions. Nick Zangwill’s aesthetic definition makes it easy to defend the proposed claim, but is not very informative for the purposes of fully appreciating some perfumes. On the other hand, Jerrold Levinson’s intentional-historical definition and Dominic Lopes’s approach to defining art make it more challenging to defend the proposed claim. I show that, even so, the challenge may be met. Moreover, the challenge is well worth engaging with, since tackling it uncovers features of some perfumes that are essential to their full appreciation.
C. Brozzo (2020). Categorically Perceiving Motor Actions. In F. Calzavarini & M. Viola (eds.), Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in Philosophy of Neuroscience. Springer, pp. 465-482.
In this chapter, I will present an empirical conjecture to the effect that some bodily actions are categorically perceived. These are bodily actions such as grasping or reaching for something, which I am going to call motor actions. My conjecture builds on one recently put forward about how the categorical perception of facial expressions of some emotions works. I shall motivate my own conjecture on the basis of both theoretical and empirical considerations, describe how it could be operationalised and what explanatory gain could be obtained from it.
C. Brozzo (2017). Motor Intentions: How Intentions and Motor Representations Come Together. Mind & Language, 32(2), 231-256.
What are the most detailed descriptions under which subjects intend to perform bodily actions? According to Pacherie (2006), these descriptions may be found by looking into motor representations—action representations in the brain that determine the movements to be performed. Specifically, for any motor representation guiding an action, its subject has an M-intention representing that action in as much detail. I show that some M-intentions breach the constraints that intentions should meet. I then identify a set of intentions—motor intentions—that represent actions in as much detail as some motor representations while meeting the constraints that intentions should meet.
O. Blomberg*, & C. Brozzo* (2017). Motor intentions and non-observational knowledge of action: A standard story. Thought, 6(3), 137-146.
*The authors contributed equally to this work.
According to the standard story given by the Causal Theory of Action, an action is an intrinsically mindless bodily movement that is appropriately caused by an intention. Those who embrace this story typically take this intention to have a coarse-grained content, specifying the action only down to the level of the agent’s habits and skills. Markos Valaris (2015) argues that, because of this, the standard story cannot make sense of the deep reach of our non-observational knowledge of action. He concludes that we therefore have to jettison its conception of actions as mindless bodily movements animated from the outside by intentions. Here we defend the standard story. We can make sense of the reach of non-observational knowledge of action once we reject the following two assumptions: (i) that an intended habitual or skilled action is a so-called basic action—that is, an action that doesn’t involve any finer-grained intentions—and (ii) that an agent, in acting, is merely executing one intention rather than a whole hierarchy of more or less fine-grained intentions. We argue that (i) and (ii) are false.
S. Mölbert, L. Klein, A. Thaler, B. Mohler, C. Brozzo, P. Martus, H. O. Karnath, S. Zipfel, & K. Giel. (2017). Depictive and Metric Body Size Estimation in Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 57, 21-31.
A distorted representation of one's own body is a diagnostic criterion and core psychopathology of both anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Despite recent technical advances in research, it is still unknown whether this body image disturbance is characterized by body dissatisfaction and a low ideal weight and/or includes a distorted perception or processing of body size. In this article, we provide an update and meta-analysis of 42 articles summarizing measures and results for body size estimation (BSE) from 926 individuals with AN, 536 individuals with BN and 1920 controls. We replicate findings that individuals with AN and BN overestimate their body size as compared to controls (ES= 0.63). Our meta-regression shows that metric methods (BSE by direct or indirect spatial measures) yield larger effect sizes than depictive methods (BSE by evaluating distorted pictures), and that effect sizes are larger for patients with BN than for patients with AN. To interpret these results, we suggest a revised theoretical framework for BSE that accounts for differences between depictive and metric BSE methods regarding the underlying body representations (conceptual vs. perceptual, implicit vs. explicit). We also discuss clinical implications and argue for the importance of multimethod approaches to investigate body image disturbance.