Alex Wiegmann

@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Ruhr-University Bochum

Alex Wiegmann


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https://researchid.co/alexw1102
51

Scopus Publications

1706

Scholar Citations

21

Scholar h-index

27

Scholar i10-index

Scopus Publications

  • GPT-4’s Alignment with Human Lie and Falsity Attribution in Cases of Deceptive Implicatures
    Nikolai Shurakov, Moritz Kolbe, Neele Engelmann, Alex Wiegmann
    Synthese Library, 2026
  • Altruistic Behavior in Charitable Giving: a Comparison between Rational, Numerical, and Emotional Prompts
    Celso Vieira, Alex Wiegmann, Joachim Horvath
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2025
    The evidence on the influence of rational appeals on moral behavior remains inconclusive. The opportunity to donate to a charity provides a fruitful applied case to test the details that might explain the mixed results. Previous studies have demonstrated the power of emotional appeals to induce participants to donate, while different rational appeals vary in their performance. Our paper presents the results of three pre-registered experiments comparing how much participants were willing to donate via direct cash transfers when exposed to different conditions. Experiment 1 tested five conditions. Three are vignette-based: Narrative, our emotional textual prompt, presents the testimony of an identified recipient, while Argument presents a Singer-style argument for charitable giving, and Facts consists of the numerical results of an evaluation of a cash transfer program. The other two conditions are based on perspective-taking exercises with either a reasonable donor or a suffering recipient, designed to elicit empathy with the beneficiaries. As predicted, the average amount donated in the control condition was significantly lower than in each of the other five conditions. Narrative performed best, significantly better than all other conditions. Among the rational conditions, Facts performed better descriptively. Its success is surprising given the poor performance of adding numerical information in other studies. After a replication with the vignette conditions in Experiment 2, we tested two variations of our Facts condition to explore how numerical information was taken into consideration. The numerical information in Large Numbers conveyed a highly effective intervention, while those in Small Numbers presented a barely positive impact. Since both variations generated roughly the same average donation amount, it seems that the numbers were not processed as numerical information.
  • How Much Harm Does It Take? An Experimental Study on Legal Expertise, the Severity Effect, and Intentionality Ascriptions
    Karolina M. Prochownik, Romy D. Feiertag, Joachim Horvath, Alex Wiegmann
    Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence, 2025
    Kneer and Bourgeois-Gironde (2017) reported that legal experts’ intentionality ascriptions are susceptible to the “severity effect” (i.e., influenced by differently harmful side effects), which violates the outcome-independent legal concept of intentionality prevalent in many criminal law systems. This challenges the “legal expertise defense” (= legal experts are more competent users of legal concepts and their legal judgments are more reliable than those of laypeople). Prochownik, Krebs, Wiegmann, and Horvath (2020) hypothesized that the “severity effect” might be due to confounding features of the previously used vignettes (i.e., the somewhat bad cases not being perceived as harmful by legal experts). They created new stimuli with clear cases of harm that differed in the degree of harm across two conditions, and they did not observe any “severity effect” in legal experts or laypeople. Yet, the difference in harm ratings across conditions was not very large. The current study addresses this limitation: Even after increasing the difference in the perceived degree of harm, we still do not observe the “severity effect” in legal experts or laypeople.
  • Actual and Perceived Partisan Bias in Judgments of Political Misinformation as Lies
    Louisa M. Reins, Alex Wiegmann
    Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2025
    In times of what has been coined “post-truth politics,” people are regularly confronted with political actors who intentionally spread false or misleading information. The present article examines (a) to what extent partisans’ judgments of such behaviors as cases of lying are affected by whether the deceiving agent shares their partisanship (actual bias) and (b) to what extent partisans expect the lie judgments of others to be affected by a bias of this kind (perceived bias). In two preregistered experiments ( N = 1,040), we find partisans’ lie judgments to be only weakly affected by the partisanship ascribed to political deceivers, regardless of whether deceivers explicitly communicate or merely insinuate political falsehoods. At the same time, partisans expect their political opponents’ lie judgments to be strongly affected by the deceiving agents’ partisanship. Surprisingly, misperceptions of bias were also present in people’s predictions of bias within their own political camp.
  • Advances in experimental philosophy of lying
    Wiegmann, Alex
    Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Lying, 2025
    Lying is a familiar and morally important phenomenon. No matter if it is in election battles, in personal relationships or in the form of fake news – lying affects us almost every day. Showcasing cutting-edge research on the concept of lying, including work on blatant falsehoods, children’s concept of lying and deception in the courtroom, this interdisciplinary collection examines what it means to lie and how lying should be defined. Bringing together leading and rising scholars from philosophy, psychology, linguistics and anthropology, chapters present novel empirical findings using a variety of methods including experiments, armchair methods, corpus studies and fMRI. Advancing our understanding of the concept of lying, it also focuses on related concepts such as “fake news” and “bullshit”, as well as fundamental questions such as whether lying is morally worse than misleading. It is an essential resource for any student or scholar looking to stay ahead of the latest developments in the philosophy of lying and related fields in philosophy of language, ethics and moral philosophy, philosophy of law, moral psychology, linguistics and cognitive science.
  • Introduction
    Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Lying, 2025
  • The role of stakes in lying: an empirical investigation of the robustness of the folk concept of lying
    Nikolai Shurakov, Alex Wiegmann
    Philosophical Psychology, 2025
  • Sacrificing objects instead of persons: Order effects without emotional engagement
    Emilian Mihailov, Ivar R. Hannikainen, Alex Wiegmann
    Philosophical Psychology, 2025
    In this paper we develop test cases to adjudicate between dual-process and the causal mapping explanations of order effects. Using dilemmas with minimized emotional force, we explore new conditions for order effects to occur. Overall, the results support causal model theory. We produced novel evidence that order effects extend not only to cases with low emotional engagement, but also to specialized judgments about whether an action violates a rule. However, when objects are sacrificed instead of persons the order effect either disappears or becomes symmetrical, contrary to previous theorizing that it is an asymmetrical transfer effect. Causal model theory needs to be developed to include interplays between the moral status of sacrificed entities and computational models of causal mapping. Symmetric order effects remain a puzzle, motivating future research. Though we do not know how to explain them yet, we discuss how symmetric order effects can influence policy decision making.
  • Folk Concepts of Race, Cross-culturally
    Leda Berio, Steffen Koch, Daniel James, Benedict Kenyah-Damptey, Alex Wiegmann
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2025
    The investigation of folk concepts of race has been central to many theoretical and experimental contributions in recent decades; however, most of these contributions have been centred around the North American cultural context. Despite many philosophers pointing to a possible discrepancy between the European, and especially the German, context and the U.S.-American one, a systematic investigation has yet to be undertaken. This paper provides the first cross-cultural experimental study of U.S.-American and German concepts of race. More specifically, it examines whether German concepts of race are more biological than U.S.-American ones and to what extent Germans and U.S.-Americans lean towards conservationism or eliminativism about concepts of race. Surprisingly, our results suggest that U.S.-Americans’ concepts of racial categories such as Black, White, or Asian are no less biologically loaded than Germans’ but that Germans lean far more towards eliminativism than U.S. Americans. We discuss multiple explanations for this finding and develop avenues for future research. In doing so, this paper contributes to the larger project of cross-cultural comparisons between folk theories of race—a project we deem highly fruitful and timely.
  • Camouflaged liability: How the distinction between civilians and soldiers influences moral judgement of permissible harm in war
    Juan Carlos Marulanda‐Hernández, Alex Wiegmann, Michael R. Waldmann
    European Journal of Social Psychology, 2024
    Previous research has shown that people judge sacrificing a few people to save a larger number to be morally permissible when the intervention targets the threat but not when it targets the victims. We investigated whether this distinction according to the locus of intervention influences people's evaluations of wartime scenarios and whether such evaluations vary according to different types of victims (e.g., civilians vs. soldiers). We observed a significant effect of locus of intervention in situations in which a smaller number of civilians were sacrificed to save a larger number of civilians (Study 1; N = 142). However, the effect of locus of intervention was less pronounced in scenarios in which soldiers were sacrificed to save civilians (Studies 2 and 3; N = 173 and N = 841). A fourth experiment (N = 477) explored why participants treated soldiers and civilians differently. Participants believed that it is more permissible to sacrifice soldiers because they consent to being harmed.
  • Exploring the psychology of LLMs’ moral and legal reasoning
    Guilherme F.C.F. Almeida, José Luiz Nunes, Neele Engelmann, Alex Wiegmann, Marcelo de Araújo
    Artificial Intelligence, 2024
  • Bald-Faced Lies, Blushing, and Noses that Grow: An Experimental Analysis
    Vladimir Krstić, Alexander Wiegmann
    Erkenntnis, 2024
  • Does lying require objective falsity?
    Alex Wiegmann
    Synthese, 2023
  • Arguing about thought experiments
    Joachim Horvath, Alex Wiegmann
    Synthese, 2023
  • Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers
    Louisa M. Reins, Alex Wiegmann, Olga P. Marchenko, Irina Schumski
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2023
  • Truetemp cooled down: the stability of Truetemp intuitions
    Adrian Ziółkowski, Alex Wiegmann, Joachim Horvath, Edouard Machery
    Synthese, 2023
  • Lying with deceptive implicatures? Solving a puzzle about conflicting results
    Alex Wiegmann
    Analysis United Kingdom, 2023
  • Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation
    Willemsen, Pascale, Wiegmann, Alex
    Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation, 2022
  • Introduction
    Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation, 2022
  • Intuitive Expertise in Moral Judgments
    Joachim Horvath, Alex Wiegmann
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2022
  • True lies and Moorean redundancy
    Alex Wiegmann, Emanuel Viebahn
    Synthese, 2021
  • Predicting responsibility judgments from dispositional inferences and causal attributions
    Antonia F. Langenhoff, Alex Wiegmann, Joseph Y. Halpern, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tobias Gerstenberg
    Cognitive Psychology, 2021
  • Should I say that? An experimental investigation of the norm of assertion
    Neri Marsili, Alex Wiegmann
    Cognition, 2021
  • Is Lying Bound to Commitment? Empirically Investigating Deceptive Presuppositions, Implicatures, and Actions
    Louisa M. Reins, Alex Wiegmann
    Cognitive Science, 2021
  • Folk Intuitions about Reference Change and the Causal Theory of Reference
    Steffen Koch, Alex Wiegmann
    Ergo, 2021
  • Blame Blocking and Expertise Effects Revisited
    Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Comparative Cognition Animal Minds Cogsci 2021, 2021
  • Lying, Deceptive Implicatures, and Commitment
    Alex Wiegmann, Pascale Willemsen, Jörg Meibauer
    Ergo, 2021
  • Can a Question Be a Lie? An Empirical Investigation
    Emanuel Viebahn, Alexander Wiegmann, Neele Engelmann, Pascale Willemsen
    Ergo, 2021
  • Intending to deceive versus deceiving intentionally in indifferent lies
    Alex Wiegmann, Ronja Rutschmann
    Philosophical Psychology, 2020
  • Intuitive Expertise and Irrelevant Options
    Joachim Horvath, Karina Meyer, Alex Wiegmann
    Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3, 2020
  • Not as Bad as Painted? Legal Expertise, Intentionality Ascription, and Outcome Effects Revisited
    Proceedings for the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Developing A Mind Learning in Humans Animals and Machines Cogsci 2020, 2020
  • The folk concept of lying
    Alex Wiegmann, Jörg Meibauer
    Philosophy Compass, 2019
  • Folk epistemology and epistemic closure
    Tim Kraft, Alex Wiegmann
    Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 2, 2018
  • Correction to: Empirically Investigating the Concept of Lying (Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, (2017), 34, 3, (591-609), 10.1007/s40961-017-0112-z)
    Alex Wiegmann, Ronja Rutschmann, Pascale Willemsen
    Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2018
  • Empirically Investigating the Concept of Lying
    Alex Wiegmann, Ronja Rutschmann, Pascale Willemsen
    Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2017
  • No need for an intention to deceive? Challenging the traditional definition of lying
    Ronja Rutschmann, Alex Wiegmann
    Philosophical Psychology, 2017
  • Explaining moral behavior: A minimal moral model
    Magda Osman, Alex Wiegmann
    Experimental Psychology, 2017
  • Factors guiding moral judgment, reason, decision, and action
    Alex Wiegmann, Magda Osman
    Experimental Psychology, 2017
  • How the truth can make a great lie: An empirical investigation of the folk concept of lying by falsely implicating
    Cogsci 2017 Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Computational Foundations of Cognition, 2017
  • Causal models mediate moral inferences
    Jean-Francois Bonnefon
    Moral Inferences, 2017
  • Intuitive expertise and intuitions about knowledge
    Joachim Horvath, Alex Wiegmann
    Philosophical Studies, 2016
  • Lying despite telling the truth
    Alex Wiegmann, Jana Samland, Michael R. Waldmann
    Cognition, 2016
  • Moral intuitionism and empirical data
    Jonas Nagel, Alex Wiegmann
    Dual Process Theories in Moral Psychology Interdisciplinary Approaches to Theoretical Empirical and Practical Considerations, 2016
  • When killing the heavy man seems right Making people utilitarian by simply adding options to moral dilemmas
    Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Cogsci 2015, 2015
  • Transfer effects between moral dilemmas: A causal model theory
    Alex Wiegmann, Michael R. Waldmann
    Cognition, 2014
  • Scientific study of morals
    Maria Gräfenhain, Alex Wiegmann
    Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics, 2013
  • On the Robustness of Intuitions in the two best-known Trolley Dilemmas
    Cooperative Minds Social Interaction and Group Dynamics Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Cogsci 2013, 2013
  • Moral Judgment
    Michael R. Waldmann, Jonas Nagel, Alex Wiegmann
    Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, 2012
  • Putting the trolley in order: Experimental philosophy and the loop case
    S. Matthew Liao, Alex Wiegmann, Joshua Alexander, Gerard Vong
    Philosophical Psychology, 2012
  • Order Effects in Moral Judgment Searching for an Explanation
    Building Bridges Across Cognitive Sciences Around the World Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Cogsci 2012, 2012

RECENT SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS

  • GPT-4’s Alignment with Human Lie and Falsity Attribution in Cases of Deceptive Implicatures
    N Shurakov, M Kolbe, N Engelmann, A Wiegmann
    Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence: The State of the Art, 431-443 , 2026
    2026
  • Altruistic Behavior in Charitable Giving: a Comparison between Rational, Numerical, and Emotional Prompts
    C Vieira, A Wiegmann, J Horvath
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 16 (4), 1167-1195 , 2025
    2025
    Citations: 1
  • Are the concepts of truth and lying shared across cultures?
    A Wiegmann, L Reins, M Mizumoto, A Erut, Q Li, S Orr
    American Psychologist , 2025
    2025
    Citations: 3
  • Folk concepts of race, cross-culturally
    L Berio, S Koch, D James, B Kenyah-Damptey, A Wiegmann
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1-22 , 2025
    2025
    Citations: 1
  • The role of stakes in lying: an empirical investigation of the robustness of the folk concept of lying
    N Shurakov, A Wiegmann
    Philosophical Psychology, 1-20 , 2025
    2025
  • Actual and perceived partisan bias in judgments of political misinformation as lies
    LM Reins, A Wiegmann
    Social Psychological and Personality Science 16 (4), 384-396 , 2025
    2025
    Citations: 3
  • Sacrificing objects instead of persons: Order effects without emotional engagement
    E Mihailov, IR Hannikainen, A Wiegmann
    Philosophical Psychology 38 (2), 579-598 , 2025
    2025
    Citations: 1
  • How much harm does it take?: an experimental study on legal expertise, the severity effect, and intentionality ascriptions
    K Prochownik, RD Feiertag, J Horvath, A Wiegmann
    Cambridge University Press , 2025
    2025
    Citations: 4
  • Advances in experimental philosophy of lying
    A Wiegmann
    Bloomsbury Publishing , 2025
    2025
  • How Much Harm Does it Take? An Experimental Study on Legal Expertise and Severity Effect
    KAW Prochownik, J Horvath, R Feiertag
    Tobia , 2025
    2025
    Citations: 2
  • Lying, Fake News, and Bullshit
    A Wiegmann
    2025
  • Camouflaged liability: How the distinction between civilians and soldiers influences moral judgement of permissible harm in war
    JC Marulanda‐Hernández, A Wiegmann, MR Waldmann
    European Journal of Social Psychology 54 (6), 1168-1181 , 2024
    2024
    Citations: 1
  • Exploring the psychology of LLMs’ moral and legal reasoning
    GFCF Almeida, JL Nunes, N Engelmann, A Wiegmann, M De Araújo
    Artificial Intelligence 333, 104145 , 2024
    2024
    Citations: 135
  • Altruistic Behavior in Charitable Giving: A Comparison Between Rational and Emotional Prompts
    C Vieira, A Wiegmann, J Horvath
    2024
  • Bald-faced lies, blushing, and noses that grow: An experimental analysis
    V Krstić, A Wiegmann
    Erkenntnis 89 (2), 479-502 , 2024
    2024
    Citations: 13
  • Does lying require objective falsity?
    A Wiegmann
    Synthese 202 (2), 52 , 2023
    2023
    Citations: 8
  • Exploring the psychology of gpt-4’s moral and legal reasoning
    GF Almeida, JL Nunes, N Engelmann, A Wiegmann, M de Araújo
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.01264 , 2023
    2023
    Citations: 26
  • Arguing about thought experiments
    J Horvath, A Wiegmann
    Synthese 201 (6), 217 , 2023
    2023
    Citations: 3
  • Lying Without Saying Something False? A Cross-Cultural Investigation of the Folk Concept of Lying in Russian and English Speakers
    LM Reins, A Wiegmann, OP Marchenko, I Schumski
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2), 735-762 , 2023
    2023
    Citations: 11
  • Truetemp cooled down: The stability of Truetemp intuitions
    A Ziółkowski, A Wiegmann, J Horvath, E Machery
    Synthese 201 (3), 108 , 2023
    2023
    Citations: 7

MOST CITED SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS

  • Putting the trolley in order: Experimental philosophy and the loop case
    SM Liao, A Wiegmann, J Alexander, G Vong
    Philosophical Psychology 25 (5), 661-671 , 2012
    2012
    Citations: 157
  • Order effects in moral judgment
    A Wiegmann, Y Okan, J Nagel
    Philosophical Psychology 25 (6), 813-836 , 2012
    2012
    Citations: 153
  • 19 moral judgment
    MR Waldmann, J Nagel, A Wiegmann
    The Oxford handbook of thinking and reasoning, 364 , 2012
    2012
    Citations: 153
  • Exploring the psychology of LLMs’ moral and legal reasoning
    GFCF Almeida, JL Nunes, N Engelmann, A Wiegmann, M De Araújo
    Artificial Intelligence 333, 104145 , 2024
    2024
    Citations: 135
  • Intuitive expertise and intuitions about knowledge
    J Horvath, A Wiegmann
    Philosophical Studies 173 (10), 2701-2726 , 2016
    2016
    Citations: 98
  • Is lying bound to commitment? Empirically investigating deceptive presuppositions, implicatures, and actions
    LM Reins, A Wiegmann
    Cognitive Science 45 (2), e12936 , 2021
    2021
    Citations: 80
  • Transfer effects between moral dilemmas: A causal model theory
    A Wiegmann, MR Waldmann
    Cognition 131 (1), 28-43 , 2014
    2014
    Citations: 80
  • Lying despite telling the truth
    A Wiegmann, J Samland, M Waldmann
    Cognition , 2016
    2016
    Citations: 72
  • No need for an intention to deceive? Challenging the traditional definition of lying
    R Rutschmann, A Wiegmann
    Philosophical Psychology 30 (4), 438-457 , 2017
    2017
    Citations: 62
  • Explaining moral behavior
    M Osman, A Wiegmann
    Experimental Psychology , 2017
    2017
    Citations: 62
  • Intuitive expertise in moral judgments
    J Horvath, A Wiegmann
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2), 342-359 , 2022
    2022
    Citations: 59
  • Intuitive expertise and irrelevant options
    A Wiegmann, J Horvath, K Meyer
    Oxford studies in experimental philosophy 3 (3), 275 , 2020
    2020
    Citations: 53
  • The folk concept of lying
    A Wiegmann, J Meibauer
    Philosophy compass 14 (8), e12620 , 2019
    2019
    Citations: 52
  • Lying, deceptive implicatures, and commitment
    A Wiegmann, P Willemsen, J Meibauer
    Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 , 2022
    2022
    Citations: 49
  • Predicting responsibility judgments from dispositional inferences and causal attributions
    AF Langenhoff, A Wiegmann, JY Halpern, JB Tenenbaum, T Gerstenberg
    Cognitive Psychology 129, 101412 , 2021
    2021
    Citations: 48
  • Can a question be a lie? An empirical investigation
    E Viebahn, A Wiegmann, N Engelmann, P Willemsen, E VIEBAHN, ...
    Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 , 2021
    2021
    Citations: 38
  • How the truth can make a great lie: An empirical investigation of the folk concept of lying by falsely implicating
    A Wiegmann, P Willemsen
    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 39 , 2017
    2017
    Citations: 36
  • Should I say that? An experimental investigation of the norm of assertion
    N Marsili, A Wiegmann
    Cognition 212, 104657 , 2021
    2021
    Citations: 35
  • A double causal contrast theory of moral intuitions in trolley dilemmas
    MR Waldmann, A Wiegmann
    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 32 (32) , 2010
    2010
    Citations: 28
  • Exploring the psychology of gpt-4’s moral and legal reasoning
    GF Almeida, JL Nunes, N Engelmann, A Wiegmann, M de Araújo
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.01264 , 2023
    2023
    Citations: 26