NAGEL VS. NAGEL ON THE NATURE OF PHENOMENAL CONCEPTS

In a footnote to his ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’, Thomas Nagel sketches a promising account of phenomenal concepts that purports to explain why mind‐body identity statements, even if necessary, will always seem contingent. Christopher Hill and Brian McLaughlin have recently developed this sketch into a more robust theory. In Nagel's more recent work, however, he suggests that the only adequate theory of phenomenal concepts is one that makes the relation between phenomenal and physical states intelligible, or ‘transparent’. Developing such a theory, however, appears to be no easy task. In this paper I argue that the Nagel‐Hill‐McLaughlin proposal is preferable – and that a serious problem with it, noticed by Stephen Yablo, can be avoided by revising the proposal according to some further suggestions made by Nagel himself.     

Response error and processing biases in confidence judgment

Previous studies showed that random error can explain overconfidence effects typically observed in the literature. One of these studies concluded that, after accounting for random error effects in the data, there is little support for cognitive‐processing biases in confidence elicitation. In this paper, we investigate more closely the random error explanation for overconfidence. We generated data from four models of confidence and then estimated the magnitude of random error in the data. Our results show that, in addition to the true magnitude of random error specified in the simulations, the error estimates are influenced by important cognitive‐processing biases in the confidence elicitation process. We found that random error in the response process can account for the degree of overconfidence found in calibration studies, even when that overconfidence is actually caused by other factors. Thus, the error models say little about whether cognitive biases are present in the confidence elicitation process. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Defining, Measuring, and Comparing Organisational Cultures

La littérature portant sur la culture des organisations souffre d'un manque manifeste d'enquêtes extensives débouchant sur des études comparatives. Afin de rendre plus comparables les cultures organisationnelles, nous proposons une définition et une série de dimensions. La culture organisationnelle renverrait aux perceptions communes des pratiques de travail dans le cadre des unités constitutives des organisations. A l'examen d'études empiriques, les cinq dimensions suivantes nous sont apparues: autonomie, orientation externe, coordination interdépartementale, orientation vers les ressources humaines et orientation vers le développement. L'utilisation de cette définition et de ces dimensions générales devrait faciliter la comparaison des cultures organisationnelles et l'accumulation de résultats.
Within the body of organisation culture literature, there is a conspicuous absence of large-scale studies reporting on comparative studies. In order to increase comparability of organisational cultures we propose a definition and a set of dimensions. Organisational culture is defined as shared perceptions of organisational work practices within organisational units. On the basis of empirical studies we discerned the following five dimensions: autonomy, external orientation, interdepartmental coordination, human resource orientation, and improvement orientation. Use of this definition and a set of such generic dimensions would facilitate the comparison of organisational cultures and the accumulation of research findings.     

INTEGRATING GENDER AND ETHNICITY INTO PSYCHOLOGY COURSES

In this introduction to the special issue on teaching about gender and ethnicity in psychology, we consider the assumptions underlying an inclusive curriculum that pays attention to gender and ethnicity and address why such a curriculum has merit. We review empirical studies, assessing whether existing curricula are inclusive, and present an overview of the articles and the recurrent themes. These themes include the complexity of the interaction between ethnicity and gender; the difficulty of deciding which of the many possible ethnic groups to include in course material; the dominance of evaluative comparison in discussions of differences among groups; the interdisciplinary nature of research on ethnicity; and the tendency in psychology to ignore the importance of the power differences that confound analyses of the effect of ethnicity and gender.     

Ethnic pride and self-control related to protective and risk factors: test of the theoretical model for the strong African American families program.

OBJECTIVE: To test a theoretical model of how ethnic pride and self-control are related to risk and protective factors. DESIGN: A community sample of 670 African American youth (mean age = 11.2 years) were interviewed in households. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Measures of cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and sexual behavior (lifetime to past month). RESULTS: Structural modeling analyses indicated parenting was related to self-control and self-esteem, and racial socialization was related to ethnic pride. Self-control and self-esteem variables were related to levels of deviance-prone attitudes and to perceptions of engagers in, or abstainers from, substance use and sexual behavior. The proximal factors (behavioral willingness, resistance efficacy, and peer behavior) had substantial relations to the criterion variables. Participant gender and parental education also had several paths in the model. Results were generally similar for the 2 outcome behaviors. CONCLUSIONS: In this population, self-esteem and self-control are related to parenting approaches and have pathways to attitudes and social perceptions that are significant factors for predisposing to, or protecting against, early involvement in substance use and sexual behavior.     

Auditory and temporal factors in the modality effect

Subjects in five experiments read nine-digit memory lists from a cathode ray tube for immediate recall. Reading aloud always produced a localized and reliable advantage for the last item, compared to reading silently. Two experiments on whispered and mouthed lists, with or without simultaneous broadband noise, falsified expectations derived from the theory of precategorical acoustic storage. Three additional experiments showed no enhancement of recency in the silent conditions when the digits were drawn or spelled gradually on the screen, a result that is inconsistent with the changing-state hypothesis. The classic auditory-visual modality effect is large and reliable, but still poorly understood.     

Perceived racism and cardiovascular reactivity and recovery to personally relevant stress.

This study evaluated cardiovascular responses (CVR) to an active speech task with blatantly discriminatory (BRC) versus neutral (NRC) stimuli and an anger recall task in a sample of Black men (N = 73; age 18 to 47). Diastolic blood pressure scores were higher for NRC versus BRC stimuli during anger recall (p = .05). Moreover, persons in the NRC group who perceived high levels of racism (vs. no racism or BRC group) during active speech showed larger increases in blood pressure across postspeech rest, anger recall, and subsequent rest (p = .03). The notable elevation in CVR in response to an ambiguous event extends current models of racism suggesting that subtle racism is a psychosocial stressor that erodes health through chronically elevated CVR.     

Observing responses in rats: Support for the secondary reinforcement hypothesis

Rats' lever presses on a retractable lever earned brief presentations of discriminative stimuli signalling periods in which responding on an alternative lever was either non-reinforced (extinction) or reinforced on a random ratio schedule. The predictions of two theoretical accounts of this behaviour were tested by studying the effects of omitting either the stimulus signalling the reinforced or that signalling the non-reinforced schedule component. Under these conditions rats' behaviour is determined by the conditioned, affective properties of the stimuli rather than by their purely informational properties.