Stability,breadth and guidance

Much recent work on explanation in the interventionist tradition emphasizes the explanatory value of stable causal generalizations—i.e., causal generalizations that remain true in a wide range of background circumstances. We argue that two separate explanatory virtues are lumped together under the heading of `stability’. We call these two virtues breadth and guidance respectively. In our view, these two virtues are importantly distinct, but this fact is neglected or at least under-appreciated in the literature on stability. We argue that an adequate theory of explanatory goodness should recognize breadth and guidance as distinct virtues, as breadth and guidance track different ideals of explanation, satisfy different cognitive and pragmatic ends, and play different theoretical roles in (for example) helping us understand the explanatory value of mechanisms. Thus keeping track of the distinction between these two forms of stability yields a more accurate and perspicuous picture of the role that stability considerations play in explanation.     

Failures of explaining away and screening off in described versus experienced causal learning scenarios

Causal Bayes nets capture many aspects of causal thinking that set them apart from purely associative reasoning. However, some central properties of this normative theory routinely violated. In tasks requiring an understanding of explaining away and screening off, subjects often deviate from these principles and manifest the operation of an associative bias that we refer to as the rich-get-richer principle. This research focuses on these two failures comparing tasks in which causal scenarios are merely described (via verbal statements of the causal relations) versus experienced (via samples of data that manifest the intervariable correlations implied by the causal relations). Our key finding is that we obtained stronger deviations from normative predictions in the described conditions that highlight the instructed causal model compared to those that presented data. This counterintuitive finding indicate that a theory of causal reasoning and learning needs to integrate normative principles with biases people hold about causal relations.     

Reducing exposure to trust-related risks to avoid self-blame

Three studies demonstrated that anticipated self-blame elicits more conservative decisions about risks that require trust than about otherwise economically identical risks that do not. Participants were more reluctant to invest money in a company when it risked failure due to fraud versus low consumer demand (Study 1), and to risk points in an economic game when its outcome ostensibly depended on another participant versus chance (Studies 2 and 3). These effects were mediated by anticipated self-blame (Studies 1 and 2). Additionally, participants who actually experienced a loss felt more self-blame when the loss violated their trust and became even more conservative in subsequent risk decisions relative to participants whose loss did not violate their trust (Study 3). No support emerged for alternative explanations based on either the perceived probability of incurring a loss or an aversion to losses that profit others. The motivational power of trust violations is discussed.     

Historical Use of the Climate Sink

In this paper I discuss a popular position in the climate justice literature concerning historical accountability for climate change. According to this view, historical high-emitters of greenhouse gases—or currently existing individuals that are appropriately related to them—are in possession of some form of emission debt, owed to certain of those who are now burdened by climate change. It is frequently claimed that such debts were originally incurred by historical emissions that violated a principle of fair shares for the world’s natural resources. Thus, a suitable principle of natural resource justice is required to render this interpretation of historical accountability complete. I argue that the need for such a principle poses a significant challenge for the historical emission debt view, because there doesn’t appear to be any determinate answer to the question what a fair share of climate sink capacity would have been historically. This leaves the historical emission debt view incomplete and thus unable to explain a powerful intuition that appears to motivate the view: namely, that there is something unjust about how the climate sink has historically been used. I suggest an alternative explanation of this common intuition according to which historically unequal consumption of climate sink capacity, whether or not wrongful in and of itself, is a symptom of broader global injustice concerning control over and access to the world’s natural resources. This broader historical injustice will be harder to quantify and harder to repair than that which the historical emission debt purports to identify.     

不确定性决策违背“确定事件原则”的心理机制再探

不确定性决策违背＂确定事件原则＂的心理机制再探从决策理由切入,在现实情境中考察了违背确定事件原则（sure-thing principle）的心理机制,检验了基于理由（reason-based）的假设。研究结果表明,违背确定事件原则的被试在不确定条件下知觉到的理由冲突程度显著高于遵循确定事件原则的被试在不确定条件下知觉到的理由冲突程度;违背确定事件原则的被试在不确定条件下知觉到的理由清晰程度显著低于其在两种确定条件下知觉到的理由清晰程度,而遵循确定事件原则的被试在不确定条件下知觉到的理由清晰程度则介于其在两种确定条件下知觉到的理由清晰程度之间。研究结果支持了基于理由的假设。     

Let’s be healthy together: Relational motivation for physical health is more effective for women

Four studies examined the role of relationally-autonomous reasons in health behavior (RARHs) and how gender moderates their association with health outcomes. Study 1 (n = 160) involved the development of a measure of RARHs. The results of a factor analysis distinguished RARHs from other types of health reasons. In Study 2, participants (n = 284) completed a survey assessing their relational reasons prior to taking assessments of their body composition and fitness level. In Study 3, participants (n = 577) completed an online survey assessing RARHs, self-construal and health behaviors. The results of Studies 2 and 3 showed that RARHs positively predicted healthy outcomes for females only. In Study 4, participants (n = 72) were asked to complete an online survey, attend an orientation session, keep track of their exercise and nutrition over the course of a week, and attend a follow-up session. The results revealed that having an exercise partner was positively associated with RARHs, and that this in turn predicted reported effort and progress outcomes at the follow-up session for females only. Implications for theories of motivation and gender differences are discussed.     

Culture and judgment of causal relevance

The authors hypothesized that because the causal theories of East Asians were more holistic and complex than those of Americans, the amount of information considered before making a final attribution would be larger for East Asians than for Americans. This hypothesis was supported through 4 studies. When participants attempted to explain a deviant behavior (Study 1) or a prosocial behavior (Study 2), Korean participants took into consideration a greater amount of information than did either American or Asian American participants. Study 3 replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2 within each culture. Finally, Study 4 established a link between the present findings and past research on culture and attribution. Namely, Study 4 found that Koreans made more external attributions than Americans because Koreans considered more information than did Americans.     

Belief in Conspiracy Theories and Susceptibility to the Conjunction Fallacy

People who believe in the paranormal have been found to be particularly susceptible to the conjunction fallacy. The present research examines whether the same is true of people who endorse conspiracy theories. Two studies examined the association between conspiracist ideation and the number of conjunction violations made in a variety of contexts (neutral, paranormal and conspiracy). Study 1 found that participants who endorsed a range of popular conspiracy theories more strongly also made more conjunction errors than participants with weaker conspiracism, regardless of the contextual framing of the conjunction. Study 2, using an independent sample and a generic measure of conspiracist ideation, replicated the finding that conspiracy belief is associated with domain‐general susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy. The findings are discussed in relation to the association between conspiracism and other anomalous beliefs, the representativeness heuristic and the tendency to infer underlying causal relationships connecting ostensibly unrelated events. © 2014 The Authors. Applied Cognitive Psychology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Mechanisms of eyewitness suggestibility: tests of the explanatory role hypothesis

In a recent paper, Chrobak and Zaragoza (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(3), 827–844, 2013) proposed the explanatory role hypothesis, which posits that the likelihood of developing false memories for post-event suggestions is a function of the explanatory function the suggestion serves. In support of this hypothesis, they provided evidence that participant-witnesses were especially likely to develop false memories for their forced fabrications when their fabrications helped to explain outcomes they had witnessed. In three experiments, we test the generality of the explanatory role hypothesis as a mechanism of eyewitness suggestibility by assessing whether this hypothesis can predict suggestibility errors in (a) situations where the post-event suggestions are provided by the experimenter (as opposed to fabricated by the participant), and (b) across a variety of memory measures and measures of recollective experience. In support of the explanatory role hypothesis, participants were more likely to subsequently freely report (E1) and recollect the suggestions as part of the witnessed event (E2, source test) when the post-event suggestion helped to provide a causal explanation for a witnessed outcome than when it did not serve this explanatory role. Participants were also less likely to recollect the suggestions as part of the witnessed event (on measures of subjective experience) when their explanatory strength had been reduced by the presence of an alternative explanation that could explain the same outcome (E3, source test + warning). Collectively, the results provide strong evidence that the search for explanatory coherence influences people’s tendency to misremember witnessing events that were only suggested to them.     

Explaining enkratic asymmetries: knowledge-first style

There are two different kinds of enkratic principles for belief: evidential enkratic principles and normative enkratic principles. It’s frequently taken for granted that there’s not an important difference between them. But evidential enkratic principles are undermined by considerations that gain no traction at all against their normative counterparts. The idea that such an asymmetry exists between evidential and normative enkratic principles is surprising all on its own. It is also something that calls out for explanation. Similarly, the considerations that undermine evidential enkratic principles also undermine certain narrow-scope evidential principles. This too generates explanatory questions. I show how a knowledge-first view of rationality can easily address these (and further) explanatory questions. Thus we have one more reason to put knowledge first in epistemology.     

The Identifiable Victim Effect: Using an Experimental-Causal-Chain Design to Test for Mediation

The identifiable victim effect (IVE) refers to individuals’ tendency to offer greater aid to identifiable victims than to statistical victims. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether emotional reactions work to mediate IVE. In two experiments based on the experimental-causal-chain design proposed by Spencer et al. (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 845–851, 2005), it was shown that an identifiable victim evokes stronger emotional reactions than does a statistical victim (Study 1). It was also demonstrated that the identifiable victim shown or described with a specific expression or information to evoke stronger emotional reactions elicited greater willingness to donate money in participants (Study 2). The results of two studies based on the experimental-causal-chain approach demonstrated that the underlying causal mechanism for the IVE is participants’ emotional reactions to identified victims. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.     

Tell Me a Story: How Children's Developing Domain Knowledge Affects Their Story Construction

Young children distinguish between the physical and biological domains of knowledge. The current study examines how this distinction is expressed in a story construction task. Three- and 4-year-olds were shown pairs of pictures, one that depicted a normal event and one that depicted an event that violated either physical or biological causal structure. Children were asked to choose which picture to include in a story. Three-year-olds generally showed no systematic patterns of responses when constructing their stories. Four-year-olds, in contrast, made more normal than violation choices overall, and their stories were relatively consistent with regard to the fictional world's internal coherence. When 4-year-olds did include violation events in their stories, those violations tended to be of physical rather than biological causality. These data suggest that a general understanding of impossible events is underpinned by causal domain knowledge.     

The role of surprise in the attribution process

Abstract

We report five studies which compared two theories linking surprise to causal attribution. According to the attributional model, surprise is frequently caused by luck attributions, whereas according to the expectancy-disconfirmation model, surprise is caused by expectancy disconfirmation and stimulates causal thinking. Studies 1 to 3 focused on the question of whether surprise is caused by luck attributions or by unexpectedness. In Studies 1 and 2, subjects had to recall success or failure experiences characterised by a particular attribution (Study 1) or by low versus high surprisingness (Study 2), whereas in Study 3, unexpectedness and luck versus skill attributions were independently manipulated within a realistic setting. The main dependent variables were unexpectedness (Studies 1 and 2), degree of surprise (Studies 1 and 3), and causal attributions (Study 2). The results strongly suggest that surprise is caused by expectancy disconfirmation, whereas luck attributions are neither sufficient nor necessary for surprise. Studies 4 and 5 addressed the question of whether surprise stimulates attributional thinking, again using a remembered-incidents technique. The findings of the previous studies were replicated, and it was confirmed that surprising outcomes elicit more attributional search than unsurprising ones. Additional results from Study 5 suggest that causal thinking is also stimulated by outcomes that are both negative and important.     

Direction dependence analysis: A framework to test the direction of effects in linear models with an implementation in SPSS

In nonexperimental data, at least three possible explanations exist for the association of two variables x and y: (1) x is the cause of y, (2) y is the cause of x, or (3) an unmeasured confounder is present. Statistical tests that identify which of the three explanatory models fits best would be a useful adjunct to the use of theory alone. The present article introduces one such statistical method, direction dependence analysis (DDA), which assesses the relative plausibility of the three explanatory models on the basis of higher-moment information about the variables (i.e., skewness and kurtosis). DDA involves the evaluation of three properties of the data: (1) the observed distributions of the variables, (2) the residual distributions of the competing models, and (3) the independence properties of the predictors and residuals of the competing models. When the observed variables are nonnormally distributed, we show that DDA components can be used to uniquely identify each explanatory model. Statistical inference methods for model selection are presented, and macros to implement DDA in SPSS are provided. An empirical example is given to illustrate the approach. Conceptual and empirical considerations are discussed for best-practice applications in psychological data, and sample size recommendations based on previous simulation studies are provided.     

No Harm,Still Foul: Concerns About Reputation Drive Dislike of Harmless Plagiarizers

Across a variety of situations, people strongly condemn plagiarizers who steal credit for ideas, even when the theft in question does not appear to harm anyone. Why would people react negatively to relatively harmless acts of plagiarism? In six experiments, we predict and find that these negative reactions are driven by people's aversion toward agents who attempt to falsely improve their reputations. In Studies 1–3, participants condemn plagiarism cases that they agree are harmless (i.e., stealing credit from an anonymous source). This effect is mediated by the extent to which participants perceive the plagiarizer to have falsely benefitted from plagiarizing. In Studies 4–5, we demonstrate that this effect is not explained solely by participants’ negative response to lies or violations of permission. In Study 6, participants condemn a plagiarism case in which the idea's original author actually benefits, providing the strongest evidence that people condemn plagiarism for reasons beyond perceived harm. We discuss how this work connects to broader questions of intellectual property and impression management.     

When Beliefs Lead to (Im)Moral Action: How Believing in Torture's Effectiveness Shapes the Endorsement of Its Use

Does believing in torture's effectiveness shape the endorsements of its use? Using a multimethod approach across six studies, we provide converging evidence that efficacy beliefs can help increase understanding of individual differences and situational influences on torture support. Studies 1a and 1b found that torture opinions contained more efficacy‐based language than other types of harm and that people relied more on torture efficacy than torture's inherent morality when conveying their views. Study 2 assessed predictors of torture favorability including effectiveness and other key covariates, revealing that efficacy beliefs strongly predicted torture favorability—an association that retained its predictive validity above and beyond individual differences known to influence torture support. Mediation analyses further showed that efficacy beliefs explained key associations with torture support. Studies 3 and 4 used moral dilemmas requiring decisions about torture versus other harm. Results showed that individuals who believed harm would be effective were more likely to endorse its use; this was especially evident for torture judgments. Study 5 replicated the torture‐efficacy effect while also revealing efficacy effects for other interrogation techniques, thus suggesting the effect is driven more by the instrumental objective of torture than harm or moral violations. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Chewing on it can chew you up: effects of rumination on triggered displaced aggression

Ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood of displaced aggression following a minor annoyance (trigger). In Study 1, provoked participants who ruminated for 25 min were more aggressive toward a fumbling confederate than were distracted participants. Provocation-induced negative affect was positively related to aggression but only among those who ruminated. Study 2 conceptually replicated Study 1 and also found that the more negatively people reacted to the trigger, the more likely the trigger was to increase displaced aggression. Study 3 replicated the findings of Studies 1 and 2 by using an 8-hr rumination period. All 3 studies suggest that ruminating about a provocation increases the likelihood that a minor triggering annoyance will increase displaced aggression.     

Affect Intensity and Risk Preference in Life-Saving Decisions

The current studies investigated the influence of affect intensity on risk preference in life-saving decisions. Results from 4 experiments found that people are more risk-seeking when affect intensity is higher. This effect occurs in both gain and loss framing conditions (Study 2 and Study 3) and is robust in both between-subject design (Studies 1–3) and within-subject design (Study 4). The effect holds for saving human lives (Study 1 and Study 4), as well as for saving animal lives (Study 2 and Study 3). The results generalize from laboratory hypothetical settings (Studies 1–3) to simulations of a fire emergency (Study 4). Finally, the results from American samples (Studies 1–3) are replicated using a Chinese sample (Study 4). In addition, Study 5 demonstrates that the manipulations used in these experiments have an effect on affect intensity while not influencing alternative explanatory variables. The effect size for risk preference rises and falls with the effect size for manipulations.     

Boundary Issues and Multiple Relationships in Genetic Counseling Supervision: Supervisor,Non-supervisor,and Student Perspectives

Boundary issues and multiple relationships potentially affect all supervision interactions. Boundary crossings are departures from the strictest professional role and may or may not benefit supervisees. Boundary violations are outside common practice and may place supervisees at significant risk. Multiple relationships occur when supervisors concurrently or consecutively hold two or more roles with supervisees. Studies in other fields indicate supervisors and supervisees may be uncertain about professional conduct regarding these issues. In this study, genetic counselor supervisors (n?=?126), non-supervisors (n?=?72), and genetic counseling students (n?=?129) completed an anonymous survey investigating four major questions: 1) Are various boundary issues and multiple relationships perceived as differentially appropriate? 2) Do supervisor, non-supervisor, and student perceptions differ? 3) What challenging situations have respondents experienced? and 4) What management strategies did they use? There was general agreement among groups in their appropriateness ratings of 56 hypothetical supervisor behaviors, although supervisor ratings tended to reflect stricter boundaries regarding the appropriateness of interactions than student ratings. A majority rated unavoidable boundary crossings and supervisor multiple relationships involving an academic relationship as most appropriate, and romantic/sexual multiple relationships and/or boundary violations as least appropriate. Analysis of respondents’ actual challenging situations revealed many involved boundary violations, placed students at risk of harm, and often resulted in student compliance.     

Guiding others for their own good: Action orientation is associated with prosocial enactment of the implicit power motive

Prior research has repeatedly documented how people who are implicitly motivated by power motives may hurt other people’s interests. However, people may also enact the implicit power motive (nPower) in a prosocial manner. Using an Operant Motive Test, the authors differentiated five enactment strategies within nPower and investigated personality antecedents and personal benefits of a prosocial enactment strategy. Two studies found that demand-related action orientation (i.e., ability to self-regulate positive affect) was associated with prosocial enactment of nPower. Furthermore, prosocial enactment of nPower was associated with a higher explicit power motive among future teachers (Study 1) and future psychologists (Study 2). Finally, there was an indirect effect of action orientation through the prosocial enactment of nPower on the explicit power motive (Studies 1 and 2) and, in turn, on well-being (Study 2). Our integration of motivation and self-regulation research (the “what” and “how” of goal striving) helps to better understand the dual nature of power motives.