The creative process has the potential to increase wellbeing and foster human flourishing (Dolan and Metcalfe, 2012 ; Forgeard and Eichner, 2014 ; O’Brien and Murray, 2015 ; Conner et al., 2018 ; Kaufman, 2018 ), yet has received little attention in the humanistic management literature. In this paper, we present three experiments showing that idea originators experience greater relationship conflict with counterparts who have committed perceived “idea theft”, i.e., proposed identical or related ideas. We test a model that identifies (...) a mechanism—self-threat—that mediates the relationship between idea theft and relationship conflict and identifies an intervention to ameliorate that self-threat via self-affirmation. Study 1 demonstrates the idea originator’s attribution of malign attributions to, and negative moral emotions toward, the counterpart. Study 2 demonstrates that idea originators ostracize both those who propose identical ideas and those who propose merely related ideas. In Study 3, evidence for self-threat as the mechanism underlying the negative relational consequences is provided via both a direct test of mediation as well as via moderation by self-affirmation. Our research contributes to the nascent idea theft literature and suggests a way to reduce its negative consequences. (shrink)

Historical analysis and policy making often require counterfactual thought experiments that isolate hypothesized causes from a vast array of historical possibilities. However, a core precept of Jervis's “systems thinking” is that causes are so interconnected that the historian can only with great difficulty imagine causation by subtracting all variables but one. Prediction, according to Jervis, is even more problematic: The more sensitive an event is to initial conditions (e.g., butterfly effects), the harder it is to derive accurate forecasts. Nevertheless, if (...) awareness of system effects can help forecasters better calibrate their probability estimates of whether or not certain events will come to pass, systems thinkers who are pessimistic about prediction are diluting their confidence too much. The challenge is a meta-cognitive one: thinking systematically about when to engage in systems thinking; and weighing the costs and benefits of using simple or complex heuristics in policy environments that can shift suddenly from quiescence to turbulence. (shrink)

International relations theories have often been faulted for not advancing falsifiable forecasts. Given the complexities of geopolitics and the near impossibility of satisfying the “ceteris paribus” clause in scientific hypothesis testing, this criticism imposes an unfair standard. It is reasonable however to ask about the predictive track records of international relations theorists who enter high-stakes policy debates. Whether a neorealist of neo-institutionalist proves an adroit or maladroit forecaster sheds little light on the truth status of their preferred theory but considerable (...) light on: (a) how much credence to attach to their claims about the likely outcomes of pursuing various policy options in specific theaters of conflict; (b) how superior forecasters blend abstract covering laws with real-world knowledge to generate well-calibrated probability estimates. (shrink)

Heuristics are necessary but far from sufficient explanations for moral judgment. This commentary stresses: (a) the need to complement cold, cognitive-economizing functionalist accounts with hot, value-expressive, social-identity-affirming accounts; and (b) the importance of conducting reflective-equilibrium thought and laboratory experiments that explore the permeability of the boundaries people place on the “thinkable.”.

Timur Kuran's Private Truths, Public Lies makes a compelling case that people often misrepresent their private preferences in response to real or imagined social pressures, that the relative power of competing interest groups to punish opinion deviance and reward conformity determines the patterns and pervasiveness of preference falsification, and that preference falsifi‐cation helps explain such diverse outcomes as the persistence and sudden collapse of communism and the precarious persistence of racial preferences in the United States and of the caste system (...) in India. Although preference falsification is important and raises questions about the legitimacy of the opinions expressed in opinion polls and elections, it does not seem widespread enough to warrant the conclusion that ordinary people lack the courage necessary to make democracy work. (shrink)

Intelligence analysts, like other professionals, form norms that define standards of tradecraft excellence. These norms, however, have evolved in an idiosyncratic manner that reflects the influence of prominent insiders who had keen psychological insights but little appreciation for how to translate those insights into testable hypotheses. The net result is that the prevailing tradecraft norms of best practice are only loosely grounded in the science of judgment and decision-making. The “common sense” of prestigious opinion leaders inside the intelligence community has (...) pre-empted systematic validity testing of the training techniques and judgment aids endorsed by those opinion leaders. Drawing on the scientific literature, we advance hypotheses about how current best practices could well be reducing rather than increasing the quality of analytic products. One set of hypotheses pertain to the failure of tradecraft training to recognize the most basic threat to accuracy: measurement error in the interpretation of the same data and in the communication of interpretations. Another set of hypotheses focuses on the insensitivity of tradecraft training to the risk that issuing broad-brush, one-directional warnings against bias (e.g., over-confidence) will be less likely to encourage self-critical, deliberative cognition than simple response-threshold shifting that yields the mirror-image bias (e.g., under-confidence). Given the magnitude of the consequences of better and worse intelligence analysis flowing to policy-makers, we see a compelling case for greater funding of efforts to test what actually works. (shrink)

Until social psychology devotes as much attention to construct and external validity as it does to internal validity, the field will continue to produce theories that fail to replicate in the field and cannot be used to meliorate social problems.

Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity – particularly diversity of viewpoints – for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack of political diversity can undermine (...) the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority's thinking. (4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology. (shrink)

The Tebtunis Papyri, Part II. Edited by B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, with the assistance of E. J. Godspeed. London: Henry Frowde, 1907. Pp. xv + 485. Two Facsimiles and Map. £2 5s. net.

We propose a friendly amendment to integrative experiment design (IED), adversarial-collaboration IED, that incentivizes research teams from competing theoretical perspectives to identify zones of the design space where they possess an explanatory edge. This amendment is especially critical in debates that have high policy stakes and carry a strong normative-political charge that might otherwise prevent free exchange of ideas.

In five works spanning a decade, Philip E. Tetlock's interest in counterfactuals has changed. He began with an optimistic desire to make social science more rigorous by identifying best practices in the absence of non-imagined controls for experimentation. Soon, however, he adopted a more pessimistic analysis of the cognitive and psychological barriers facing experts. This shift was brought on by an awareness that experts are not rational Bayesians who continually update their theories to keep up with new information; but (...) instead are affected by political, cognitive, and psychological heuristics, including hindsight bias, cognitive conservatism, and the fundamental attribution error. But techniques of computational simulation-involving the rigorous production of large numbers of counterfactual worlds-make it possible to mitigate both problems that Tetlock identifies: that history, produced only once, is a lousy teacher; and that humans, with their collection of non-Bayesian heuristics, are lousy pupils. Tetlock was wrong to reject this approach as theoretically promising but rhetorically and practically impractical. (shrink)

Linda Moulton Howe. An Alien Harvest. Littleton, Colorado: LMH Productions. 1989. Pp. xviii. 455. $55.00. Cloth. ISBN 0‐9620570‐1‐0. Available from Linda Howe Productions, 904 Summit North Drive, Atlanta, Georgia 30324.

Research has established that exposure to a combination of diagnostic (i.e., relevant) and nondiagnostic (i.e., irrelevant) information results in predictions that are more regressive than predictions based on diagnostic information (Hackenbrack, 1992; Hoffman and Patton, 1997). This phenomenon has been labeled the dilution effect (e.g., Tetlock and Boettger, 1989) and has been documented when individuals make predictions. This study tests for the dilution effect when small groups make predictions, and examines the effect of using a procedure designed to reduce (...) the dilution effect. Results indicate that group predictions are influenced by nondiagnostic information in the same manner as are individual predictions, and allowing participants to rate the diagnosticity of information prior to making predictions does not reduce the dilution effect. (shrink)

Research has established that exposure to a combination of diagnostic (i.e., relevant) and nondiagnostic (i.e., irrelevant) information results in predictions that are more regressive than predictions based on diagnostic information (Hackenbrack, 1992; Hoffman and Patton, 1997). This phenomenon has been labeled the dilution effect (e.g., Tetlock and Boettger, 1989) and has been documented when individuals make predictions. This study tests for the dilution effect when small groups make predictions, and examines the effect of using a procedure designed to reduce (...) the dilution effect. Results indicate that group predictions are influenced by nondiagnostic information in the same manner as are individual predictions, and allowing participants to rate the diagnosticity of information prior to making predictions does not reduce the dilution effect. (shrink)

Philip E. Tetlock's finding that "hedgehog" experts (those with one big theory) are worse predictors than "foxes" (those with multiple, less comprehensive theories) offers fertile ground for future research. Are experts as likely to exhibit hedgehog- or fox-like tendencies in areas that call for explanatory, diagnostic, and skill-based expertise-as they did when Tetlock called on experts to make predictions? Do particular domains of expertise curtail or encourage different styles of expertise? Can we trace these different styles to childhood? (...) Finally, can we nudge hedgehogs to be more like foxes? Current research can only grope at the answers to these questions, but they are essential to gauging the health of expert political judgment. (shrink)

Philip E. Tetlock and I agree that forecasting tools are best evaluated in peer-reviewed settings and in comparison not only to expert judgments, but also to alternative modeling strategies. Applying his suggested standards of assessment, however, certain forecasting models not only outperform expert judgments, but also have gone head-to-head with alternative models and outperformed them. This track record demonstrates the capability to make significant, reliable predictions of difficult, complex events. The record has unfolded, contrary to Tetlock's contention, not (...) only in government and business applications, but also in numerous peer-reviewed publications containing hundreds of real-time forecasts. Moreover, reliable prediction is achieved while avoiding significant false-positive or false-negative rates. (shrink)

In his justly celebrated Expert Political Judgment, Philip E. Tetlock evaluates the judgment of economic and political experts by rigorously testing their ability to make accurate predictions. He finds that ability profoundly limited, implying that expert judgment is virtually useless, if not worse. He concludes by proposing a project that would seek to improve experts' performance by holding them publicly accountable for their claims. But Tetlock's methods severely underestimate the value of expert opinion. Despite their notorious disagreements, experts (...) have highly pertinent information and advice in many areas of public policy. The main problem with experts is that political actors seize on their most extreme views in one direction or the other, and overlook their areas of general agreement and the core of relatively reliable information that they provide. (shrink)

In his remarkably meticulous and even-handed 2005 book, Expert Political Judgment, Philip E. Tetlock establishes that the only thing we can count on in the political experts' predictions is that they will underperform-in some cases significantly-the predictions made by mechanical statistical procedures, including random chance. Experts have many uses and Tetlock does not claim that they have no value. However, Tetlock zeroes in on experts' important political role-as prognosticators. Tetlock does not attempt the impossible by trying (...) to judge experts on their ability to prognosticate the effects of public policies; this would require that Tetlock himself could know what those effects were, and even in retrospect, it isn't that simple. Experts' failure to predict much simpler matters, however, such as GDP growth within a broad range, strongly suggests that technocracy is worse than putting dart-throwing chimps in charge of public policy. (shrink)

A constructivist approach to ethics must include some process—such as Rawls’ (1971) reflective equilibrium—for moving from initial evaluative judgments to those that one can affirm. Walker’s (1998; 2003) feminist version of reflective equilibrium incorporates what she calls “transparency testing” to weed out pernicious, ideologically shaped intuitions. However, in light of empirical work on the plurality of values and on the cognitive processes through which people arrive at moral judgments (i.e. an automatic, intuitive process and/or a controlled reasoning process), I raise (...) one concern: some moral requirements can only be grasped intuitively and should not have to be affirmed from the perspective of other confidently held values. The “requirements of love” (Frankfurt 2004) are one such example; failing to fulfill these requirements is, for someone who loves, unthinkable (Frankfurt 1988); one transgresses the associated values merely by considering sacrificing them. I suggest—citing empirical work on “sacred values” (Tetlock 2000; 2003)—that to subject these requirements to transparency testing would be to transgress them by having “one thought too many” (Williams 1981). One’s confidence in these values, and the authority of these values, depend on an automatic process. I consider the risks, and the necessity, of embracing both intuitive and reasoning processes for affirming the authority of a plurality of moral values. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Hermeneutical Turn in American Critical Theory, 1830–1860M. D. WalhoutLong considered an obscure province of biblical studies, hermeneutics is now familiar territory to American literary critics, along with phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism, and the other European theories that have redrawn the map of American criticism in the past twenty-five years. The gradual transformation of hermeneutics into a theory of criticism, and ultimately into a comprehensive theory of the human sciences, (...) was the work of a series of great German thinkers, including Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. These figures were introduced (or reintroduced) to American critics by E. D. Hirsch, whose Validity in Interpretation (1967) “shattered,” in the words of Richard E. Palmer, “the splendid isolation of American literary criticism from hermeneutics.” Hailing Schleiermacher and Dilthey as the forefathers of “objective interpretation,” Hirsch dismissed Heidegger and Gadamer as prophets of subjectivism. For his part, Palmer strove to vindicate Heidegger and Gadamer as the true heirs of the hermeneutical tradition. Noting the difference between Hirsch’s understanding of hermeneutics and theirs, Palmer concluded,So the hermeneutical debate goes on. On the one side are the defenders of objectivity and validation, who look to hermeneutics as the theoretical source for norms of validation; on the other side are the phenomenologists of the event of understanding, who stress the historical character of this “event,” and consequently the limitations of all claims to “objective knowledge” and “validity.” 1Twenty-five years later this hermeneutical debate is still going on. [End Page 683]What Hirsch and Palmer did not realize is that they were reviving a debate over the nature of interpretation that dated from the late nineteenth century, when American literary criticism was undergoing professionalization. 2 As early as 1885, in the programmatic introduction to his book on Shakespeare as a dramatic artist, Richard G. Moulton had declared, “In the treatment of literature the proposition which seems to stand most in need of assertion at the present moment is, that there is an inductive science of literary criticism.” Moulton proceeded to lay down “a foundation axiom of inductive literary criticism: Interpretation in literature is of the nature of a scientific hypothesis, the truth of which is tested by the degree of completeness with which it explains the details of the literary work as they actually stand.” 3 Thirty years later Moulton repeated this axiom, insisting that “such inductive treatment constitutes the very alphabet of science.” 4 But Moulton’s determination to apply the logic of the natural sciences to the interpretation of literature was not without its critics. In 1900 the German-born philologist Julius Goebel began a valiant, if futile, effort to introduce the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey to his American colleagues. 5 Years later, in an article published in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Goebel drew on Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutik und Kritik (1838) to show “the possibility of attaining exact knowledge in the mental sciences without the aid of the scientific or laboratory methods.” 6 Later still, in an article on Dilthey published in the same journal, Goebel recalled how he had argued in an address to the Modern Language Association that criticism “had lost touch with the contemporary movements emphasizing the independence and importance of the mental sciences. What seemed to me needed above all was a reform of the method of interpretation for which Dilthey had set the example both in principle and practice.” 7 It was not until the late 1960s that Goebel’s project was finally revived.While Goebel may have been the first American literary scholar to use the word “hermeneutics,” the concept of interpretation had long been a part of American critical theory. In fact, what might be called the “hermeneutical turn” in American critical theory occurred well before the era of professionalization. [End Page 684] In order to trace this turn, we must recover the work of the amateur critical theorists of the antebellum era, including such forgotten figures as George Allen and Edwin Percy Whipple. Disciples of the Schlegels and Coleridge, these amateur theorists established the basic premises of the hermeneutical turn: that criticism is a science; that the critic must “reproduce” the author’s creative process; that... (shrink)

“Public health legal preparedness” is a term born in the ferment, beginning in the late 1990s, that has led to unprecedented recognition of the essential role law plays in public health and, even more recently, in protecting the public from terrorism and other potentially catastrophic health threats.The initial articulation of public health has not kept pace with rapid evolution in the concept and in practical development of public health preparedness itself. This poses the risk that legal preparedness may fall behind (...) construction of general readiness in the public health system—and may, in fact, undercut achievement of comprehensive public health preparedness for massive threats to health in both the United States and world-wide. Inadvertent results might include both negative health impacts and infringement on individual rights. (shrink)

Medical practice should evolve alongside medical ethics. As our understanding of the ethical implications of physician-patient interactions becomes more nuanced, physicians should integrate those lessons into practice. As early as the 1930s, epidemiological studies began to identify that the rates of medical procedures varied significantly along geographic and socioeconomic lines. Dr. J. Alison Glover recognized that tonsillectomy rates in school children in certain school districts in England and Wales were in some cases eight times the rates of children in other (...) districts, with the only significant predictive factors being the current chief medical officer in the area and the socioeconomic well-being of the child's parents. Unfortunately, Dr. Glover's work revealed that the increase in tonsillectomies did not improve the health of adolescent patients and appeared to be performed “as a routine prophylactic ritual for no particular reason and with no particular result.”. (shrink)

This article links recent work on assimilative and contrastive counterfactual thinking with research on the impact of accountability on judgment and choice. Relative to participants who felt accountable solely for bottom-line performance outcomes, participants who were accountable for their decision-making process (a) had more pronounced differential reactions to clearly winning versus (winning but) nearly losing and to clearly losing versus (losing but) nearly winning; (b) were less satisfied with the quality of their decisions when they nearly lost and more satisfied (...) with the quality of their decisions when they nearly won; and (c) invested less money into investments that nearly failed and more money into investments that nearly succeeded. This pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that process accountability amplified assimilative counterfactual thinking, whereas outcome accountability attenuated it. The evidence underscores the power of contextual features of the decision-making environment to shape key cognitive and affective consequences of upward and downward counterfactual comparisons. (shrink)

This article explores situational determinants and psychological consequences of counterfactual excuse-making - denying responsibility by declaring `I couldn’t have known.’ Participants who were made accountable for a stock investment decision that resulted in an outcome caused by unforeseeable circumstances were particularly likely to generate counterfactual excuses and, as a result, to deny responsibility for the outcome of their choices and minimize their perceptions of control over the decision process. The article discusses the implications of these findings for structuring accountability reporting (...) relationships in business and, more generally, stresses the benefits of counterfactual denials of responsibility for maintaining self-esteem and a desired self-identity. (shrink)