Publications

Boosting Wisdom: Distance from the self enhances wise reasoning, attitudes and behavior.

igrossm — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 05:00:00 GMT

Although humans strive to be wise, they often fail to do so when reasoning over issues that have profound personal implications. Here we test the hypothesis that psychological distance enhances wise reasoning, attitudes and behavior under such circumstances. Two experiments demonstrate that cueing people to reason about personally meaningful issues (Study 1: Career prospects for the unemployed during an economic recession; Study 2: Anticipated societal changes associated with one’s chosen candidate losing the 2008 United States presidential election) from a distanced perspective enhances wise reasoning (dialecticism; intellectual humility), attitudes (cooperation-related attitude assimilation) and behavior (willingness to join a bipartisan group).

Identity styles and wisdom during emerging adulthood: Relationships with mindfulness and savoring

Anna Gomberg — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:00:00 GMT

By Sherry L. Beaumont

Erikson’s (1968) supposition about the importance of mature identity for wisdom was examined by testing the hypothesis that informational identity processing is uniquely associated with wisdom and with related positive subjective experiences (mindfulness and savoring). Emerging adults (N = 320; 68.5% women; age range=18–29 years) completed self-report measures of: identity styles (informational, normative, diffuse), identity commitment, wisdom (cognitive, reflective, affective), mindfulness, savoring beliefs, and savoring behaviors. The informational style was positively related to wisdom, mindfulness, and savoring beliefs as well as to several savoring behaviors (e.g., absorption and counting blessings). The highest levels of informational identity processing, identity commitment, mindfulness, and savoring beliefs were found for individuals who scored in the top quartile on wisdom. Finally, structural equation modeling was used to examine linear relationships among these variables and revealed that the informational style positively predicted wisdom, which positively predicted mindfulness and savoring beliefs.

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Successful aging: Choosing wisdom over despair

Anna Gomberg — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:00:00 GMT

By Joanne C. Giblin

Abstract: This article defines wisdom and despair as choices for cognitively intact older adults. Some individuals are able to integrate the conditions of old age while others respond in ways that inhibit effective integration. The conscious aging theory, as well as Erikson's developmental theory regarding achievement of integrity/wisdom, provides a theoretical basis for exploration of this topic. Constructs of personality, including self-concept, self-acceptance, destiny control, interiority, rigidity, and flexibility, are described. Finally, guidelines for nurses working with older adults who are facing this developmental stage of life are provided.

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David Hume and the "Politics of Humanity"

Anna Gomberg — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:00:00 GMT

By Ryan P. Hanley

Abstract: Recently a call has gone up for a revival of the “politics of humanity.” But what exactly is the “politics of humanity”? For illumination this paper turns to Hume’s analysis of humanity’s foundational role in morality and modern politics. Its aims in so doing are twofold. First, it aims to set forth a new understanding of the unity of Hume’s practical and epistemological projects in developing his justifications for and the implications of his remarkable and underappreciated claim that humanity is the only sentiment on which a moral system can be founded. Second, by attending to Hume’s substantive definition of humanity and its relationship to benevolence and sympathy in particular, it aims to clarify the relationship between the principal elements of the politics of humanity: “humanism” or secularism, “humane” or other-directed values, and mutual recognition of our shared “humanness.”

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Laypeople's Conceptions of Wisdom and Its Development: Cognitive and Integrative Views

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:00:00 GMT

By Judith Glück and Susan Bluck

Objectives. This study examined individual differences in laypeople's conceptions of wisdom using a person-oriented approach, as previous studies using a priori group variables may have underestimated the variability. Although there is a tradition of examining people's implicit theories of wisdom, this study is the first to also investigate their views of how wisdom develops.

Method. A total of 1,955 participants rated the importance of 8 items concerning what wisdom is and 9 items concerning how wisdom develops.

Results. Cluster analyses identified 2 conceptions of what wisdom is. Participants with a “cognitive conception” rated cognitive and reflective characteristics as central to wisdom; participants with an “integrative conception” additionally endorsed affective characteristics. Conceptions varied by age and sex. Concerning the development of wisdom, participants with a cognitive conception viewed learning from experiences and from wise persons as central; participants with an integrative conception rated experience with life challenges as equally important.

Discussion. Laypeople's views of wisdom are not unitary, and the way in which wisdom is viewed is related to how it is seen as developing in a person's life. These empirical differences in implicit theories of wisdom map onto theoretical differences in the views of wisdom researchers.

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Conceptualizing and Measuring Wisdom: A Reply to Ardelt

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:00:00 GMT

By Matthew Taylor, Glen Bates and Jeffrey Dean Webster

The authors reply to Ardelt's comment (see record 2011-06003-006) on their original paper (see record 2011-06003-001) comparing the 3D-WS and SAWS and discuss the SAWS relative to cognition, critical life experiences, and their use of subscale scores as predictors of forgiveness and well-being. The authors further discuss the nature of the SAWS subscales based upon input by a panel of wisdom experts.

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Local Wisdom and Health Promotion: Barrier or Catalyst?

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:00:00 GMT

By Alessandro Demaio

The respectful, appropriate use of local wisdom (LW) in health promotion increases penetration and longevity of positive behavior change. Collaborations based on mutual respect, flexibility and trust between health program organizers, traditional and local practitioners, and the communities being served are the goal for public health physicians in our modern, globalized world. This meta-analysis reviewed literature from the past 18 years drawn from a wide range of sources. This investigations proposes a grassroots, material shift toward regarding health promotion interventions as partnerships when planning, executing, and evaluating health promotion projects. This holistic approach would be based on the premise that LW is equal to expert opinion. This article endorses the integration of LW at every stage of the health promotion process concluding that it is through empowerment and involvement of local communities, their culture and specific environmental conditions that best-practice health promotion can be achieved.

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Already Wise: Our Inborn Ability to Make the Best Choices

Douglas McKee — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:00:00 GMT

“Wisdom is the freedom and the ability to make the kinds of choices that move our life forward and benefit the planet.” Wisdom is actually a “How” we make our best choices and not a “what we choose or “why we choose it.” Wisdom is the antidote for the choices that keep us mired in a world of negative emotions and poor choices.
If someone could demonstrate you Already have the Ability and you Already actually have the Freedom to make wiser choices, wouldn’t your life be radically better tomorrow, and even better in the future?
Well, you Already have the “ability.” You were born wise. You were born ready to learn and ready to love. Wisdom and altruism are built into your genes.
And, you Already have the freedom. Your successful habits such as speaking, dressing, working, and driving hold the key to that freedom. Many thousands of times a day your subconscious Already uses information in wise ways.
Already Wise walks you through that inborn ability so you can begin using it consciously to make the kinds of choices that can move your life toward what you once thought it could be.

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Psychological Wisdom Research: Commonalities and Differences in a Growing Field

Anna Gomberg — Sun, 01 May 2011 05:00:00 GMT

By Ursula M. Staudinger and Judith Glück

Abstract: Wisdom represents a fruitful topic for psychological investigations for at least two reasons. First, the study of wisdom emphasizes the search for the continued optimization and the further cultural evolution of the human condition. Second, it exemplifies the collaboration of cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. The growth and scope of psychological wisdom research over the past few decades demonstrate that it is possible to investigate this complex construct with empirical rigor. Since the 1970s, five main areas have been established: lay definitions of wisdom, conceptualizing and measuring wisdom, understanding the development of wisdom, investigating the plasticity of wisdom, and applying psychological knowledge about wisdom in life contexts.

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Comparing the Psychometric Properties of Two Measures of Wisdom: Predicting Forgiveness and Psychological Well-Being with the Self-Assessed Wisdom Scale (SAWS) and the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS)

Anna Gomberg — Sun, 01 May 2011 05:00:00 GMT

By Matthew Taylor, Glen Bates and Jeffrey Dean Webster

Abstract: Two recently developed scales of wisdom were compared on their abilities to have their dimensional structure replicated and to predict relevant personality (i.e., forgiveness) and life satisfaction (i.e., psychological well-being) variables. One hundred and seventy-six primarily (71%) Australian participants ranging in age from 18 to 68 years (M = 36.60, SD = 12.07) completed an online survey of the Self-Assessed Wisdom Scale (SAWS; Webster, 2003, Journal of Adult Development, 10, 13-22; 2007, International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 65, 163-183), the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS; Ardelt, 2003, Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 52B, 15-27), the Heartland Forgiveness Scale (Thompson et al., 2005, Journal of Personality, 73, 313-360), Ryff's (1989, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1069-1081) measure of psychological well-being (PWB), and a measure of social desirability (BIDR; Paulhus, 1984, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 598-609). Results indicated that the dimensional structure of the SAWS, but not the 3D-WS, replicated, and the 3D-WS, but not the SAWS, was contaminated by a social desirability response bias. Both scales predicted equally well PWB and forgiveness in predicted directions. Implications for future use of both scales are discussed.

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The measurement of wisdom: A commentary on Taylor, Bates, and Webster's comparison of the SAWS and 3D-WS.

Anna Gomberg — Sun, 01 May 2011 05:00:00 GMT

By Monika Ardelt

Abstract: In a commentary on Taylor, Bates, and Webster's article, the author (a) clarifies the development and assessment of the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS); (b) describes the difference between the essential components of wisdom and its predictors, correlates, and consequences; and (c) conducts additional bivariate correlation analyses between the components of the 3D-WS and Webster's Self-Administered Wisdom Scale (SAWS) and all the forgiveness and psychological well-being subscales. Results show that the cognitive, reflective, and affective dimensions of the 3D-WS were significantly and positively correlated with all the forgiveness and psychological well-being subscales. By contrast, only the emotional regulation and humor components of the SAWS were consistently positively associated with those subscales. It appears that the 3D-WS measures the essential cognitive, reflective, and affective components of wisdom, whereas the SAWS contains a reflective wisdom component, a wisdom predictor, a consequence of wisdom, and two necessary but not sufficient wisdom components.

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Being a Good Ruler in a Deviant Community: Aristotle's Account of the Polity

Anna Gomberg — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 05:00:00 GMT

By Elena Irrera

Abstract: In 'Politics' III, 4.1277a15-16 Aristotle presents 'phronesis' as the characteristic excellence of the good ruler. Difficulties arise when we consider that, on his view, a good ruler should 'always' be loyal to his constitution ('Politics' V, 9.1309a34), even when its prescriptions are contrary to moral goodness. This paper investigates the condition of a wise ruler in imperfect communities by attempting to answer the following questions: (i) Would a wise ruler be capable of retaining his practical wisdom in a deviant community and stay loyal to the constitution? (ii) Can the quality of any deviant 'polis' be improved by the ruler's practical wisdom without losing its distinctive nature? It is argued that Aristotle believes in the possibility of improving a deviant constitution compatibly with its preservation, and that such a possibility does not undermine the ruler's practical wisdom. The only one constitution that leaves this possibility open is the polity.

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Mindfulness and the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention and Awareness

Anna Gomberg — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 05:00:00 GMT

By Antonino Raffone, Angela Tagini, and Narayanan Srinivasan

Abstract: Mindfulness can be understood as the mental ability to focus on the direct and immediate perception or monitoring of the present moment with a state of open and nonjudgmental awareness. Descriptions of mindfulness and methods for cultivating it originated in Eastern spiritual traditions. These suggest that mindfulness can be developed through meditation practice to increase positive qualities such as awareness, insight, wisdom, and compassion. In this article we focus on the relationships between mindfulness, with associated meditation practices, and the cognitive neuroscience of attention and awareness. Mindful awareness is related to distributed attention, phenomenal consciousness, and momentary self-awareness, as characterized by recent findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience as well as in influential consciousness models. Finally, we outline an integrated neurocognitive model of mindfulness, attention, and awareness, with a key role of prefrontal cortex.

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"From Promised Land to Reconciled Cosmos: Paul's Translation of 'Worldview,' 'Worldstory,' and 'Worldperson'"

Mark — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:00:00 GMT

Although in a selection of biblical and theological essays, my contribution is on Paul as a major contributor to the subsequent shape of western thought and society. The central puzzle of Paul's life is how this zealous Pharisee obsessed with land, city and temple never refers to them again (or only neutrally / negatively) in his subsequent career as the apostle. Having traced how this happened, I move on to the implications. In p[articular, the irony that Paul becomes arguably the first translator of a worldview out of its original cultural soil, and thus plays the pivotal role that leads in time to the ideas of culture, and personal and social transformation.

Successful aging through the eyes of Alaska Natives: Exploring generational differences among Alaska Natives.

Anna Gomberg — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 06:00:00 GMT

By Lewis P. Jordan

Abstract: There is very little research on Alaska Native (AN) elders and how they subjectively define a successful older age. The lack of a culturally-specific definition often results in the use of a generic definition that portrays Alaska Native elders as aging less successfully than their White counterparts. However, there is a very limited understanding of a diverse array of successful aging experiences across generations. This research explores the concept of successful aging from an Alaska Native perspective, or what it means to age well in Alaska Native communities. An adapted Explanatory Model (EM) approach was used to gain a sense of the beliefs about aging from Alaska Natives. Research findings indicate that aging successfully is based on local understandings about personal responsibility and making the conscious decision to live a clean and healthy life, abstaining from drugs and alcohol. The findings also indicate that poor aging is often characterized by a lack of personal responsibility, or not being active, not being able to handle alcohol, and giving up on oneself. Most participants stated that elder status is not determined by reaching a certain age (e.g., 65), but instead is designated when an individual has demonstrated wisdom because of the experiences he or she has gained throughout life. This research seeks to inform future studies on rural aging that prioritizes the perspectives of elders to impact positively on the delivery of health care services and programs in rural Alaska.

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A Rational Heuristic Model of Economic Decision-Making

Anna Gomberg — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 06:00:00 GMT

By Anna Grandori

A conspicuous ‘hole’ lies between the ‘rational-choice’ paradigm and the ‘behavioral decision-making’ paradigm. The ‘missing model’ is ‘heuristic’ (research-based) yet ‘rational’ (non-biasing): a set of methods for the logically sound discovery and design of economic actions, options and objectives. Such a model is developed in this paper, enriching the notion and repertory of heuristics that are typically considered in economic and cognitive sciences with the notion and set of heuristics typically considered in the philosophy of science and the logic of discovery. The model then provides a response to the hitherto unaddressed question of how knowledge, on which the rationality and wisdom of any decision largely depends, can be constructed in a valid and reliable way. The specification of the heuristics that can effectively and efficiently guide economic discovery and innovation seems to be overdue in an economy said to be knowledge intensive and innovation oriented.

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Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system

Anna Gomberg — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 06:00:00 GMT

By Sabine Niederer and José van Dijck

Wikipedia is often considered as an example of 'collaborative knowledge'. Researchers have contested the value of Wikipedia content on various accounts. Some have disputed the ability of anonymous amateurs to produce quality information, while others have contested Wikipedia's claim to accuracy and neutrality. Even if these concerns about Wikipedia as an encyclopaedic genre are relevant, they misguidedly focus on human agents only. Wikipedia's advance is not only enabled by its human resources, but is equally defined by the technological tools and managerial dynamics that structure and maintain its content. This article analyses the sociotechnical system—the intricate collaboration between human users and automated content agents—that defines Wikipedia as a knowledge instrument.

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Profiting with Honor: Cicero’s Vision of Leadership

Anna Gomberg — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 06:00:00 GMT

By George Bragues

This article attempts to uncover the relevance of Cicero’s thought to present-day management through an analysis of his last philosophical study, On Duties. Applying a methodology grounded in Socratic skepticism, Cicero synthesizes the Stoics and Aristotle to create his own moral theory. From this theory, we derive a Ciceronian set of recommended traits that make up a model business leader. Central to this model is the recognition that there are two lodestars in life, the beneficial and the honorable. The first directs each of us to attend to our personal happiness, and the second to our moral worth. In Cicero’s view, the life of leading sizable associations is what best satisfies this dual imperative. The honor of a business leader is secured by the practice of four virtues: wisdom, justice, greatness of spirit, and seemliness. A leader properly seeks his/her own benefit by recognizing that success comes from the relationships he/she establishes and that he/she are more apt to cultivate these by being virtuous. Cicero is not so naïve as to fail to see that the beneficial and the honorable may come into tension, noting various examples from business to illustrate the dilemma. But he insists a businessperson can be ethical and prosper at the same time once he/she comprehends the social fellowship of humanity.

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The measurement of wisdom: A commentary on Taylor, Bates, and Webster’s comparison of the SAWS and 3D-WS

ardelt — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 05:00:00 GMT

In my reply to Taylor, Bates, and Webster’s article, I (a) clarify the development and assessment of the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale (3D-WS), (b) describe the difference between the essential components of wisdom and its predictors, correlates, and consequences, and (c) conduct additional bivariate correlation analyses between the components of the 3D-WS and Webster’s Self-Administered Wisdom Scale (SAWS) and all the forgiveness and psychological well-being subscales. Results show that the cognitive, reflective, and affective dimensions of the 3D-WS were significantly and positively correlated with all the forgiveness and psychological well-being subscales. By contrast, only the emotional regulation and humor components of the SAWS were consistently positively associated with those subscales. It appears that the 3D-WS measures the essential cognitive, reflective, and affective components of wisdom, whereas the SAWS contains a reflective wisdom component, a wisdom predictor, a consequence of wisdom, and two necessary but not sufficient wisdom components.

Wisdom, age, and well-being

ardelt — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 05:00:00 GMT

After giving an overview of Western, Eastern, and culturally inclusive theories of wisdom, this chapter summarizes the theoretical and empirical research on the association between aging and wisdom and the effect of wisdom on well-being. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies show that wisdom characteristics tend to increase in adolescence and early adulthood. Yet in adulthood, the development of wisdom appears to be facilitated by favorable social conditions and a strong motivation for psychosocial growth. Empirical research also indicates that wisdom is positively related to subjective and psychological well-being in the later years of life, particularly in less privileged populations. Future research should explore in greater detail how wisdom develops over the life course and what possible roles schools, universities, and religious/spiritual institutions might play in the cultivation of wisdom. Future studies should also investigate the impact wise elders have on society and the well-being of present and future generations.

Commentary: Neuroenhancement: Wisdom of the Masses or ”False Phronesis”?

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 06:00:00 GMT

By D. Larriviere and M. A. Williams

Abstract: Neuroenhancement (NE) refers to the use of prescription medications by healthy persons to boost their cognitive skills. This growing phenomenon represents a potential market not only for pharmaceutical manufacturers but also for physicians who might enter the potentially lucrative specialty of so-called cosmetic neurology. But before the medical establishment gears up to supply drugs to produce wisdom for the masses, we should ask whether the wisdom of the masses in regard to NE is wisdom at all.

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Are Older Adults Wiser Than College Students? A Comparison of Two Age Cohorts

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 06:00:00 GMT

By Monika Ardelt

Abstract: This study examined whether (a) older adults are wiser than college students, (b) college-educated older adults are wiser than current college students, and (c) wise older adults show evidence of personal growth. Using a sample of 477 undergraduate college students and 178 older adults (age 52+), results showed that college students tended to score as high on the self-administered three-dimensional wisdom scale (3D-WS) as older adults. However, college-educated older adults tended to score significantly higher on the reflective and affective dimensions of wisdom and the overall score of the 3D-WS than did current college students. Qualitative evidence suggests that many older adults, particularly in the top 20% of wisdom scorers, grew wiser with age by learning from life experiences. The results indicate that wisdom might increase with age for individuals with the opportunity and motivation to pursue its development.

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The Role of Emotional Wisdom in Salespersons' Relationships with Colleagues and Customers

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 06:00:00 GMT

By Richard P. Bagozzi, Frank Belschak, Willem Verbek

Abstract: Emotional wisdom is defined as a set of seven dimensions of basic skills and meta-narratives concerning how to regulate emotions within specific domains in such a way that the individual's and firm's well-being are tied together. Using operationalizations of emotional wisdom for salespersons from a wide range of industries (Study 1) and in automotive dealerships (Study 2), with respect to both colleagues and customers, it is discovered that salespeople who score high on emotional wisdom cope differently with socially challenging situations and achieve better social relationships than those who score low on emotional wisdom. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Suppose a salesperson compares him/herself with a colleague who is performing better than him/herself and feels envy as a result. S/he may regulate or control this envy by congratulating the colleague, so as to be able to maintain a good relationship with the colleague. Or imagine a salesperson who develops friendships with customers, yet has to present the firm in a professional manner when dealing with customers and avoid making inappropriate disclosures of private feelings. Researchers note that the ability to regulate one's emotions is an important part of work, especially for customer-boundary spanners, where ambivalent situations often occur such as described above (e.g., Fineman, 2000; Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987; Morris & Feldman, 1996).

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The Long-Term Effects of World War II Combat Exposure on Later Life Well-Being Moderated by Generativity

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 06:00:00 GMT

By Monika Ardelta, Scott D. Landesa and George E. Vaillant

Abstract: According to theories of stress-related growth, coping with traumatic events can lead to greater psychosocial maturity in resilient individuals or psychosocial maladjustment in less resilient individuals. Using a sample of 160 World War II veterans of the 60-year longitudinal Study of Adult Development, this research examined the long-term effects of high and no combat exposure among Harvard-educated white men who either achieved or failed to achieve Erikson's psychosocial developmental stage of generativity in midlife. Although combat exposure by itself was unrelated to the outcome variables, only among veterans with high combat exposure was generativity consistently positively related to physical and psychological health, wisdom characteristics, and well-being. The results indicate a resilience effect for men with high combat exposure who experienced subsequent psychosocial growth.

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Wisdom - The Ultimate Christmas Gift

Douglas McKee — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 06:00:00 GMT

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I recently finished writing my second book. This one is about Wisdom. Not the kind of wisdom that seeks to answer mankind’s biggest questions, but the kind of wisdom that helps each of us make the best use of our time and energy on a daily basis.

Wisdom is the freedom andability to make the kinds of decisions that evolve our lives adn benefit the planet.

Wisdom is the antidote for the vast majority of the negative emotions that cause us most of our problems. Wisdom is the cure for stress, anxiety, depression, and anger. Why? Because when we are thinking wisely we are focused on the facts of a situation and not on the emotions of our story about the situation. Facts don’t have feelings and emotions rarely have facts.

Wisdom is more important now than ever. If we look at every aspect of our culture, we must admit that things are really a mess.

Wisdom can fix all those things, but where is wisdom needed the most? It is needed the most at the level of the individual because that is where we live and raise our children. If they turn out to be no wiser than we have been, to put it bluntly, we are all screwed.

It is obvious that the people we have asked to lead us are dedicated to making selfish, short-sighted, and unwise decisions. It is obvious that our trust has been misplaced.

We must return to the ethos that made our culture the envy of the world; the ethos of self-reliance. Self reliance is the highest form of trust. We can trust ourselves to make the kinds of choices that evolve our own lives rather than depending on our environment to take care of us.

Wisdom is the key to self reliance because it requires us to focus on the things that are really important.

What difference does it make what is on the TV if our children are not being educated?

What difference does my address make if my children are not mentally and physically healthy?

What difference does the label on my shirt make if I cannot find a moments peace from my worries?

What difference does our income make if our children are destined to live in a third world country?

We cannot rely on anyone other than ourselves to make sure the distress in our lives is minimal, that our relationships are loving and respectful, and that our children are healthy and well educated.

Practicing wisdom will do that. Think about the impact that making the best decisions would make on your life.

1. More Time

2. Less Distress

3. More Energy

4. Better Relationships

That’s the ultimate Christmas gift, to yourself and to your family.

Democracy Under Uncertainty

Anna Gomberg — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Democracy Under Uncertainty: The Wisdom of Crowds and the Free-Rider Problem in Group Decision Making

By Tatsuya Kameda, Takafumi Tsukasaki, Reid Hastie, Nathan Berg

Abstract: We introduce a game theory model of individual decisions to cooperate by contributing personal resources to group decisions versus by free riding on the contributions of other members. In contrast to most public-goods games that assume group returns are linear in individual contributions, the present model assumes decreasing marginal group production as a function of aggregate individual contributions. This diminishing marginal returns assumption is more realistic and generates starkly different predictions compared to the linear model. One important implication is that, under most conditions, there exist equilibria where some, but not all, members of a group contribute, even with completely self-interested motives. An agent-based simulation confirmed the individual and group advantages of the equilibria in which behavioral asymmetry emerges from a game structure that is a priori perfectly symmetric for all agents (all agents have the same payoff function and action space but take different actions in equilibria). A behavioral experiment demonstrated that cooperators and free riders coexist in a stable manner in groups performing with the nonlinear production function. A collateral result demonstrated that, compared to a dictatorial decision scheme guided by the best member in a group, the majority/plurality decision rules can pool information effectively and produce greater individual net welfare at equilibrium, even if free riding is not sanctioned. This is an original proof that cooperation in ad hoc decision-making groups can be understood in terms of self-interested motivations and that, despite the free-rider problem, majority/plurality decision rules can function robustly as simple, efficient social decision heuristics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

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Wisdom of Crowds Versus Wisdom of Linguists: Measuring the Semantic Relatedness of Words

Anna Gomberg — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by Torsten Zesch and Iryna Gurevych

In this article, we present a comprehensive study aimed at computing semantic relatedness of word pairs. We analyze the performance of a large number of semantic relatedness measures proposed in the literature with respect to different experimental conditions, such as (i) the datasets employed, (ii) the language (English or German), (iii) the underlying knowledge source, and (iv) the evaluation task (computing scores of semantic relatedness, ranking word pairs, solving word choice problems). To our knowledge, this study is the first to systematically analyze semantic relatedness on a large number of datasets with different properties, while emphasizing the role of the knowledge source compiled either by the ‘wisdom of linguists’ (i.e., classical wordnets) or by the ‘wisdom of crowds’ (i.e., collaboratively constructed knowledge sources like Wikipedia).

The article discusses benefits and drawbacks of different approaches to evaluating semantic relatedness. We show that results should be interpreted carefully to evaluate particular aspects of semantic relatedness. For the first time, we employ a vector based measure of semantic relatedness, relying on a concept space built from documents, to the first paragraph of Wikipedia articles, to English WordNet glosses, and to GermaNet based pseudo glosses. Contrary to previous research (Strube and Ponzetto 2006; Gabrilovich and Markovitch 2007; Zesch et al. 2007), we find that ‘wisdom of crowds’ based resources are not superior to ‘wisdom of linguists’ based resources. We also find that using the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article as opposed to the whole article leads to better precision, but decreases recall. Finally, we present two systems that were developed to aid the experiments presented herein and are freely available for research purposes: (i) DEXTRACT, a software to semi-automatically construct corpus-driven semantic relatedness datasets, and (ii) JWPL, a Java-based high-performance Wikipedia Application Programming Interface (API) for building natural language processing (NLP) applications.

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John Dewey and the Moral Resources of Humanistic Naturalism

NathB — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 05:00:00 GMT

To be published in the forthcoming volume "Dewey’s Enduring Impact." Edited by John Shook. Forthcoming, 2010 (Prometheus Books)

Practical wisdom and the development of cross-cultural knowledge management

Anna Gomberg — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Practical wisdom and the development of cross-cultural knowledge management: a global leadership perspective

By David J. Pauleen, David Rooney, and Nigel J. Holden

Abstract: This paper responds to calls for pragmatic context-dependent cross-cultural scholarship. Specifically, with regard to global organisations, we attempt to reconcile the imbalance between global and local concerns by proposing a framework that merges a new understanding of culture with a classical leadership approach. The objective is to achieve more effective cross-cultural practice. The article makes the case for an appreciation of what we call 'cross-cultural knowledge management' and the role of wisdom in global business leadership in a modern culturally diverse knowledge economy.

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Teaching Practical Wisdom in Medicine through Clinical Judgement

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Teaching practical wisdom in medicine through clinical judgement, goals of care, and ethical reasoning

by Lauris Christopher Kaldjian

Clinical decision making is a challenging task that requires practical wisdom—the practised ability to help patients choose wisely among available diagnostic and treatment options. But practical wisdom is not a concept one typically hears mentioned in medical training and practice. Instead, emphasis is placed on clinical judgement. The author draws from Aristotle and Aquinas to describe the virtue of practical wisdom and compare it with clinical judgement. From this comparison, the author suggests that a more complete understanding of clinical judgement requires its explicit integration with goals of care and ethical values. Although clinicians may be justified in assuming that goals of care and ethical values are implicit in routine decision making, it remains important for training purposes to encourage habits of clinical judgement that are consciously goal-directed and ethically informed. By connecting clinical judgement to patients' goals and values, clinical decisions are more likely to stay focused on the particular interests of individual patients. To cultivate wise clinical judgement among trainees, educational efforts should aim at the integration of clinical judgement, communication with patients about goals of care, and ethical reasoning. But ultimately, training in wise clinical judgement will take years of practice in the company of experienced clinicians who are able to demonstrate practical wisdom by example. By helping trainees develop clinical judgement that incorporates patients' goals of care and ethical reasoning, we may help lessen the risk that ‘clinical judgement’ will merely express ‘the clinician's judgement.’

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Moral Judgments Recruit Domain-General Valuation Mechanisms to Integrate Representations of Probability and Magnitude

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Moral Judgments Recruit Domain-General Valuation Mechanisms to Integrate Representations of Probability and Magnitude

By Amitai Shenhav and Joshua D. Greene

"Many important moral decisions, particularly at the policy level, require the evaluation of choices involving outcomes of variable magnitude and probability. Many economic decisions involve the same problem. It is not known whether and to what extent these structurally isomorphic decisions rely on common neural mechanisms. Subjects undergoing fMRI evaluated the moral acceptability of sacrificing a single life to save a larger group of variable size and probability of dying without action. Paralleling research on economic decision making, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum were specifically sensitive to the “expected moral value” of actions, i.e., the expected number of lives lost/saved. Likewise, the right anterior insula was specifically sensitive to outcome probability. Other regions tracked outcome certainty and individual differences in utilitarian tendency. The present results suggest that complex life-and-death moral decisions that affect others depend on neural circuitry adapted for more basic, self-interested decision making involving material rewards."

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Are Health and Happiness the Product of Wisdom? The Relationship of General Mental Ability to Educational and Occupational Attainment, Health, and Well-Being

Anna Gomberg — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Timothy A. Judge, Remus Iliesb and Nikolaos Dimotakisb

Abstract: This study tested a structural model explaining the effects of general mental ability on economic, physical, and subjective well-being. A model was proposed that linked general mental ability to well-being using education, unhealthy behaviors (smoking and excessive drinking), occupational prestige, and health as mediating variables. The sample consisted of 398 individuals, from whom measures were collected across 4 periods. The results supported a model that includes direct and indirect (through unhealthy behaviors and occupational prestige) links from mental ability to physical well-being (i.e., health) and economic well-being. Furthermore, the results supported the relationships of economic well-being and physical well-being to subjective well-being. Overall, the study underscores the importance of general mental ability to work and nonwork outcomes, including physical, economic, and psychological well-being.

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Wisdom: Definition, assessment, and its relation to successful cognitive and emotional aging

ardelt — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:00:00 GMT

This chapter gives an overview of the definition and assessment of wisdom in the contemporary literature and describes its relation to successful cognitive and emotional aging.

The Meaning of Wisdom and Its Development Throughout Life- Chapter

Anna Gomberg — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Karelitz, T. M., Jarvin, L., & Sternberg, R. J.

"Wisdom is a valuable virtue that has been praised, appreciated, and studied throughout the span of human civilization. Yet, wisdom is hard to achieve and harder to apply to one’s life. This chapter presents the main ways in which wisdom has been conceived."

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How the Opinion of Others Affects Our Valuation of Objects

A. J. Stasic — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Daniel K. Campbell-Meiklejohn, Dominik R. Bach, Andreas Roepstorff, Raymond J. Dolan1 and Chris D. Frith

"The opinions of others can easily affect how much we value things. We investigated what happens in our brain when we agree with others about the value of an object and whether or not there is evidence, at the neural level, for social conformity through which we change object valuation. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging we independently modeled (1) learning reviewer opinions about a piece of music, (2) reward value while receiving a token for that music, and (3) their interaction in 28 healthy adults. We show that agreement with two “expert” reviewers on music choice produces activity in a region of ventral striatum that also responds when receiving a valued object. It is known that the magnitude of activity in the ventral striatum reflects the value of reward-predicting stimuli. We show that social influence on the value of an object is associated with the magnitude of the ventral striatum response to receiving it. This finding provides clear evidence that social influence mediates very basic value signals in known reinforcement learning circuitry. Influence at such a low level could contribute to rapid learning and the swift spread of values throughout a population."

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Intellectual enrichment lessens the effect of brain atrophy on learning and memory in multiple sclerosis

A. J. Stasic — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By James F. Sumowski, Glenn R. Wylie, DPhil, Nancy Chiaravalloti, and John DeLuca

"Learning and memory impairments are prevalent among persons with multiple sclerosis (MS); however, such deficits are only weakly associated with MS disease severity (brain atrophy). The cognitive reserve hypothesis states that greater lifetime intellectual enrichment lessens the negative impact of brain disease on cognition, thereby helping to explain the incomplete relationship between brain disease and cognitive status in neurologic populations. The literature on cognitive reserve has focused mainly on Alzheimer disease. The current research examines whether greater intellectual enrichment lessens the negative effect of brain atrophy on learning and memory in patients with MS."

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Predicting Persuasion-Induced Behavior Change from the Brain

A. J. Stasic — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Emily B. Falk, Elliot T. Berkman, Traci Mann, Brittany Harrison, and Matthew D. Lieberman

"Although persuasive messages often alter people's self-reported attitudes and intentions to perform behaviors, these self-reports do not necessarily predict behavior change. We demonstrate that neural responses to persuasive messages can predict variability in behavior change in the subsequent week. Specifically, an a priori region of interest (ROI) in medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) was reliably associated with behavior change (r = 0.49, p < 0.05). Additionally, an iterative cross-validation approach using activity in this MPFC ROI predicted an average 23% of the variance in behavior change beyond the variance predicted by self-reported attitudes and intentions. Thus, neural signals can predict behavioral changes that are not predicted from self-reported attitudes and intentions alone. Additionally, this is the first functional magnetic resonance imaging study to demonstrate that a neural signal can predict complex real world behavior days in advance."

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Information Without Truth

A. J. Stasic — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:00:00 GMT

BY ANDREA SCARANTINO AND GUALTIERO PICCININI

"According to the Veridicality Thesis, information requires truth. On this view, smoke carries information about there being a fire only if there is a fire, the proposition that the earth has two moons carries information about the earth having two moons only if the earth has two moons, and so on. We reject this Veridicality Thesis. We argue that the main notions of information used in cognitive science and computer science allow A to have information about the obtaining of p even when p is false."

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The Unconscious Will: How the Pursuit of Goals Operates Outside of Conscious Awareness

wattawa — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by Ruud Custers and Henk Aarts

People often act in order to realize desired outcomes, or goals. Although behavioral science recognizes that people can skillfully pursue goals without consciously attending to their behavior once these goals are set, conscious will is considered to be the starting point of goal pursuit. Indeed, when we decide to work hard on a task, it feels as if that conscious decision is the first and foremost cause of our behavior. That is, we are likely to say, if asked, that the decision to act produced the actions themselves. Recent discoveries, however, challenge this causal status of conscious will. They demonstrate that under some conditions, actions are initiated even though we are unconscious of the goals to be attained or their motivating effect on our behavior. Here we analyze how goal pursuit can possibly operate unconsciously.

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Epistemology and Science Education: A Study of Epistemological Views of Teachers

Cait — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Alexandros Apostolou and Vasilis Koulaidis

The aim of this paper is to study the epistemological views of science teachers for the following epistemological issues: scientific method, demarcation of scientific knowledge, change of scientific knowledge and the status of scientific knowledge. Teachers' views for each one of these epistemological questions were investigated during semi-structured interviews. These issues were studied according to the following epistemological positions: empirico-inductivism, hypothetico-deductivism, contextualism and relativism. In general, the analysis of the interviews showed that a mixture of empirico-inductive and contextualist positions were dominant among science teachers for most epistemological issues. The hypothetico-deductive views appeared to have little support. For the question of scientific method teachers appear to have eclectic views.

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How Neuroscience Will Change Our View On Consciousness

Cait — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Victor A. F. Lamme

Is there consciousness in machines? Or in animals? What happens to consciousness when we are asleep, or in vegetative state? These are just a few examples of the many questions about consciousness that are troubling scientists and laypersons alike. Moreover, these questions share a striking feature: They seem to have been around forever, yet neither science nor philosophy has been able to provide an answer. Why is that? In my view, the main reason is that the study of consciousness is dominated by what we know from introspection and behavior. This has fooled us into thinking that we know what we are conscious of. The scientific equivalent of this is Global Workspace theory. But in fact we don't know what we are conscious of, as I will explain from a simple experiment in visual perception. Once we acknowledge that, it is clear that we need other evidence about the presence or absence of a conscious sensation than introspection or behavior. Assuming the brain has something to do with it, I will demonstrate how arguments from neuroscience, together with theoretical and ontological arguments, can help us resolve what the exact nature of our conscious sensation is. It turns out that we see much more than we think, and that Global Workspace theory is all about access but not about seeing. The exercise is an example of how neuroscience will move us away from psychological intuitions about consciousness, and hence depict a notion of consciousness that may go against our deepest conviction: “My consciousness is mine, and mine alone.” It's not.

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Selective Changes in Thin Spine Density and Morphology in Monkey Prefrontal Cortex Correlate with Aging-Related Cognitive Impairment

Cait — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Dani Dumitriu, Jiandong Hao, Yuko Hara, Jeffrey Kaufmann, William G. M. Janssen, Wendy Lou,
Peter R. Rapp, and John H. Morrison

Age-associated memory impairment (AAMI) occurs in many mammalian species, including humans. In contrast to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), in which circuit disruption occurs through neuron death, AAMI is due to circuit and synapse disruption in the absence of significant neuron loss and thus may be more amenable to prevention or treatment. We have investigated the effects of aging on pyramidal neurons
and synapse density in layer III of area 46 in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of young and aged, male and female rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) that were tested for cognitive status through the delayed non-matching-to-sample (DNMS) and delayed response tasks. Cognitive tests revealed an age-related decrement in both acquisition and performance on DNMS. Our morphometric analyses revealed both an age-related loss of spines (33%, p< 0.05) on pyramidal cells and decreased density of axospinous synapses (32%, p< 0.01) in layer III of area 46. In addition, there was an age-related shift in the distribution of spine types reflecting a selective vulnerability of small, thin spines, thought to be particularly plastic and linked to learning. While both synapse density and the overall spine size average of an animal were predictive of number of trials required for acquisition of DNMS (i.e., learning the task), the strongest correlate of behavior was found to be the head volume of thin spines, with no correlation between behavior and mushroom spine size or density. No synaptic index correlated with memory performance once the task was learned.

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Facilitating Client Change: Principles Based Upon the Experience of Eminent Psychotherapists

A. J. Stasic — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Heidi M. Levitt and Daniel Williams

"Eminent therapists across psychotherapy meta-orientations were asked to describe the processes by which they facilitate change in psychotherapy. A grounded theory analysis of these interviews was conducted. Safety within the psychotherapeutic relationship was identified as a central element in creating client change to the extent that in-session risk taking was important in that orientation. As well, common processes across orientation in structuring new awareness emerged as a core finding. Patterns were identified in how therapists balanced negotiating the client-therapist relationship while fostering new awareness. Principles based on therapists' common intentions are put forward to guide future research and psychotherapy integration efforts."

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Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions

A. J. Stasic — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Joshua M. Ackerman, Christopher C. Nocera, John A. Bargh

"Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal conceptual and metaphorical knowledge, as well as a springboard for the application of this knowledge. In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Among other effects, heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, rough objects made social interactions appear more difficult, and hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations. Basic tactile sensations are thus shown to influence higher social cognitive processing in dimension-specific and metaphor-specific ways."

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Defining Wisdom

Douglas McKee — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 05:00:00 GMT

We all know the story in which science supposedly demonstrates a Bumblebee only flies because it doesn’t know it can’t. I know the real story but like that one better because the bumblebee still goes about its daily tasks, unencumbered by knowing about all the impossible parameters which are being erroneously applied to its existence.

My effort to define wisdom is a lot like the life of the Bumblebee. Because I was not formally educated I did not know it would be an impossible task. Not knowing this allowed me to study wisdom from a practical point of view with the expectation of actually finding an answer.

Wisdom is a human activity. As such, a definition must reflect what wise people do. It cannot be found in activities people cannot do. If knowledge is not knowable and ethical questions cannot be answered, a usable definition of wisdom will not be found in metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics. So there is scant hope the philosophers will define it any time soon, having been at it already for twenty-five centuries without success. And the Psychologists, the real experts of the human mind, have been studying “crazy” people so long they are unable to recognize or understand sanity at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying philosophers aren’t wise, because most demonstrate considerably more wisdom than the average and they ask tough questions. We really need them. But the goal of their profession is not to be wise; it is asking complex questions and to use Logic to govern their exchanges.

We ordinary folks can’t do those things. It is not because we lack the capacity but that we lack the time, inclination, and financial support which must be present to enable such a continued effort.

I am writing this because I believe a workable and usable definition of wisdom is not an impossible task. As a matter of fact, looking at how we mortals use it, the definition is fairly simple. “Wisdom is the altruistic use of our best critical thinking skills to determine an optimum decision or solution for a situation.”

As such, we can see why wise decisions stand out like beacons in a fog. They are examples of the heights we can attain when we choose to do so. Defined thusly, wisdom is obviously a teachable and learnable skill.

Our real problem is not with the lack of wisdom per se, it is with its implementation. The larger, and more pressing problem today is the lack of integrity and courage necessary to choose the wise course, to actually do the things our wisdom dictates.

www.douglasmckee.com

From Executive Mechanisms Underlying Perception and Action to the Parallel Processing of Meaning

Cait — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Philip J. Barnard

The dominant conceptualization of working memory distinguishes mechanisms that handle auditory‐verbal and visuospatial representations from central executive resources that control and guide them. A straightforward case can be made that executive mechanisms evolved initially in the service of directing attention to salient environmental stimuli or events and selecting adaptive actions under the guidance of affective markers. In this paper, “working‐memory capacity” is viewed as an emergent property of interactions between specialist subsystems with no homunculus‐like executive. Mental capability could well have advanced via the differentiation of a single multimodal subsystem into additional new specialist subsystems that process not just verbal and spatial representations but also subsystems specialized to manipulate different kinds of meaning. The resulting overall mental architecture would devolve control of action and speech to peripheral mechanisms while allowing central subsystems to focus attention and decision making on meaning. According to this hypothesis, increased mental capability is dually based on the development of more abstract representations and on the observation that the more subsystems there are, the more the mind can do at one and the same time: only the most advanced mental architecture can control walking, talking, and thinking at one and the same time.

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Complexipacity, Wisdom and Education

Cait — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Tom Abeles

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of the emerging science of complexity and the rise of fast computational capabilities on human understanding of the world and the implications for education.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a scenario in which the skills and experience of individuals are compared to those that can be undertaken by technology.

Findings – The paper points out the complexity that smart computers may have on humans and human society and provides some critical issues that must be considered as technology rapidly presents new, more powerful and sophisticated devices with on-board artificial intelligence.

Originality/value – The paper concludes that complexipacity may be the blending of education with real world experience, cause with purpose, and humans with fast adders.

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Calvin and Locke: Dueling Epistemologies in The New-England Primer, 1720–1790

Cait — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Stephanie Schnorbus

Most historians agree there was a shift away from Calvinism and toward Enlightenment thought during the eighteenth century. When discussing that shift in relation to children's literature or education, some historians use The New-England Primer as an example of unchanging Calvinism. Other historians argue that changes, especially the addition of certain illustrated lessons, secularized the primer. This essay argues that the changes to illustrations and their accompanying text in The New-England Primer can best be understood through a grasp of John Calvin's and John Locke's theories of knowledge. An examination of text, images, and epistemology in The New-England Primer reveals that the shift from Calvin to Locke was neither complete nor terribly secularizing. The changes that did occur, beginning with significant ones in the 1750s, are an excellent example of how Christianity and the Enlightenment interacted, and they call into question whether secularization is the best characterization of that interaction.

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Proverbs and the Wisdom of Literature: The Proverbs of Alfred and Chaucer's Tale of Melibee

Cait — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Christopher Cannon

In an essay in which he explored the nature of the proverb, Kenneth Burke wondered why it would not be possible to 'extend such analysis … to encompass the whole field of literature'. For Burke, the possibility for such extension stemmed from a similarity in 'strategy', and the proposition that even 'the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art' shares the proverb's capacity to intervene in 'situations'. This comparison seems, at first, to rest on a fairly conventional definition of the proverb as ethical 'equipment' (a kind of pragmatic tool 'for living'), but, as Burke's analysis unfolds, it slowly absorbs to the proverb much of the affect that we usually associate with literature (by 'naming … a situation', Burke says, the proverb acts as a kind of 'medicine', helping us to 'adopt an attitude' towards it). For Derrida, who sees an equally strong analogy between what he calls the 'aphorism' and literature, the comparison presses in the opposite direction. As he describes the resemblance between Romeo and Juliet and a series of disconnected and repeatedly cited sentences, as the well-known and highly valued play is in his eyes 'aphoristic' insofar as it is also endlessly repeated and thus shorn of its originary circumstances, literature seems to have absorbed many of the qualities we usually attribute to the aphorism. In this account, a work is literature not only because of certain inherent qualities but because it has 'already happened, in essence before it happens' - because the very esteem that makes us class it as 'literature' also ensures that we will repeatedly perform (or read) it. In this definition of the 'literary', in other words, whatever it is about the work that makes us value it in the first place is not dimmed by familiarity but, rather, 'survive[s] thanks to it'.

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Ways of Knowing, Learning, and Developing

Cait — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Kurt C. Strange

The information age presents great opportunity to move fromdata to information to knowledge and potentially to go furtherto generate understanding and wisdom. As information is generatedin ever smaller segments, however, and as we use informationfor increasingly narrow purposes, our understanding of the worldis becoming more and more fragmented. Stunted developmentalong this data-information-knowledge-understanding-wisdom pathway leaves the potential of the information age unmet and itsinhabitants often overwhelmed and unwise.

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Prior Information Biases Stimulus Representations during Vibrotactile Decision Making

wattawa — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Claudia Preuschhof, Torsten Schubert, Arno Villringer, and Hauke R. Heekeren

Neurophysiological data suggest that the integration of prior information and incoming sensory evidence represents the neural basis of the decision-making process. Here, we aimed to identify the brain structures involved in the integration of prior information about the average magnitude of a stimulus set and current sensory evidence. Specifically, we investigated whether prior average information already biases vibrotactile decision making during stimulus perception and maintenance before the comparison process. For this purpose, we used a vibrotactile delayed discrimination task and fMRI. At the behavioral level, participants showed the time-order effect. This psychophysical phenomenon has been shown to result from the influence of prior information on the perception of and the memory for currently presented stimuli. Similarly, the fMRI signal reflected the integration of prior information about the average vibration frequency and the currently presented vibration frequency. During stimulus encoding, the fMRI signal in primary and secondary somatosensory (S2) cortex, thalamus, and ventral premotor cortex mirrored an integration process. During stimulus maintenance, only a region in the intraparietal sulcus showed this modulation by prior average information. Importantly, the fMRI signal in S2 and intraparietal sulcus correlated with individual differences in the degree to which participants integrated prior average information. This strongly suggests that these two regions play a pivotal role in the integration process. Taken together, these results support the notion that the integration of current sensory and prior average information is a major feature of how the human brain perceives, remembers, and judges magnitude stimuli.

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Coevolution of Composite‐Tool Technology, Constructive Memory, and Language

Cait — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Stanley H. Ambrose

The evolution of modern human behavior was undoubtedly accompanied by neurological changes that enhanced capacities for innovation in technology, language, and social organization associated with working memory. Constructive memory integrates components of working memory in the medial prefrontal cortex to imagine alternative futures. Enhanced mental time travel permits long‐range strategic planning. Within this broadly conceived area of cognitive neuropsychology, I will focus on two stages of the evolution of cognitive faculties for planning. The first involves executing complex sequences of actions involving manufacture of multicomponent artifacts; the second involves enhanced planning through information sharing, which required the establishment of extended regional social interaction networks based on trust and cooperation. Both stages were probably accompanied by important innovations in grammatical speech.

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Working Memory and the Speed of Life

Cait — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By April Nowell

Hominin evolution is the result of complex interactions of biology and behavior within particular physical, social, and cultural environments. While evolution takes place at the species level, species are made up of individuals engaging in a social world. Extensive research into topics such as theory of mind and social intelligence have highlighted the importance of sociality and social factors in understanding the evolution of the hominin brain. The hominin brain has trebled in size throughout our evolution and has undergone significant reorganization. These changes have associated life‐history costs and benefits and can be understood only in the context of alterations in hominin ranging behavior, locomotion, diet, energetic requirements, subsistence strategies, childbirth, ontological development, demography, communication/play, and technology. Many of the significant changes in these variables, as well as in cranial development, coincide with the emergence of Homo erectus. It is with this species that we see a clear movement away from pongid life‐history patterns toward a pattern that we would eventually recognize as human. I discuss key changes in hominin life history that can reasonably be associated with H. erectus and the cognitive implications of these changes for an early enhancement of working memory away from ape‐grade abilities.

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Wisdom and Numbers

Cait — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Eerik Lagerspetz

There is a permanent tension between the requirements of substantivegoodness or wisdom and those of formal legitimacy in publicdecision-making. This article charts the various attempts toreconcile the two requirements within decision rules. First,the history of decision rules from medieval times to the 19thcentury is briefly reviewed. Second, it is shown that the mostpopular contemporary attempt to justify a decision principlein epistemic terms, based on Condorcet’s famous Jury Theorem,does not actually support democracy. Finally, it is argued thatthe contemporary theorists of deliberative democracy are ultimatelystruggling with the same old problem as the medieval politicaltheorists. All attempts to combine the two requirements in asystematic way are doomed to fail.

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Educational Wisdom of African Oral Literature: African Proverbs as vehicles for Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills in Social Studies Education

Cait — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Lewis Asimeng-Boahene

Preparing children to function effectively as global citizens in today's complex and ethnically polarized nations and the world, will require students who think critically about the knowledge of the histories, experiences, and the cultural practices of other parts of the world.

This paper offers African cultural heritage through proverbs as a frame for developing critical thinking skills among American students in the United States

Xhosa (South Africa) Proverb: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu 'A person is a person through persons'

Weatherwiser?

wattawa — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

The article, written by Defining Wisdom grantee Deborah Coen, reviews several books on the history of weather, including "Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783," by Matthew Mulcahy, "British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment," by Jan Golinski, and "Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology," by Kristine C. Harper.

Read Coen's recent wisdom blog.

Link to the review.

Collective wisdom and decision making in surgical oncology

wattawa — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by N Robson and D Rew

AIM: To describe systems for capturing and optimising collective knowledge and insight in areas of complexity and uncertainty in surgical oncology, with particular reference to the Delphi process and related systems. METHODS: Internet search engines (Google, Google Scholar) and four databases (SCOPUS, PubMed, Medline and Embase) were searched to find English language articles on the use of The Delphi Process and related systems in surgical oncology, using a variety of search terms. FINDINGS: There are a number of established systems for co-opting group knowledge and facilitating collective decision-making. These find applications in commerce, industry, government and defence. They have also been applied to problems in surgical oncology, for example using the Delphi process to optimise the management of colorectal cancers and metastases. CONCLUSIONS: Collective decision making tools find practical applications in the allocation of resources and in clinical decision making in fields of surgical oncology practice where there is a wide range of evidence and expert opinion. Such methodologies set new standards for the collating of professional expertise and for the writing of "best clinical practice" guidelines in the cancer subspecialities.

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Lab Experiments for the Study of Social-Ecological Systems

wattawa — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by Marco A. Janssen, Robert Holahan, Allen Lee, and Elinor Ostrom

Governance of social-ecological systems is a major policy problem of the contemporary era. Field studies of fisheries, forests, and pastoral and water resources have identified many variables that influence the outcomes of governance efforts. We introduce an experimental environment that involves spatial and temporal resource dynamics in order to capture these two critical variables identified in field research. Previous behavioral experiments of commons dilemmas have found that people are willing to engage in costly punishment, frequently generating increases in gross benefits, contrary to game-theoretical predictions based on a static pay-off function. Results in our experimental environment find that costly punishment is again used but lacks a gross positive effect on resource harvesting unless combined with communication. These findings illustrate the importance of careful generalization from the laboratory to the world of policy.

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Meaning and Value in a Secular Age: Why Eupraxsophy Matters

NathB — Sat, 01 May 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Meaning and Value in a Secular Age: Why Eupraxsophy Matters

The Writngs of Paul Kurtz

Edited by Nathan Bupp

The term eupraxsophy was first coined and introduced by Paul Kurtz in 1988 to characterize a secular orientation to life that stands in contrast to religion. Derived from three ancient Greek roots—eu (good, well); praxis (practice, conduct), and sophia (wisdom)—eupraxsophy literally means “good practice and wisdom.” Drawing upon philosophy, science, and ethics, eupraxsophy offers a thoroughly secular moral vision, which respects the place of human values in the context of the natural world and presents an empirically responsible yet hopeful picture of the human situation and the cosmos in which we abide.

Kurtz’s key writings about the theory and practice of eupraxsophy are conveniently gathered together in one place for the first time in this volume. Written with eloquence and scope, these incisive essays show how Kurtz’s brand of humanism moves above and beyond the current “new atheism.” Eupraxsophy successfully bridges the cultural divide between science and value and provides a genuine and constructive ethical alternative to religion, one that is able to deal effectively with the complexities inherent in our increasingly fragmented world.

Paul Kurtz (Amherst, NY), professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the author or editor of more than fifty books, including The Transcendental Temptation, The Courage to Become, Embracing the Power of Humanism, plus nine hundred articles and reviews. He is the founder and chairman of the Center for Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He has appeared on many major TV and radio talk shows, and has lectured at universities worldwide.

Nathan Bupp (Amherst, NY) is the vice president and director of communications for the Center for Inquiry and the associate editor of Free Inquiry magazine. His articles and book reviews have been published in Free Inquiry and he is a contributor to Dewey's Enduring Impact (Prometheus Books), edited by John R. Shook and Paul Kurtz.

Practical Wisdom and Ethical Awareness Through Student Experiences Of Development

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Karim-Aly Kassam

How is book-learning at university made relevant to societal needs? What pedagogical framework helps to transform students from those who know about major challenges of the twenty-first century to those who know how to respond to such challenges in a particular socio-cultural and ecological context? This narrative about the practical experience of Canadian students in two separate international-development classes shows that learning is ultimately about linking the education of students to its consequences for communities and society. The students' maturation from a community of enquirers to a community of social practice is not just an intellectual transformation from 'knowing that' to 'learning how', but also the development of a heightened ethical awareness of the consequential link between freedom and responsibility.

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For Mortal Souls: Philosophy and Therapeia in Nietzsche's Dawn

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Keith Ansell Pearson

This chapter seeks to make a contribution to the growing interest in Nietzsche's relation to traditions of therapy in philosophy that has emerged in recent years. It is in the texts of his middle period (1878–82) that Nietzsche's writing comes closest to being an exercise in philosophical therapeutics, and in this chapter I focus on Dawn from 1881 as a way of exploring this. Dawn is a text that has been admired in recent years for its ethical naturalism and for its anticipation of phenomenology. My interest in the text in this chapter is in the way it revitalises for a modern age ancient philosophical concerns, notably a teaching for mortal souls who wish to be liberated from the fear and anguish of existence, as well as from God, the ‘metaphysical need’, and romantic music, and are able to affirm their mortal conditions of existence. As a general point of inspiration I have adopted Pierre Hadot's insight into the therapeutic ambitions of ancient philosophy which was, he claims, ‘intended to cure mankind's anguish’ (for example, anguish over our mortality). This is evident in the teaching of Epicurus which sought to demonstrate the mortality of the soul and whose aim was, ‘to free humans from “the fears of the mind”.’ Similarly, Nietzsche's teaching in Dawn is for mortal souls. In the face of the loss of the dream of the soul's immortality, philosophy for Nietzsche, I shall show, has new consolations to offer in the form of new sublimities. Indeed, for Nietzsche it is by reflecting, with the aid of psychological observation, on what is ‘human, all too human’, that ‘we can lighten the burden of life’ (HH 35). Nietzsche's thinking in Dawn contains a number of proposals and recommendations of tremendous value to philosophical therapeia, including (a) a call for a new honesty about the human ego and human relations, including relations of self and other and love, so as to free us from certain delusions; (b) the search for an authentic mode of existence which appreciates the value of solitude and independence; (c) the importance of having a rich and mature taste in order to eschew the fanatical. After an introduction to Nietzsche's text the chapter is divided into two main parts. In the first main part I explore various aspects of his conception of philosophical therapy, including purification of the higher feelings and liberation from the destructive effects of ‘morality’ and Christianity. In the second main part I explore his conception of ‘the passion of knowledge’, which is the passion that guides modern free spirits as they seek to overcome the need of religion and constraints of ‘morality’, and to access the new sublimities of philosophy.

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Epistemic Beliefs and Achievement Motivation in Early Adolescence

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Robert Ricco, Sara Schuyten Pierce and Connie Medinilla

This study seeks to establish the relevance of middle schoolstudents’ naïve beliefs about knowledge and learningin science to their achievement motivation in this domain. Apredominantly Hispanic and lower-income sample of 459 middleschool students (sixth through eighth grades) completed measuresof epistemic beliefs along with several measures of motivation.Results indicated that a belief that scientific knowledge developsand that justification is necessary to valid knowledge in sciencewere positively related to mastery goals, task value, and self-efficacy.Epistemic beliefs were also found to predict science gradesover and above the contributions of motivational factors. Surprisingly,an uncritical acceptance of authority figures and a belief inscientific knowledge as certain were more typical of studentswho adopted motivational states (e.g., mastery goals) previouslyfound to be supportive of learning. The latter findings maybe unique to early adolescence within the ethnic and socioeconomicstatus parameters of the present sample.

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Depth of Field/Depth of Understanding

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Eric Baylin

The article is a personal account of my engagement with some recent neuroscientific theory put forth by Mary Helen Immordino‐Yang (University of Southern California) about the integral relationship between emotion and cognition. Specifically, the research suggests the necessity of engaging students on an emotional level in order to thoroughly engage them cognitively. The article outlines a process of teaching high school photography students the concept of depth of field in the context of the unfolding revelations from my engagement with the brain research. The process was one of trial and error that eventually led to some important insights about teaching and learning in general, most importantly about my own need to engage on an emotional level with the subject being taught.

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A Perspective on Epistemology and Ontology of Indian Psychology

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Dharm P. S. Bhawuk

The epistemology of Indian Psychology (IP) is akin to that ofIndian Philosophy or in general the Indian world view of knowledge,truth and belief about making sense of the self and the world.In this article, the epistemological and ontological foundationsof IP are derived from a verse from the Ishopanishad and corroboratedby verses from the Bhagavad-Gita. In doing so, epistemologicalquestions like what is knowledge in IP or what knowledge (ortheories) should IP develop and how (the methodology) are answered.Similarly, ontological questions like what is the being thatis the focus of IP research or are biomechanical or spiritual-social-biologicalbeings of interest to IP are addressed. The simplicity and clarityof this derivation fulfils the twin research criteria of parsimonyand aesthetics. The role of epistemology and ontology in constructingcultural meaning for theory, method and practice of IP is discussed.

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Epistemological Beliefs and Theory of Planned Behavior: Examining Beliefs about Knowledge and Knowing as Distal Predictors of Indonesian Tertiary Students’ Intention to Study

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Gregory Arief D. Liem, Allan B. I. Bernardo

Using the theory of planned behavior or TPB (Ajzen, 2005) as a general framework, the study examines the role of Indonesian students’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing (epistemological beliefs) as a distal antecedent predictor of students’ behavioral intention in studying for a forthcoming examination. Consistent with the TPB, it was hypothesized that the effects of epistemological beliefs on the behavioral intention to study would be mediated by three proximal antecedent predictors: (a) attitudes toward studying hard, (b) personal norms related to studying hard, and (c) perceived behavioral control over studying hard. Participants were 497 psychology undergraduate students at a private university in Indonesia, who answered a Bahasa Indonesian translation of Chan and Elliott’s (2002) Epistemological Belief Questionnaire and a questionnaire on their beliefs and behavioral intentions related to studying hard and persistently for an examination. The results of hierarchical multiple regressions supported the hypotheses. Students’ belief that effort is a prerequisite of the attainment of knowledge and belief that ability is innate and non-malleable were positive and negative predictors, respectively, of studying hard-related attitudes, personal norms, perceived behavioral control, and behavioral intentions. And the relationships between effort and ability beliefs and studying behavioral intentions were fully mediated by the three proximal predictors of the behavioral intention.

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Problems of Other Minds: Solutions and Dissolutions in Analytic and Continental Philosophy

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Jack Reynolds

While there is a great diversity of treatments of other minds and inter-subjectivity within both analytic and continental philosophy, this article specifies some of the core structural differences between these treatments. Although there is no canonical account of the problem of other minds that can be baldly stated and that is exhaustive of both traditions, the problem(s) of other minds can be loosely defined in family resemblances terms. It seems to have: (1) an epistemological dimension (How do we know that others exist? Can we justifiably claim to know that they do?); (2) an ontological dimension that incorporates issues having to do with personal identity (What is the structure of our world such that inter-subjectivity is possible? What are the fundamental aspects of our relations to others? How do they impact upon our self-identity?); and (3) A conceptual dimension in that it depends on one's answer to the question what is a mind (How does the mind – or the concept of 'mind'– relate to the brain, the body and the world?). While these three issues are co-imbricated, I will claim that analytic engagements with the problem of other minds focus on (1), whereas continental philosophers focus far more on (2). In addition, this article will also point to various other downstream consequences of this, including the preoccupation with embodiment and forms of expressivism that feature heavily in various forms of continental philosophy, and which generally aim to ground our relations with others in a pre-reflective manner of inhabiting the world that is said to be the condition of reflection and knowledge.

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Feeling Our Feelings: What Philosophers Think and People Know

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Suzanna Smith

The very title of Eva Brann's book suggests the extent to which "our feelings" is a topic at once familiar and unknown. The title could have been "Feeling Your Feelings" or simply "Feeling Feelings," but she seems to have wanted to stress the fact that the feelings she is concerned with belong to "us." At stake is not the possibility of one feeling shared by all but the many feelings we feel on our own, and occasionally, with others. Still, there is some sense of commonality implied by the use of "our" in Feeling Our Feelings, although not perhaps the sort of anxious sense of commonality that one might feel if one were to read a book called Spending Our Money. Whatever tentative impression of a community of readers (and feelers, as it were) that we might have gleaned from the first part of the title is qualified in the second part, which suggests a distinction between how philosophers and people perceive the feelings. Philosophers think about feelings; people know them. If knowing is the object of thinking, it would seem that the philosophers are not quite people, but that they are aspiring to be more like us in thinking. But if knowing—or thinking that one knows—prevents one from rightly perceiving that one should attempt to know more by thinking, then perhaps it ought be the other way around.

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Baring the Brain as Well as the Soul: Milan Kundera's The Joke

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Yvonne Howell

Are we innately superstitious? Is it possible for even the most hardened atheist-existentialist not see the hand of destiny, traffic deities, or other disembodied psychological agents when a fortuitous parking spot transforms his life? Maybe our adaptive ability to infer intentionality to other people's behavior evolved at some point into an innate drive to infer intentionality to the gestures of the universe? Kundera's Czech novel The Joke (1965) can be read as prescient obsession with our insistence on deciphering existential meanings. I explore Bering's "Existential Theory of Mind" hypothesis to re-examine The Joke in a post-Cold War context.

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Genes, Memes, and the Chinese Concept of Wen: Toward a Nature/Culture Model of Genetics

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

The Chinese concept of wen is examined here in the context of contemporary gene theory and the "cultural branch" of gene theory called "memetics." The Chinese notion of wen is an untranslatable term meaning "pattern," "structure," "writing," and "literature." Wen hua—generally translated as "culture"—signifies the process through which one adopts wen. However, this process is not simply one of civilizational mimesis or imitation but the "creation" of a new pattern. Within a gene-wen debate we are able to read genes neither in terms of nature or culture but, in a Chinese way, in terms of "nature-culture." "Posthuman" or "transhuman" models that celebrate the creation of techno-bio bodies (cyborgs) as the continuation of the human by nonhuman means are still dependent on a clear distinction between nature and technology (culture) that is rooted in the Greek and Christian traditions. Bioengineering does not do more than gradually replacing the "given" by the "made" until the body is seen as a commodity malleable in the hands of modern technology. A wen-based genetics offers a new perspective on nature-culture continuity because it is not trapped in nature but involved in a concept of wen that a Western mind tends to identify too quickly with natural necessity.

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The Rehabilitation of Spontaneity: A New Approach in Philosophy of Action

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Brian J. Bruya

Scholars working in philosophy of action still struggle with the freedom/determinism dichotomy that stretches back to Hellenist philosophy and the metaphysics that gave rise to it. Although that metaphysics has been repudiated in current philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the dichotomy still haunts these fields. As such, action is understood as distinct from movement, or motion. In early China, under a very different metaphysical paradigm, no such distinction is made. Instead, a notion of self-caused movement, or spontaneity, is elaborated. In this article a general conception of spontaneity from early Daoism is explained, detailing its constituent aspects. Similar notions appeared from time to time in Western philosophy, and these instances are pursued, exploring how their instantiations differed from Daoist spontaneity and why. Based on these approximate examples of spontaneity and on early Daoist spontaneity, new criteria are postulated for a plausible theory of action that dispenses with presuppositions that eventuate in a freedom/determinism dichotomy, and instead the possibility is offered of a general model of action that can be applied smoothly across current philosophical and cognitive scientific subdisciplines.

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Keeping Faith: Evolution and Theology

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Jayna L. Ditty and Philip A. Rolnick

Since 1859, with the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, biology has increasingly challenged comfortable theological assumptions. Being convinced, however, that evolutionary biology and theology have in common the desire to know truth, we have used Ian Barbour's models of interaction in order to investigate ways in which evolutionary biology and theology conflict, are independent, can be in dialogue, or might even be integrated in light of the quest for truth, goodness, and beauty. In our conversations (one of us is a biologist and the other a theologian), we have sought to uphold scientific rigor and reasoned faith, even though differences in methods and assumptions complicate the effort. In spite of these differences, meaningful conversation can take place between biology and theology if theologians do not question the data of scientific discovery but remain free to question the data's interpretation at the theological level. Likewise, biologists should not restrict themselves to hegemonic and reductionist interpretations that leave little or no room for nonbiological reality.

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Expert Consensus on Characteristics of Wisdom: A Delphi Method Study

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Dilip V. Jeste, Monika Ardelt, Dan Blazer, Helena C. Kraemer, George Vaillant and Thomas W. Meeks

Purpose: Wisdom has received increasing attention in empirical research in recent years, especially in gerontology and psychology, but consistent definitions of wisdom remain elusive. We sought to better characterize this concept via an expert consensus panel using a 2-phase Delphi method. Design and Methods: A survey questionnaire comprised 53 Likert scale statements related to the concepts of wisdom, intelligence, and spirituality was developed to determine if and how wisdom was viewed as being distinct from the latter 2 concepts. Of the 57 international wisdom experts contacted by e-mail, 30 completed the Phase 1 survey and 27 also completed the Phase 2 survey. Results: In Phase 1, there were significant group differences among the concepts of wisdom, intelligence, and spirituality on 49 of the 53 items rated by the experts. Wisdom differed from intelligence on 46 of these 49 items, whereas wisdom differed from spirituality on 31 items. In Phase 2, we sought to define wisdom further by selecting 12 items based on Phase 1 results. Most experts agreed on many of the suggested characteristics of wisdom—that is, it is uniquely human; a form of advanced cognitive and emotional development that is experience driven; and a personal quality, albeit a rare one, which can be learned, increases with age, can be measured, and is not likely to be enhanced by taking medication. Implications: There was considerable agreement among the expert participants on wisdom being a distinct entity and a number of its characteristic qualities. These data should help in designing additional empirical research on wisdom.

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Collective Wisdom and Individual Freedom

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Christopher McMahon

The paper distinguishes two ways of understanding a wise society. A society can be wise by virtue of possessing mostly true evaluative beliefs. Or it can be wise by virtue of employing rational procedures of collective belief formation. If the first possibility involves the society's being, in Margaret Gilbert's sense, a plural subject of evaluative beliefs, social wisdom will, as Gilbert says, entail an abridgement of individual freedom. But, this paper argues, if a society's being wise is understood as its employing rational procedures of collective belief formation, social wisdom positively requires individual freedom.

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The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth: Robert Grosseteste on Universals (and the Posterior Analytics)

Cait — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

By Christina Van ***

The reintroduction of aristotle's Analytics to the Latin West—in particular, the reintroduction of the Posterior Analytics—forever altered the course of medieval epistemological discussions. ¹ In the memorable words of Jonathan Barnes, "Aristotle's sweet Analytics ravished generations of European scholars and scientists. The Prior Analytics displayed the pure discipline of logic, well-formed, elegant, seductive; the Posterior Analytics beckoned to deeper mysteries, offering a sure path to scientific progress, clear and imperious in its injunctions, delicious in its rigor." ² Although the Analytics fell decidedly from grace in later centuries, the sophisticated account of human cognition developed in the Posterior Analytics appealed so strongly to thirteenth-century European scholars that it became one of the two central theories of knowledge advocated in the later Middle Ages.

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How Prevalent is Wishful Thinking? Misattribution of Arousal Causes Optimism and Pessimism in Subjective Probabilities

wattawa — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by Joachim Vosgerau

People appear to be unrealistically optimistic about their future prospects, as reflected by theory and research in the fields of psychology, organizational behavior, behavioral economics, and behavioral finance. Many real-world examples (e.g., consumer behavior during economic recessions), however, suggest that people are not always overly optimistic. I suggest that people can be both overly optimistic and pessimistic in their beliefs about future events, depending on whether they focus on success or on failure. More specifically, people judge the likelihood of desirable and undesirable events to be higher than similar neutral events because they misattribute the arousal those events evoke to their greater perceived likelihood. I demonstrated this stake-likelihood effect in 4 studies. In Study 1, arousal was shown to increase likelihood judgments. Study 2 demonstrated that such elevated likelihood judgments are due to misattribution of the arousal from having a stake in the outcome. Study 3 demonstrated that such misattribution of arousal occurs for desirable and undesirable events. Study 4 showed the effects of optimism and pessimism on likelihood judgments in a field setting with soccer fans. Together, the findings suggest that wishful thinking might be less prevalent than previously believed. Pessimism might be as likely as optimism in subjective probabilities.

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Behavior and Energy Policy

wattawa — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by Hunt Allcott and SendhilMullainathan

The article discusses energy efficiency, human behavior, and research on both. The authors opine that behavioral sciences can be used to develop business and policy innovations. The article discusses relevant research investigations. The propensity of people to forego using cost-effective energy technologies by conserving energy is noted. Thus, the relevance of non-price based energy-use strategies is established. The company OPOWER is noted along with its research on behavior programs implemented at the household level.

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The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity

wattawa — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by Luhrmann, T. M., Nusbaum, Howard, Thisted, Ronald

In this article, we use a combination of ethnographic data and empirical methods to identify a process called “absorption,” which may be involved in contemporary Christian evangelical prayer practice (and in the practices of other religions). The ethnographer worked with an interdisciplinary team to identify people with a proclivity for “absorption.” Those who seemed to have this proclivity were more likely to report sharper mental images, greater focus, and more unusual spiritual experience. The more they prayed, the more likely they were to have these experiences and to embrace fully the local representation of God. Our results emphasize learning, a social process to which individuals respond in variable ways, and they suggest that interpretation, proclivity, and practice are all important in understanding religious experience. This approach builds on but differs from the approach to religion within the culture-and-cognition school.

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The Social Desirability of Punishment Avoidance

wattawa — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by Avraham D. Tabbach

This article argues that the law should sometimes encourageoffenders to incur costs to avoid punishment. Avoidance, suchas concealment of evidence, perjury, or obstruction of justice,is generally deemed socially undesirable because it wastes resourcesand reduces deterrence. However, since avoidance is also costlyto offenders, it may substitute for socially costlier punishmentssuch as imprisonment and therefore be socially desirable. This,however, does not imply that punishing avoidance is sociallyundesirable. Rather, punishing avoidance should discourage avoidanceas little as possible or even encourage avoidance. This articlealso questions the argument that sanctions should generallynot be maximal if avoidance is present. It shows that this argumentholds only if punishment takes the sole form of fines. If punishmenttakes the sole form of imprisonment, then imprisonment shouldnevertheless be maximal. This is another manifestation of thesocial desirability of punishment avoidance.

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Points of View, Social Positioning and Intercultural Relations

wattawa — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by Gordon Sammut and George Gaskell

The challenge of intercultural relations has become an important issue in many societies. In spite of the claimed value of intercultural diversity, successful outcomes as predicted by the contact hypothesis are but one possibility; on occasions intercultural contact leads to intolerance and hostility. Research has documented that one key mediator of contact is perspective taking. Differences in perspective are significant in shaping perceptions of contact and reactions to it. The ability to take the perspective of the other and to understand it in its own terms is a necessary condition for successful intergroup outcomes. This paper sheds light on the processes involved in intercultural perspective taking by elaborating the notion of the point of view based on social representations theory. The point of view provides a theory of social positioning that can analyse cultural encounters between social actors, and identify the conditions for positive relations. Insights are drawn from a study of public views on the relative merits of science and religion, following a documentary by Richard Dawkins in which it was suggested that religion is a source of evil. The findings demonstrate that the point of view may be categorised according to a three-way taxonomy according to the extent to which it is open to another perspective. A point of view may be monological—closed to another's perspective entirely, dialogical—open to the possibility of another perspective while maintaining some percepts as unchallengeable, or metalogical—open to another's perspective based on the other's frame of reference.

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Degrees of Uncertainty: An Overview and Framework For Future Research On Experience-Based Choice

wattawa — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by Tim Rakow and Ben R. Newell

A striking finding has emerged recently in the literature: When decision makers are faced with essentially the same choice, their preferences differ as a function of whether options are described or are “experienced” via observation and feedback. For example, when presented the described choice: (A) A 90% chance of $0 and a 10% chance of $10 or (B) $1 for sure, people tend to prefer (A). But when those same two options are experienced through observation of “draws” from two payoff distributions that match the described options, the modal preference reverses. Why? This is just one question that the papers in this special issue address. In addition, they address the rich repertoire of issues that arise when one considers experience-based choices. The decisions-from-experience paradigm—with its focus on the acquisition and integration of information prior to choice, as well the choice itself—taps many of the fundamentals of psychology (learning, memory, encoding, knowledge representation, modelling) thus inspiring novel and fruitful avenues for research. This paper reviews recent research on experience-based choice, and highlights the contribution of the papers in the special issue. The paper introduces a framework that places different types of decisions along a continuum of uncertainty about what one is choosing between, which emphasizes the rich and varied role of “experience” in decision making. It ends by identifying important unsolved questions that are ripe for future research.

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Good Things Come to Those Who Wait: Attenuated Discounting of Delayed Rewards in Aged Fischer 344 Rats

wattawa — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Nicholas W. Simon, Candi L. LaSarge, Karienn S. Montgomery, Matthew T. Williams, Ian A. Mendez, Barry Setlow, Jennifer L. Bizon

The ability to make advantageous choices among outcomes that differ in magnitude, probability, and delay until their arrival is critical for optimal survival and well-being across the lifespan. Aged individuals are often characterized as less impulsive in their choices than their young adult counterparts, demonstrating an increased ability to forgo immediate in favor of delayed (and often more beneficial) rewards. Such “wisdom” is usually characterized as a consequence of learning and life experience. However, aging is also associated with prefrontal cortical dysfunction and concomitant impairments in advantageous choice behavior. Animal models afford the opportunity to isolate the effects of biological aging on decision-making from experiential factors. To model one critical component of decision-making, young adult and aged Fischer 344 rats were trained on a two-choice delay discounting task in which one choice provided immediate delivery of a small reward and the other provided a large reward delivered after a variable delay period. Whereas young adult rats showed a characteristic pattern of choice behavior (choosing the large reward at short delays and shifting preference to the small reward as delays increased), aged rats maintained a preference for the large reward at all delays (i.e., attenuated “discounting” of delayed rewards). This increased preference for the large reward in aged rats was not due to perceptual, motor, or motivational factors. The data strongly suggest that, independent of life experience, there are underlying neurobiological factors that contribute to age-related changes in decision-making, and particularly the ability to delay gratification.

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Framing Essay: Performing Public Wisdom

wattawa — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by Leon de Kock

"The conceit is often adopted in the strategic performance of public wisdom - oracular, figurative, enunciating visions and versions of self as well as community - that truth is looming, that it is there to be embraced in self-evidently resonant forms of availability. However, in reviewing these acts in which calls to sagacity, vision and veracity are figuratively and/or performatively made in the public domain, it is necessary to distinguish between the reason or art or self-declared wisdom so brought into mediated public existence, on the one hand, and the contested context of the performance, on the other.

In the nineteenth century, no less than in the twentieth and the twenty-first, the question of how and to whom the 'artistic', prophetic or intellectual voice speaks, and in what manner that audience is framed, constituted and convened, has involved - as Khwezi Mkhize suggests in his article in this section - a process of 'seaming and pairing' realms of experience which may be quite disjunct (and I would add disjunct in ontological, cosmological, aesthetic, moral and political terms), but which nevertheless converge in spaces of public contestation.

Writing about Isaac Wauchope, poet and preacher, a leading member of the Christian African intelligentsia of the late nineteenth century, Mkhize reminds us that 'between the African subject and the specific text he invokes, what one is meant to glean is the world of African subjectivity', despite the fact that a significant proportion of Wauchope's readers (both intended and real) might have been distinctly 'disjunct' from precisely this 'world of African subjectivity', given the mixed colonial context in which he was writing and publishing. Between langue and parole,¹ one might add, between the multivalent, rhizomatic tissue of semantics into which the performing subject delves for his symbolic ammunition, on the one hand, and the context into which he chooses to direct his message, on the other, the paradoxes of public sphere enunciation find their form. Because in so shaping that message and its pathway, the performer also negotiates the space to be heard among the public or publics to whom his act of effect or affect is addressed, effectively calling them into being as an audience, a group, in the particular timbre of his or her orchestration. At least, this is the performer's mission. Alternatively, a public, oracular figure can be called into being by various groups or publics 'consecrating' such a figure in distinct 'fields' (literary, media, politics), as Anthea Garman, following Pierre Bourdieu, argues about Antjie Krog in her article in this section (see also Garman 2009). It is precisely such complexities in the conception of speaking positions, audiences, authors and modes of address that have characterised the public 'performance of wisdom and affect' over the past two centuries in southern Africa..."

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How Planful is Routine Behavior? A Selective-Attention Model of Performance in the Tower of Hanoi

wattawa — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by Elena G. Patsenko, Erik M. Altmann

Routine human behavior has often been attributed to plans—mental representations of sequences goals and actions—but can also be attributed to more opportunistic interactions of mind and a structured environment. This study asks whether performance on a task traditionally analyzed in terms of plans can be better understood from a “situated” (or “embodied”) perspective. A saccade-contingent display-updating paradigm is used to change the environment by adding, deleting, and moving task-relevant objects without participants’ direct awareness. Response latencies, action patterns, and eye movements all indicate that performance is guided not by plans stored in memory but by a control routine bound to objects as needed by perception and selective attention. The results have implications for interpreting everyday task performance and particular neuropsychological deficits.

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Pro-Environmental Behavior and Rational Consumer Choice: Evidence From Surveys of Life Satisfaction

wattawa — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Heinz Welsch and Jan Kühling

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the hypothesis of decision error in environmental-friendly consumption. Existing evidence suggests that people make systematic mistakes in affective forecasting that lead to suboptimal decisions. The paper hypothesizes that such errors are important in the context of the private provision of environmental goods and shows in a simple theoretical model that decision errors imply a non-zero net marginal utility at the chosen level of environmental-friendly consumption. Using life satisfaction as a proxy for experienced utility, the empirical analysis finds a positive and significant association between life satisfaction and pro-environmental behavior, which is consistent with environmental-friendly consumption being less than individually optimal. The results are robust to controlling not only for socio-demographic characteristics but also for differences in environment-related personal attitudes.

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The Impact of Autonomy and Task Uncertainty On Team Performance: A Longitudinal Field Study

wattawa — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:00:00 GMT

by John L. Cordery, David Morrison, Brett M. Wright, Toby D. Wal

In this paper, we seek to account for modest and inconsistent empirical support for a positive relationship between team autonomy and team performance by proposing that team task uncertainty impacts on team performance and moderates the impact of increased autonomy. Task uncertainty is defined in terms of a team's lack of prior knowledge about which operational problems will arise when, and the best way of dealing with them. Results from a longitudinal field study of 17 wastewater treatment teams showed that higher levels of task uncertainty were initially associated with reduced performance, assessed in terms of the quality of treated effluent produced by the teams. An intervention designed to enhance team autonomy led to general improvements in team performance, though moderated by team task uncertainty. Under conditions of enhanced team autonomy, a positive relationship emerged between task uncertainty and team performance.

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From Moral to Legal Judgment: The Influence of Normative Context in Lawyers and other Academics

nick stock — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Stephan Schleim, Tade M. Spranger, Susanne Erk, Henrik Walter

Various kinds of normative judgments are an integral part of everyday life. We extended the scrutiny of social cognitive neuroscience into the domain of legal decisions, investigating two groups, lawyers and other academics, during moral and legal decision-making. While we found activation of brain areas comprising the so-called ‘moral brain’ in both conditions, there was stronger activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus particularly when subjects made legal decisions, suggesting that these were made in respect to more explicit rules and demanded more complex semantic processing. Comparing both groups, our data show that behaviorally lawyers conceived themselves as emotionally less involved during normative decision-making in general. A group × condition interaction in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex suggests a modulation of normative decision-making by attention based on subjects’ normative expertise.

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Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience

nick stock — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Stephen S. Hall

"A compelling investigation into one of our most coveted and cherished ideals, and the efforts of modern science to penetrate the mysterious nature of this timeless virtue.

We all recognize wisdom, but defining it is more elusive. In this fascinating journey from philosophy to science, Stephen S. Hall gives us a dramatic history of wisdom, from its sudden emergence in four different locations (Greece, China, Israel, and India) in the fifth century B.C. to its modern manifestations in education, politics, and the workplace. We learn how wisdom became the provenance of philosophy and religion through its embodiment in individuals such as Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus; how it has consistently been a catalyst for social change; and how revelatory work in the last fifty years by psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists has begun to shed light on the biology of cognitive traits long associated with wisdom — and, in doing so, begun to suggest how we might cultivate it.

Hall explores the neural mechanisms for wise decision making; the conflict between the emotional and cognitive parts of the brain; the development of compassion, humility, and empathy; the effect of adversity and the impact of early-life stress on the development of wisdom; and how we can learn to optimize our future choices and future selves.

Hall's bracing exploration of the science of wisdom allows us to see this ancient virtue with fresh eyes, yet also makes clear that despite modern science's most powerful efforts, wisdom continues to elude easy understanding."

Daniel Kahneman: The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory

nick stock — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

From TED

"Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness..."

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Reasoning About Social Conﬂicts Improves Into Old Age

igrossm — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

by Igor Grossmann, Jinkyung Na, Michael E. W. Varnum, Denise C. Park, Shinobu Kitayama, and Richard E. Nisbett

It is well documented that aging is associated with cognitive declines in many domains. Yet it is a common lay belief that some aspects of thinking improve into old age. Speci ﬁ cally, older people are believed to show better competencies for reasoning about social dilemmas and conﬂicts. Moreover, the idea of aging-related gains in wisdom is consistent with views of the aging mind in developmental psychology. However, to date research has provided little evidence corroborating this assumption. We addressed this question in two studies, using a representative community sample. We asked participants to read stories about intergroup con ﬂ icts and interpersonal conﬂicts and predict how these con ﬂ icts would unfold. We show that relative to young and middle-aged people, older people make more use of higher-order reasoning schemes that emphasize theneed for multiple perspectives, allow for compromise, and recognize the limits of knowledge. Our coding scheme was validated by a group of professional counselors and wisdom researchers. Social reasoning improves with age despite a decline in ﬂ uid intelligence. The results suggest that it might be advisable to assign older individuals to key social roles involving legal decisions, counseling, and intergroup negotiations. Furthermore, given the abundance of research on negative effects of aging, this study may help to encourage clinicians to emphasize the inherent strengths associated with aging.

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Going Green to be Seen: Status, Reputation, and Conspicuous Conservation

nick stock — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Vladas Griskevicius, Joshua M. Tybur, Bram Van den Bergh

Why do people purchase proenvironmental “green” products? We argue that buying such products can be construed as altruistic, since green products often cost more and are of lower quality than their conventional counterparts, but green goods benefit the environment for everyone. Because biologists have observed that altruism might function as a “costly signal” associated with status, we examined in 3 experiments how status motives influenced desire for green products. Activating status motives led people to choose green products over more luxurious nongreen products. Supporting the notion that altruism signals one’s willingness and ability to incur costs for others’ benefit, status motives increased desire for green products when shopping in public (but not private) and when green products cost more (but not less) than nongreen products. Findings suggest that status competition can be used to promote proenvironmental behavior.

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On the Epistemology of Language

Cait — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

By Cheng-hung Tsai

Epistemology of language, a branch of both epistemology and the philosophy of language, asks what knowledge of language consists in. In this paper, I argue that such an inquiry is a pointless enterprise due to its being based upon the incorrect assumption that linguistic competence requires knowledge of language. However, I do not think the phenomenon of knowledge of language is trivial. I propose a virtue-theoretic account of linguistic competence, and then explain the phenomenon from a virtue-semantic point of view.

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Neural Correlates of the "Aha" Experiences: Evidence From an fMRI Study of Insight Problem Solving

A. J. Stasic — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

By Qiu J, Li H, Jou J, Liu J, Luo Y, Feng T, and Wu Z, Zhang Q.

"In the present study, we used learning-testing paradigm to examine brain activation of "Aha" effects with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during solving Chinese logogriphs. Blood oxygenation level-dependent fMRI contrasts between Aha and No-aha conditions were measured. Increased activities in the precuneus (BA 19/7), the left inferior/middle frontal gyrus (BA 9/6), the inferior occipital gyrus (BA 18), and the cerebellum were specifically associated with the "Aha" effects. The results indicate that (1) the precuneus might be involved in successful prototype events retrieval, (2) the left inferior frontal/middle frontal gyrus might be involved in forming novel association and breaking mental sets, (3) the inferior occipital gyrus and the cerebellum might be involved in re-arrangement of visual stimulus and deployment of attentional resources."

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Conceptual Challenges and Directions for Social Neuroscience

Cait — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

By Ralph Adolphs

Social neuroscience has been enormously successful and is making major contributions to fields ranging from psychiatry to economics. Yet deep and interesting conceptual challenges abound. Is social information processing domain specific? Is it universal or susceptible to individual differences and effects of culture? Are there uniquely human social cognitive abilities? What is the “social brain,” and how do we map social psychological processes onto it? Animal models together with fMRI and other cognitive neuroscience approaches in humans are providing an unprecedented level of detail and many surprising results. It may well be that social neuroscience in the near future will give us an entirely new view of who we are, how we evolved, and what might be in store for the future of our species.

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Debate: To Nudge or Not to Nudge

nick stock — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Daniel M. Hausman and Brynn Welch

One of the hottest ideas in current policy debates is “libertarian paternalism,” the design of policies that push individuals toward better choices without limiting their liberty. In their recent book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and then Obama advisor (now head of the White House’s Office of Information and regulatory Affairs), Cass Sunstein, suggest several ways in which government agencies and private organizations might “nudge” individuals toward actions that are better or them. They hope to promote libertarian paternalism as a promising foundation for bipartisanship—a way of maintaining our firm commitment to freedom of choice while also helping people make better decisions for themselves” (p. 14). They suggest “that libertarian paternalism offers a real Third Way—one that can break through some of the least tractable debates in contemporary democracies” (p. 252/255).
In this article, we address questions both about paternalism—what is it, and could there be a variety that does not limit freedom?—and about nudges—what are they, and should those who value freedom find them unobjectionable? We deny libertarian paternalism is both libertarian and paternalist and that it is as benign as Thaler and Sunstein maintain. We argue that some of their proposals constitute a istinctive variety of paternalism, whose libertarian credentials are dubious, even though their implementation would not be coercive4 and would not significantly limit freedom of choice. Our focus is on their concepts, not their policies.
After a first section that clarifies what Thaler and Sunstein take libertarian paternalism to be, section II addresses the question of what constitutes paternalism. In our view, what makes some of the policies Thaler and Sunstein call “libertarian paternalism” paternalistic is that they push people to make choices that are good for themselves by taking advantage of imperfections in human decision-making abilities. Section III then addresses the broader question concerning what limits there ought to be on nudges—that is, the use of flaws in human judgment and choice to influence people’s behavior.

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The Epistemology of the Financial Crisis: Complexity, Causation, Law, and Judgment

jlipshaw — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:00:00 GMT

The focus on complexity as a problem of the financial meltdown of 2008–2009 suggests that crisis is in part epistemological: we now know enough about financial and economic systems to be threatened by their complexity, but not enough to relieve our fears and anxieties about them. What marks the current crisis is anxiety that the financial world has evolved to the point that there are hidden structures, like "too big to fail" institutions or credit default swaps, that have widespread and adverse downsides. I propose an analogy between medicine and law in the sense of "regulatory technology." If bubbles are the disease, then the analogy is to bipolar syndrome—exuberance, or even a little hypomania is okay on the upswing, but true mania is bad, as is the resulting swing to depression. Good regulation, then, would be something like lithium, which keeps us on an even keel. There are two questions. The first is really whether we understand the forces well enough to regulate them. Regulation is a function of prediction; prediction is a function of observed regularity; observed regularities invoke the problem of scientific (not legal) causation; causation returns us to the question whether the human system being analyzed is capable of being reduced to helpful predictive models. The second question is: Who does the understanding? What we are dealing with instead is a crisis of confidence in those who purport to be experts in what we cannot fathom merely through common sense. The conundrum, of course, is that if it takes an expert to see the problem caused by complexity, how are we, possessing merely common sense, supposed to do anything but rely on their judgment? The epistemological crisis arises from our own judgments to rely on, believe in, trust, or have faith in that judgment.

Fragments and Figments

Charles Stirton — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I have created a blog site where I will be uploading all my published and unpublished work plus Estories and Ebooks. To access these please go Charles Stirton's profile which lists the entries. The hotlink is situated just below the photograph.

Emotional and Behavioural Reactions to Moral Transgressions: Cross-Cultural and Individual Variations in India and Britain

wattawa — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:00:00 GMT

by Simon M. Laham, Sonavi Chopra, Mansur Lalljee, Brian Parkinson

Reactions to moral transgressions are subject to influence at both the cultural and individual levels. Transgressions against an individual's rights or against social conventions of hierarchy may elicit different reactions in individualistic and collectivistic cultures. In the current study, affective and behavioural reactions to transgressions of autonomy (rights) and community (hierarchy) were examined in India and Britain. Results revealed that although reactions to autonomy transgressions are similar in India and Britain, Indian participants express more moral outrage than do Britons in response to transgressions of community. Results also supported the contention of emotion-specificity in affective moral reaction: Participants in both India and Britain reported anger in response to autonomy transgressions, but contempt in response to violations of community. Importantly, these results extend previous research by demonstrating the importance of emotion specificity in moral reactions, as opposed to categorization or dilemma resolution. In addition, an individual difference measure of respect for persons was shown to moderate reactions to moral transgressions. Specifically, participants with high respect for persons were less negative to violators of the community ethic, but not the autonomy ethic. These findings highlight the importance of examining emotion-specific responses in the moral domain and introduce a significant individual difference variable, respect for persons, into the psychology of morality.

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Neural Evidence for Inequality-averse Social Preferences

nick stock — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Elizabeth Tricomi, Antonio Rangel, Colin F. Camerer, John P. O’Doherty

A popular hypothesis in the social sciences is that humans have social preferences to reduce inequality in outcome distributions because it has a negative impact on their experienced reward. Although there is a large body of behavioural and anthropological evidence consistent with the predictions of these theories, there is no direct neural evidence for the existence of inequality-averse preferences. Such evidence would be especially useful because some behaviours that are consistent with a dislike for unequal outcomes could also be explained by concerns for social image or reciprocity, which do not require a direct aversion towards inequality. Here we use functional MRI to test directly for the existence of inequality-averse social preferences in the human brain. Inequality was created by recruiting pairs of subjects and giving one of them a large monetary endowment. While both subjects evaluated further monetary transfers from the experimenter to themselves and to the other participant, we measured neural responses in the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, two areas that have been shown to be involved in the valuation of monetary and primary rewards in both social and non-social contexts. Consistent with inequality-averse models of social preferences, we find that activity in these areas was more responsive to transfers to others than to self in the ‘high-pay’ subject, whereas the activity of the ‘low-pay’ subject showed the opposite pattern. These results provide direct evidence for the validity of this class of models, and also show that the brain’s reward circuitry is sensitive to both advantageous and disadvantageous inequality.

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Crossing the Interdisciplinary Divide: Political Science and Biological Science

nick stock — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Justin Greaves, Wyn Grant

This article argues that interdisciplinary collaboration can offer significant intellectual gains to political science in terms of methodological insights, questioning received assumptions and providing new perspectives on subject fields. Collaboration with natural scientists has been less common than collaboration with social scientists, but can be intellectually more rewarding. Interdisciplinary work with biological scientists can be especially valuable given the history of links between the two subjects and the similarity of some of the methodological challenges faced. The authors have been involved in two projects with biological scientists and this has led them critically to explore issues relating to the philosophy of science, in particular the similarities and differences between social and natural science, focusing on three issues: the problem of agency, the experimental research design and the individualistic fallacy. It is argued that interdisciplinary research can be fostered through shared understandings of what constitutes 'justified beliefs'. Political science can help natural scientists to understand a more sophisticated understanding of the policy process. Such research brings a number of practical challenges and the authors explain how they have sought to overcome them.

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Actors are Skilled in Theory of Mind But Not Empathy

wattawa — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:00:00 GMT

by Thalia R. Goldstein, Katherine Wu, Ellen Winner

Actors must imagine themselves in a different world: they must adopt the perspective of multiple characters, grasp their beliefs and intentions, and feel their emotions. In this study we tested the hypothesis that actors have unusually sharp mind-reading abilities and unusually strong empathy. In Study 1, adolescent actors outperformed adolescents without acting experience in their ability to imagine the mental states expressed by pictures of peoples' eyes (a theory of mind measure), but did not excel on empathy as measured by a self-report scale. In Study 2, we replicated these findings with young adults using a different measure of theory of mind. These findings show that adolescent and adult actors are skilled in reading others' mental states, but do not report above average levels of empathy. Thus, strength in theory of mind can exist independently of strength in empathy.

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Confidence Mediates How Investment Knowledge Influences Investing Self-Efficacy

wattawa — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:00:00 GMT

by James Forbes and S. Murat Kara

A comprehensive investment literacy questionnaire surveyed potential sources (viz., knowledge, confidence) of investing self-efficacy in a large sample of working adults. As expected, the effect of investment knowledge on belief in one’s future capability of orchestrating a plan to achieve investment goals was mediated by confidence. Overall, employees’ applied investment knowledge accuracy was low: 57%. In general, investment knowledge was reliably related to confidence. However, confidence and investment knowledge accuracy were completely independent for 9 of 21 items, implying an inability to inhibit poor investment decisions or an inability to exploit investment opportunities. A policy of required investment training could be implemented so as to not impede individuals’ freedom of choice, which would likely help the truly uninformed to become more informed and ultimately successful investors.

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Load Theory of Selective Attention and the Role of Perceptual Load: Is it Time for Revision?

wattawa — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:00:00 GMT

by Neha Khetrapal

Perceptual load hypothesis is proposed as a compromise between early and late theory of selective attention which states that the selection will operate early when the load on perception is high and it will operate late when the load on perception is low. Experimental findings have shown that the perceptual load hypothesis is too simplistic in nature as perceptual load is not the only determinant of selection processes. It is difficult to apply the load hypothesis to explain the occurrence of early selection in low load displays as well as the selection processes that operate on
distractor and target stimuli that are a part of the same object. Factors like spatial proximity, cues that manipulate the spatial extent of attentional focus, salience of targets as well as the distractors, and perceptual grouping between the target and the distractors should be taken into account while explaining the selective control of attention. Thus, the perceptual load of the display is one such factor that affects selective attention and goal-directed behaviour, but it is not the only factor to affect the selective control of attention.

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The Talking Point: Creating an Environment for Exploring Complex Meaning

wattawa — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:00:00 GMT

(A Collaborative Project of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras)

"The Talking Point is all about how people learn within groups. People can be much smarter than crowds if you measure “smart” as decision-making speed. Crowds can be much wiser than individuals if you measure wisdom by depth of understanding. It is possible to understand a great deal of information yet (or maybe because of this) you can also be slow to make decisions. If rushed, crowds will make poor decisions in spite of their wisdom. So... to get good group decisions on a time scale that will keep pace with policy development needs and social necessities, groups have to be supported so that their decision-making process can be accelerated. Much has been said and written about this problem over the years. It is dangerous to have the power of groups without the wisdom of groups, and it is tragic to have the wisdom of groups without the power of groups. The Talking Point presents a meeting point for the wisdom and power of groups through the use of Structured Dialogic Design.

With hopeful intentions, as a culture we have poisoned the well just when we need it most. We have touted design charettes and stakeholder processes as engagement vehicles and then ignored, marginalized or corrupted the very input that we swore to hold as sacred. This has created a myth that large scale collaboration is not possible, and the myth has led to considerable disillusionment among would-be participants and could-be sponsors. Structured Dialogic Design seeks to bust the myth about our limited capabilities to sustain boundary spanning collaboration. To bust this myth, Structured Dialogic Design needs to usher in a new wave of collaborative planning. Scholars have identified the Structured Dialogic Design methodology as the cutting edge of “third phase” science - where the reality of a situation embraces interactions between objective findings and subjective intentions.

The Talking Point provides a window for observing how Structured Dialogic Design has been put into practice and paints a panorama of the issues that confront complex social system design. This book is itself a bridge between scholarship and practice, written to be accessible yet anchored to major themes in cognitive psychology, information systems, social systems, and models of group learning. The book is an invitation for transformational leaders and those who support transformational leaders to pick up a new tool in the essential quest to put our nation and our world back on track toward sustainable futures. The Talking Point is a fresh source of water in a world that is thirsty for new ways of solving complex problems."

Link to the publisher.

The Role of Therapist Self-Disclosure in Psychotherapy: A Qualitative Review.

nick stock — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Jennifer R. Henretty, Heidi M. Levitt

Over 90% of therapists self-disclose to clients (Mathews, 1989; Pope, Tabachnick, & Keith-Spiegel, 1987; Edwards & Murdock, 1994), however, the implications of therapist self-disclosure are unclear, with highly divergent results from one study to the next. The goal of this paper was to review the empirical literature relevant to therapist self-disclosure, and provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding of the factors that affect, and are affected by, therapist self-disclosure. Findings are organized into an integrated model examining the who, what, when, why, and how of therapist self-disclosure. In addition, training implications and suggestions for future research are provided.

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Age, experience, and the beginning of wisdom

ardelt — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:00:00 GMT

What wisdom is and what it encompasses has been variously defined across the ages, starting with the earliest ‘wisdom literature' among the ancient Sumerians in 3000 B.C. (Birren and Svensson, 2005). Distinctions between wisdom as knowledge of the material and social world (episteme or scientia), as the pursuit of timeless, universal truths (sophia or sapientia), or as good and prudent behavior (phronesis or practical wisdom) can be found, for example, in the wisdom writings of the Ancient Greek philosophers, the 4^th century philosopher and theologian St. Augustine, and the French Renaissance statesman and scholar Montaigne (Birren and Svensson, 2005; Robinson, 1990). The discussion of whether wisdom consists of intellectual knowledge of the world and the human condition or is a quality that ‘transcends the intellect' (Naranjo, 1972: 225) and whose characteristics are timeless and universal (Ardelt, 2000b) continues until this day. In this chapter, I first distinguish between Western and Eastern approaches to wisdom before I introduce culturally inclusive definitions of wisdom. I then discuss the hypothetical and empirical relation between wisdom and age and address the role of crises and hardships in the development of wisdom. The chapter concludes with speculations about the promotion of wisdom in everyday life and the benefits of wisdom, particularly for older adults.

Leadership and Cultural Context: A theoretical and empirical examination based on Project GLOBE.

phanges — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:00:00 GMT

In this chapter we examine how effective leadership varies across national and cultural boundaries. Specifically, we ask what elements of leadership are core and more universal across these boundaries? The foundation of our approach is the notion that organizations and societies have implicit leadership theories, wherein beliefs about the attributes that define effective leadership are contained in distinctive cognitive structures, or schemas. The content of such schemas shapes perceptions by individuals regarding who is and who is not a leader. While schemas about leadership are shaped by an individual's early personal experiences with and observations of those acting as leaders, a shared schema may also develop within a cultural group and influence the most effective way to lead across these cultural groups.

The Centrality of Wisdom

Cop — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:00:00 GMT

This article begins

Considering the complexity of the world situation and the large number of problems that humanity faces, the task of achieving a heaven on earth seems daunting. Where does one start?

Is there by any chance a simplifying element, a focal point, a center from which the needed changes can flow? I believe there is. That point of origin, that central source which allows us to address any problem optimally, is wisdom. Wisdom is an all-purpose aid to creating heaven on earth. Whatever our life-focus happens to be among those ten essential heaven-on-earth elements, wisdom raises the level of our contribution.

The rest of the article makes the case fort focusing on wisdom development and closes with the question: "Because the quality of our doing can only reflect the quality of our understanding, isn’t the widespread cultivation of wisdom absolutely essential for achieving a heaven on earth?"

The full-text article is online.

Evolving the Capacity to Understand Actions, Intentions, and Goals

nick stock — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Marc Hauser and Justin Wood

We synthesize the contrasting predictions of motor simulation and teleological theories of action comprehension and present evidence from a series of studies showing that monkeys and apes—like humans—extract the meaning of an event by (a) going beyond the surface appearance of actions, attributing goals and intentions to the agent; (b) using details about the environment to infer when an action is rational or irrational; (c) making predictions about an agent's goal and the most probable action to obtain the goal, within the constraints of the situation; (d) predicting the most probable outcome of actions even when they are physiologically incapable of producing the actions; and (e) combining information about means and outcomes to make decisions about social interactions, some with moral relevance. These studies reveal the limitations of motor simulation theories, especially those that rely on the notion of direct matching and mirror neuron activation. They provide support, however, for a teleological theory, rooted in an inferential process that extracts information about action means, potential goals, and the environmental constraints that limit rational action.

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Challenging Certainty: The Utility and History of Counterfactualism

nick stock — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Simon T. Kaye

Counterfactualism is a useful process for historians as a thought-experiment because it offers grounds to challenge an unfortunate contemporary historical mindset of assumed, deterministic certainty. This article suggests that the methodological value of counterfactualism may be understood in terms of the three categories of common ahistorical errors that it may help to prevent: the assumptions of indispensability, causality, and inevitability. To support this claim, I survey a series of key counterfactual works and reflections on counterfactualism, arguing that the practice of counterfactualism evolved as both cause and product of an evolving popular assumption of the plasticity of history and the importance of human agency within it. For these reasons, counterfactualism is of particular importance both historically and politically. I conclude that it is time for a methodological re-assessment of the uses of such thought-experiments in history, particularly in light of counterfactualism's developmental relatedness to cultural, technological, and analytical modernity.

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Embodied Cognition and Mindreading

nick stock — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Shannon Spaulding

Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of mindreading and those that challenge the alleged ubiquity of mindreading. Together, these two kinds of arguments, if successful, would present a serious challenge to the standard account of human social understanding. In this paper, I examine the strongest of these embodied cognition arguments and argue that mindreading approaches can withstand the best of these arguments from embodied cognition.

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A Social-Cognitive Framework of Multidisciplinary Team Innovation

nick stock — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Susannah B. F. Paletz, Christian D. Schunn

The psychology of science typically lacks integration between cognitive and social variables. We present a new framework of team innovation in multidisciplinary science and engineering groups that ties factors from both literatures together. We focus on the effects of a particularly challenging social factor, knowledge diversity, which has a history of mixed effects on creativity, most likely because those effects are mediated and moderated by cognitive and additional social variables. In addition, we highlight the distinction between team innovative processes that are primarily divergent versus convergent; we propose that the social and cognitive implications are different for each, providing a possible explanation for knowledge diversity's mixed results on team outcomes. Social variables mapped out include formal roles, communication norms, sufficient participation and information sharing, and task conflict; cognitive variables include analogy, information search, and evaluation. This framework provides a roadmap for research that aims to harness the power of multidisciplinary teams.

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The Freedom of Desire: Hegel's Response to Rousseau on the Problem of Civil Society

nick stock — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Jeffrey Church

The ever-growing body of literature on civil society can benefit from a return to the original theoretical articulation and defense of the concept in the work of G.W.F. Hegel. Specifically, this article suggests that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's influential critique of civil society remains unanswered and argues that Hegel responded with a sweeping and sympathetic institutional design that remains relevant today. Hegel agrees with Rousseau that commercial society aggravates the dissatisfaction of its members, and that educating individual desire through institutional design is necessary to solve this difficulty. However, modern states need not adopt Rousseau's extreme and impracticable solution. Hegel's concrete, market-based associations of civil society render desires satiable and elevate them to accord with the common good, while still maintaining the freedom and distinctness of a pluralistic modern society.

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Good and Good For You: An Affect Theory of Happiness

nick stock — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Laura Sizer

Happiness is something we all want and strive for. But what is it and why do we want it so badly? Philosophers have offered two sorts of answers to the first question, identifying happiness either with a psychological state or condition (a feeling, emotion or set of judgments), or with the conditions of a life—how well the life is going for the person living it, often measured by some objective standard of value. These two approaches, what I’ll henceforth refer to as subjective, or ‘good feelings,’ and objective, ‘good lives’ accounts of happiness, reflect tensions in our intuitions about the nature of happiness. Each approach captures different, but important, features of our intuitions, making it difficult to accept either a purely subjective or objective view. This has led some philosophers to suggest that these are not competing accounts of one thing, ‘happiness,’ but accounts of several different things to which everyday language has, unfortunately, given the same name (Thomas 1968; Haybron 2000). Others propose that each is a
necessary component of happiness, that happiness is a matter of possessing both the relevant subjective and objective properties (*** 1979; Nozick 1989, e.g.). I think this latter view is right, but that we need to better understand why or how these two elements are important and how they might be linked. In this paper I argue that an affect theory of happiness is able to reconcile both the subjective and objective strands of our intuitions about happiness.

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Comparing the Neural Basis of Monetary Reward and Cognitive Feedback during Information-Integration Category Learning

nick stock — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Reka Daniel and Stefan Pollmann

The dopaminergic system is known to play a central role in reward-basedlearning (Schultz, 2006), yet it was also observed to be involvedwhen only cognitive feedback is given (Aron et al., 2004). Withinthe domain of information-integration category learning, inwhich information from several stimulus dimensions has to beintegrated predecisionally (Ashby and Maddox, 2005), the importanceof contingent feedback is well established (Maddox et al., 2003). We examined the common neural correlates of reward anticipationand prediction error in this task. Sixteen subjects performedtwo parallel information-integration tasks within a single event-relatedfunctional magnetic resonance imaging session but received amonetary reward only for one of them. Similar functional areasincluding basal ganglia structures were activated in both taskversions. In contrast, a single structure, the nucleus accumbens,showed higher activation during monetary reward anticipationcompared with the anticipation of cognitive feedback in information-integrationlearning. Additionally, this activation was predicted by measuresof intrinsic motivation in the cognitive feedback task and bymeasures of extrinsic motivation in the rewarded task. Our resultsindicate that, although all other structures implicated in categorylearning are not significantly affected by altering the typeof reward, the nucleus accumbens responds to the positive incentiveproperties of an expected reward depending on the specific typeof the reward.

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A Distraction Can Impair or Enhance Motor Performance

nick stock — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Christopher Hemond, Rachel M. Brown, Edwin M. Robertson

Humans have a prodigious capacity to perform multiple taskssimultaneously. Being distracted while, for example, performinga complex motor skill adds complexity to a task and thus leadsto a performance impairment. Yet, it may not be just the presenceor absence of a distraction that affects motor performance.Instead, the characteristics of the distraction may play a criticalrole in affecting human motor performance. Here, we show thatperformance of a motor sequence can be substantially enhancedby simultaneously learning an independent color sequence. Incontrast, performance of the same motor sequence was impairedby concurrently counting the number of red cues that were inthe color sequence. The color and motor sequences had differentlengths (10 vs 12 items), different numbers of elements (fivevs four elements), and different temporal patterns (randomlyintermittent vs continuous) and thus were independent of oneanother. These observations show that distracting informationdoes not always impair motor performance, and so is not a sufficientexplanation for the impaired performance. Instead, the influencethat a distraction exerts upon performance is mediated by thetype of processes engaged: when similar core processes are engaged,motor performance is enhanced, whereas when very different processesare engaged (i.e., counting and sequence performance), performanceis impaired. Thus, these observations deepen our understandingof how a distraction, depending on its characteristics, caneither impair or enhance performance and may offer novel approachesto optimizing human cognition.

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Cognitive Management in an Enduring National Rivalry: The Case of India and Pakistan

nick stock — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Peter Suedfeld, Rajiv Jhangiani

Using integrative complexity scoring, the current study addresses how communications by leaders of India and Pakistan have revealed their information processing and decision-making strategies. The hostility between India and Pakistan started with the official creation of the two states and has lasted through more than a half-century. It has been marked by four full-scale wars and almost constant ethnopolitical, terrorist, and guerrilla violence. It is one of the most enduring and bloody binational rivalries of recent decades. Shared aspects of history and culture make the comparisons relatively free of confounding factors. In common with previous findings, complexity scores have shown reliable associations with impending war and with continued peace (or low-intensity conflict).

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Infant and Early Childhood Exposure to Adult-Directed and Child-Directed Television Programming: Relations with Cognitive Skills at Age Four

Cait — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

By Rachel Barr, Alexis Lauricella, Elizabeth Zack, Sandra L. Calvert.

This study described the relations among the amount of child-directed versus adult-directed television exposure at ages 1 and 4 with cognitive outcomes at age 4. Sixty parents completed 24-hour television diaries when their children were 1 and 4 years of age. At age 4, their children also completed a series of cognitive measures and parents completed an assessment of their children's executive functioning skills. High levels of exposure to programs designed for adults during both infancy and at age 4, and high levels of household television use at age 4, were all associated with poorer executive functioning at age 4. High exposure to television programs designed for adults during the preschool years was also associated with poorer cognitive outcomes at age 4. In contrast, exposure to television programs designed for young children at either time point was not associated with any outcome measure at age 4. These results suggest that exposure to child-directed versus adult-directed television content is an important factor in understanding the relation between media exposure and developmental outcomes.

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Parents and peers as providers of support in adolescents' social network: a developmental perspective

nick stock — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Jorge F. del Valle, Amaia Bravo, Mónica López

The authors carried out an assessment of social support networks with a sample of 884 Spanish adolescents aged 12 to 17. The main goal was to analyze the development of the figures of parents and peers as providers of social support in the two basic dimensions of emotional and instrumental support. In peers, they distinguished between the contexts from which they came (school, associations, and friends from the community) to observe whether there were different tendencies. The results of the MANOVA indicate significant effects on both dimensions for the factors age, provider, and interaction between the two. The authors conclude that the tendencies for decline in the provision of support from parents and the corresponding increase in support from peers during adolescence are different for each dimension, and also for the different types of friends, according to context. Parents maintain a good level of instrumental support, but not of emotional support.

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Dynamic Cultural Influences on Neural Representations of the Self

nick stock — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Joan Y. Chiao, Tokiko Harada, Hidetsugu Komeda, Zhang Li, Yoko Mano, Daisuke Saito, Todd B. Parrish, Norihiro Sadato and Tetsuya Iidaka

People living in multicultural environments often encounter situations which require them to acquire different cultural schemas and to switch between these cultural schemas depending on their immediate sociocultural context. Prior behavioral studies show that priming cultural schemas reliably impacts mental processes and behavior underlying self-concept. However, less well understood is whether or not cultural priming affects neurobiological mechanisms underlying the self. Here we examined whether priming cultural values of individualism and collectivism in bicultural individuals affects neural activity in cortical midline structures underlying self-relevant processes using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Biculturals primed with individualistic values showed increased activation within medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) during general relative to contextual self-judgments, whereas biculturals primed with collectivistic values showed increased response within MPFC and PCC during contextual relative to general self-judgments. Moreover, degree of cultural priming was positively correlated with degree of MPFC and PCC activity during culturally congruent self-judgments. These findings illustrate the dynamic influence of culture on neural representations underlying the self and, more broadly, suggest a neurobiological basis by which people acculturate to novel environments.

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Democracy and Judicial Review: Are They Really Incompatible?

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Annabelle Lever

This article shows that judicial review has a democratic justification, although it is not necessary for democratic government and its virtues are controversial and often speculative. Against critics like Waldron and Bellamy, it shows that judges, no less than legislators, can embody democratic forms of representation, accountability and participation. Hence, judicial review is not undemocratic simply because it enables unelected judges to over-rule elected legislators when people disagree about rights. Against recent defenders of judicial review, such as Eisgruber and Brettschneider, it shows that democratic arguments for judicial review do not require judges to be better at protecting rights than legislators. Hence a democratic justification for judicial review does not depend on complex and inevitably controversial interpretations and evaluations of judicial as opposed to legislative judgments. Democratic government does not demand special virtue, competence or wisdom in its citizens or their leaders. From a democratic perspective, therefore, the case for judicial review is that it enables individuals to vindicate their rights against government in ways that parallel those they commonly use against each other. This makes judicial review normatively attractive whether or not it leads to better decisions than would be made by other means.

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Measuring the Quality of Life in the U.S.: Political Reflections

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Jacob Hacker

A review of The Measure of America: American Human Development Report, 2008-2009, by Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, and Eduardo Borges Martins. Reports from abroad on the American condition have a special place in the canon of social commentary. There is Lord Bryce's American Commonwealth (1888), Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906) and, of course—the standard setter—Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in 1835. What makes these works touchstones is not just the quality of the analysis or the fame of their authors but the privileged status they have come to enjoy as works of external reflection and criticism. For a people prone to ignore the rest of the world or see abroad only a mirror image of themselves, Americans have always had a surprisingly soft spot for the foreign observer willing to discourse on what makes their nation unique.

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Imagination, Concentration, and Generalization: Peirce on the Reasoning Abilities of the Mathematician

Cait — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

By Daniel G. Campos

I discuss the epistemic conditions for the possibility of mathematical discovery that are implied by Peirce’s logic of mathematical inquiry. Peirce describes the mathematician’s reasoning abilities as the powers of imagination, concentration, and generalization. I interpret all three as different semiotic abilities to reason with mathematical icons, given Peirce’s conception of mathematics as the study of what is true of hypothetical states of things and his view of mathematical method as experimentation upon diagrams that embody formal relations. These abilities come into play at different stages of the process of experimentation upon diagrams. I illustrate Peirce’s view with a historical example from ancient Greek geometry.

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Attending to Nature: Empathetic Engagement with the More than Human World

Cait — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

By Lori Gruen

Val Plumwood urged us to attend to earth others in non-dualistic ways. In this essay I suggest that such attention be promoted through what I call "engaged empathy." Engaged empathy involves critical attention to the conditions that undermine the well being or flourishing of those to whom empathy is directed and this requires moral agents to attend to things they might not have otherwise. Engaged empathy requires gaining wisdom and perspective and, importantly, motivates the empathizer to act ethically.

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A Theology of Meaning: Hasidism and Deconstruction in Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire

Cait — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

By Lauren Barlow

Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire, released in 1972, is a personal retelling of the lives and legends of the early Hasidic masters of Eastern Europe. The novel begins with the movement's founder, the Baal Shem, and chronicles the rise and development of the movement through the teachings and lives of those who followed him. Although these lives are filled with fantasy, paradox, and contradiction, Wiesel's account has one constant message: in the suffering of exile, every Jew can speak for God. When Souls on Fire was released, Victor Malka asked Elie Wiesel, "What is, for you, the greatest Hasidic saying?" and Wiesel replied, "There is much to choose from. Without doubt, one that I find beautiful and like very much is the saying of this master: 'I have always sought to discover what man is, and finally I have understood. He is the language of God'" (Malka 37). And this is the message that Wiesel explores in Souls on Fire as he presents the words of Hasidic masters who taught that, despite God's absence, every Jew can give meaning to existence and provide comfort in suffering through word and deed. Stated more simply, Wiesel's Hasidism teaches that through speech and action, man can become the language of God. For this paper, I would like to explore in Souls on Fire how it is that man is the language of God. And in exploring this question, I would also like to illustrate the resonances between this aspect of Jewish theology and deconstruction, by drawing from Derrida's "Edmond Jabés and The Question of the Book." For, the correspondence between these two illustrates that in the absence of God and all that He symbolizes, writing can be a form of prayer that can begin to redeem both man and God.

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Translation as Self-Consciousness: Ancient Sciences, Antediluvian Wisdom, and the ‘Abbāsid Translation Movement

Cait — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

By Hayrettín Yücesoy

This article discusses the translation of ancient Greek, Indian, and Persian texts of philosophy and sciences into Arabic from the eighth through the tenth centuries c.e. In particular, it addresses the issue of how ancient sciences were justified and legitimized in the early ‘Abbāsid period (ca. 750–850). Modern scholars have so far devoted a great deal of attention to the role of the caliphate and its administrative elite in the translation movement, but they have by and large neglected the role of prevailing ideological and intellectual discourses as a major component of the legitimating process in ‘Abbāsid society. Less concerned with documenting practical needs or emphasizing the role of the caliphate to explain the history of the translation movement, this article explores how the narratives of prophetic and antediluvian wisdom as a discursive intervention shaped, within the broader context of scholarly consciousness, the reception history of ancient sciences. It argues that the reference to occult and prophetic knowledge, often attributed to Hermes, as the source of all knowledge, articulated, with the idioms of the developing discourse of ‘ilm, the desire to cast ancient sciences as part of an Islamic monotheistic narrative and the emerging historical consciousness that embraced the past as a theater of prophetic action.

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Nameless + harmless = blameless: When seemingly irrelevant factors influence judgment of (un)ethical behavior

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Francesca Gino, Lisa L. Shu and Max H. Bazerman

People often make judgments about the ethicality of others’ behaviors and then decide how harshly to punish such behaviors. When they make these judgments and decisions, sometimes the victims of the unethical behavior are identifiable, and sometimes they are not. In addition, in our uncertain world, sometimes an unethical action causes harm, and sometimes it does not. We argue that a rational assessment of ethicality should not depend on the identifiability of the victim of wrongdoing or the actual harm caused if the judge and the decision maker have the same information. Yet in five laboratory studies, we show that these factors have a systematic effect on how people judge the ethicality of the perpetrator of an unethical action. Our studies show that people judge behavior as more unethical when: (1) identifiable vs. unidentifiable victims are involved and (2) the behavior leads to a negative rather than a positive outcome. We also find that people’s willingness to punish wrongdoers is consistent with their judgments, and we offer preliminary evidence on how to reduce these biases.

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The Problem of Single-Party Predominance in an Unconsolidated Democracy: The Example of Argentina

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Leslie E. Anderson

Parties can be a crucial to democratic function but not all parties or party systems are democratic. Some parties are fully competitive within a pluralist system while others, notably hegemonic parties, are antithetical to democracy. Between competitive, pluralist party systems and hegemonic party systems lie predominant party systems. These are compatible with democracy where democracy is fully consolidated but inhibit democratic consolidation in settings with an authoritarian history or where the rule of law is incomplete. The effect of predominant parties in unconsolidated democracies has not been fully studied in comparative context. I scrutinize this problem in Argentina, which has followed an electoral calendar for two decades, but lacks a fully pluralist system of power-sharing among two nationally-competitive parties. The authoritarian background of Peronism, of Argentina itself and the limited competitive potential of the Radical Party have curtailed democratic development. The article underscores the seriousness of Argentina's dilemma by contrasting its situation with Democratic Party predominance in the United States Deep South in the 1940s. The comparison of democratic development in an older democracy with that of a newer democracy illustrates that some of the processes of consolidation are similar and that the experience of older democracies may indicate possible solutions for newer democracies.

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Restricted and Elaborated Modes in the Cultural Analysis of Politics

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Brian Steensland

The "cultural turn" that swept across the social sciences a generation ago ushered in renewed attention to the cultural analysis of politics. Yet despite this growing area of research, there remains a lack of integration between cultural and noncultural studies of political phenomena. Should this state of affairs be a source of concern for cultural sociologists? I believe it should be. In this essay, I outline reasons why this is the case and what might be done to address this issue. Drawing loosely on Basil Bernstein's distinction between "restricted" and "elaborated" codes, I suggest that cultural analyses of politics need to be more "elaborated" in nature and I offer three guidelines that can orient this type of research program.

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The ‘return to community’

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Barbara Fawcett, Maurice Hanlon

In Australia and the United Kingdom over the past two decades,the way human service professionals have been involved in ‘communities’,whether defined by ‘place’, ‘interest’or ‘exclusion’, has varied with the political complexionof the government in power. This has resulted in both opportunitiesfor and constraints on human services practice and communityparticipation. In this article, the terminology and the conceptualframes associated with work both in and with communities arecritically scrutinized. However, it is also contended that spatialanalysis and social entrepreneurship can enable those workingin the field to respond productively to the New Public Managementand ‘Third Way’ approaches that have shaped thepolicy context of human services practice. It is argued thata form of spatial analysis and of social entrepreneurship canbe used to facilitate meaningful participation in decision-makingprocesses in a variety of communities and to re-forge socialconnections at a range of levels.

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A Social Representations Approach To The Communication Between Different Spheres: An Analysis Of The Impacts Of Two Discursive Formats

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Susana Batel and Paula Castro

This paper discusses the potential of the notions of reification and consensualization as developed by the theory of social representations as analytical tools for addressing the communication between the lay and scientific spheres. Social Representations Theory started by offering an over-sharp distinction between the reified and the consensual universes of which science and common sense, respectively, were presented as paradigmatic. This paper, however, suggests that the notions of consensual and reified can be considered as describing two distinct communicative formats: reification implying the use of arguments which establish prescriptions for representations and action, and consensualization relying on arguments which recognize the heterogeneity of representation and action. We illustrate this proposal through the analysis of a case in which the expert and the lay spheres of a Lisbon neighborhood opposed each other regarding the new laws of public participation in community matters. This analysis showed how reification and consensualization can be used as discursive formats by both spheres. The implications of the use of reification and consensualization and how they may depend on several power resources and have different impacts on social change are discussed.

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Unconscious Learning versus Visual Perception: Dissociable Roles for Gamma Oscillations Revealed in MEG

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Maximilien Chaumon, Denis Schwartz and Catherine Tallon-Baudry

Oscillatory synchrony in the gamma band (30–120 Hz) has been involved in various cognitive functions including conscious perception and learning. Explicit memory encoding, in particular, relies on enhanced gamma oscillations. Does this finding extend to unconscious memory encoding? Can we dissociate gamma oscillations related to unconscious learning and to conscious perception? We investigate these issues in a magnetoencephalographic experiment using a modified version of the contextual cueing paradigm. In this visual search task, repeated presentation of search arrays triggers an unconscious spatial learning process that speeds reaction times but leaves conscious perception unaffected. In addition to a high-frequency perceptual gamma activity present throughout the experiment, we reveal the existence of a fronto-occipital network synchronized in the low gamma range specifically engaged in unconscious learning. This network shows up as soon as a display is searched for the second time and disappears as behavior gets affected. We suggest that oscillations in this network shape neural processing to build an efficient neural route for learned displays. Accordingly, in the last part of the experiment, evoked responses dissociate learned images at early latencies, suggesting that a sharpened representation is activated without resort on learning gamma oscillations, whereas perceptual gamma oscillations remain unaffected.

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What Is Political Psychology?

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Kristen Renwick Monroea, William Chiua, Adam Martina and Bridgette Portman

We contribute to a greater understanding of political psychology by 1) collecting data in a more systematic way for the intellectual community, 2) sensitizing students to the extent to which any intellectual discipline is socially constructed and is a work in progress, 3) heightening awareness of the political aspects of intellectual life, 4) exposing readers to the wide variety of diverse approaches and methodologies utilized by political psychologists, and 5) suggesting the range of topics that political psychology can address successfully and the range of techniques it can utilize.

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Public Intellectuality: Academies of Exhibition and the New Disciplinary Secession

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Patricia Mooney Nickel

Painting in fin-de-siècle Vienna, like public intellectuality in fin-de-siècle America, was an act of portrayal at a time when artists then, like intellectuals today, composed in an environment characterized by rapid technological change, conservatism, and a government bureaucracy that attempted to pre-empt individual decisions about everyday life. In Vienna this environment was coupled with a public which "was nothing if not conservative. Not only the new, the unfamiliar, but also the great was to be distrusted… Add to which, there was a certain delight in the persecution of the great…" $ Public hostility to counter-portrayals of reality was reinforced by bureaucracies for whom, "the unforeseen, the irrational was excluded; not only the administrative, but also the academic and cultural institutions of the capital ossified beyond any possibility of change…" 5 Intellectual visions of alternatives are likewise judged to be extraneous in fin-de-siècle America, where a letter to The Economist in December 2008 charged that "Academics of all persuasions are where they are today because they believe they know better than anyone else how things should work. Whether many are capable of actually making the world work is quite another issue. The difficulties we face now are not academic; they are real public-policy problems." 6

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A Longitudinal Test of the Model of Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Miriam Matthews, Shana Levin, Jim Sidanius

Using data from a longitudinal study of college students, this study assessed the relationships among the threat perceptions of realistic threat and intergroup anxiety, the ideological motives of system justification and social dominance orientation (SDO), and political conservatism. Those who had higher perceptions of realistic threat and intergroup anxiety at the end of their first year of college showed higher levels of system justification and SDO at the end of their second and third years of college, controlling for precollege expressions of each variable. Higher levels of these two ideological motives at the end of students' second and third years of college were associated with more politically conservative attitudes at the end of students' fourth year of college, again controlling for precollege expressions. These longitudinal results are discussed in terms of a model of political conservatism as motivated social cognition.

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Purpose: giftedness in intrapersonal intelligence.

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Seana Moran

Purpose is an internal compass that integrates engagement in activities that affect others, self-awareness of one's reasons, and the intention to continue these activities. We argue that purpose represents giftedness in intrapersonal intelligence, which processes information related to self, identity, self-regulation, and one's place in the world. Purpose is an extraordinary achievement. It is an ideal that young people are expected to accomplish by the end of high school, yet in our mixed methods study, only 26% of our sample overall (N=270 youth age 12-22) expressed a purpose. Still, purpose can be achieved precociously. Some youth achieve purpose much earlier than the norm: 11 6th graders in our sample showed a purpose.

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Automatic Evaluation

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Melissa J. Ferguson and Vivian Zayas

Humans continuously evaluate aspects of their environment (people, objects, places) in an automatic fashion (i.e., unintentionally, rapidly). Such evaluations can be highly adaptive, triggering behavioral responses away from threats and toward rewards in the environment. Even in the absence of immediate threats and fleeting rewards, the ability to automatically evaluate aspects of the environment enables individuals to effortlessly make sense of their world without depleting limited and valuable cognitive resources. We discuss two lines of research on automatic evaluation: The first demonstrates that people can evaluate a stimulus even when they are not conscious of the stimulus and thus unaware of having evaluated it. The second line of work shows that even when people are conscious of a stimulus, they may evaluate it without intending to do so. We end by discussing current theoretical questions regarding this topic.

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The Process of Personal Change Through Reading Fictional Narratives: Implications for Psychotherapy Practice and Theory.

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Heidi M. Levitt, Woraporn Rattanasampan, Sean Suwichit, Caroline Stanley, Tamara Robinson

This qualitative study provides an understanding of how and when individuals experience transformational change as a consequence of reading narratives. Six participants who attributed significant personal changes to reading were recruited and interviewed. The investigators used grounded theory method to analyze these interviews and identify processes through which change unfolded. The core category of the analysis was identification with characters' experiences created a safe venue to consider threat and experiment with new possibilities and perspectives. Empathizing with protagonists enabled readers to integrate new modes of responding to personally difficult situations. Implications for bibliotherapy and narrative therapy are discussed.

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Distinguishing the Power of Agency from Agentic Power: A Note on Weber and the "Black Box" of Personal Agency

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Colin Campbell

The concept of agency, although central to many sociological debates, has remained frustratingly elusive to pin down. This article is an attempt to open up what has been called the "black box" of personal agency by distinguishing clearly between two contrasting conceptions of the phenomenon. These two conceptions are very apparent in the manner in which the concept is defined in sociological reference works, resembling as it does a similar contrast in the treatment of the concept of power. The two are referred to as type 1 and type 2 or the power of agency as compared with agentic power, the essential contrast being that the first refers to an actor's ability to initiate and maintain a program of action while the second refers to an actor's ability to act independently of the constraining power of social structure. The nature of these two forms of personal agency is then illustrated by referring to material taken from Weber's essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this essay itself being understood as an argument that focuses on the crucial role played by an increase in the power of agency in ushering in the modern world. Finally, it is argued that these two conceptions of agency possess no given logical relationship with each other, it being perfectly possible for individuals to be possessed of considerable power of agency while lacking agentic power, and vice versa. It is therefore concluded that it is important, in all discussions of human agency, to distinguish clearly between these two forms.

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Does Habitus Matter? A Comparative Review of Bourdieu's Habitus and Simon's Bounded Rationality with Some Implications for Economic Sociology

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Francois Collet

In this article, I revisit Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and contrast it with Herbert Simon's notion of bounded rationality. Through a discussion of the literature of economic sociology on status and Fligstein's political-cultural approach, I argue that this concept can be a source of fresh insights into empirical problems. I find that the greater the change in the social environment, the more salient the benefits of using habitus as a tool to analyze agents' behavior.

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Philosophical Pitfalls: The Methods Debate in American Political Science

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Nivien Saleh

Positivism dominates research in U.S. political science. I will show that even though
critical realism is virtually unknown in the discipline, realist concepts have found their
way into debates among qualitative methodologists. The analysis begins with a
juxtaposition of positivist and realist foundations. Next, I will trace the methodology
debate that has unfolded in the U.S., examining in what ways it reflects these
foundational assumptions. Over the last number of years, I demonstrate, qualitative
methodologists have engaged in philosophical hybridity, because they have drawn on
realist concepts while continuing to adhere to an empiricist ontology. This kind of cherry-
picking is a perilous strategy, and I suggest that methodologists examine their ontological
assumptions, especially their views on causation. To do so, they need to engage critical
realism. This exercise would benefit political science, because it would provide scholars
with exciting new research possibilities. Moreover, critical realism is well-suited to
support the discipline’s central quest: gaining insight into the world by using few
examined cases to draw inferences to larger sets of unexamined cases.

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Contextualized self: When the self runs into social dilemmas

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Chang-Jiang Liu, Shu Li

Research on the construction of self and of others has indicated that the way that individuals construe themselves and others exerts an important influence on their cognition, emotion, and even behavior. The present study extends this line of research to mixed-motive situations in which short-term individual and long-term collective interests are at odds. In addition, this study associates the importance of context interdependence, and specifically its interaction with independent self-construal, with an individual's cooperative behavior. We used a priming task to manipulate the level of self-construal and also manipulated the degree of interdependent context by giving participants a chance to assign rewards either to their group members or to themselves alone. The results showed that when participants received interdependent (as opposed to independent) self-construal priming, they consistently contributed highly, regardless of context manipulation. In contrast, those primed with an independent self-construal contributed less in the investment game, but only when placed in a context where group members were encouraged to think about their individual (versus mutual) fate. In this situation they contributed the least to the group in the game. These findings indicate that independent self-construal in a low interdependence context produces the most competitive behavior. The results also showed that how participants felt about their interaction with other group members mediated the effect of context interdependence on cooperative behavior, and possibly that was especially the case for independent self-construal. The results demonstrate that the self can be contextualized and embedded in the social contexts and symbolic systems within which people live.

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The Evolution of Misbelief

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Ryan T. McKay, Daniel C. Dennett

From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this rule? How can we account for mistaken beliefs, bizarre delusions, and instances of self-deception? We explore this question in some detail. We begin by articulating a distinction between two general types of misbelief: those resulting from a breakdown in the normal functioning of the belief formation system (e.g., delusions) and those arising in the normal course of that system's operations (e.g., beliefs based on incomplete or inaccurate information). The former are instances of biological dysfunction or pathology, reflecting “culpable” limitations of evolutionary design. Although the latter category includes undesirable (but tolerable) by-products of “forgivably” limited design, our quarry is a contentious subclass of this category: misbeliefs best conceived as design features. Such misbeliefs, unlike occasional lucky falsehoods, would have been systematically adaptive in the evolutionary past. Such misbeliefs, furthermore, would not be reducible to judicious – but doxastically noncommittal – action policies. Finally, such misbeliefs would have been adaptive in themselves, constituting more than mere by-products of adaptively biased misbelief-producing systems. We explore a range of potential candidates for evolved misbelief, and conclude that, of those surveyed, only positive illusions meet our criteria.

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"Can Do" Attitudes: Some Positive Illusions Are Not Misbeliefs

Owen Flanagan

McKay & Dennett (M&D) argue that positive illusions are a plausible candidate for a class of evolutionarily “selected for” misbeliefs. I argue (Flanagan 1991; 2007) that the class of alleged positive illusions is a hodge-podge, and that some of its members are best understood as positive attitudes, hopes, and the like, not as beliefs at all.

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Adaptive Misbelief or Judicious Pragmatic Acceptance?

Keith Frankish

This commentary highlights the distinction between belief and pragmatic acceptance, and asks whether the positive illusions discussed in section 13 of the target article may be judicious pragmatic acceptances rather than adaptive misbeliefs. I discuss the characteristics of pragmatic acceptance and make suggestions about how to determine whether positive illusions are attitudes of this type.

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Why We Don't Need Built-in Misbeliefs

Carol S. Dweck

In this commentary, I question the idea that positive illusions are evolved misbeliefs on the grounds that positive illusions are often maladaptive, are not universal, and may be by-products of existing mechanisms. Further, because different beliefs are adaptive in different situations and cultures, it makes sense to build in a readiness to form beliefs rather than the beliefs themselves.

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Positive Illusions and Positive Collusions: How Social Life Abets Self-Enhancing Beliefs

Jonathon D. Brown

Most people hold overly (though not excessively) positive self-views of themselves, their ability to shape environmental events, and their future. These positive illusions are generally (though not always) beneficial, promoting achievement, psychological adjustment, and physical well-being. Social processes conspire to produce these illusions, suggesting that affiliation patterns may have evolved to nurture and sustain them.

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Non-instrumental belief is largely founded on singularity

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

George Ainslie

The radical evolutionary step that divides human decision-making from that of nonhumans is the ability to excite the reward process for its own sake, in imagination. Combined with hyperbolic over-valuation of the present, this ability is a potential threat to both the individual's long term survival and the natural selection of high intelligence. Human belief is intrinsically “unfounded” or under-founded, which may or may not be adaptive.

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Extending the range of adaptive misbelief: Memory “distortions” as functional features

nick stock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Pascal Boyer

A large amount of research in cognitive psychology is focused on memory distortions, understood as deviations from various (largely implicit) standards. Many alleged distortions actually suggest a highly functional system that balances the cost of acquiring new information with the benefit of relevant, contextually appropriate decision-making. In this sense many memories may be examples of functionally adaptive misbelief.

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What’s Wrong With Science? Towards a People’s Rational Science of Delight and Compassion.

Cait — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

By Nicholas Maxwell.

What ought to be the aims of science? How can science best serve humanity? What would an ideal science be like, a science that is sensitively and humanely responsive to the needs, problems and aspirations of people? How ought the institutional enterprise of science to be related to the rest of society? What ought to be the relationship between science and art, knowledge and wisdom, thought and feeling, reason and desire, mind and heart? Should the social sciences model themselves on the natural sciences: or ought they to take a different form if they are to serve the interests of humanity objectively, sensitively and rigorously? Might it be possible to get into human life, into art, education, politics, industry, international affairs, and other domains of human activity, the same kind of progressive success that is found so strikingly, on the intellectual level, within science? These are some of the questions tackled by What’s Wrong With Science?

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Emotional Reactivity Across the Adult Life Span: The Cognitive Pragmatics Make a Difference

wattawa — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 06:00:00 GMT

by Ute Kunzmann and David Richter

Previously, we found that during films about age-typical losses, older adults experienced greater sadness than young adults, whereas their physiological responses were just as large. In the present study, our goal was to replicate this finding and extend past work by examining the role of cognitive functioning in age differences in emotional reactivity. We measured the autonomic and subjective responses of 240 adults (age range = 20 to 70) while they viewed films about age-typical losses from our previous work. Findings were fully supportive of our past work: The magnitude of subjective reactions to our films increased linearly over the adult years, whereas there were no age differences on the level of physiological reactivity. We also found that the subjective reactions of adults with high pragmatic intelligence were of moderate size independent of their own age or the age relevance of the emotion elicitor. In contrast, the subjective reactions of adults low on pragmatic intelligence were more variable. Together, this evidence suggests that research on age differences in emotional reactivity may benefit from a perspective that considers individual difference variables as well as contextual variations.

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Fast and Frugal Heuristics: Tools of Social Rationality

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Ralph Hertwig and Stefan M. Herzog

Homo economicus cannot help but be puzzled by people's baffling array of social behaviors that conflict with economic theory. To accommodate these “deviant” behaviors within the standard view of rationality, defined in terms of probability theory, logic and rational choice theory, economists and psychologists tend to inject some psychology into the rational choice framework. In contrast, we propose to start afresh: We put forth the thesis that humans' social intelligence is not qualitatively different from their nonsocial intelligence, and that important aspects of both kinds of intelligence can be modeled in terms of boundedly rational fast and frugal heuristics. These heuristics can be ecologically and socially rational in that they exploit the structure of physical and social environments as well as evolved capacities to foster performance both in games against nature and in social games.

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The Cognitive-Ecological Approach to Rationality in Social Psychology

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Klaus Fiedler and Michaela Wänke

The entire discipline of social cognition has been greatly influenced by the heuristics-and-biases research program, which was traditionally based on an internal attribution of bounded rationality to the individual's motives and resource limitations. The cognitive-ecological approach challenges this fundamental attribution bias in the researchers' mind, offering alternative accounts for a long list of allegedly cognitive biases and shortcomings in terms of external, environmental sampling biases. In addition to suggesting reattributions for old findings, the cognitive-ecological approach has inspired the discovery of novel phenomena, such as interactive sampling schemes, communication biases, multi-level problems, and ecological properties that constrain the input to cognitive processes. While this reattribution offers excuses for the mind's apparent biases, it also entails an accusation for the meta-cognitive myopia that prevents the mind from understanding the pitfalls of the information environment. Thus, rather than taking either a cynically pessimistic or a naively optimistic side in the rationality debate, the cognitive-ecological approach emphasizes the fascinating interactions of cognitive and ecological constraints of information processing.

Adaptive Rationality: An Evolutionary Perspective on Cognitive Bias

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Martie G. Haselton, Gregory A. Bryant, Andreas Wilke, David A. Frederick, Andrew Galperin, Willem E. Frankenhuis, Tyler Moore

A casual look at the literature in social cognition reveals a vast collection of biases, errors, violations of rational choice, and failures to maximize utility. One is tempted to draw the conclusion that the human mind is woefully muddled. We present a three-category evolutionary taxonomy of evidence of biases: biases are (a) heuristics, (b) error management effects, or (c) experimental artifacts. We conclude that much of the research on cognitive biases can be profitably reframed and understood in evolutionary terms. An adaptationist perspective suggests that the mind is remarkably well designed for important problems of survival and reproduction, and not fundamentally irrational. Our analysis is not an apologia intended to place the rational mind on a pedestal for admiration. Rather, it promises practical outcomes including a clearer view of the architecture of systems for judgment and decision making, and exposure of clashes between adaptations designed for the ancestral past and the demands of the present.

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Neuroculture

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Giovanni Frazzetto & Suzanne Anker

Neuroscience addresses questions that, if resolved, will reveal aspects of our individuality. Therefore neuroscientific knowledge is not solely constrained within laboratories, but readily captures the attention of the public at large. Ideas, concepts and images in neuroscience widely circulate in culture and are portrayed in literature, film, works of art, the mass media and commercial products, therefore shaping social values and consumer practices. The interaction between art and science offers an opportunity to make the scientific community and the public aware of the social and ethical implications of the scientific advances in neuroscience.

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The motivated use of moral principles

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

by Eric Luis Uhlmann, David A. Pizarro, David Tannenbaum and Peter H. Ditto

Five studies demonstrated that people selectively use general moral principles to rationalize preferred moral conclusions. In Studies 1a and 1b, college students and community respondents were presented with variations on a traditional moral scenario that asked whether it was permissible to sacrifice one innocent man in order to save a greater number of people. Political liberals, but not relatively more conservative participants, were more likely to endorse consequentialism when the victim had a stereotypically White American name than when the victim had a stereotypically Black American name. Study 2 found evidence suggesting participants believe that the moral principles they are endorsing are general in nature: when presented sequentially with both versions of the scenario, liberals again showed a bias in their judgments to the initial scenario, but demonstrated consistency thereafter. Study 3 found conservatives were more likely to endorse the unintended killing of innocent civilians when Iraqis civilians were killed than when Americans civilians were killed, while liberals showed no significant effect. In Study 4, participants primed with patriotism were more likely to endorse consequentialism when Iraqi civilians were killed by American forces than were participants primed with multiculturalism. However, this was not the case when American civilians were killed by Iraqi forces. Implications for the role of reason in moral judgment are discussed.

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Investigating the Role of Two Types of Understanding in Relationship Well-Being: Understanding Is More Important Than Knowledge

A. J. Stasic — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

By: Monique M. H. Pollman and Catrin Finkenauer

Understanding is at the heart of intimate relationships. Itis unclear, however, whether understanding—partners’subjective feeling that they understand each other—orknowledge—partners’ accurate knowledge of each other—ismore important for relationship well-being. The present articlepits these two types of understanding against each other andinvestigates their effects on relationship well-being. In aprospective study among 199 newlywed couples, partners’self-reported and perceived understanding and their knowledgein different domains were assessed. Understanding was independentof knowledge. Self-reported and perceived understanding predictedrelationship well-being but neither type of knowledge did. Thus,subjectively feeling that one understands and is understoodby one’s partner appears to be more important to relationshipwell-being than actually knowing and being known by one’spartner.

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Emotions as Within or Between People? Cultural Variation in Lay Theories of Emotion Expression and Inference

A. J. Stasic — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

By Yukiko Uchida, Sarah S. M. Townsend, Hazel Rose Markus, and Hilary B. Bergsieker

Four studies using open-ended and experimental methods testthe hypothesis that in Japanese contexts, emotions are understoodas between people, whereas in American contexts, emotions areunderstood as primarily within people. Study 1 analyzed televisioninterviews of Olympic athletes. When asked about their relationships,Japanese athletes used significantly more emotion words thanAmerican athletes. This difference was not significant whenquestions asked directly about athletes' feelings. In Study2, when describing an athlete's emotional reaction to winning,Japanese participants implicated others more often than Americanparticipants. After reading an athlete's self-description, Japaneseparticipants inferred more emotions when the athlete mentionedrelationships, whereas American participants inferred more emotionswhen the athlete focused only on herself (Study 3). Finally,when viewing images of athletes, Japanese participants inferredmore emotions for athletes pictured with teammates, whereasAmerican participants inferred more emotions for athletes picturedalone (Studies 4a and 4b).

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Individuals, groups, fitness and utility: multi-level selection meets social choice theory

A. J. Stasic — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

By Samir Okasha

In models of multi-level selection, the property of Darwinian fitness is attributed to entities at more than one level of the biological hierarchy, e.g. individuals and groups. However, the relation between individual and group fitness is a controversial matter. Theorists disagree about whether group fitness should always, or ever, be defined as total (or average) individual fitness. This paper tries to shed light on the issue by drawing on work in social choice theory, and pursuing an analogy between fitness and utility. Social choice theorists have long been interested in the relation between individual and social utility, and have identified conditions under which social utility equals total (or average) individual utility. These ideas are used to shed light on the biological problem.

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The long reach of philosophy of biology

A. J. Stasic — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

A review of Michael Ruse's book by Matt Gers.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology covers a broad range of topics in this field. It is not just a textbook focusing on evolutionary theory but encompasses ethics, social science and behaviour too. This essay outlines the scope of the work, discusses some points on methodology in the philosophy of biology, and then moves on to a more detailed analysis of cultural evolution and the applicability of a philosophy of biology toolkit to the social sciences. It is noted that concepts like the species concept may generalise to other domains whilst failing to account for the nature of all species. Finally, the author notes the omission of any discussion of information in biology.

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Knowledge and Intellectual Practice in Swahili Context: 'Wisdom' and the Social Dimensions of Knowledge

Cait — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

By Kai Kresse

This article investigates ‘wisdom’ from an ethnographic perspective that pays attention to the ways in which knowledge is performed, appreciated, negotiated and questioned in everyday life in Mombasa, on the Swahili coast. It discusses the baraza setting (daily meeting points for male social peers) as a venue for intellectual practice and the appreciation of wisdom. Basic features of communicative interaction identified there can also be found to be in play when looking at case studies of individuals and their performances. The article looks at how two genres (didactic tenzi poetry and Ramadhan lectures) are used by Swahili intellectuals who are regarded as exceptional in their field. Verbal, performative and social skills are found to be crucial aspects of wisdom, which also has to do with being able to engage with common social concerns in a manner that leads to further insight and intellectual orientation for others. In this sense, social responsibilities and moral obligations in the use of knowledge play an important role. Overall, the article seeks to contribute to a general discussion of wisdom, based on insights gained on the East African coast.

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Cognitive Error and Contemplative Practices: The Cultivation of Discernment in Mind and Heart

Cait — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

By Wesley J. Wildman

Brains are amazing organs in all creatures with central nervous systems and especially in human beings. But they are not perfect. Without forgetting the larger success story of cognitive evolution, I want to explore the way that cognitive biases sometimes produce errors in both religious and secular social settings and how such errors can be diagnosed and corrected when they occur. This will involve noticing that error diagnosis and correction is a process that certain social groups have a vested interest in resisting or neglecting, in some respects, while the very same social groups may furnish resources that support the detection of cognitive errors, in other respects.

This presents a moral quandary for both secular and religious groups. Should we educate children to be fully aware of their cognitive vulnerability to advertising, thereby learning how to resist and eventually become immune to one of the fundamental power sources of modern market economies? Should religious groups explain to young people their cognitive tendencies to posit the action of supernatural beings whether or not any such action exists, even though this may disrupt the power of religious groups to forge bracing social togetherness that supports psychologically useful coping skills? While I do not seek to answer such complex moral questions in this paper, I do argue that knowledge of cognitive biases and the resulting tendencies to cognitive error, self-defeating behaviors, and self-deception should be made available to those individuals and groups who are interested in promoting a high degree of critical self-awareness in the analysis of beliefs and behaviors in both secular and religious contexts.

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Beholding the Logos: The Church, the Environment, and the Meaning of Man

Cait — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

By Christopher J. Thompson

To behold the heavens and gaze upon the infinite expanse of a star-studded sky, indeed to ponder any vista of creation's splendor is to be drawn not merely into the mystery of creation, the intricacies of cause and effect; rather, to ponder the mystery of things is to be inevitably drawn into the meaning of the human person. The splendor of being thrusts us back upon ourselves and calls us to question the meaning of our own existence. ¹

Does our Catholic intellectual tradition help us navigate such questions? Is there a distinctive Catholic voice crying in the wilderness?

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Optimal Predictions in Everyday Cognition: The Wisdom of Individuals or Crowds?

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

by Michael C. Mozer, Harold Pashler and Hadjar Homaei

Griffiths and Tenenbaum (2006) asked individuals to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday events (e.g., cake baking times), and reported that predictions were optimal, employing Bayesian inference based on veridical prior distributions. Although the predictions conformed strikingly to statistics of the world, they reflect averages over many individuals. On the conjecture that the accuracy of the group response is chiefly a consequence of aggregating across individuals, we constructed simple, heuristic approximations to the Bayesian model premised on the hypothesis that individuals have access merely to a sample of k instances drawn from the relevant distribution. The accuracy of the group response reported by Griffiths and Tenenbaum could be accounted for by supposing that individuals each utilize only two instances. Moreover, the variability of the group data is more consistent with this small-sample hypothesis than with the hypothesis that people utilize veridical or nearly veridical representations of the underlying prior distributions. Our analyses lead to a qualitatively different view of how individuals reason from past experience than the view espoused by Griffiths and Tenenbaum.

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The Wisdom of Individuals: Exploring People’s Knowledge About Everyday Events Using Iterated Learning

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

by Stephan Lewandowsky, Thomas L. Grifﬁths, Michael L. Kalish

Determining the knowledge that guides human judgments is fundamental to understanding how people reason, make decisions, and form predictions. We use an experimental procedure called ‘‘iterated learning,’’ in which the responses that people give on one trial are used to generate the data they see on the next, to pinpoint the knowledge that informs people’s predictions about everyday events (e.g., predicting the total box ofﬁce gross of a movie from its current take). In particular, we use this method to discriminate between two models of human judgments: a simple Bayesian model (Grifﬁths & Tenenbaum, 2006) and a recently proposed alternative model that assumes people store only a few instances of each type of event in memory (MinK; Mozer, Pashler, & Homaei, 2008). Although testing these models using standard experimental procedures is difﬁcult due to differences in the number of free parameters and the need to make assumptions about the knowledge of individual learners, we show that the two models make very different predictions about the outcome of iterated learning. The results of an experiment using this methodology provide a rich picture of how much people know about the distributions of everyday quantities, and they are inconsistent with the predictions of the MinK model. The results suggest that accurate predictions about everyday events reﬂect relatively sophisticated knowledge on the part of individuals.

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The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Dreams to Tap into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

by Jeremy Taylor

"Renowned dream expert Jeremy Taylor can help you discover how the hidden messages in your dreams can change your life. In The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Dreams to Tap Into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life, Taylor shows us how dreams can be the keys to gaining insight into our past and our conflicts, as well as excursions into the fantastic realm of creative inspiration.

This book provides readers with specific, hands-on techniques to help them remember and interpret their dreams, establish a dream group, and learn the universal symbolism of dreaming.

Full of case histories and a thoughtful chapter about dreams as clues to the evolution of consciousness, this updated, revised and expanded edition of Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill is a life- changing and potentially world-changing work..."

Link to the publisher.

"I Was a Boy with Power to Talk" (Conf. 1.8.13): Augustine and Ancient Theories of Language Acquisition

Cait — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

By Tarmo Toom

This study compares Augustine's remarks on language acquisition in the Confessions with those of Stoics, Epicureans, and Pyrrhonists and assesses the similarities and differences of the respective accounts. It studies a specific issue in Augustine's philosophy of language, language acquisition, which so far and in connection with ancient theories has received only passing attention.

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Cortex and Memory: Emergence of a New Paradigm

nick stock — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Joaquín M. Fuster

Converging evidence from humans and nonhuman primates is obliging us to abandon conventional models in favor of a radically different, distributed-network paradigm of cortical memory. Central to the new paradigm is the concept of memory network or cognit—that is, a memory or an item of knowledge defined by a pattern of connections between neuron populations associated by experience. Cognits are hierarchically organized in terms of semantic abstraction and complexity. Complex cognits link neurons in noncontiguous cortical areas of prefrontal and posterior association cortex. Cognits overlap and interconnect profusely, even across hierarchical levels (heterarchically), whereby a neuron can be part of many memory networks and thus many memories or items of knowledge.

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The scent of supercolonies: the discovery, synthesis and behavioural verification of ant colony recognition cues

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Miriam Brandt, Ellen van Wilgenburg, Robert Sulc, Kenneth J Shea and Neil D Tsutsui (wisdom grantee)

Background

Ants form highly social and cooperative colonies that compete, and often fight, against other such colonies, both intra- and interspecifically. Some invasive ants take sociality to an extreme, forming geographically massive 'supercolonies' across thousands of kilometres. The success of social insects generally, as well as invasive ants in particular, stems from the sophisticated mechanisms used to accurately and precisely distinguish colonymates from non-colonymates. Surprisingly, however, the specific chemicals used for this recognition are virtually undescribed.

Results

Here, we report the discovery, chemical synthesis and behavioural testing of the colonymate recognition cues used by the widespread and invasive Argentine ant (Linepithema humile). By synthesizing pure versions of these chemicals in the laboratory and testing them in behavioural assays, we show that these compounds trigger aggression among normally amicable nestmates, but control hydrocarbons do not. Furthermore, behavioural testing across multiple different supercolonies reveals that the reaction to individual compounds varies from colony to colony -- the expected reaction to true colony recognition labels. Our results also show that both quantitative and qualitative changes to cuticular hydrocarbon profiles can trigger aggression among nestmates. The data point the way for the development of new, environmentally-friendly, control strategies based on the species-specific manipulation of aggressive behaviour.

Conclusions

Overall, our findings reveal the identity of specific chemicals used for colonymate recognition by the invasive Argentine ants. Although the particular chemicals used by other ants may differ, the patterns reported here are likely to be true for ants generally. As almost all invasive ants display widespread unicoloniality in their introduced ranges, our findings are particularly relevant for our understanding of the biology of these damaging invaders.

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How effectively do people learn from a variety of different opinions?

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

by Andrew Healy

This paper presents experimental evidence about how effectively individuals learn from information coming from heterogeneous sources. In the experiment, Thai subjects observed information that came from Americans and from other Thais that they could use to help them answer a series of questions. Despite listening too little to either group, subjects demonstrated a significant amount of statistical sophistication in how they weighed observed American information relative to observed Thai information. The data indicate that subjects understood that outside information has extra value because people from the same group tend to make the same kinds of mistakes. The results illustrate the importance of forming diverse groups to solve problems.

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The cognitive neuroscience of deception

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Giorgio Ganis and Julian Paul Keenan

William Hazlitt (1778-1830), a British writer, once asserted that, “life is the art of being deceived.” Human social relations are so steeped in deception that it is impossible to imagine life without it. From great drama sweeping one away momentarily to interleaved complex romantic relationships, the joining of humans is cemented in place by deception. The basis of who we are (or aren't) in relation to others is often predicated on falsification such that all moral, legal, and ethical systems must take account of this core feature of human nature. Some researchers have gone so far as to postulate that human brains are innately primed to deceive, since deception is recorded in all societies, extending back to the earliest written record, and it occurs early in life in a predictable manner. Given the appropriate abstract reasoning skills, along with basic social abilities, human brains quickly discover that rewards outweigh the costs associated with deception. It is therefore an important task of social neuroscience to reveal the inner workings of deception....

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When Elephants Fly: Differential Sensitivity of Right and Left Inferior Frontal Gyri to Discourse and World Knowledge

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Laura Menenti, Karl Magnus Petersson, René Scheeringa, and Peter Hagoort

Both local discourse and world knowledge are known to influence sentence processing. We investigated how these two sources of information conspire in language comprehension. Two types of critical sentences, correct and world knowledge anomalies, were preceded by either a neutral or a local context. The latter made the world knowledge anomalies more acceptable or plausible. We predicted that the effect of world knowledge anomalies would be weaker for the local context. World knowledge effects have previously been observed in the left inferior frontal region (Brodmann's area 45/47). In the current study, an effect of world knowledge was present in this region in the neutral context. We also observed an effect in the right inferior frontal gyrus, which was more sensitive to the discourse manipulation than the left inferior frontal gyrus. In addition, the left angular gyrus reacted strongly to the degree of discourse coherence between the context and critical sentence. Overall, both world knowledge and the discourse context affect the process of meaning unification, but do so by recruiting partly different sets of brain areas.

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Toward a Relativity Theory of Rationality

wattawa — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Arie W. Kruglanski and Edward Orehek

We analyze two conceptions of rationality featured in the social science literature, rationality as a means-ends relation and rationality as logical consistency. The former concerns the rationality of actions; it involves choosing the best means to one's ends and is naturally akin to conceptions of utility. The latter concerns the rationality of judgments, it involves their consistency with other knowledge and is naturally akin to conceptions of truth and probability. We assume that (1) a uniform process of judgment formation is involved in both rational and irrational judgments; it follows that the distinction between more or less rational instances must refer to judgmental outcomes rather than processes; (2) in the moment all judgments are consistent with the available evidence hence all are locally (and trivially!) rational. Accordingly, we present a relativity theory of rationality whereby any meaningful conception of rationality needs to transcend the local context and involve comparisons of local outcomes with detached (inter or intrapersonal) points of reference.

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The Role of Peer Social Capital in Educational Assimilation of Immigrant Youths

nick stock — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Igor Ryabov

The academic achievement of immigrant children has been a focus of social research for decades. Yet little attention has been paid to peer social capital and its importance as a school context factor for the academic success of immigrant youths. Using multilevel data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Waves 1 and 3), this article draws upon social capital theory and assimilation theory to examine the effects of peer social capital on the academic achievement and attainment of immigrant and native youths. The effects of three measures of peer social capital are studied, controlled for many important variables, for example, sociodemographic background variables, school characteristics, and family social capital. Results indicate that only the average GPA (grade point average) of peers had a consistent and significant effect on children's achievement and attainment, whereas the density and the homogeneity of the peer network did not. Furthermore, all three measures of peer social capital have stronger effects for immigrant youths than for native youths.

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Changing Lives, Resistant Institutions: A New Generation Negotiates Gender, Work, and Family Change

nick stock — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Kathleen Gerson

Sociology's enduring concern with explaining the links between individual and social change has never been more relevant. We are poised at a moment when changing lives are colliding with resistant institutions. These tensions have created social conflicts and personal dilemmas for women and men alike. To explain the interplay between lives and institutions and to develop effective strategies for transcending the impasse between public demands and private needs, we need a deeper understanding of how these structural and cultural conflicts play out in the lives of young women and men. This article proposes a framework for such an inquiry.

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The Mafioso Case: Autonomy and Self-respect

nick stock — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Carla Bagnoli

This article argues that immoralists do not fully enjoy autonomous agency because they are not capable of engaging in the proper form of practical reflection, which requires relating to others as having equal standing. An adequate diagnosis of the immoralist’s failure of agential authority requires a relational account of reflexivity and autonomy. This account has the distinctive merit of identifying the cost of disregarding moral obligations and of showing how immoralists may become susceptible to practical reason. The compelling quality of reason should not be represented as the capacity to force them to abide by morality on pain of incoherence. Rather, its authority (and objectivity) is shown when it presents them with the prospect of a transition that makes sense for them to undertake.

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Responsibility and the Brain Sciences

nick stock — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Felipe De Brigard, Eric Mandelbaum, David Ripley

Some theorists think that the more we get to know about the neural underpinnings of our behaviors, the less likely we will be to hold people responsible for their actions. This intuition has driven some to suspect that as neuroscience gains insight into the neurological causes of our actions, people will cease to view others as morally responsible for their actions, thus creating a troubling quandary for our legal system. This paper provides empirical evidence against such intuitions. Particularly, our studies of folk intuitions suggest that (1) when the causes of an action are described in neurological terms, they are not found to be any more exculpatory than when described in psychological terms, and (2) agents are not held fully responsible even for actions that are fully neurologically caused.

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Taken on Faith? The Impact of Uncertainty, Knowledge Relatedness, and Richness of Information on Entrepreneurial Opportunity Exploitation

nick stock — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Matthew S. Wood, J. Michael Pearson

This article develops a theoretical model that suggests thatdifferential levels of uncertainty, knowledge relatedness, andrichness of information will have a substantial impact on thedecision to engage in entrepreneurship. Effects of the individualdifferences fear of failure and general self-efficacy are alsoconsidered. Using a metric conjoint methodology, respondentsare asked to evaluate a series of profiles with different levelsof each attribute and then indicate their willingness to investin an entrepreneurial opportunity. This approach allows forthe calculation of main and interaction effects as well as theimportance of each factor in the investment decision. Resultsindicated that all three factors and their interactions playa significant role in the decision to engage in entrepreneurialaction. The degree of opportunity-related uncertainty was foundto be the most important factor in the decision-making process.

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Sit Back and Enjoy The Ride: Financial planners and the symbolic domination of clients.

nick stock — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Patrick F. Parnaby

Borrowing from Bourdieu’s theory of practice, specifically, the relationship between forms of capital and discourse on the one hand and the nature of symbolic domination on the other (see Bourdieu 1998; 1991), this paper seeks to answer the following question: what discursive strategies do personal financial planners use to facilitate desirable client behavior vis-à-vis market investment? On the basis of 32 semi-structured interviews with financial planners and textual analyses of relevant industry materials, I argue that planners use three essential discursive strategies: the naturalization of market volatility, the establishing of reasonable expectations, and the managing of external discourses. Together, these discursive strategies facilitate the symbolic domination of clients while cultivating a professional relationship amenable to long term investment and profitability.

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