Simulation and Understanding Other Minds

There is much disagreement about how extensive a role theoretical mind‐reading, behavior‐reading, and simulation each have and need to have in our knowing and understanding other minds, and how each method is implemented in the brain, but less discussion of the epistemological question what it is about the products of these methods that makes them count as knowledge or understanding. This question has become especially salient recently as some have the intuition that mirror neurons can bring understanding of another's action despite involving no higher‐order processing, whereas most epistemologists writing about understanding think that it requires reflective access to one's grounds, which is closer to the intuitions of other commenters on mirror neurons. I offer a definition of what it is that makes something understanding that is compelling independently of the context of cognition of other minds, and use it to show two things: 1) that theoretical mind‐reading and simulation bring understanding in virtue of the same epistemic feature, and 2) why the kind of motor representation without propositional attitudes that is done by mirror neurons is sufficient for action understanding. I further suggest that more attention should be paid to the potential disadvantages of a simulative method of knowing. Though it can be more efficient in some cases, it can also bring vulnerability, wear and tear on one's personal equipment, and unintended mimicry.     

Understanding Occupational Stress in Child-Welfare Supervisors1

The consequences of occupational stress include not only physical and psychological illnesses, but also a variety of employment problems. The current study examined stress and physical symptoms reported by a sample of child-welfare supervisors at a state human-services agency. Results indicated that a tendency to suppress angry feelings was related to an increased level of perceived stress and a greater number of physical symptoms. Suppressed anger was also related to dissatisfaction with co-workers. Finally, results did not suggest any significant relationships between type of managerial style typically employed and job satisfaction, perceived stress, anger, or physical symptoms. Results of the present study highlight the importance of focusing on anger expression in interventions developed to address occupational stress.     

Understanding the Determinants of Consumer Composting Behavior1

This study compared 3 models of waste management behavior: (a) a theory of reasoned action model, (b) an environmental belief-behavior model, and (c) an integrated waste management model which is based on the theory of planned behavior. The three models were compared using data from a sample of over 1,400 individual respondents who each completed a survey and a 2-week diary of their consumer composting activities. Overall, the results suggest that while the environmental beliefs-behavior model and the integrated waste management models both fit the data well, the integrated waste management model provided better predictive power and offers significant insight into the factors that influence composting behavior.     

Understanding Narratively,Understanding Alterity

Phenomenology's systematic exploration of how a world comes into existence for knowers – knowers who are often conceptualized as individual and ostensibly isolated – requires that it provide some account of the constitution of alterity. In this paper, I address this issue by arguing that we apperceive alterity in terms of the intentionality of behavior. A corollary of this argument is that the apperception of an alter as specifically human is a secondary attribution, following the primary apperception of intention. I further argue that the intentionality of behavior is understood through the projection of a narrative frame, or a “protonarrative,” onto the alter's behavior. I suggest that protonarrativity is the form that experience takes as its ontological condition. Our living is not simply known to us reflectively as protonarrative; rather, experience is lived as protonarrative.This essay is based on a paper presented at the annual conference of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, Memphis, Tennessee, October 28–30, 2004.     

Understanding Seat-Belt Intentions and Behavior: A Decision-Making Approach1

In an experimental study designed to investigate a decision-making model of seat-belt use, 227 employees of an agrochemical company participated in a health information program in which they watched either a videotape on seat belts or a control videotape and completed questionnaires immediately afterward and at 3 months and 1 year after exposure. In terms of total effects, the seat-belt videotape influenced beliefs, fear, and intentions assessed immediately after exposure, but had no effect on self-reported frequency of belt use at 3 months or 1 year. A full path analysis indicated some support for the decision-making model. In particular, probability difference (the perceived reduction in risk of death or serious injury due to wearing a belt) had a large influence on intentions to wear a belt and partly mediated the effect of the videotape on intentions. Reported frequency of belt use at 3 months was influenced both by post-test intentions and by initial frequency of belt use. Similarly, belt use at 1 year was affected by belt use at 3 months and by initial belt use. The findings are discussed in terms of the role of subjective probabilities and habitual factors in seat-belt use.     

Understanding Male Bias Against Girls and Women in Science1

Boys consistently have expressed more negative attitudes toward women in science than have girls. The basis of these negative male attitudes was explored in a sample of 159 male and 158 female science‐oriented high school students. The students participated in a science enrichment program in which positive information about women in science was provided. Consistent with theories of prejudice and stereotyping: (a) at the beginning of the program, more negative attitudes toward women in science were linked to lower science self‐confidence among boys, but not among girls; and (b) following the program, analysis of residual post‐scores (with pre‐scores controlled) indicated that changes in self‐confidence over the course of the program were related significantly to changes in attitudes toward women in science among boys but not among girls. Implications for girls’ and women's participation in science are discussed.     

Toward an Understanding of Family Planning Behaviors: An Initial Investigation1

Based on a theoretical model developed by Fishbein (1972), a questionnaire was administered to 73 female college students to test the hypotheses that (1) behavioral intention (BI) to use birth control pills is a function of (a) one's attitude toward the act (A-act) of using birth control pills and/or (b) one's normative beliefs weighted by one's motivation to comply with those perceived norms (ΣNB(Mc)); and (2) A-act of using birth control pills is a function of (or is highly correlated with) the sum of one's beliefs about the consequences of using birth control pills times the evaluation of those beliefs (ΣBiai). In support of the hypotheses, (1) the multiple correlation between the two components of the model and BI was significant (R= 335, p < .01); and (2) the correlation between XBiui and A-act was significant (r= .792, p < .01).     

Understanding microworlds

Little is known about how individuals understand change in complex systems. In the natural world, for instance, the effects of change need to be understood in terms of two-way (interdependent) causal processes. Based on subject's ratings of the causal likelihood that a given change will yield a target effect and on subjects' ratings of the impact of a given change on specified populations in a microworld, White (1997, 2000) argued that individuals in fact understand change in terms of one-way causal processes and assume that causal effects decline with distance from the source of the change. An alternative view is that the ratings reflect individuals' mental simulations of change as elicited by the tasks. Experiments 1 and 2 confirm that such ratings are task dependent and that individuals make no general assumption that causal effects decrease with distance. Experiment 3 shows that when required to explain a pattern of change in the size of a population individuals can construct two-way causal explanations consistent with this mental simulation proposal.     

Understanding Beliefs

Beliefs are central to political psychology, but in many ways remain undertheorized. A good starting place for further thought is the typology of Smith, Bruner, and White that separates reality testing from the social and psychological functions of beliefs. The concept of beliefs has several connotations, some of which involve faith and emotions. It is often difficult to grasp others' beliefs, especially when they are foreign to us or morally repugnant. It is even more difficult to determine whether beliefs are powerful in the sense of determining behavior and autonomous in the sense of not being directly derivable from other factors. The Smith, Bruner, and White typology is useful here, helps us understand the operation of biases, and points to the multiple roles that beliefs play in people's lives, including managing trade-offs and generating what looks to others like hypocrisy.     

Understanding anthropologists

In this paper I show how to treat problems in the philosophy of the social sciences, in particular anthropology, without the need to settle questions in the theory of meaning about realism and anti‐realism. In doing this, I show how it is possible, contrary to received opinion, to ward off conceptual relativism without adoption of realist semantics. The argument involves sketching the feasibility of a viable non‐realist concept of objectivity. Having distinguished the required notion of objectivity, I then bring this to bear on issues that have dominated the philosophy of anthropology in recent years: the translatability of ritual beliefs; the adequacy of symbolist anthropology; the concept of rationality. I offer a new way of handling these issues which supports an anti‐realist, but intellectualist, account of ritual belief.     

Understanding Truth

Book Information Understanding Truth. By Soames Scott. Oxford University Press. New York. 1999. Pp. ix + 268. Cloth.     

Understanding sustainability

Proposed solutions to sustainability often bring different economic sectors into conflict; when a sustainable solution for one sector is non-sustainable for another it creates what we call the dilemma of sustainability. A recent example took place in the Columbia Basin of the Pacific Northwest, involving competing notions of sustainability by fisheries and the energy industry. Taking up some ideas of Eger and Lyotard, we criticize the constructivist approach which treats large ecosystems as constructions and the process of resolving conflicts of sustainability as one solely consisting of negotiations involving the trading off of interests. We propose instead to treat such conflict resolution via a Gadamerian-inspired hermeneutics that sees different economic sectors as having different interpretations of sustainability and that aims at common understanding.