Social expectations guide people's evaluations of others’ behaviors, but the origins of these expectations remain unclear. It is traditionally thought that people's expectations depend on their past observations of others’ behavior, and people harshly judge atypical behavior. Here, we considered that social expectations are also influenced by a drive for reciprocity, and people evaluate others’ actions by reflecting on their own decisions. To compare these views, we performed four studies. Study 1 used an Ultimatum Game task where participants alternated Responder (...) and Proposer roles. Modeling participants’ expectations suggested they evaluated the fairness of received offers via comparisons to their own offers. Study 2 replicated these findings and showed that observing selfish behavior (lowball offers) only promoted acceptance of selfishness if observers started acting selfishly themselves. Study 3 generalized the findings, demonstrating that they also arise in the Public Goods Game, emerge cross‐culturally, and apply to antisocial punishment whereby selfish players punish generosity. Finally, Study 4 introduced the Trust Game and showed that participants trusted players who reciprocated their behavior, even if it was selfish, as much as they trusted generous players. Overall, this research shows that social expectations and evaluations are rooted in drives for reciprocity. This carries theoretical implications, speaking to a parallel in the mechanisms driving both decision‐making and social evaluations, along with practical importance for understanding and promoting cooperation. (shrink)

Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical content and variables and because its computations have the properties that are normally assigned to rules. The systems serve (...) complementary functions and can simultaneously generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and its characterization. (shrink)

We propose a causal model theory to explain asymmetries in judgments of the intentionality of a foreseen side-effect that is either negative or positive (Knobe, 2003). The theory is implemented as a Bayesian network relating types of mental states, actions, and consequences that integrates previous hypotheses. It appeals to two inferential routes to judgment about the intentionality of someone else's action: bottom-up from action to desire and top-down from character and disposition. Support for the theory comes from three experiments that (...) test the prediction that bottom-up inference should occur only when the actor's primary objective is known. The model fits intentionality judgments reasonably well with no free parameters. (shrink)

Conceptual features differ in how mentally tranformable they are. A robin that does not eat is harder to imagine than a robin that does not chirp. We argue that features are immutable to the extent that they are central in a network of dependency relations. The immutability of a feature reflects how much the internal structure of a concept depends on that feature; i.e., how much the feature contributes to the concept's coherence. Complementarily, mutability reflects the aspects in which a (...) concept is flexible. We show that features can be reliably ordered according to their mutability using tasks that require people to conceive of objects missing a feature, and that mutability (conceptual centrality) can be distinguished from category centrality and from diagnosticity and salience. We test a model of mutability based on asymmetric, unlabeled, pairwise dependency relations. With no free parameters, the model provides reasonable fits to data. Qualitative tests of the model show that mutability judgments are unaffected by the type of dependency relation and that dependency structure influences judgments of variability. (shrink)

A normative framework for modeling causal and counterfactual reasoning has been proposed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines. The framework takes as fundamental that reasoning from observation and intervention differ. Intervention includes actual manipulation as well as counterfactual manipulation of a model via thought. To represent intervention, Pearl employed the do operator that simplifies the structure of a causal model by disconnecting an intervened-on variable from its normal causes. Construing the do operator as a psychological function affords predictions about how people (...) reason when asked counterfactual questions about causal relations that we refer to as undoing, a family of effects that derive from the claim that intervened-on variables become independent of their normal causes. Six studies support the prediction for causal arguments but not consistently for parallel conditional ones. Two of the studies show that effects are treated as diagnostic when their values are observed but nondiagnostic when they are intervened on. These results cannot be explained by theories that do not distinguish interventions from other sorts of events. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 31-44, January 2022.

With armed conflict in the Persian Gulf now upon us, Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc takes a long-term view of the nature and roots of war, presenting a controversial thesis: The notion of the "noble savage" living in peace with one another and in harmony with nature is a fantasy. In Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage , LeBlanc contends that warfare and violent conflict have existed throughout human history, and that humans have never lived in ecological (...) balance with nature. The start of the second major U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf, combined with regular headlines about spiraling environmental destruction, would tempt anyone to conclude that humankind is fast approaching a catastrophic end. But as LeBlanc brilliantly argues, the archaeological record shows that the warfare and ecological destruction we find today fit into patterns of human behavior that have gone on for millions of years. Constant Battles surveys human history in terms of social organization-from hunter gatherers, to tribal agriculturalists, to more complex societies. LeBlanc takes the reader on his own digs around the world -- from New Guinea to the Southwestern U.S. to Turkey -- to show how he has come to discover warfare everywhere at every time. His own fieldwork combined with his archaeological, ethnographic, and historical research, presents a riveting account of how, throughout human history, people always have outgrown the carrying capacity of their environment, which has led to war. Ultimately, though, LeBlanc's point of view is reassuring and optimistic. As he explains the roots of warfare in human history, he also demonstrates that warfare today has far less impact than it did in the past. He also argues that, as awareness of these patterns and the advantages of modern technology increase, so does our ability to avoid war in the future. (shrink)

Statements that share an explanation tend to lend inductive support to one another. For example, being told that Many furniture movers have a hard time financing a house increases the judged probability that Secretaries have a hard time financing a house. In contrast, statements with different explanations reduce one another s judged probability. Being told that Many furniture movers have bad backs decreases the judged probability that Secretaries have bad backs. I pose two questions concerning such discounting effects. First, does (...) the reduction depend on explanations being mutually incompatible or does it occur when explanations are deemed irrelevant to one another? I found that a small discounting effect occurred with statements that were blatantly unrelated. However, the discounting effect also depended on a factor external to the argument being judged; the composition of the argument set. Second, are explanation effects attributable to changes in the belief afforded statements or to response-specific changes resulting from misunderstanding of the probability rating task or response bias? The results implicate changes in belief. Prior belief influenced conditional probability more than argument strength judgements, as it would if participants understood the tasks in the same way as the experimenter. Also, conditional probability true and false judgements were complementary, suggesting no response bias. (shrink)

This study examines the logical coherence of the theological claim that Jesus was "truly man and truly God." The primary question dealt with is whether or not it is possible for one person to have all of the properties necessary for being fully divine and all of the properties necessary for being fully human. The philosophical approach is analytic, focusing upon alleged coherence problems generated by applying the Indiscernibility of Identicals to statements about Jesus. Two extended arguments against the coherence (...) of the doctrine of the incarnation are examined and rebutted. The bulk of the study is a presentation and evaluation of five modern philosophical approaches to solving the coherence problems generated by the Indiscernibility of Identicals. These are Relative Trinitarianism, the One-Nature view, the Reduplicative maneuver, kenoticism, and the Two-Minds view. Relative Trinitarianism is rejected because it denies the Indiscernibility of Identicals as a logical principle. The One-Nature view unnecessarily alters the concept of divinity and it, too, is rejected. Traditional kenoticism is judged an inadequate response to the incoherence challenge, but a revised kenoticism does show that many statements about Jesus can be coherently stated. This revised kenoticism eliminates coherence problems concerning many properties of Jesus, but not all. Some statements about Jesus, particularly modal statements, can be coherently stated as reduplicative statements. The problem is that some Steven A. Long incarnational property adjectives do not appear to be logically attributive, hence they cannot be predicated reduplicatively. Though the Two-Minds view is rejected, some features of it are used to show how incarnational property adjectives can be logically attributive and predicated reduplicatively. The conclusion is that there are no convincing arguments against the coherence of the incarnation and that a revised kenoticism and the Reduplicative maneuver together can be used to formulate a coherent interpretation of the doctrine of the incarnation that is possibly true. (shrink)

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: 'We': The Dangerous Thing -- 1 The Sellarsian Ethical Framework -- 2 Josiah Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty -- 3 Richard Rorty's Quasi-Sellarsian We -- 4 On the Prospects of Redescribing Rorty Roycely -- Bibliography -- Index.

Future work is needed to establish that pure short-term memory is a coherent individual difference attribute that is separable from traditional compound short-term memory measures. Psychometric support for latent pure short-term memory capacity will provide an important starting point for future fine-grained analyses of the intrinsic factors that influence individual differences in math skills.

Along with national data, this book uses two detailed questionnaires which were administered to older Americans in Allegany County, New York in 1983 and 1987 as the basis for exploring the public lives of rural older Americans. The authors discuss the factors that shape the political views and behavior of the rural elderly, consulting social, economic, health and nutritional variables.

A philosophical conception of norms is developed and defended. Chapter I first examines the received view of norms in the social scientific and philosophical literature. On this view, norms are rule-like, an essentially subjective or internal conception. It will be argued, however, that norms are better described as patterns of behavior, an objective or external conception. The pattern view achieves a better fit with our intuitive understanding of norms, and is better suited to the role norms are to play in (...) social theory. The second chapter continues the appraisal of the pattern conception by looking at how norms perform in an applied theoretical context, namely, utilitarian moral theory. The third and fourth chapters attempt to reconcile the notion of conformity necessary to the pattern conception with the dictates of methodological individualism. The possibility of an individualistic grounding will be seen to depend on the types of individuals that are assumed to exist. As this study assumes the existence of moral motivation, as well as narrowly self-interested, rational motivation, an individualistic grounding will require a moral and a rational grounding for norms. Chapter III discusses the rational grounding and Chapter IV the moral. In addition, the analysis of the types of situations in which conformity is rational and moral will provide a superior typology of norms. (shrink)

From beginning to end, the ethical vision of The Good Place is shaped by creator Mike Schur's reading of T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other. The characters on The Good Place become better people not because they have figured out a system for getting along with each other. Rather, the moral journey of the characters on The Good Place changes them into fundamentally different people. Levinasian ethics focuses on the encounter with other people and the response to that (...) encounter. For Emmanuel Levinas, the act of preserving an understanding of the world or self is always done at the expense of other people. Contrary to Scanlon, on The Good Place the responsibility for the other is not met in agreement or in respecting disagreement. It is met in the willingness to cede one's place to the other. (shrink)

Jacob Böhme (1576-1624), the noted theosophist and mystic of the German Baroque, was possessed of a strong sense of the spiritual which pervades the many profound and lofty ideas of his thought. His philosophy is rooted in the belief that everything exists and becomes intelligible only through its opposite. This is sometimes considered the basis of philosophical systems akin to those of Hegel, Spinoza, and Schelling; and the sectarian Philadelphians were formed for the explication of his works. Here the hidden (...) meanings behind Böhme's mystical language are examined through his theory of theosophic-semantic elevation of the "phoneme" to codified "lexeme." This is the first organized and highly idiosyncratic linguistic grammar of the German Baroque, a grammar that emerges from behind the effect of words-in-context analysis. This is an invaluable study for both the literary historian and the student of linguistic history.--front jacket flat. (shrink)

Somatic mutations arising in human skin cancers are heterogeneously distributed across the genome, meaning that certain genomic regions (e.g., heterochromatin or transcription factor binding sites) have much higher mutation densities than others. Regional variations in mutation rates are typically not a consequence of selection, as the vast majority of somatic mutations in skin cancers are passenger mutations that do not promote cell growth or transformation. Instead, variations in DNA repair activity, due to chromatin organization and transcription factor binding, have been (...) proposed to be a primary driver of mutational heterogeneity in melanoma. However, as discussed in this review here, recent studies indicate that chromatin organization and transcription factor binding also significantly modulate the rate at which UV lesions form in DNA. The authors propose that local variations in lesion susceptibility may be an important driver of mutational hotspots in melanoma and other skin cancers, particularly at binding sites for ETS transcription factors. (shrink)

The discipline area of physical education has historically struggled for legitimacy, sometimes being seen as a non-serious pursuit in educational terms compared to other subjects within the school curriculum. This book represents the first attempt in nearly 30 years to offer a coherent philosophical defence and conceptualisation of physical education and sport as subjects of educational value, and to provide a philosophically sound justification for their inclusion in the curriculum. The book argues that rather than relegating the body to ‘un-thinking’ (...) learning, a person’s essential being is not confined to their rationality but involves an embodied dimension. It traces the changing conceptions of the body, in philosophy and theology, that have influenced our understanding of physical education and sport, and investigates the important role that embodiment and movement play in learning about, through and in physical education. Physical education is defended as a vital and necessary part of education because the whole person goes to school, not just the mind, but the thinking, feeling and acting facets of a person. It is argued that physical education has the potential to provide a multitude of experiences and opportunities for students’ to become aware of their embodiment, explore alternative modes of awareness and to develop insights into and new modes of being not available elsewhere in the curriculum, and to influence moral character through the support of a moral community that is committed to that practice. Representing a sophisticated and spirited defence of the educational significance and philosophical value of physical education and sport, this book will be fascinating reading for any advanced student or researcher with an interest in physical education, the philosophy of sport, or the philosophy of education. (shrink)

Recent sociological studies, like Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, support the claim that Americans retain an ideal of isolated self-sufficiency. Yet the material conditions of our culture require ideals that shun exclusiveness and encourage associated living. The result of this dissonance is that Americans tend to approach their own and others’ values in a way that boils down to irrational personal preference. …Such is the cultural predicament that a theory of moral education must ultimately confront. In this essay I (...) articulate a Deweyan theory of moral understanding that makes our moral decisions and social commitments intelligible, enabling us to give empirically warranted, substantive justifications for our valuations. I argue that an emphasis on educating moral imagination could gradually lead our culture beyond its fossilized individualistic ideals. I further argue that any theory of moral education that ignores moral imagination is empirically irresponsible. (…). (shrink)

Larry A. Hickman and Albert Borgmann have carried on a decades-long debate about the status and value of technological practices. Hickman’s work develops from the thought of John Dewey. A recent essay alleges that Hickman’s engagement with Borgmann has been superficial, particularly because full engagement would involve admitting that Dewey’s instrumentalist theory of inquiry and his aesthetics are at odds. This paper argues not only that Hickman has attended to the full scope of Borgmann’s thought but also that Dewey is (...) innocent of the criticism charged. Along the way, I develop a critique of the traditionalistic nostalgia implicit in accounts like Borgmann’s. This all serves to address the longstanding concern that pragmatism can be reduced to a crass form of instrumentalism. (shrink)

In this essay I intentionally employ Nietzsche's genealogical method as a means to critique the complex concept of ‘good’ teaching, and at the same time reconstitute ‘good’ teaching in a form that is radically different from contemporary accounts. In order to do this, I start out by undertaking a genealogical analysis to both reveal the complicated historical development of ‘good’ teaching and also disentangle the intertwining threads that remain hidden from us so we are aware of the core threads that (...) hold it together. Two major threads are identified in my analysis, which I refer to as: Genealogy I: Teaching as applied science or practice; and, Genealogy II: Teaching as a vocational calling or neutral profession. With this in mind, I take the two value systems presented in my critique of ‘good’ teaching, and rather than return to old, or create new values, I argue that the true task of any educational endeavour is to make human beings human. Therefore, in the spirit of Nietzsche, I revive and extend Nietzsche's account of Bildung as a dynamic way of living timeless educational aims, such as learning to see, think, speak, write and feel in becoming true human beings. (shrink)

The gain of a selective advantage in cancer as well as the establishment of complex traits during evolution require multiple genetic alterations, but how these mutations accumulate over time is currently unclear. There is increasing evidence that a mutator phenotype perpetuates the development of many human cancers. While in some cases the increased mutation rate is the result of a genetic disruption of DNA repair and replication or environmental exposures, other evidence suggests that endogenous DNA damage induced by AID/APOBEC cytidine (...) deaminases can result in transient localized hypermutation generating simultaneous, closely spaced (i.e. “clustered”) multiple mutations. Here, we discuss mechanisms that lead to mutation cluster formation, the biological consequences of their formation in cancer and evidence suggesting that APOBEC mutagenesis can also occur genome‐wide. This raises the possibility that dysregulation of these enzymes may enable rapid malignant transformation by increasing mutation rates without the loss of fitness associated with permanent mutators. (shrink)

Recent research highlights the positive effects of organizational CSR engagement on employee outcomes, such as job and life satisfaction, performance, and trust. We argue that the current debate fails to recognize the potential risks associated with CSR. In this study, we focus on the risk of work addiction. We hypothesize that CSR has per se a positive effect on employees and can be classified as a resource. However, we also suggest the existence of an array of unintended negative effects of (...) CSR. Since CSR positively influences an employee’s organizational identification, as well as his or her perception of engaging in meaningful work, which in turn motivates them to work harder while neglecting other spheres of their lives such as private relationships or health, CSR indirectly increases work addiction. Accordingly, organizational identification and work meaningfulness both act as buffering variables in the relationship, thus suppressing the negative effect of CSR on work addiction, which weakens the positive role of CSR in the workplace. Drawing on a sample of 565 Swiss employees taken from the 2017 Swiss Public Value Atlas dataset, our results provide support for our rationale. Our results also provide evidence that the positive indirect effects of organizational CSR engagement on work addiction, via organizational identification and work meaningfulness, become even stronger when employees care for the welfare of the wider public. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)