How much can the school house control?

Conflict between school systems and their communities is part of American history. Much of the conflict is symbolic, the school being the stage for the acting out of deeper clashes. Several hundred teachers in the north Florida area were polled in 1977 and 1978 to identify areas of conflict between schools and community. The issue which evoked the greatest dissension was the question of responsibility for the children of the new American underclass. Data were tabulated and analyzed in the light of historical patterns developed by the author, and the conclusion drawn that school-community conflict will persist with regard to the teaching of underclass children because the public has no clear perception about who is responsible.     

Livestock judges: How much information can an expert use?

The number of dimensions used by expert livestock judges in making decisions was determined by two different experimental procedures. In the first, judgments were made of hypothetical gilts (female breeding pigs) described by verbal statements along 11 relevant dimensions. In the second, judgments were made based on photographs of Poland-China breeding gilts. The judges were found to use 9–11 pieces of information in the first study but were generally found to use fewer than three in the second. These results were interpreted to indicate that expert judges can integrate a large number of dimensions but that intercorrelations present in real stimuli tend to reduce the number of dimensions found. This suggests that experts may be able to use substantially more information than was previously thought.     

How do people know?

To fully understand processes of knowing and knowledge acquisition, it is necessary to examine people's understanding of their own knowing. Individual and developmental differences in what it means to know something, and hence in the criteria for justifying knowledge claims, have potentially wide-ranging implications. In providing support for a claim, young children have difficulty differentiating explanation of why a claim makes sense and evidence that the claim is true. Epistemic understanding progresses developmentally, but substantial variation remains among adults, with few adults achieving understanding of the complementary strengths and weaknesses of evidence and explanation in argument. Epistemic understanding shapes intellectual values and hence the disposition (as opposed to competence) to exercise intellectual skills. Only its most advanced levels support a disposition to engage in the intellectual effort that reasoned argument entails. The sample case of juror reasoning illustrates how epistemic understanding underlies and shapes intellectual performance.     

Communicating stereotype‐relevant information: How readily can people individuate?

It is often suggested that people automatically form an impression of a target by using stereotypes. However, people can flexibly deploy different types of individuating processes, depending on the communicative context. We showed that people can individuate targets from their social category by communicating stereotype‐inconsistent information (person–group individuation) when they are required to reproduce information about the targets and people can individuate targets from other individuals by communicating information that is distinctive about the targets (person–person individuation) when required to identify the targets. The participants' performance is unrelated to information memorability (Experiment 1) and is not affected by time pressure (Experiment 2). Humans' adaptive capacity for individuation is discussed.     

How do people order stimuli?

People may find it easier to construct an order after first representing stimuli on a scale or categorizing them, particularly when the number of stimuli to be ordered is large or when some of them must be remembered. Five experiments tested this hypothesis. In two of these experiments (1 and 3), we asked participants to rank line lengths or to rank photographs by artistic value. The participants provided evidence of how they performed these tasks, and this evidence indicated that they often made use of some preliminary representation—either a metric or a categorization. Two further experiments (2 and 4) indicated that people rarely produced rankings when given a choice of assessment measures for either the length of lines or the artistic value of photographs. In Experiment 5, when the number of lines was larger or lines were only visible one at a time, participants were faster at estimating line lengths as a percentage of the card covered than at rank ordering the lengths. Overall, the results indicate that ordering stimuli is not an easy or natural process when the number of stimuli is large or when the stimuli are not all perceptible at once. An implication is that the psychological measures available to individuals are not likely to be purely ordinal when many of the elements being measured must be recalled.     

How much is an icon worth?

We report a new technique for assessing the amount of information extracted from the icon that follows a briefly presented picture. The problem of how to measure such information was formulated in terms of how much physical exposure of a picture an icon is worth. Consider two types of stimulus presentations, each with a base duration of d ms. The first is a d-ms picture followed by an icon, and the second is a d + a-ms picture not followed by an icon. How large does a have to be so that equivalent amounts of information are extracted in the two cases? To answer this question, we showed people pictures and later tested their memory for the pictures. We found that the physical exposure duration needed to reach a particular level of performance was approximately 100 ms longer when an icon was not permitted versus when the icon was permitted. This value was independent of the base duration and the luminance of the picture. Moreover, the same value was obtained using three different kinds of memory test and four different sets of pictures. We conclude that an icon is worth approximately 100 ms of additional physical exposure duration. A reasonable explanation for this robust equivalence between icon and stimulus is that the same encoding processes are responsible for extracting information from the icon and from the physical stimulus. Therefore, any variable that affects these encoding processes must affect extraction of information from the icon and the physical stimulus in an identical manner. This prediction was confirmed for one such variable, picture luminance.     

How can psychotherapists influence psychiatry?

Summary

This paper is based on an invited contribution to the first APP conference on psychoanalytic psychotherapy services in Europe. I was asked to address the question “How can psychotherapists influence psychiatry?” within the overall title for the half-day session of “Psychiatry and Psychodynamics: Towards integration or splitting”. As a background to later discussion I began with a historical sketch of how we had arrived at the current situation in the UK with a specialty of psychotherapy, both separate from and yet still within psychiatry. I argued the need for a separate specialty to protect the space needed for psychotherapy in the face of the inevitable polarisations that occur within psychiatry. Some of the tensions between the different points of view are likened to those between masculine and feminine roles. This specialty might eventually emerge into or foster a new profession of psychotherapy but will still need to negotiate its position in relation to psychiatry.     

How can Ethnomethodology be Heideggerian?

The purpose of this paper is to begin to try to understand the extent to which ethnomethodology (EM) might be informed by some concepts and ideas from the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. This is done in two parts. The first looks at Heidegger's later work and compares his conception of the ontological difference with Garfinkel's work on the difference between EM and formal sociological analysis (FA). The second part turns to Heidegger's earlier work (around Being and Time) and works through a number of affinities between the analysis of Dasein and ethnomethodological versions of everydayness.     

How can you patent genes?

What accounts for the continued lack of clarity over the legal procedures for the patenting of DNA sequences? The patenting system was built for a "bricks-and-mortar" world rather than an information economy. The fact that genes are both material molecules and informational systems helps explain the difficulty that the patent system is going to continue to have.     

How lucky can you get?

In this paper, I apply Duncan Pritchard’s anti-luck epistemology to the case of knowledge through testimony. I claim (1) that Pritchard’s distinction between veritic and reflective luck provides a nice taxonomy of testimony cases, (2) that the taxonomic categories that emerge can be used to suggest precisely what epistemic statuses are transmissible through testimony, and (3) that the resulting picture can make clear how testimony can actually be knowledge-generating.     

How internal can you get?

This paper examines Laurence BonJour's defense of internalism inThe Structure of Empirical Knowledge with an eye toward better understanding the issues which separate internalists from externalists. It is argued that BonJour's Doxastic Presumption cannot play the role which is required of it to make his internalism work. It is further argued that BonJour's internalism, and, indeed, all other internalisms, are motivated by a Cartesian view of an agent's access to her own mental states. This Caretsian view is argued to be untenable, and, accordingly, so is internalism.     

How do people apprehend large numerosities?

People discriminate remarkably well among large numerosities. These discriminations, however, need not entail numerical representation of the quantities being compared. This research evaluated the role of both non-numerical and numerical information in adult judgments of relative numerosity for large-numerosity spatial arrays. Results of Experiment 1 indicated that judgments of relative numerosity were affected by the amount of open space in the arrays being compared. Further, the accuracy of verbal estimates of the numerosities of the arrays made upon completion of the comparison task bore little relation to performance on that task. Experiment 2, however, showed that numerical estimates for individually presented arrays were affected in much the same way by open space within or around the edges of the array as were the comparative judgments examined in Experiment 1. The findings suggest that adults heuristically utilize non-numerical cues as well as numerical information in apprehending large numerosities.     

How can the impact of implementation intentions as a behaviour change intervention be improved?

Interventions requesting individuals to form implementation intentions, specific plans regarding how and when to enact behaviour, have been shown to be effective in changing a wide range of health, social, and organisational behaviours. A small proportion of studies have sought to identify, within full-factorial designs, under what circumstances and for whom implementation intention-based interventions are most effective. This review covers this issue. A number of potential moderators of the effects of implementation intentions on behaviour were identified (intentions, motivation type, collaboration, plan reminders, goal type, plan type, conscientiousness, perfectionism, procrastination, stress). Of these, the strength of one's intentions have been tested, and supported, most often as a moderator of implementation intention effects. For some of these moderators (e.g., conscientiousness, goal difficulty) the results were contradictory but for others the results were more consistent (e.g., motivation type, plan reminders). Additional moderators might be identified by comparing effects of implementation intentions across studies.     

Do people really believe they are above average?

A question that has plagued self-enhancement research is whether participants truly believe the overly positive self-assessments they report, or whether better-than-average effects reflect mere hopes or self-presentation. In a test of people’s belief in the accuracy of their self-enhancing trait ratings, participants made a series of bets, each time choosing between betting that they had scored at least as high on a personality test as a random other participant, or betting on a random drawing in which the probability of success was matched to their self-assigned percentile rank on the test. They also reported the point at which they would switch their bet from their self-rating to the drawing, or vice versa. Participants were indifferent between betting on themselves or on the drawing, and it took only a slight change in the drawing’s probability for them to switch their bet, indicating that people truly believe their self-enhancing self-assessments.     

How much memory does oculomotor search have?

Research has demonstrated that oculomotor visual search is guided by memory for which items or locations within a display have already been inspected. In the study reported here, we used a gaze-contingent search paradigm to examine properties of this memory. Data revealed a memory buffer for search history of three to four items. This buffer was effected in part by a space-based trace attached to a location independently of whether the object that had been seen at that position remained visible, and was subject to interference from other stimuli seen in the course of a trial.