How we think and act together

In this paper, I examine the challenges socially extended minds pose for mainstream, individualistic accounts of social cognition. I argue that individualistic accounts of social cognition neglect phenomena important to social cognition that are properly emphasized by socially extended mind accounts. Although I do not think the evidence or arguments warrant replacing individualistic explanations of social cognition with socially extended explanations, I argue that we have good reason to supplement our individualistic accounts so as to include the ways in which situational context affects social interactions. The result, I hope, is a more sophisticated individualism that offers a more comprehensive account of how we think and act together.     

Social Trust and Value Change: The Decline of Social Capital in American Youth, 1976–1995

Given the importance that generalized social trust plays in various theories of American society, recent evidence of its low levels among younger people portends ominous changes in American civic life. Using survey data collected from high school seniors over the last 20 years, this paper examines the origins of social trust among young people and the causes of change in beliefs about trust over time. Such changes could not be accounted for by the explanations for declining trust offered in other accounts of social capital. An alternative explanation, based on the theoretical accounts of Alexis de Tocqueville and Emile Durkheim, is that materialistic values may be undermining young people's views about the trustworthiness of others. Both aggregate time series correlations and an individual-level model show that the rapid rise of materialistic value orientations that occurred among American youth in the 1970s and 1980s severely eroded levels of social trust. The paper concludes with some observations about the likely trajectory of American democracy, given the kinds of trends observed in the youth data.     

Collective Rights and Personal Freedoms: A Discursive Analysis of Participant Accounts of Authoritarianism

This article presents a discursive analysis of participant accounts of authoritarianism, with the aim of understanding how participants construct accounts about authority, when, and for what purposes. Participants completed a 30‐item Right‐Wing Authoritarianism scale and were then interviewed about how they went about this task. Analyses revealed that, despite an overall consistency when answering items on an authoritarianism scale, participants in this study did not consistently choose to produce authoritarian responses in contrast to the nonauthoritarian alternative. Instead, the construction and expression of authoritarian ideas was found to be directly related to two rhetorical features of conversing about authoritarianism: (1) the ideological dilemma of society versus individual and (2) the mobilization of arguments about social and personal threat that allowed participants to construct accounts about collective rights or personal freedoms. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for current debates about how authoritarianism should be theorized and studied.     

The ontology of character traits in Hume

This paper argues that Hume can account for character traits as lasting mental qualities without violating his reductionist account of the mind as a changing bundle of ideas and impressions. It argues that a trait is a disposition to act according to certain passions or motivations, explained entirely with reference to the ideas and impressions constituting one's current self. This account is consistent with Hume's view of the mind, and relies solely on his accounts of the association of impressions and ideas, and of the relationship between belief and passion, to establish relations that can properly be called lasting mental qualities.     

Average explanations

Good scientific explanations sometimes appear to make use of averages. Using concrete examples from current economic theory, I argue that some confusions about how averages might work in explanations lead to both philosophical and economic problems about the interpretation of the theory. I formulate general conditions on potentially proper uses of averages to refine a notion of average explanation. I then try to show how this notion provides a means for resolving longstanding philosophical problems in economics and other quantitative social sciences.Some of the ideas in this essay were presented at the Philosophy of Economics II Conference at Tilburg University. I thank the participants for helpful remarks.     

Do customs compete with conditioning? Turf battles and division of labor in social explanation

We often face a bewildering array of different explanations for the same social facts (e.g. biological, psychological, economic, and historical accounts). But we have few guidelines for whether and when we should think of different accounts as competing or compatible. In this paper, I offer some guidelines for understanding when custom or norm accounts do and don’t compete with other types of accounts. I describe two families of non-competing accounts: (1) explanations of different (but similarly described) facts, and (2) accounts which seem to differ but are really different parts or versions of the same underlying explanation. I argue that, while many types of apparent competitors don’t really compete with customs, there are some that do. I also describe some of the central problems, which suggest that custom accounts will compete poorly with their rivals.     

Social representations in the ordinary explanation of a ‘riot’

This paper critically examines the notion of social representations by way of a systematic analysis of media and participants' accounts of the St Pauls street disturbances of 1980. The analysis concentrates on two major explanatory categories which appear in the accounts: (A) ‘race’; (B) ‘government cuts and amenities’. In each case it is possible to distinguish three different levels of consensus between accounts: (i) particular explanatory schemata can be recognized as available but treated as mistaken; (ii) particular explanatory schemata can be recognized as relevant and adopted to explain the particular events, although in different ways; (iii) particular schemata can be adopted and used to explain events in the same way. The flexible meaning of these categories is highlighted along with the recurrent reference to alternative explanations. These findings raise problems for the suggestion that social representations minimize conflict and create ‘consensual universes’, and question the straightforward relationship between social representations and identifiable social groups. In conclusion the need is identified for a more detailed analysis of the language in which social representations are couched, and the relationship they bear to different contexts of use.     

心算加工中tie effect的加工机制

tie effect主要表现为tie比nontie更快更准确解决,以及tie/nontie与问题大小的交互作用,较大题目的tie比nontie具有更明显的反应时优势,tie的问题大小效应比nontie要小的多。有关tie effect加工机制的解释主要有基于编码的理论和基于结果通达的理论。目前的研究主要通过操作问题呈现方式以及报告加工策略的方法分别考察编码方式及加工策略的影响,今后研究应开拓新的研究范式以加深对其加工机制的认识。     

Tales from Existential Oceans: Terror Management Theory and How the Awareness of Our Mortality Affects Us All

Terror management theory is a social psychological theory that draws from existential, psychodynamic, and evolutionary perspectives to understand the often potent influence that deeply rooted concerns about mortality can have on our sense of self and social behavior. The present article presents a brief introduction to the theory, comments on critiques and alternative explanations, and highlights where the theory came from, where it has been, and a few places that it might be going. Research is reviewed that uses this analysis to understand conscious and unconscious processes of psychological defense, the role of relationships and basic structuring of reality for managing existential distress, the integration of these ideas with motives for creativity and psychological growth, as well as a number of applied directions that help to make sense of pressing social problems.     

Explanations of social shyness

Shyness is a widespread reaction to social situations, characterized by inaction, self-consciousness, and heightened physiological reaction. Two explanations of this pattern have been proposed, in terms of a primary emotion related to shame or as a form of social anxiety. These positions lead to different predictions, but have attracted little investigation. Explanations of individual differences in shyness have emphasized either social skill deficits or low self-esteem, but these are not supported by empirical evidence. It is argued that an explanation in terms of self-attentional processes accounts for current findings, leads to original predictions, and relates shyness more closely to social psychological principles.     

When Do Scientific Explanations Compete? Steps Toward a Heuristic Checklist

It's not uncommon for scientists to give different explanations of the same phenomenon, but we currently lack clear guidelines for deciding whether to treat such accounts as competitors. This article discusses how science studies can help create tools and guidelines for thinking about whether explanations compete. It also specifies how one family of discourse rules enables there to be differing accounts that appear to compete but don't. One hopes that being more aware of the linguistic mechanisms making compatible accounts appear to compete will prevent people from wasting resources trying to show which account is right.     

Explaining the Paradox of Hedonism

The paradox of hedonism is the idea that making pleasure the only thing that we desire for its own sake can be self-defeating. Why would this be true? In this paper, I survey two prominent explanations, then develop a third possible explanation, inspired by Joseph Butler's classic discussion of the paradox. The existing accounts claim that the paradox arises because we are systematically incompetent at predicting what will make us happy, or because the greatest pleasures for human beings are found in certain special goods which hedonists cannot enjoy. On the account that I develop, the paradox is a consequence of a theory about the nature of pleasure, together with a view about the requirements of rational belief. Which of these explanations is correct, I argue, bears on central questions about how to understand the nature and extent of the paradox.     

Return of the question "why": advantages of exploring pre-existing explanations

We suggest that there are many advantages in thoroughly exploring the causal explanations given by clients or members of their social network to account for their problems. Specific interviewing techniques are presented to uncover clients' causal explanations or their impressions about the causal explanations of others. Various advantages of exploring these explanations are discussed. They include improved cooperation, development of "systemic empathy," detachment from the explanations of other professionals, recognition and avoidance of coalitions, loosening of firmly held explanations, dilution of noxious explanations, generation of new and positive explanations toward solutions, and taking a bird's-eye view or meta position about such explanations. We conclude that acceptance and appreciation of the human tendency to believe in causal explanations is a fruitful way to enhance interaction between clinicians and clients.     

Using Social Representations Theory to Examine Lay Explanation of Contemporary Social Crises: The Case of Ireland's Recession

Social actors operate under a basic imperative to construct explanations for the events that surround them. Many issues that dominate the societal agenda today are not available to direct perception, derive from traditionally expert domains and are relatively remote from immediate local experience. This presents a challenge for lay explanation of these issues. Social representations theory offers a useful framework through which the construction of lay explanation for such issues can be examined. The current study recruited this theoretical framework to investigate lay explanations of the recent economic recession in Ireland. Data consisted of semi‐structured interviews with 14 members of the public and a web‐based survey (N = 138). The data suggested that explanations for the recession could be organised into three major themes: Power, Ordinary People and Fatalism. Strictly economic explanations were eschewed; instead, people drew upon a wide range of ideas about society, politics, morality, public spheres and personhood. The implications of these findings for understanding lay explanation of contemporary social crises are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Asymmetric Explanations of Group Differences: Experimental Evidence of Foucault’s Disciplinary Power

Whilst the same group differences can be explained in many ways, explanations of group differences tend to spontaneously figure the distinctive attributes of lower‐status groups against a background norm of high‐status groups’ attributes. We suggest that this asymmetry occurs in the explanations of scientists and laypeople who have been influenced by the history of ‘disciplinary power’ which works to disempower lower‐status people by making them visible to the human sciences. We argue that social groups who are habitually studied first in research programs, more commonly encountered social groups, and prototypical social groups are all less likely than their counterparts to be marked in spontaneous explanations of empirical group differences. We present evidence that groups who are explicitly mentioned in such explanations are assumed to be lower in power. We describe some limitations to current knowledge about such asymmetric explanations and suggest some directions for further research, including our thoughts about how to integrate existing findings with the possibility of formulating cognitive alternatives to the status quo among minority groups.     

Causal Attribution and Perceived Realism of Stories

Just as people generate causal explanations for social events around them, story readers usually generate inferences about causality of events when reading a story. The attribution literature suggests that, when judging events that happen to others, people spontaneously generate dispositional explanations for negative events and situational explanations for positive events and the reverse when judging events that happen to themselves. Three experiments examined how these spontaneously generated inferences of causality interacted with causal explanations provided by the text of a story to influence perceived realism. The results indicate that the relationship between spontaneously generated causal attributions and information supplied by the story had little influence on realism judgments about story characters or about other people. When evaluating the story scenario for the self, however, results of all three experiments show that people find information consistent with their own spontaneous attributions more realistic. The results contribute to our understanding of the psychological processes that may drive realism evaluations of stories and possible contrasting mechanisms between attributions in story worlds and the social world.     

Ontology and scientific explanation: Pluralism as an a priori condition of psychology

The field of psychology can be understood in terms of general accounts of mental life that differ over time and between cultures or in terms of an academic discipline. For the former, pluralism is an a priori condition because history and culture produce necessarily and universally varying accounts of human subjectivity that are embedded in local practices and traditions. This argument is traced to the nature of psychological objects and events that are of a cultural-historical kind. For Psychology as an academic discipline it is argued that pluralism depends on varying ontological levels, ranging from natural to cultural-historical kinds. The same argument of varying levels applies to the concept of explanation. It is shown that important accounts in the discipline do not provide natural-scientific explanations but rather hermeneutic interpretations that afford high levels of pluralism. Based on the idea of a necessary and universal pluralism in the field of psychology, conditions for the possibility of integration are provided. It is argued that the first step of integration includes recognition of pluralistic accounts of mental life. Instead of assimilation, the accommodation of new ideas is recommended.     

Taking visual disability into account: Explaining failure to experts and non-experts

The present study was designed to investigate visually handicapped students' explanations for failure when the motive to maintain or enhance self-esteem was in conflict with the motive to present a favorable social image. Subjects experienced manipulated failure in a text comprehension task and were subsequently asked to give causal and responsibility attributions in the presence of either a visually handicapped or a non-handicapped experimenter. It was expected that visually disabled participants would claim a handicap-bonus from the non-handicapped experimenter by explicitly presenting non-defensive attributions and accounts as well as handicap-related responses, while defensive explanations should be more pronounced when faced with a blind experimenter. The data provide support for the existence of presumed social expectations as determinants of individuals' verbal self-presentations.     

Unification,Reduction, and Non-Ideal Explanations

Kitcher's unification theory of explanation seems to suggest that only the most reductive accounts can legitimately be termed explanatory. This is not what we find in actual scientific practice. In this paper, I attempt to reconcile these ideas. I claim that Kitcher's theory picks out ideal explanations, but that our term explanation is used to cover other accounts that have a certain relationship with the ideal accounts. At times, versions and portions of ideal explanations can also be considered explanatory.     

Representations of Mental Health Among Middle‐Aged Urban Chinese Men

Little is understood by the ideas that urban Chinese population holds about mental health. Insufficient research and recognition of mental illnesses, and a dearth of social resources for mental health support and promotion limit understandings of how daily life stresses restrict the quality of life of China's urban population. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 15 middle‐age urban men, we map out men's accounts of how they battle to cope with the demands of everyday social, political, and familial pressures. The study reveals that the representations of mental health are shaped by notions of control over emotions, adherence to Confucian philosophy, familial obligations, and the need to demonstrate social obedience and conformity. Data also suggest that the participants represent stable family support along with healthy social interactions as important enabling factors of positive mental health, whereas pressures of modernity are regarded as significant disruptive factors in mental health. The theory of social representations guides the process as well as analytic interpretations of this research. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.