Manipulation and Autonomy: Beyond the Dichotomy

Many people are worried that new technologies like ChatGTP and discoveries about human behavior like our many biases and psychological vulnerabilities make it possible to manipulate people at a massive scale. But why worry about manipulation? Many scholars assume that manipulation automatically undermines personal autonomy (cf. Klenk & Hancock 2019). Based on that assumption, manipulation appears as an "existential threat" to some of our most central political and economic institutions, as former US president Barack Obama put it in a recent speech.

This workshop will address a glaring gap that keeps scholars and policymakers from correctly understanding, assessing, and mitigating this threat. The dichotomy of manipulation and autonomy is readily assumed but only weakly supported by theory and evidence.

Therefore, we will pursue an interdisciplinary approach to achieve our objective of providing nuance to the rigid manipulation-autonomy link.

Now is the right time to address this topic. Legislation is already proposed that aims to curb manipulation on the assumption that it undermines autonomy. The most important example is the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act, which prohibits "harmful" manipulation that escapes people's autonomous decision-making. Naturally, sensibly interpreting such legislative material requires a sound understanding of the autonomy-manipulation link. Without the insights that our workshop will generate, such well-meaning legislation is at risk of failing its aims.

The workshop will be successful when we have contributed to (1) clarifying the conceptual relation of manipulation and autonomy (today, our picture of that relation is merely an uncriticised, unsupported presumption) and (2) developed an experimental paradigm for the empirical investigation of the impact of manipulation on autonomy in practice (which is lacking today)

Website aim
The guiding question of the workshop is: “How does manipulation (contingently) relate to autonomy?” We pursue two main theoretical aims:

1. To identify where there are needs to be conceptual nuance in understanding the theoretical association between manipulation and threats to autonomy, from which we can devise hypotheses.

2. To build on the conceptual expansion of theory and hypotheses to propose an experimental paradigm that investigates the precise effects of manipulation on autonomy

We also pursue the practical aim of creating a community of scholars to spark the field of manipulation studies. At the end of the workshop, we aim to come away with concrete plans for research projects and follow-up activities to illuminate the nature of manipulation and, specifically, its relation to autonomy.