Joint Guidance (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2025)
Sometimes, we act in concert with others, as when we go for a walk together, or when two mathematicians try to prove a difficult theorem with each other. An interesting question is what distinguishes the actions of individuals that together constitute some joint activity from those that amount to a mere aggregation of individual behaviours. It is common for philosophers to appeal to collective intentionality to explain such instances of shared agency. This framework generalizes the approach traditionally used to explain individual action: a behaviour is an action just in case it causally follows from the relevant intention. Contemporary philosophers of action, as well as cognitive psychologists, however, have criticised this way of explaining individual actions, favouring instead an approach that puts “control” or “guidance” as the discerning factor: a behaviour is an action just in case the agent controls it, or just in case the agent guides it. In this paper, I argue that we should include talk of guidance even in cases of joint action. I first show that problems of deviant causation arise also in cases of joint action, and that therefore guidance is required to face this issue. Then, I show what a “capacity to guide” amounts to for a group and how collective guidance relates to individual guidance. Joint guidance is actually constituted by task co-representation and the sense of being jointly committed. I argue that an approach that favours joint guidance over joint intentions eschews a lot of metaphysical problems about collective mentality and group subjects, and it is thus more explanatorily fruitful.
The Sunk Cost of Effort
The sunk cost effect, the tendency to persist in a suboptimal course of action because of prior investments, is well-established in contexts involving monetary investments, but has received less attention in contexts involving effort investments. Across five experiments (N = 1789), we investigated the sunk cost effect for effort investments in individual and social contexts. Experiment 1 demonstrated a sunk cost effect for self-invested effort. Experiment 2 extended this to a social context, demonstrating a tendency to honor other agents’ prior effort investments. Experiment 3 replicated this social sunk effort cost effect and revealed it not to be modulated by the presence or absence of a shared goal. Experiment 4 provided evidence that sunk cost reasoning may be attenuated when effort costs are invested in a coordinated joint action with a shared goal and shared rewards. Experiment 5 isolated the role of social expectations in the social sunk cost effect.
Efforts and Joint Efforts
Common parlance is rife with talk of joint efforts. We talk about teams striving together to win championships, communities coordinating to improve local conditions, and colleagues working together to complete complex projects. Joint efforts are often heralded in contexts ranging from family dynamics to corporate environments and even international relations. But what exactly is a joint effort? Do joint efforts exist as distinct entities from efforts simpliciter, or is the term “joint effort” just a gloss indicating the mere aggregations of individual efforts? How do joint efforts relate to the efforts of the individuals involved? Are they experienced differently, perhaps even felt collectively? These questions are crucial to understanding the nature of joint efforts and their implications for both philosophical inquiry and practical application. Trying to answer to these questions directly might seem particularly hazardous as there is no shared theory of individual effort, and the philosophical discourse on the matter is rather ambiguous.
In what follows, I will provide a characterisation of joint efforts and of the feeling of joint effort in terms of joint guidance, the psychological capacity that people have to jointly guide action. I defend an effort-first account of joint efforts (Bermúdez & Massin, 2023), according to which the feeling of joint effort is about, or represents, joint efforts. Accordingly, (joint) efforts are specific kinds of (joint) actions, or better, (joint) efforts are complex and goal-directed (joint) action sub-routines that are necessary to successfully perform the (joint) action in question. “Complex”, in this context, means that those sub-routines are instances of skilled behaviour, where “skilled behaviour” is intended in the broadest sense possible, so as to include, for example, self-control (Bermúdez, 2021; Sripada, 2021).
Captured Attention is all there is to Biases, or Why Implicit Bias might not be Implicit, after all
The traditional approach to research on implicit biases explains biased behaviours on the basis of implicit attitudes, i.e. unconscious psychological states or processes over which the subject has no conscious access. However, this approach has received significant criticism, particularly regarding the poor predictive ability of standard measures of implicit biases for actual discriminatory behaviours, the considerable fluctuation of individuals' scores on implicit measures over the course of months, weeks and even days, and the ability of individuals to correctly predict and adjust their biases. When taken together, all these findings suggest that, in conceptualising implicit biases as unconscious attitudes, we are missing something. In this paper, I try to put forward a different theory of “implicit” bias, not based on the existence of implicit attitudes. Specifically, I argue that the biased behaviour emerges from attentional interactions between subjects and their contexts. I maintain that “implicitly” biased behaviour is the result of a-intentional attentional engagement with situationally salient stimuli. Captured attention can explain both why biases are more tied to situations than to persons and how situational factors affect individual behaviours.
Self-Control Beyond the Self
Self-control is widely understood as the act of (re)aligning one’s behaviors with one’s commitments in the face of contrary motivations or temptations. On this characterization, self-control is essentially intrapersonal: it is the control of (a part of) the self by (another part of) the same self. In this paper, I challenge this assumption on two fronts. First, I argue that there are genuine instances of interpersonal self-control, where the controlling self and the controlled self are different individuals. These cases, such as a support group helping a member resist temptation, fulfill the same function as intrapersonal self-control and demonstrate that self-control can extend across individuals. Second, following this, I argue that the function of self-control is in fact not to resolve internal motivational conflicts, but to manage social conflicts – conflicts between individual intentions and social expectations or functions. This characterization, I show, eschews many traditional problems of self-control, such as how to interpret errant cases. From an evolutionary perspective, self-control primarily evolved to foster cooperation, enforce social norms, and ensure the wellbeing of the social group. By reframing self-control as a socially functional mechanism, I challenge traditional individualistic views and reveals the profoundly interpersonal roots of self-control.
Beyond the Blink: Attention and Ensemble Perception
This is an experimental study on the role of attention in ensemble perception. It combines the attentional blink paradigm with other related tasks for ensemble perception.
Imagination and the Nature of Desire
In this (nowadays almost abandoned) paper, I argue that to desire x just means to imagine x, or, in other words, desires are specific imaginings.
Automaticity and the Problem of Guidance
The Biology of Agency