Sensitivity to number: Reply to Gebuis and Gevers

Past research showing a bias towards the larger non-symbolic number by adults and children in line bisection tasks (de Hevia & Spelke, 2009) has been challenged by Gebuis and Gevers, suggesting that area subtended by the stimulus and not number is responsible for the biases. I review evidence supporting the idea that although sensitivity to number might be relatively affected by visual cues, number is a major, salient property of our environment. The influence of non-numerical cues might be seen as the concurrent processing of dimensions that entail information of magnitude, without implying that number is constructed out of those dimensions.     

Correction to: Anger and Absurdity

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice - A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-021-10225-0     

Correction to: Accuracy-dominance and conditionalization

Philosophical Studies -     

Forced compliance: Commitment to compliance and commitment to activity

It is argued that the standard manipulation of free choice in a forced compliance situation has fostered confusion between the two different types of choices offered to subjects, namely commitment or non-commitment to compliance with the experimenter and choice of counter-attitudinal activity per se. From a theoretical viewpoint, the two choices have very different implications. The former is a prerequisite to dissonance arousal; the latter may bring about consonant cognitions which reduce the dissonance ratio. Two experiments which separated these two choices confirmed the above predictions, derived from a radical conception of the dissonance theory (Beauvois and Joule, 1981, 1994). The results are inconsistent with the reinterpretation of dissonance effects in self-perception terms.     

Harming and failing to benefit: a reply to purves

Philosophical Studies - A prominent objection to the counterfactual comparative account of harm is that it classifies as harmful some events that are, intuitively, mere failures to benefit. In an...     

Attachment to parents and to God: a panel-data approach

ABSTRACT

Research at the nexus of attachment theory and religion has generally been constrained both by data limitations and by a view of attachment style as fixed early in life. I use three waves of data to test key hypotheses from this literature in new ways. Closeness to mother and closeness to father serve as proxies for attachment to parents and closeness to God serves as a proxy for attachment to God. The correspondence hypothesis predicts that people who feel closer to their parents feel closer to God, the compensation hypothesis predicts that people lacking a parent feel closer to God, and the socialized correspondence hypothesis predicts that people with nonreligious parents will feel less close to God if they feel closer to their parents. I find strong evidence in favor of the correspondence hypothesis, but I find no evidence in favor of the compensation hypothesis or the socialized correspondence hypothesis.     

Children's capacity to agree to psychological research: knowledge of risks and benefits and voluntariness

A series of studies investigated the capacity of children between the ages of 7 and 12 to give free and informed consent to participation in psychological research. Children were reasonably accurate in describing the purpose of studies, but many did not understand the possible benefits or especially the possible risks of participating. In several studies children's consent was not affected by the knowledge that their parents had given their permission or by the parents saying that they would not be upset if the children refused. In contrast, other studies found that children were much more likely to stop their participation if the experimenter said explicitly that she would not be upset if they stopped. We suggest that experimenters should pay more attention to describing the possible risks and benefits of participation in research, and that they should also make it clearer to children that they are free to stop once they have begun.