Fairness Between Competing Claims

Fairness is a central, but under-theorized, notion in moral and political philosophy. This paper makes two contributions. Firstly, it criticizes Broome’s seminal account of fairness in (1990–1991) Proc Aristotelian Soc 91:87–101, showing that there are problems with restricting fairness to a matter of relative satisfaction and holding that it does not itself require the satisfaction of the claims in question. Secondly, it considers the justification of lotteries to resolve cases of ties between competing claims, which Broome claims as support for his theory, and contrasts random procedures to contests of skill, which may also be considered lotteries in a broader sense. I offer no alternative account of fairness of my own, but hope to point the way for future research on the nature of fairness.     

Étude des effets cognitifs et affectifs de l’alphabétisation chez des adultes dans un contexte tunisien

This paper explores some of the cognitive and affective repercussions of literacy in the case of young Tunisian adults. I have evaluated the cognitive skills of 133 subjects, who are in the most part young women aged between 16 and 35 and assigned to different literacy levels. The framework of my investigation is informed by such fields as inductive reasoning, phonemic and semantic organisation and the capacity of storing and retrieving verbal information. I have appraised the intensity of the subjects’ depressive feelings so as to assess their emotional state. My aim is to demonstrate the positive impact literacy has on cognitive capacities as far as the above-mentioned fields are concerned. By the same token, I have underscored a concomitant effect upon the subjects’ emotional condition, for the intensity of illiterate people's feelings of depression is more exacerbated than in literate subjects’ case.     

The facing bias in biological motion perception: Effects of stimulus gender and observer sex

Under orthographic projection, biological motion point-light walkers offer no cues to the order of the dots in depth: Views from the front and from the back result in the very same stimulus. Yet observers show a bias toward seeing a walker facing the viewer (Vanrie, Dekeyser, & Verfaillie, 2004). Recently, we reported that this facing bias strongly depends on the gender of the walker (Brooks et al., 2008). The goal of the present study was, first, to examine the robustness of the effect by testing a much larger subject sample and, second, to investigate whether the effect depends on observer sex. Despite the fact that we found a significant effect of figure gender, we clearly failed to replicate the strong effect observed in the original study. We did, however, observe a significant interaction between figure gender and observer sex.     

Thinking groups: Rhetorical enactment of collective identity in three Israeli Kibbutzim

The present paper reports a case study about public deliberations in three Israeli kibbutzim regarding a disputed school issue: whether to maintain a traditional in-kibbutz high school despite a heavy financial burden or to close it and send kibbutz youths to a public regional school The results served as a demonstration of a 'thinking group' (i.e. of how the collective aims of a group are achieved by the coordinated rhetorical behaviour of individuals according to the formal rules of the collective deliberations). First, video-recordings of six general assembly meetings in which the issue was discussed was analyzed as to their argumentative content. Second, the extracted arguments were presented to a sample of 342 kibbutz members to capture the distribution of opinions in the population. It is proposed that most kibbutz members were willing to preserve their collective living and saw the closure of their in-kibbutz school as a threat to their traditional collective identity. We observed a distinct form of public rhetoric during the deliberations in the general meetings which provides a podium for the disputed opinions, preserves the kibbutz shared identity representation and avoids social friction.     

Further investigations of how rare disaster information affects risk taking: A registered replication report

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Across two experiments, Newell, Rakow, Yechiam, and Sambur (Nature Climate Change, 6(2), 158–161, 2016) demonstrated that providing rare disaster...     

Getting scarred and winning lotteries: effects of exemplar cuing and statistical format on imagining low‐probability events

Three experiments tested the exemplar cuing and frequency format accounts of how the ‘imaginability’ of low‐probability events is enhanced. The experiments manipulated imaginability by varying the statistics used to describe negative (e.g. being scarred as a result of laser surgery) and positive (e.g. winning a lottery) low‐probability events. The results strongly supported the frequency format account, whereby imaginability is enhanced through the use of frequency formats for conveying statistical information (e.g. 20 out of 2000 as opposed to 0.01%). However, only limited support was found for exemplar cuing (EC) theory. Overall the results support the claim that the imaginability of outcomes plays a key role in thinking about low‐probability events, but question the mechanisms specified by EC theory for mediating such effects. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.