Buyers Versus Sellers: How They Differ in Their Responses to Framed Outcomes

Consumers’ reactions to a difference in price can depend on how it is framed. If buyers interpret paying $60 rather than $65 as getting a $5 discount, then they are likely to consider paying $60 to be a gain and paying $65 to be a nongain. Alternatively, if they interpret having to pay $65 rather than $60 as incurring a $5 penalty, then they may consider paying $60 to be a nonloss and paying $65 to be a loss. Similarly, sellers can also experience gains, nongains, nonlosses, and losses. This article suggests that buyers are prevention focused and consequently place a greater emphasis on loss‐related frames, whereas sellers are promotion focused and place a greater emphasis on gain‐related frames. Therefore, for equivalent positive outcomes, buyers feel better about nonlosses, but sellers feel better about gains. For equivalent negative outcomes, buyers feel worse about losses, but sellers feel worse about nongains. These effects, however, disappear when there is little motivation to process information about the monetary transaction.     

How to Read Wittgenstein

"How to Read Wittgenstein" is a discussion of some misinterpretations that arise when Ludwig Wittgenstein's later works are read, not in their historical context, but as though they were written for a generation of philosophers influenced by G.E. Moore and ordinary language philosophy. The criticisms are directed primarily at Oswald Hanfling's "Critical Notice" in Philosophical Investigations 19:2 (April, 1996).     

How They View Their Role: A Survey of Counselors in Different Secondary Schools

This study investigated how counselors in differently structured secondary schools look at their functions. Differences found were examined in relationship to expectations set forth in professional guidelines.     

How Personality and Reward Relate to Automobile Drivers' Judgments of Affordances Using Their Own Vehicles

Abstract

Researchers have long recognized the importance of psychological processes in motor vehicle safety, but ecological theory-based research on factors that might contribute to motor vehicle crashes has lagged. This study was designed to test factors that might influence motor vehicle drivers' judgments of passability and fit-ability affordances. In particular, the authors tested personality and behavioral reinforcement as factors that might influence automobile drivers' judgments of affordances in three tasks set at various π-numbers: driving forward through a gap, driving backward through a gap, and fitting into a parallel-parking spot. Results across two studies suggest that personality does not relate to judgment of driving environment affordances, but institution of a behavioral reward system causes drivers to judge affordances in different ways. Implications for future research and for automobile safety intervention are discussed.     

How to reason without words: inference as categorization

The idea that reasoning is a singular accomplishment of the human species has an ancient pedigree. Yet this idea remains as controversial as it is ancient. Those who would deny reasoning to nonhuman animals typically hold a language-based conception of inference which places it beyond the reach of languageless creatures. Others reject such an anthropocentric conception of reasoning on the basis of similar performance by humans and animals in some reasoning tasks, such as transitive inference. Here, building on the modal similarity theory of Vigo [J Exp Theor Artif Intell, 2008 (in press)], we offer an account in which reasoning depends on a core suite of subsymbolic processes for similarity assessment, discrimination, and categorization. We argue that premise-based inference operates through these subsymbolic processes, even in humans. Given the robust discrimination and categorization abilities of some species of nonhuman animals, we believe that they should also be regarded as capable of simple forms of inference. Finally, we explain how this account of reasoning applies to the kinds of transitive inferences that many nonhuman animals display.     

Assessing Knowledge Through Gesture: Using Children's Hands to Read Their Minds

Is the information that gesture provides about a child's understanding of a task accessible not only to experimenters who are trained in coding gesture but also to untrained observers? Twenty adults were asked to describe the reasoning of 12 different children, each videotaped responding to a Piagetian conservation task. Six of the children on the videotape produced gestures that conveyed the same information as their nonconserving spoken explanations, and 6 produced gestures that conveyed different information from their nonconserving spoken explanations. The adult observers displayed more uncertainty in their appraisals of children who produced different information in gesture and speech than in their appraisals of children who produced the same information in gesture and speech. Moreover, the adults were able to incorporate the information conveyed in the children's gestures into their own spoken appraisals of the children's reasoning. These data suggest that, even without training, adults form impressions of children's knowledge based not only on what children say with their mouths but also on what they say with their hands.     

Of Keys and Gifts: How to Read The Gift of Authority

Abstract

The Gift of Authority has received a cautious welcome from Anglicans. A reason for this, it is said, is that its language or culture are insufficiently Anglican. The article argues that this should not deter anyone because there are non-Anglican ecclesiologies – most notably that of Medard Kehl – which contain a vision of the Church that is basically the same as that behind The Gift, and which at the same time bear a close family resemblance to principles of Anglican ecclesiology. It is argued that using these as an Anglican ‘hermeneutical key’ to The Gift instead of focusing primarily on the language used, would substantially increase Anglican understanding and appreciation of the report.     

Middle-School Students' Understanding of the Equal Sign: The Books They Read Can't Help

This study examined how 4 middle school textbook series (2 skills-based, 2 Standards-based) present equal signs. Equal signs were often presented in standard operations equals answer contexts (e.g., 3 + 4 = 7) and were rarely presented in nonstandard operations on both sides contexts (e.g., 3 + 4 = 5 + 2). They were, however, presented in other nonstandard contexts (e.g., 7 = 7). Two follow-up experiments showed that students' interpretations of the equal sign depend on the context. The other nonstandard contexts were better than the operations equals answer context at eliciting a relational understanding of the equal sign, but the operations on both sides context was best. Results suggest that textbooks rarely present equal signs in contexts most likely to elicit a relational interpretation—an interpretation critical to success in algebra.     

How infants begin to extract words from speech

A crucial step for acquiring a native language vocabulary is the ability to segment words from fluent speech. English-learning infants first display some ability to segment words at about 7.5 months of age. However, their initial attempts at segmenting words only approximate those of fluent speakers of the language. In particular, 7.5-month-old infants are able to segment words that conform to the predominant stress pattern of English words. The ability to segment words with other stress patterns appears to require the use of other sources of information about word boundaries. By 10.5 months, English learners display sensitivity to additional cues to word boundaries such as statistical regularities, allophonic cues and phonotactic patterns. Infants’ word segmentation abilities undergo further development during their second year when they begin to link sound patterns with particular meanings. By 24 months, the speed and accuracy with which infants recognize words in fluent speech is similar to that of native adult listeners. This review describes how infants use multiple sources of information to locate word boundaries in fluent speech, thereby laying the foundations for language understanding.     

Toddlers' language-mediated visual search: They need not have the words for it

Eye movements made by listeners during language-mediated visual search reveal a strong link between visual processing and conceptual processing. For example, upon hearing the word for a missing referent with a characteristic colour (e.g., “strawberry”), listeners tend to fixate a colour-matched distractor (e.g., a red plane) more than a colour-mismatched distractor (e.g., a yellow plane). We ask whether these shifts in visual attention are mediated by the retrieval of lexically stored colour labels. Do children who do not yet possess verbal labels for the colour attribute that spoken and viewed objects have in common exhibit language-mediated eye movements like those made by older children and adults? That is, do toddlers look at a red plane when hearing “strawberry”? We observed that 24-month-olds lacking colour term knowledge nonetheless recognized the perceptual–conceptual commonality between named and seen objects. This indicates that language-mediated visual search need not depend on stored labels for concepts.     

Beauvoir on Women's Complicity in Their Own Unfreedom

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argues that women are often complicit in reinforcing their own unfreedom. But why women become complicit remains an open question. The aim of this article is to offer a systematic analysis of complicity by focusing on the Heideggerian strands of Beauvoir's account. I begin by evaluating Susan James's interpretation of complicity qua republican freedom, which emphasizes the dependent situation of women as the primary cause of their complicity. I argue that James's analysis is compelling as far as it goes, but that it implies complicity is the inevitable outcome of women's current existence and fails to adequately account for Beauvoir's claim that women actively embrace their own unfreedom. I then draw out the Heideggerian strands of Beauvoir's analysis, demonstrating how this enables us to systematize Beauvoir's account of women's oppressive situation with her claims regarding the active role women can play in reinforcing their own unfreedom. I argue that this approach preserves the strengths of the republican interpretation, but provides a better account of cases where complicity may not be inevitable and yet some women still act to reinforce rather than resist their own unfreedom.     

How to do things with (recorded) words

The aim of this paper is to evaluate which context determines the illocutionary force of written or recorded utterances—those involved in written texts, films and images, conceived as recordings that can be seen or heard in different occasions. More precisely, my paper deals with the “metaphysical” or constitutive role of context—as opposed to its epistemic or evidential role: my goal is to determine which context is semantically relevant in order to fix the illocutionary force of a speech act, as distinct from the information the addressee uses to ascertain the semantically relevant context. In particular I will try to assess two different perspectives on this problem, a Conventionalist Perspective and an Intentionalist Perspective. Drawing on the literature on indexicals in written texts and recorded messages, I will argue in favor of the Intentionalist Perspective: the relevant context is the one intended by the speaker. Bringing intentions into the picture, however, requires qualification; in particular, I will distinguish my Weak Intentionalist proposal from a Strong Intentionalist one. I will show that the Weak Intentionalist Perspective is flexible enough to deal with cases of delayed communication, but not so unrestricted as to yield counter-intuitive consequences.