What makes you you? Is it your body, your brain, your mind and your memories, or your soul? Four Carleton students—Lorenzo Najt ’13 (New York), Daniel Peck ’13 (Olathe, Kans.), Sarah Pinkham ’12 (Wooster, Ohio), and Jabir Yusoff ’11 (Singapore)—are working on an experimental philosophy project to discover how people’s intuitions about personal identity vary based on demographics such as education level, race, age, and religion.

Project: The students created and administered a survey featuring hypothetical scenarios. They asked people on the streets of Minneapolis and Faribault to imagine that they have been left an inheritance by a rich uncle and posed several questions, for example: What if you and a friend could switch brains, memories, or souls? To whom should the inheritance be given?

Support: The group won a summer fellowship from Carleton’s QuIRK (Quantitative Inquiry, Reasoning, and Knowledge) initiative and worked with philosophy professor Angela Curran and sociology professor Annette Nierobisz to refine their survey.

Next steps: To expand their research pool, the students successfully applied to the Yale Experimental Philosophy Project; Yale is funding and conducting further research and will help the students analyze the results. The group will present a paper on the project at the Eastern American Philosophical Association Conference in New York City in the fall.