Teachers' Epistemic Authority: Perceptions of Students and Teachers

The present study examines students' perception of the teacher's role as epistemic authorities, that is, a source of determinative influence on the formation of individuals' knowledge, from three perspectives. First, it examines 7th and 10th graders' perception of their teachers as epistemic authorities. The results showed that a teacher's subject matter, as well as students' age and gender, influence perception of him/her as an epistemic authority. In addition, interest in the subject matter was found to be an important predictor of students' perception. The second part focuses on teachers' self-perceptions as epistemic authorities. The results indicated that teachers' personal efficacy is the most powerful predictor of their self-perception. Finally, the study compares students' perceptions of teachers as epistemic authorities, teachers' self-perceptions in these terms and teachers' perceptions of how their students perceive them. Two main findings showed the following: (a) teachers perceive themselves as being more of an epistemic authority than their students consider them; (b) teachers believe that students perceive them as being more of an epistemic authority than the students actually think.     

Perception of epistemic authority and attribution for its choice as a function of knowledge area and age

Three age groups of children and adolescents (9–10, 13–14, and 17–18 years old) were asked to indicate sources of information which serve as their epistemic authority in nine knowledge areas and to attribute reasons for their choices. In general, the results showed that children and adolescents differentiate among sources and select their epistemic authorities according to knowledge areas. It was found that while the perception of parents as epistemic authorities decreases with age, the perception of self increases considerably and becomes an important epistemic authority. In spite of the decrease in the perception of parents as epistemic authorities, they continue to be a significant source of knowledge. In addition, the perception of friends as epistemic authority increases relatively in social knowledge areas. With regard to causal explanation, it was found that children and adolescents use various reasons to explain their selection of epistemic authority. They differentiated among their reasons on the basis of the selected source. Knowledge-denotating source expertise was used as the most important reason. The selection of oneself was mainly attributed to familiarity, and helpfulness was used to explain the selection of mother, friend and father as epistemic authorities. Friend was also selected because of similarity. Age differences with regard to use of reasons reflected changes in source selection. This line of research sheds light on the interpersonal nature of knowledge acquisition.     

Epistemic authority of professors and researchers: differential perceptions by students from two cultural-educational systems

Teachers and researchers are considered epistemic authorities that provide reliable information if that information is relevant to their discipline. Students differentiate between relevant and irrelevant disciplines when assessing teachers’ expertise. In this paper, it is investigated whether students’ cultural-educational background plays a role in this differentiation between relevant and irrelevant disciplines. In large power distance cultures such as France, students learn to respect and obey their teacher, whereas in smaller power distance cultures such as the Netherlands, the relationships between students and teachers are more informal. Therefore, French students may be less sensitive to the actual discipline when assessing a source’s expertise. In an experiment, it was empirically tested whether French students perceived smaller differences than Dutch students between fictitious professors and researchers who put forward information that was or was not related to their own discipline. Results showed that the French participants indeed differentiated to a much lesser degree between professors and researchers with a relevant and an irrelevant discipline than did the Dutch participants. Further analyses indicated that students’ obedience partially mediated this effect of nationality on the difference between relevant and irrelevant disciplines. This study underlines the role that cultural-educational background can play in the assessments of epistemic authorities.     

Epistemic authority: preemption through source sensitive defeat

Modern societies are characterized by a division of epistemic labor between laypeople and epistemic authorities. Authorities are often far more competent than laypeople and can thus, ideally, inform their beliefs. But how should laypeople rationally respond to an authority’s beliefs if they already have beliefs and reasons of their own concerning some subject matter? According to the standard view, the beliefs of epistemic authorities are just further, albeit weighty, pieces of evidence. In contrast, the Preemption View claims that, when one discovers what an authority believes, it is not permissible to rely on any of one’s own reasons concerning the subject matter. The original version of this view, as proposed by Linda Zagzebski, has recently been severely criticized for recommending blind trust and for abandoning even minimal standards for critical thinking. In our paper, we defend a new version of the Preemption View—Defeatist Preemptionism—in a way that differs radically from Zagzebski’s. We argue that our view can be derived from certain widely accepted general epistemic principles. In particular, we claim that preemption can be identified as a special case of source sensitive defeat. Moreover, we argue that Defeatist Preemptionism does not lead to the undesirable consequences that critics ascribe to the Preemption View. The paper thus articulates the foundations and refinements of the Preemption View, such that it adequately captures the phenomenon of epistemic authority and the rational requirements related to it.

     

Business Students' Perceptions of Best University Professors: Does Gender Role Matter?

This study investigated the relationship between the gender and gender-role of students and their “best” university professors. Two hundred and ninety two business students in 2 universities in Atlantic Canada rated their best professors and themselves using Bem's Sex Role Inventory. Male business students were more likely than females to choose a male as their best professor, and female business students were more likely than males to choose a female as their best professor. The study also indicates that a student's own gender and gender role are significantly related to those of his/her best professor. Male professors with low femininity scores (but not necessarily high masculinity scores), and female professors who are gender-neutral (i.e., androgynous or undifferentiated) were more often chosen by students as their best professors. In general, masculinity seems to be valued more by older, part-time students with greater work experience. Implications of these findings for university teachers are discussed.     

Me, us, or them: who is more conformist? Perception of conformity and political orientation

Research has shown that people perceive others as more vulnerable than themselves to media communication, and their political out-group as more vulnerable than their political in-group. In the present study, the authors predicted that the same two biases would appear with respect to another kind of influence--conformity--but that participants' judgments would display a different pattern according to their political orientations. Right-wing and left-wing university students were asked to evaluate conformity and to estimate how conformist they, their political in-group, their political out-group, and other groups are. As hypothesized, right-wingers expressed more ambivalence toward conformity and viewed it less negatively than did left-wingers. Political orientation had no impact on the discrepancy between self and others, but it did moderate the in-group-out-group discrepancy.     

Beliefs about memory among psychology students and their professors in psychodynamic clinical and experimental study programs

IntroductionResearch has shown that lay people, and even psychologists, may have distorted knowledge about memory functioning. May different study programs in psychology influence their ideas?Objective(s)The study was aimed at evaluating psychology students’ and psychology professors’ knowledge about memory and factors potentially affecting the accuracy of episodic memory reports in clinical and legal contexts.MethodA questionnaire was administered to introductory and advanced students of psychology enrolled at different curricula – experimental psychology and clinical psychology with a psychoanalytical orientation – and to professors teaching the courses in the same curricula.ResultsResults showed that advanced students and professors in experimental psychology have higher general knowledge of factors influencing memory performance than their peers, including memory issues of particular relevance to clinical psychology; no difference between the curricula was found for the introductory students.ConclusionThe results are discussed in terms of the risks that the lack of knowledge on memory functioning of the psychologists with a psychodynamic orientation may have in producing wrong reports in forensic contexts.     

Procedural justice and social regulation across group boundaries: does subgroup identity undermine relationship-based governance?

The relational model of authority suggests that people are inclined to accept the decisions of ethnic outgroup authorities when they identify with a superordinate category they share with the authority, and when the authority satisfies their relational justice concerns. Using responses from a random sample of African Americans, Latinos, and Whites about their cross-ethnic interactions with legal authorities, the findings indicated that those who are highly identified with the superordinate category of America indicate greater reliance on relational concerns and less on instrumental concerns when evaluating the authority's decision. In contrast, identification with one's ethnic subgroup did not moderate the linkage between relational concerns and acceptance. Across all ethnic groups, there were positive rather than negative correlations between measures of American and ethnic identity. Together, these findings indicate that subgroup identity does not undermine the relational basis of social regulation and that relationship-based governance is compatible with multiculturalism.     

Constraint Respecters, Constraint Challengers, and Crisis Decision Making in Democracies: A Case Study Analysis of Kennedy versus Reagan

Models linking domestic political constraints (audience costs, pressures for the diversionary use of force, democratic norms and institutions) to foreign policy behavior generally assume that leaders simply recognize and submit to constraints in their domestic environments—a strong structural argument. In contrast, research on political leadership and decision making suggests that leaders vary systematically in their orientations toward constraints: "constraint respecters" tend to internalize potential constraints, while "constraint challengers" are more likely to view them as obstacles to be overcome. This article develops an integrative theoretical framework that explicitly incorporates these insights and applies them to the domain of crisis decision making. After identifying leaders' expected orientations toward constraints via at-a-distance methods, the plausibility of hypotheses derived from this framework is examined through case studies that explore the decision-making processes employed by President Kennedy (a "constraint respecter") and President Reagan (a "constraint challenger") during international crises. The results suggest that there is important variation in how leaders perceive and respond to domestic constraints, and that leadership style is one—though not the only—important source of this variation.     

Developmental "Roots" in Mature Biological Knowledge

ABSTRACT— Young children tend to claim that moving artifacts and nonliving natural kinds are alive, but neglect to ascribe life to plants. This research tested whether adults exhibit similar confusions when verifying life status in a speeded classification task. Experiment 1 showed that undergraduates encounter greater difficulty (reduced accuracy and increased response times) in determining life status for plants, relative to animals, and for natural and moving nonliving things, relative to artifacts and nonmoving things. Experiment 2 replicated these effects in university biology professors. The professors showed a significantly reduced effect size for living things, as compared with the students, but still showed greater difficulty for plants than animals, even as no differences from the students were apparent in their responses to nonliving things. These results suggest that mature biological knowledge relies on a developmental foundation that is not radically overwritten or erased with the profound conceptual changes that accompany mastery of the domain.     

The Belief in Equality Inventory and Leadership Behavior: A Construct Validation

The belief-in-equality construct is defined as the belief that general ability and potential are widely distributed throughout the human population, rather than being limited to an elite minority. Data from a 21-item belief-in-equality inventory and from two construct-validation tasks were gathered using a liberal-arts undergraduate sample of 201 students. Of the two validation tasks, one indicated strong construct validity ( p < .015), however, the second one produced correctly patterned but insignificant results. The results showed that leaders with a high belief in equality put more funds into training their subordinates and had a tendency to delegate more authority to them than leaders with a weak belief in equality.     

Civic Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Alternative Paths to the Development of Political Knowledge and Democratic Values

Despite the proliferation of civic education programs in the emerging democracies of Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe, there have been few recent evaluations of the effectiveness of civics instruction in achieving changes in democratic orientations among student populations. We present findings from a study conducted in 1998 that examined the impact of democratic civic education among South African high school students. Using a battery of items to gauge democratic orientations, including measures of political knowledge, civic duty, tolerance, institutional trust, civic skills, and approval of legal forms of political participation, we find that civic education had the largest effects on political knowledge, with the magnitude of the effect being approximately twice as large as the recent Niemi and Junn (1998 ) finding for the United States. Exposure to civic education per se had weaker effects on democratic values and skills; for these orientations, what matters are specific factors related to the quality of instruction and the use of active pedagogical methods employed by civics instructors. Further, we find that civic education changed the structure of students' orientations: a "democratic values" dimension coalesces more strongly, and in greater distinction, from a "political competence" dimension among students exposed to civic education than among those with no such training. We discuss the implications of the findings for our theoretical understanding of the role of civic education in fostering democratic attitudes, norms, and values, as well as the practical implications of the results for the implementation and funding of civic education programs in developing democracies in the future.     

Disobeying an Illegitimate Request in a Democratic or Authoritarian System

Crimes of obedience in the form of illegal or immoral acts committed in response to orders from authority occur in many contexts. In particular, under some circumstances of threats, people can easily accept restrictions upon democratic procedures. Recent studies have underlined the role of legitimacy in understanding the authority relationship and the importance of evaluating the legitimacy of the request rather than the legitimacy of the authority in preventing the rise of authoritarianism. The purpose of this study was to verify if people respond differently when an illegitimate request is put forward by a democratic or an authoritarian authority. The results on 224 subjects confirmed that people tend to be more obedient when they perceive authorities as democratic, notwithstanding the legitimacy of their requests.     

Predictors of College Students' Levels of Knowledge and Concern about Nuclear War

There is a growing interest regarding college student attitudes, knowledge, and concern about the potential threat of nuclear war. The present study attempted to identify salient political, psychological, and educational variables that might account for differing levels of concern and knowledge about nuclear war among college students. The results of two multiple regression analyses indicated that a greater interest in international affairs, less trust in government, more exposure to sources of nuclear war information, and being female contributed to greater concern about nuclear war. Having more political knowledge in general, being male, being more a Democrat than Republican, and having a greater interest in international affairs contributed to more knowledge about nuclear war. The results are discussed in light of their implications for university education.     

Tell Me What I Wanted to Hear: Confirmation Effect in Lay Evaluations of Financial Expert Authority

In real life, people engage in interactive decision processes by consulting with experts. However, before taking advice, they must recognise the authority of an expert to assess the quality of the advice. The main goal of this research was to investigate how the confirmation effect affects lay evaluations of the epistemic authority of financial experts. Experiment 1 showed that lay people tend to ascribe greater epistemic authority to those experts whose advice confirms people's opinions, both measured and manipulated. Experiment 2 revealed that when participants' own opinions are not salient, people tend to evaluate experts' authority as higher when their advice confirms social norms. In Experiment 3 we jointly investigated the effects of participants' own opinions and social norms on the evaluations of authority. When both sources of expertise were made salient, decision‐makers favoured advice confirming their own beliefs and used it to evaluate experts' authority. Three interpretations of the role confirmation plays in the experts' authority evaluations are proposed: (1) self‐defensive strategies; (2) processing fluency; and (3) psychological consequences of naïve realism. The paper discusses practical implications of the results. We propose that increasing consumers' knowledge about biases might protect their evaluations of financial advice from being susceptible to the confirmation effect.     

Authoritarianism and Political Impoverishment: Deficits in Knowledge and Civic Disinterest

Past research shows that authoritarian individuals hold strong opinions about a variety of political and social issues, such as race relations and military conflict. What has not been established, though, is the amount of general political knowledge that authoritarians possess. In this study, three groups of college students were administered Altemeyer's Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale; most of them also received items assessing general political knowledge and specific knowledge about the 2000 presidential election, as well as items assessing interest in politics. Relative to students with low RWA scores, those with high scores possessed less political knowledge; moreover, they expressed less interest in learning about politics. In general, authoritarianism was unrelated to how individuals got their political information or how credible they found their sources. The implication that authoritarians hold strong attitudinal beliefs with weak political knowledge is discussed.     

You'd Better Ask an Expert: Mitigating the Comprehensibility Effect on Laypeople's Decisions About Science‐Based Knowledge Claims

Research shows that laypeople rely more on their capabilities to make decisions about science‐based knowledge claims after reading comprehensible compared with less comprehensible topic information. This can be problematic, because complex science‐based issues usually cannot be understood fully without experts' further advice. The present study investigated whether making readers aware of the ‘epistemic topic complexity’ of an issue (i.e., the extent of existing topic knowledge, the complexity of relationships between concepts, and the existence of multiple expert perspectives) can mitigate this influence of comprehensibility. Undergraduate students read comprehensible or less comprehensible health texts with topic knowledge being described as complex, uncomplex, or not described at all. They reported whether they agreed with the claim and would rely on their decision. Results showed that after reading comprehensible information, participants' reliance on their decision increased less when they considered topic knowledge to be complex. Practical implications of the findings are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Students' perceptions of female professors

This paper examines student attitudes towards academic women. The literature on females in male-dominated professions suggests that clients resent their authority, deny their competence, and accord them less prestige than men. One hundred and eighty one university students evaluated professors in terms of 21 semantic differential scales and an occupational prestige ranking instrument. Contrary to expectation, female professors were perceived as more competent than male instructors in both task and socio-emotional competence. Further, the males were not assigned a significantly higher prestige score. Despite Goldberg's (1968) conclusion that females are prejudiced against their own sex, the attitudes of the female students were the more favorable.     

Mid-career change in academia: The decision to become an administrator

This study explored the reasons why professors would leave their teaching/ research occupations to begin new careers as administrators. Valence-Instrumentality-Expectancy theory of occupational preference and choice was used as a framework to examine mid-career change among professors and department chairmen at a major university. Data showed that professors' intentions to change careers and become administrators could be explained by the theory. Analyses of job characteristics demonstrated that professors who want a mid-career change are primarily attracted by the power and formal authority vested in the administrative position, while professors who prefer to remain in their career paths do so because of the autonomy it offers.     

Children and Politics: An Empirical Reassessment of Early Political Socialization

Demands for the inclusion of children, the youngest citizens, in democratic decision making are increasing. Although there is an abundance of empirical research on the political orientations of adolescents, there is a paucity of research on younger children's orientations. Our panel study of more than 700 children in their first year of primary school shows that these young children already exhibit consistent, structured political orientations. We examine the distribution and development of political knowledge, issue orientations, and notions of good citizenship. We find achievement differences between subgroups at the beginning of the school year, and these differences do not disappear. Children from ethnic minorities and lower socioeconomic residence areas show relatively less developed political orientations, and they do not improve as much over the school year as other children. Furthermore, normative political orientations and cognitive orientations differ in their development.