Belief in an Unjust World: When Beliefs in a Just World Fail

Past research has attempted to delineate personality differences between insomniacs and good sleepers but has failed to control for type of insomnia or severity of the disorder. The purpose of this study was to compare MMPI scores of mild and severe sleep onset insomniacs with a control group of noninsomniacs. Results demonstrated that sleep onset insomniacs, regardless of degree of severity, differed significantly from noninsomniacs; and that mild and severe insomniacs differed from each other on only one MMPI scale.     

When Consumers’ Self‐Image Motives Fail

Self‐image motives and “sacrosanct beliefs” are powerful motivators of consumer judgment and decision making. The sacrosanct belief that one is rational, for instance, can cause consumers to justify seemingly unwise economic decisions. This article outlines some of the occasions when self‐image motives appear to fail. For instance, although consumers occasionally pat themselves on the back for making questionable purchase decisions, at other times they find fault in perfectly reasonable ones. These and other recent findings provide an exception to the more general rule outlined by Dunning (2007).     

期望、体验和回忆: 当消费者不能从体验中学习

人们对消费体验的期望、回忆与真实体验时常发生分离, 而且人们很少从真实体验中得到学习。本研究认为原因之一是期望、体验和回忆三者基于不同的输入信息, 以及三者特殊的交互关系。本研究首先提出了一个关于消费者期望、体验和回忆的理论框架, 系统阐述了消费者何时不能从体验中学习以及如何能促进学习, 然后在一个消费情景中通过3×2混合实验设计考察了三者的关系。实验比较了在“预期(无体验)”、“体验后即时评价”和“体验后延迟评价”三种评价方式下被试对两种品牌火腿肠的口味评价和偏好选择。结果发现: 消费者对口味体验的期望和回忆相似, 但两者都和真实体验发生分离。最后, 本研究还讨论了这一理论框架在消费者行为中的应用、未来研究拓展等。     

On Ignorance: A Reply to Peels

Rik Peels has ingeniously argued that ignorance is not equivalent to the lack or absence of knowledge. In this response, I defend the ??Standard View of Ignorance?? according to which they are equivalent. In the course of doing so, some important lessons will emerge concerning the nature of ignorance and its relationship to knowledge.     

Anti-Autonomism Defended: A Reply to Hill

In the current issue of this journal, Scott Hill critiques some of my work on the “is”-“ought” controversy, the Hume-inspired debate over whether an ethical conclusion can be soundly, or even validly, derived from only non-ethical premises. I’ve argued that it can be; Hill is unconvinced. I reply to Hill’s critique, focusing on four key questions to which he and I give different answers.

When Virtues,Roles and Duties Fail: Early Greek and Chinese Accounts of Akrasia

Both the Mohist canon and the works of Aristotle recognize that people sometimes fail to act according to virtues, roles and duties, what in a Western context is called akrasia or “weakness of will,” an important topic in both Greek and contemporary philosophy. I argue that questions of akrasia are treated different in the early Chinese and ancient Greek philosophy. Greek accounts focus on issues of will and control, while some Chinese thinkers treat akrasia as a lack of a skill, and the failure to act in the right way is less lack of will than lack of skill. I begin with a brief account of the problem of akrasia as first presented by Plato in the “Protagoras” and Republic, and developed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. I then turn to akrasia in an early Chinese context, focusing on a very different Mohist view of akrasia as lack of a skill. Finally, I contrast the “skill” the Mohists find lacking with a very different account of skill in the Zhuangzi.