⊃E is Admissible in “true” relevant arithmetic

The system R## of true relevant arithmetic is got by adding the -rule Infer xAx from A0, A1, A2, .... to the system R# of relevant Peano arithmetic. The rule E (or gamma) is admissible for R##. This contrasts with the counterexample to E for R# (Friedman & Meyer, Whither Relevant Arithmetic). There is a Way Up part of the proof, which selects an arbitrary non-theorem C of R## and which builds by generalizing Henkin and Belnap arguments a prime theory T which still lacks C. (The key to the Way Up is a Witness Protection Program, using the -rule.) But T may be TOO BIG, whence there is a Way Down argument that produces a better theory TR, such that R## TR T. (The key to the Way Down is a Metavaluation, on which membership in T is combined with ordinary truth-functional conditions to determine TR.) The result is a theory that is Just Right, whence it never happens that A C and A are theorems of R## but C is a non-theorem.     

The relationship between direct and indirect measures of values: Is social desirability a significant moderator?

IntroductionThe measurement of personal values is still a great challenge in social psychology due to the complex nature of this concept.ObjectiveBased on Schwartz's theory of human values, this study aimed at analysing the relationship between the Values Implicit Association Test (VIAT), a relatively new indirect measure of values, and the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ), a well-known direct measure of values. Also, it examined whether social desirability moderates this relationship.MethodSeventy-three participants (64.4% female; M age = 25.46, SD = 4.04) took part to the study in a standardized setting.ResultsResults showed different value priorities depending on the measure used (i.e., indirect vs direct), and although social desirability was related to participants’ responses on PVQ more than on VIAT, it did not moderate the association between direct and indirect measures for any of the examined values.ConclusionsImplications of the findings for value measurement and future developments are discussed.     

What are the values of young people and how are these different from the values of older generations in Georgia?

This article examines the basic values of young people (aged 18 to 25) and analyses how, if at all, these are different from the values of older generations in Georgia. Based on Shalom H. Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Values (2012), the study uses quantitative (secondary analysis of the World Values Survey [WVS]) and qualitative (40 in-depth interviews) research methods to explore basic values, perceptions and attitudes, as well as tolerance towards different minority groups in Georgia. The research findings reveal that Schwartz’s higher-ordered values ‘conservation’ (including ‘conformity’ and ‘tradition’) and ‘self-transcendence’ (including ‘benevolence’ and ‘universalism’) are very important for all age groups in Georgia. In contrast, the values of ‘openness to change’ and ‘self-enhancement’ are assessed quite dissimilarly by young and older generations. In addition, the youth turned out to be more tolerant towards different minority groups, such as people of a different religion and race, immigrants and sexual minorities.     

Table of criterion values (β) used in signal detection theory

A table of criterion values for use with the theory of signal detection (TSD) is presented. Criterion values (β) are presented for varying proportions of hits and false alarms. A brief explanation of signal detection theory is given, and the measures for sensory sensitivity (d′) and response criterion (β) are described.     

Farewell to multiculturalism? sharing values and identities in societies of immigration

For critics of multiculturalism, societies of immigration need to strengthen cohesion based on shared democratic values and national identities. This article suggests that democratic values are not a sufficient basis for political cohesion, because they are universal and cannot identify a particular polity toward which one ought to be loyal. Immigrants are always asked to accept a package deal that includes not only democratic values, but also the hegemony of established national cultures. Shared democratic values may also not be strictly necessary for political cohesion. They must be embedded in political institutions and ought to be respected by office holders, democratic politicians, and parties, but democratic states must tolerate that most citizens appear to hold illiberal beliefs including illiberal attitudes toward immigrants. Immigrants are then often asked to profess a commitment to values that citizens do not widely share. If political loyalty, cannot be exclusively based on democratic values, must societies of immigration then ask newcomers to assimilate into a shared national identity? The article argues that this requires, first, a self-transformation of these identities in response to immigration. Instead of regarding shared identities as overriding all other affiliations, democratic states should see them as overarching and overlapping. Different attitudes toward dual nationality illustrate the implication of this suggestion. The article concludes by proposing a catalyst model of multiculturalism as an alternative to the metaphors of the melting pot, the salad bowl, and the mosaic.     

Congruence and functions of personal and cultural values: do my values reflect my culture's values?

Two studies are described examining the correlation between self- and culture-referenced values at a culture level (Study 1) and correlation between self- and culture-referenced values and self-reported behavior at an individual level (Study 2). It is found that values related to individual-group relationships (embeddedness) and expression and experience of affective feelings and emotions (affective autonomy) are significantly correlated at a culture level. In Study 2, culture-referenced values are shown to correlate with behaviors attached to social norms, whereas self-rated values are found to correlate with behaviors that are not norm-governed. Implications for measurement of cultural values and cultural and cross-cultural research designs are discussed.     

What’s up in mental rotation?

We report two experiments on the influence of head tilt on mental rotation. In Experiment I, subjects decided whether dot patterns were or were not repeated about a line. Their reaction times (RTs) were consistent with the interpretation that they mentally rotated the patterns so that the line was subjectively vertical before making their decisions. When the subjects tilted their heads, the RT functions shifted in the direction of the tilt, indicating that the subjective vertical lay closer to the retinal than to the gravitational vertical. In Experiment II, subjects decided whether singly presented alphanumeric characters in various orientations were standard or backward (mirror-reversed). Again, analysis of their RTs suggested mental rotation to the standard upright, but the function was unaffected by head tilt; in this case, the subjects operated in subjective gravitational rather than retinal coordinates. The choice of retinal or gravitational coordinates may depend on whether the stimuli are interpreted egocentrically or as part of the external world.     

Task-specific strategies of mental “rotation” of facial representations

The effects of task demands on the visual comparison of facial patterns and of comparable nonfacial patterns were explored in two studies. The studies yielded two primary findings. First, faces, despite their holistic properties, are not rotated faster than comparable non-face-like patterns, although subjects’ judgments of them were uniformly more rapid than judgments for nonfaces. Second, the nature of the same-different judgment task required of subjects had a large effect on the pattern of results obtained: When stimuli were compared to their mirror images, results indicative of mental “rotation” were obtained. When stimuli were compared on the basis of similarity of individual features, the pattern of results was very different. This one manipulation produced effects that exceeded those of all of the other manipulations, including that of rotation.     

Exploring the relationship between students’ values and the values of postsecondary institutions

Little is known of how institutional and individual value systems are related among university undergraduates. With three different measures and samples of college students, perceptions of university mission and values (i.e., institutional values, creating pro-social climates, and developing a life-long commitment to values) loaded independently of their personal values systems, and often negatively with social desirability. Perceptions of institutional values were generally independent of personal value systems, using either a rank-order (Sample 1, n = 199) or rating scale method (Sample 2, n = 107), or by focusing on moral behavior structures (Sample 3, n = 208). Together, these results indicate that higher education assessment may reflect institutional values that are independent of student personal value systems.Portions of this paper were presented at the 2004 Institute for College Student Values, Tallahassee, FL     

Evaluating agents’ trustworthiness within virtual societies in case of no direct experience

A great deal of effort has been made to introduce trust models to assess trustworthiness within virtual societies. The great majority of them makes extensive use of direct experience as the main source of information, considering recommendation/reputation and inferential processes just later, as a secondary mechanism to refine trust assessment. In this kind of networks, unfortunately, direct experience might not always represent the best solution to assess trustworthiness. In fact, their highly dynamic structure promotes an increase of the average number of interconnections among agents. This in turn negatively affects the degree of knowledge the agents possess about each specific individual, i.e. direct experience. To date, however, it has not been said much about how to face these situations.It is fundamental to find an effective approach for trust assessment even in lack of direct experience, which is the central focus of this research. By the means of a multi-agent social simulation, we consider the situation in which an agent can just access indirect knowledge for trust assessment, namely recommendations of specific individuals or whole categories of individuals. Then, we compare the efficiency of these two approaches in order to identify when it is more convenient to rely on the first or on the second one. As expected, our results confirm that the dynamic nature of these networks strongly affects the role of categories. We modeled this feature introducing the “turnover” in the simulations, whereby the higher is the turnover the more convenient it is relying on categories. Besides this confirmatory result, our simulations highlight the higher degree of robustness of categories in the presence of unreliable recommenders. Such a result is even more significant if there is no available information about how reliable the recommenders are.The results we obtained are in accordance with the current literature and can be of important interest for the development of this sector.     

The perestroika of the family? Gender and occupational differences in family values in modern day Russia

The recent dramatic changes in the political and economic structures of Eastern Europe have focused interest on the position of women in Russia, where a greater openness in discussing inequalities has been accompanied by a more regressive harkening back to traditional gender roles. The study reported in this paper examines gender and occupational differences in general attitude toward the family, disclosure to family members, and child-rearing values. Three hundred sixty-eight students, 179 manual workers, and 160 entrepreneurs completed a structured measure of family orientation and replied to open-ended questions on family taboos and child-rearing practices, while a subsample (N = 475) completed a family disclosure inventory. Multivariate analyses of variance analyses revealed women to be more family oriented than men, while gender and occupation interacted in producing family disclosure rates. HILOGLINEAR analyses found that the topics suitable for family discussion, as well as the child-rearing values promoted by our respondents, were also best predicted by considering the interaction between both gender and occupation. The implications of these findings for the future shape of Russian family relations is discussed.     

Testing a direct mapping versus competition account of response dynamics in number comparison†

Tracking hand movements during number tasks has become a powerful method for disentangling competing models of numerical representation. In two experiments, participants used a computer mouse to choose whether presented numbers were greater than or less than 5. In Experiment 1, trajectories became more curved towards the incorrect response as targets approached the standard 5, indicating increasing response competition. However, trajectories showed a rightward bias modulated by numerical distance and target size, indicating a direct mapping between hand movement and an ordered, spatial number representation. In Experiment 2, I changed the direction of mouse movements bottom-to-top orientation to left-to-right. Trajectories again became more curved towards the incorrect response as targets approached 5, but this time, there was no modulation of trajectory bias by target size or distance. The results call into question a direct mapping account and instead lend support to a competition model of response dynamics in number comparison.     

How serious are expressions of protected values?

People think that some things that they value should be protected from trade-offs with other things. For example, people think that no economic gain is great enough to justify clear-cutting old-growth forest. The authors probed the stability of these protected values (PVs) in several ways. Subjects were asked to think of counterexamples, and this had some effect on PVs. Subjects were then asked how they would resolve conflicts between 2 PVs. Resolutions did not differ from those between other values, but subjects tended to feel that conflicts between PVs did not occur in reality. Despite people's claims that PVs are unchanged by variation in quantity, expression of PVs was reduced when the magnitude or probability of the violation of a PV was smaller. In summary, PVs appear to be labile and amenable to challenge. Despite earlier concerns, apparent PVs may not always preclude the use of valuation measures in cost-effectiveness analysis or negotiated agreement on controversial issues.     

Students’ perception of instrumental support and effort in mathematics: the mediating role of subjective task values

Recent research shows that teacher support is predictive of student outcomes, such as engagement and effort. In this study, we explored the relation between students’ perceptions of teacher instrumental support in mathematics lessons and their effort in mathematics. We also tested whether this relation was mediated through students’ perception of the utility value, cost, and intrinsic value of mathematics. The study was designed as a cross-sectional survey. The participants included 309 9th and 10th grade Norwegian high school students. Three dimensions of mathematics task values were measured: utility value, intrinsic value, and the cost of working with mathematics. The data were analyzed by means of structural equation modeling. Instrumental support was directly and positively related to both the utility value and the intrinsic value of mathematics. However, it was only indirectly related to the perceived cost of working with mathematics, mediated by the utility value and the intrinsic value. Instrumental support was also both directly and indirectly related to effort. The indirect relation was mediated by the students’ perception of mathematics task values.     

An eye movement analysis of “mental rotation” of simple scenes

Participants saw a standard scene of three objects on a desktop and then judged whether a comparison scene was either thesame, except for the viewpoint of the scene, ordifferent, when one or more of the objects either exchanged places or were rotated around their center. As in Nakatani, Pollatsek, and Johnson (2002), judgment times were longer when the rotation angles of the comparison scene increased, and the size of the rotation effect varied for different axes and was larger forsame judgments than fordifferent judgments. A second experiment, which included trials without the desktop, indicated that removing the desktop frame of reference mainly affected they-axis rotation conditions (the axis going vertically through the desktop plane). In addition, eye movement analyses indicated that the process was far more than a simple analogue rotation of the standard scene. The total response latency was divided into three components: theinitial eye movement latency, the first-pass time, and thesecond-pass time. The only indication of arotation effect in the time to execute the first two components was forz-axis (plane of sight) rotations. Thus, forx- andy-axis rotations, rotation effects occurred only in the probability of there being a second pass and the time to execute it. The data are inconsistent either with an initial rotation of the memory representation of the standard scene to the orientation of the comparison scene or with a holistic alignment of the comparison scene prior to comparing it with the memory representation of the standard scene. Indeed, the eye movement analysis suggests that little of the increased response time for rotated comparison scenes is due to something like a time-consuming analogue process but is, instead, due to more comparisons on individual objects being made (possibly moredouble checking).     

Orthography as a handicap? A direct comparison of spelling acquisition in Danish and Icelandic

Spelling of cross-linguistically very similar nonwords was compared in 115 Danish and 77 Icelandic children (primarily 3rd and 4th graders). Danish children made more errors than Icelandic children on word medial consonant doublets and on word initial consonant clusters, even when the groups compared were matched on simpler spelling tasks. These results suggest that the acquisition of phonemic encoding skills is slower in "deep" orthography such as Danish than in more "transparent" orthography such as Icelandic. The effect of orthography was expected for consonant doublets because of the relatively more complex sound-letter correspondences in Danish. For consonant clusters, however, sound-letter correspondences are perfectly regular in both languages. The study thus points to the conclusion that even the mastery of regular sound-letter correspondences may be delayed in deep orthography.     

Exploration of values: Israeli teachers’ professional ethics

The main purpose of this study was to explore Israeli teachers’ professional ethics and values using the Facet Theory (Guttman in Psychmetrika 33:469–506, 1968). Since Israel does not have a teachers’ code of ethics, such exploration can be a basis for constructing one. The study is mainly exploratory, and the main hypotheses that guided the study were based upon universal structure of values (Pakizeh et al. in J Exp Soc Psychol 43(3): 458–465, 2007 Schwartz, in Advances in experimental social psychology. Academic Press, San Diego, 1992), and were examined using a mapping sentence. The initial findings showed the data deployment on the SSA map exhibits both a radial and an angular form in a Radex configuration. Israeli teachers believe that professional ethics is based on conditioned values. The variables in the SSA map appear in a radial configuration forming three concentric circles: personal values, social values, and universal values. The components representing the code of ethics were deployed in an angular form showing three elements: professionalism, reliability and honesty, and decency.     

Can values moderate the attitudes of right-wing authoritarians?

This investigation explored how right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and endorsement of egalitarian beliefs may interact to determine attitudes toward immigrants, homosexuals, and African Americans. Study 1 (N = 239) found that RWA was negatively related to evaluations of immigrants for those who weakly endorsed egalitarian beliefs. In contrast, endorsement of egalitarian beliefs was associated with positive evaluations of immigrants for both low and high RWAs. RWA did not interact with egalitarianism to determine attitudes toward homosexuals or African Americans. Study 2 analyzed data from the 1992 National Election Study and replicated these effects in a young adult (age < or = 24) sample (n = 102) using moral traditionalism as a proxy for RWA. Partial support for the hypotheses also was found in the adult (age > or = 25) sample (n = 1,257). It is concluded that when tradition and/or social norms offer unclear positions, endorsement of egalitarian beliefs influences the attitudes of authoritarians.