Contribution of conversation skills to the production of judgmental errors

An impressive body of evidence has accumulated demonstrating that many of the judgmental ‘errors’ or ‘biases’ formerly thought due to purely cognitive shortcomings actually reflect the operation of communication goals and strategies that people rely upon to comprehend and generate meaningful conversation. This study examines the effects of individual differences in conversational skills on the production of biased responses using six judgmental heuristics tasks: base-rate error, conjunction error, dilution effect, underuse of consensus information, primacy effect, and confirmation bias. Clarke's (1975) ‘method of reconstruction’ was used to obtain two measures of conversational sophistication: relevance-seeking and (un)responsiveness. A path analysis predicting biased judgments from the skill variables demonstrates that a combination of these variables, which we term ‘Pragmatic Competence’, is predictive of two independent subsets of the heuristics tasks. Our model provides convergent evidence with other, parametric studies for the proposition that biased social judgments are, at least in part, artifacts of participants' reasonable (and unreasonable!) expectations concerning experimenter cooperativeness. ‘The process of forming an integrated mental model of premises is nothing more than the proper comprehension of discourse: it is required in order to grasp the full impact of what the speaker has to say’ Johnson-Laird (1983, p. 119). © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Meeting the Evil God Challenge

The evil God challenge is an argumentative strategy that has been pursued by a number of philosophers in recent years. It is apt to be understood as a parody argument: a wholly evil, omnipotent and omniscient God is absurd, as both theists and atheists will agree. But according to the challenge, belief in evil God is about as reasonable as belief in a wholly good, omnipotent and omniscient God; the two hypotheses are roughly epistemically symmetrical. Given this symmetry, thesis belief in an evil God and belief in a good God are taken to be similarly preposterous. In this paper, we argue that the challenge can be met, suggesting why the three symmetries that need to hold between evil God and good God – intrinsic, natural theology and theodicy symmetries – can all be broken. As such, we take it that the evil God challenge can be met.     

Demographic,psychosocial, and cultural predictors of entitlement in a multiethnic Canadian undergraduate sample

The current study sought to examine the demographic, psychosocial, and cultural predictors of psychological entitlement (PE) and academic entitlement (AE) and their impacts on psychological...     

Diachronic Emergence and Its Characteristics from the Viewpoint of Complexity Science

Complexity science, which arose in the second half of the 20th century, initiated research into the emergence of complex systems and led to the rise of the concept of diachronic emergence. Compared to British emergentism, research on diachronic emergence underwent some crucial changes—namely, (1) putting the enterprise of unveiling the mechanics of emergence at its core; (2) taking inter-disciplinary research as its viewpoint; (3) and taking computer simulation as its method. Because of this new approach, “diachronic emergence” is closely related to terms from complexity science such as “systems,” “self-organization,” “complexity,” and “chaos.” In this paper, we examine two cases of purported diachronic emergence and argue that both count as genuine cases of ontological emergence. The first is Paul Humphreys’ fusion emergence and the second is Mark Bedau’s simulation emergence. In both cases, the emergent entity/property possesses genuine causal powers, and hence counts as a form of ontological, not merely epistemological emergence. Fusion emergence is a kind of strong diachronic emergence that emphasizes diachronicity and non-supervenience. The kind of emergence based on computer simulations can be seen as a kind of weak diachronic emergence. Bedau studies the process and mechanics of emergence with the help of computer simulations, and he argues that weak diachronic emergence has characteristics such as underivability without simulation, explanatory incompressibility, and underivability without crawling the micro-causal web. Moreover, he tries to present an explanatory model of weak emergence that posits the existence of higher-level entities with weak downward causation and claims the emergent level to be explanatorily autonomous. The core of both strong diachronic emergence and weak diachronic emergence is a focus on unpredictable emergent entities, which are new properties or new structures generated from evolution, and a characteristic emphasis on the diachronicity of the generation of emergent entities. Therefore, diachronic emergence has characteristics such as novelty in evolution, unpredictability, and autonomy of macro-explanation.     

Catching of balls unexpectedly thrown or fired by cannon

Although learned actions can be automatically elicited in response to expected stimuli for which they have been prepared, little is known about whether learned actions can be automatically initiated by unexpected stimuli. Responses of unwitting participants to balls unexpectedly thrown by an experimenter (n=10) or propelled by a hidden ball cannon (n=22) were recorded by motion capture. Experience of ball catching correlated negatively with hand movement distance, indicating most responses were defensive, but successful catches were made in response to both thrown and fired balls. Although reaction time was faster in response to fired balls, interception was more frequent in response to thrown balls, indicating that movement cues by the thrower facilitated unexpected ball catching. The latency to begin a catching action by the only successful catcher of an unexpectedly fired ball was 296 msec. Given current knowledge of reaction time tasks and latencies of neural substrates of conscious perception and deliberation, it is probable that there was insufficient time available for conscious preparation of catch attempts. Ball catching may represent an example of a learned response which can be rapidly and unconsciously initiated without contextual priming or expectation of the stimulus.     

Direct Versus Indirect Causation as a Semantic Linguistic Universal: Using a Computational Model of English,Hebrew, Hindi,Japanese, and K'iche’ Mayan to Predict Grammaticality Judgments in Balinese

The aim of this study was to test the claim that languages universally employ morphosyntactic marking to differentiate events of more- versus less-direct causation, preferring to mark them with less- and more- overt marking, respectively (e.g., Somebody broke the window vs. Somebody MADE the window break; *Somebody cried the boy vs. Somebody MADE the boy cry). To this end, we investigated whether a recent computational model which learns to predict speakers’ by-verb relative preference for the two causatives in English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, and K'iche’ Mayan is able to generalize to a sixth language on which it has never been trained: Balinese. Judgments of the relative acceptability of the less- and more-transparent causative forms of 60 verbs were collected from 48 native-speaking Balinese adults. The composite crosslinguistic computational model was able to predict these judgments, not only for verbs that it had seen, but also––in a split-half validation test––to verbs that it had never seen in any language. A “random-semantics” model showed only a relatively small decrement in performance with seen verbs, whose behavior can be learned on a verb-by-verb basis, but achieved zero correlation with human judgments when generalizing to unseen verbs. Together, these findings suggest that Balinese conceptualizes directness of causation in a similar way to these unrelated languages, and therefore constitute support for the view that the distinction between more- versus less-distinct causation constitutes a morphosyntactic universal.