Conflict and metacognitive control: the mismatch-monitoring hypothesis of how others' knowledge states affect recall

Information about others' success in remembering is frequently available. For example, students taking an exam may assess its difficulty by monitoring when others turn in their exams. In two experiments, we investigated how rememberers use this information to guide recall. Participants studied paired associates, some semantically related (and thus easier to retrieve) and some unrelated (and thus harder). During a subsequent cued recall test, participants viewed fictive information about an opponent's accuracy on each item. In Experiment 1, participants responded to each cue once before seeing the opponent's performance and once afterwards. Participants reconsidered their responses least often when the opponent's accuracy matched the item difficulty (easy items the opponent recalled, hard items the opponent forgot) and most often when the opponent's accuracy and the item difficulty mismatched. When participants responded only after seeing the opponent's performance (Experiment 2), the same mismatch conditions that led to reconsideration even produced superior recall. These results suggest that rememberers monitor whether others' knowledge states accord or conflict with their own experience, and that this information shifts how they interrogate their memory and what they recall.     

Swimming against the tide: the changing functions and status of chaplains in the Israel Defense Force

This article describes and analyses the changes that have occurred in the services performed by chaplains in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) – the only military in the world that consists almost entirely of Jews. Essentially, we argue, the shift has been one of focus. For many years, IDF chaplains primarily (albeit never exclusively) concerned themselves with providing religious services to the minority of personnel who observed Orthodox Jewish rituals. ‘Outreach’ programmes, targeted at the secular Jewish majority, were secondary. Recently, however, the IDF rabbinate has undergone a process of ‘role expansion’, emphasising the provision of counselling and guidance to the entire Jewish complement, especially in combat units. In the second part of the article, we analyse the possible reasons for that development: demographic and cultural trends in Israeli society; the prominence of counter-insurgency missions in the IDF’s operational agenda; and the personalities of recent chief chaplains. Finally, we address the possible implications of this shift, asking whether the intra-organisational frictions that it generates, especially with the Education Corps, portends a battle for the soul of the IDF.     

Extreme Nonresponse to Acute Phase Cognitive Therapy for Depression: An Attempt to Replicate and Extend

As with other interventions for major depressive disorder (MDD), cognitive therapy (CT) results in treatment failure for about half of all participants. In 2007, Coffman and colleagues in Seattle studied this topic by identifying a group of patients who demonstrated an extremely poor response to CT (i.e., posttreatment BDI score ≥ 31). They called these patients “extreme nonresponders” (ENR) and described the pretreatment characteristics that predicted response status.     

An Examination of the “Greening of Christianity” Thesis Among Americans, 1993–2010

Some environmental and religious scholars, religious leaders, and media figures have claimed there has been a “greening of Christianity” in the United States since the mid‐1990s. Such a trend would be socially significant, as the integration of Christian values and environmental values may invigorate both domains. Using nationally representative data from the 1993 and 2010 General Social Surveys, we analyze how green self‐identified Christians in the U.S. general public are in their pro‐environmental attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Using structural equation modeling, we find no clear evidence of a greening of Christianity among rank‐and‐file Christians in the general public between 1993 and 2010. Indeed, the patterns of our results are quite similar to those from earlier decades, which documented that self‐identified Christians reported lower levels of environmental concern than did non‐Christians and nonreligious individuals. We did find evidence of some greening among evangelical Protestants, especially relative to mainline Protestants, between 1993 and 2010. We close by suggesting a few fruitful avenues for further research in this area via variable‐oriented, case‐oriented, and experimental studies and discussing some theoretical implications of our findings.     

Retrieval speeds context fluctuation: Why semantic generation enhances later learning but hinders prior learning

In recent work, retrieval has been shown to enhance memory for events following that retrieval. In this set of experiments, we examined the effects of interleaved semantic retrieval on both previous and future learning within a multilist learning paradigm. Interleaved retrieval led to enhanced memory for lists learned following retrieval. In contrast, memory was impaired for lists learned prior to retrieval (Experiment 1). These results are consistent with recent work in multilist learning, directed forgetting, and list-before-last retrieval, all of which indicate a crucial role for retrieval in enhancing mental list segregation. This pattern of results follows clearly from a theoretical perspective in which retrieval drives internal contextual change and in which contextual overlap between study and test promotes better memory. Consistent with that perspective, a 15-min delay before the final test eliminated both effects (Experiment 2). Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 with materials and assessments more appropriate for educational settings: Interleaved semantic retrieval led learners to be more able to answer questions correctly about texts studied after a retrieval event but less able to do so for texts studied earlier.     

Blending Arendtian Exemplarity with Weberian Ideal-Typic Analysis: Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ as a Vehicle for Social Critique

Arendt uses the exemplary validity of Socrates to think and value the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in our present juncture. In this way Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is not a mythic, historic, or dramatic individual, but offers an example of the best of the human condition. Unfortunately, because Arendt held the social conditioning and constraining of Socrates’ possibilities at arm’s length, his status as an exemplar is problematic and he ends up referring to a historical rather than contemporary possibilities. While Arendt had resources in her notion of the ‘world’ to better ground her simultaneously analytic and normative construction of ‘Socrates’, the lack of a social grounding makes ‘Socrates’ a significantly unmoored and shifting signifier. After showing the vacillations of ‘Socrates’ in Arendt, I supplement her normatively laden account with a Weberian grounding. With this firmer social grounding, ‘Socrates’ can refer to the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in ancient Athens and thereby highlight how our world makes a contemporary version unlikely or impossible. Yet, this Weberian grounding comes at a cost. The normative dimension essential in Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is lost due to Weberian value-neutrality. ‘Socrates’ can name a contemporary unlikelihood or impossibility, but if the enveloping social order does not value what it renders impossible, Weberian ideal-types on their own are incapable of offering normative resources for critique. I conclude by blending a Weberian social mooring with Arendt’s value-laden framework for social analysis and thereby recuperate the missing normative dimension. In short, by accepting the relational, necessarily plural, and dynamic root of human action we can, much like Arendt’s intended use of ‘Socrates’, value orientations that best express these norms, and criticize contemporary conditions that constrain their realization.