Distinguishing automatic and controlled components of attitudes from direct and indirect measurement methods

Distinct automatic and controlled processes are presumed to influence social evaluation. Most empirical approaches examine automatic processes using indirect methods, and controlled processes using direct methods. We distinguished processes from measurement methods to test whether a process distinction is more useful than a measurement distinction for taxonomies of attitudes. Results from two studies suggest that automatic components of attitudes can be measured directly. Direct measures of automatic attitudes were reports of gut reactions (Study 1) and behavioral performance in a speeded self-report task (Study 2). Confirmatory factor analyses comparing two-factor models revealed better fits when self-reports of gut reactions and speeded self-reports shared a factor with automatic measures versus sharing a factor with controlled self-report measures. Thus, distinguishing attitudes by the processes they are presumed to measure (automatic versus controlled) is more meaningful than distinguishing based on the directness of measurement.     

The Michael-Adler report (1933): criminology under the microscope

This paper details the responses made by social scientists as well as criminal justice practitioners during 1932 to a study focusing on the status of criminology by the Bureau of Social Hygiene. These responses ultimately led to the publication of the controversial Crime, Law and Social Science (1933), which gave much-needed direction to the development of criminology. Despite the importance of these responses to the creation of criminological thought, only one (by Edwin H. Sutherland) has previously been published. Examining the responses of all of the individual participants in the project gives a clearer picture of controversies and changes which ultimately occurred as the field of criminology gradually became institutionalized as an academic discipline.     

The persons‐in‐relation perspective: Towards a philosophy for counselling in society

This paper is the first in a planned series, which aims to articulate and synthesise the persons‐in‐relation perspective in counselling and psychotherapy, drawing together the contributions of the philosopher John Macmurray, the psychotherapist Ian Suttie and the psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn. The paper introduces the persons‐in‐relation perspective, derived from Macmurray's work. It outlines the historical and cultural context leading to the emergence of modernism, and the response of personalism. It summarises John Macmurray's life and philosophy, focusing on his account of knowledge, its relation to the senses and the emotions, and his view of persons, society and religion. The paper goes on to develop a hypothesis about the rise of counselling in Britain, linking it to the decline of religion, the conflict between individualism and collectivism, and the re‐emergence of the persons‐in‐relation perspective. It concludes by posing challenges for the person‐centred and psychodynamic orientations, and for counselling as a whole.     

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Developed Dynamic Reference Work

The present information explosion on the World Wide Web poses a problem for the general public and the members of an academic discipline alike, of how to find the most authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date information about an important topic. At the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), we have since 1995 been developing and implementing the concept of a dynamic reference work (DRW) to provide a solution to these problems, while maintaining free access for readers. A DRW is much more than a web-based encyclopedia, and its scope far exceeds that of an electronic journal or preprint exchange. In this article we document the progress of the SEP toward full implementation of the DRW concept. We discuss the fiscal challenges posed by our desire to maintain free or low-cost access to the contents of the SEP, and we consider technological challenges posed by the desire to stay abreast of technological developments in document markup while making it easy for authors and subject editors to write and maintain entries representing the very best scholarship.     

Inhibitory neighbor priming effects in eye movements during reading

We report an eye movement experiment investigating whether prior processing of a word’s orthographic neighbor in a sentence influences subsequent word processing during reading. There was greater difficulty in early word processing when a target word’s neighbor rather than a control word appeared earlier in a sentence; this effect was uninfluenced by the relative lexical frequency of the word and its neighbor. We discuss this inhibitory neighbor priming effect in terms of competitive network models of word recognition and the process of lexical identification in the E-Z Reader model of oculomotor control (e.g., Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998).     

How to reason without words: inference as categorization

The idea that reasoning is a singular accomplishment of the human species has an ancient pedigree. Yet this idea remains as controversial as it is ancient. Those who would deny reasoning to nonhuman animals typically hold a language-based conception of inference which places it beyond the reach of languageless creatures. Others reject such an anthropocentric conception of reasoning on the basis of similar performance by humans and animals in some reasoning tasks, such as transitive inference. Here, building on the modal similarity theory of Vigo [J Exp Theor Artif Intell, 2008 (in press)], we offer an account in which reasoning depends on a core suite of subsymbolic processes for similarity assessment, discrimination, and categorization. We argue that premise-based inference operates through these subsymbolic processes, even in humans. Given the robust discrimination and categorization abilities of some species of nonhuman animals, we believe that they should also be regarded as capable of simple forms of inference. Finally, we explain how this account of reasoning applies to the kinds of transitive inferences that many nonhuman animals display.     

A PARADOX OF JUSTIFIED BELIEVING

The following principles may plausibly be included in a wide range of theories of epistemic justification:

• (1) 

  There are circumstances in which an agent is justified in believing a falsehood,
• (2) 

  There are circumstances in which an agent is justified in believing a principle of epistemic justification,
• (3) 

  Beliefs acquired in compliance with a justifiably-believed epistemic principle are justified.

I argue that it follows from these three individually plausible claims that an agent's belief may be both justified and unjustified. I consider how theories may avoid this paradox, and conclude that deontological theories of epistemic justification face considerable, perhaps insurmountable, difficulties.     

Directed forgetting of visual symbols: Evidence for nonverbal selective rehearsal

Is selective rehearsal possible for nonverbal information? Two experiments addressed this question using the item method directed forgetting paradigm, where the advantage of remember items over forget items is ascribed to selective rehearsal favoring the remember items. In both experiments, difficult-to-name abstract symbols were presented for study, followed by a recognition test. Directed forgetting effects were evident for these symbols, regardless of whether they were or were not spontaneously named. Critically, a directed forgetting effect was observed for unnamed symbols even when the symbols were studied under verbal suppression to prevent verbal rehearsal. This pattern indicates that a form of nonverbal rehearsal can be used strategically (i.e., selectively) to enhance memory, even when verbal rehearsal is not possible.