Experimental philosophy is a growing field in cognitive science and philosophical-psychological issues. The side-effect effect, or Knobe effect, is one of the well-known topics in this area. The Knobe effect refers to the idea that people often judge the harmful side effects of a moral agent’s behavior as intentional, while they typically consider the beneficial and constructive side effects of the same behavior as unintentional. In the research literature related to experimental philosophy, this asymmetry in judgment is referred to as the Knobe effect, as it was first observed by Joshua Knobe.
The aim of the present study is to evaluate Joshua Knobe’s experiment under different conditions and to assess its replicability using various scenarios. For this purpose, sixteen scenarios were prepared and distributed among 480 university students. Each scenario was presented to 26 students, and their opinions were collected. The collected data were analyzed using the chi-square test. The chi-square statistic at the 0.01 significance level was 106.87 for harm scenarios and 39.45 for help scenarios. These results indicate that the findings observed in Joshua Knobe’s original study were not replicated in the present research. Therefore, the replicability of the Knobe effect was not confirmed in this study.
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