The purpose of this study is twofold:
First, to explicitly compare the patterns of results in what happens to the 'obligation' to what happens when people are explicitly asked about numerical identity.
Second, these results can help inform future debates about identity and legal responsibility as brain transplants become more of a reality than science fiction. Therefore, we seek to replicate these results in groupd of stakeholders in the specific questions we have here. We will concurrently run this study in general American participants, as well as the following three groups of stakeholders:
lawyers with relevant knowlegde/experience, accountants with relevant knowledge/experience, and bank managers.
We will collect 679 mTurkers and 576 professionals (192 from each group). These numbers were chosen to maximize our N under a fixed budgetary constraint ($600 for mTurk and $5,648 for professionals).
