Common Sense and the Natural Light in George Berkeley’s Philosophy

Philosophia - It is argued that George Berkeley’s term ‘common sense’ does not indicate shared conviction, but the shared capacity of reasonable judgement, and is therefore to be...     

Interval length and time-use by children with AD/HD: a comparison of four models

Predictions made by 4 competing models of time use by children with AD/HD were tested using a computerized version of the Matching Familiar Figures Test in 2 studies. In Study 1 teacher-identified AD/HD children (N = 10) and non-AD/HD controls (N = 10) completed the task under 3 different trial duration conditions (5, 10, and 15 s). In Study 2 the same task was completed by a group of children with a diagnosis of Hyperkinetic Disorder (N = 12) and controls (N = 12). In both studies AD/HD children performed poorly on trials of both 5- and 15-s duration but as well as controls on the 10-s trials. This quadratic function provided support for the State Regulation Deficit model of time use in AD/HD. The value of tailoring the temporal features of learning contexts to the conceptual style of AD/HD children is discussed.     

Medical Evidence and Virtue Ethics: A Commentary on Zarkovich and Upshur

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

Culture and beliefs about time: comparisons among black Americans, black Africans, and white Americans

The authors investigated the extent to which racial factors, cultural factors, or both influence a person's beliefs about physical time, personal time, and experienced and remembered duration. A total of 750 Black American, Black African, and White American students responded to a questionnaire on these beliefs about time. Factor analysis was used to compare belief structures. Pairwise comparisons, performed separately for each statement, tested the direction and strength of the reported beliefs. The groups showed many similarities, but they also showed some differences. All 3 groups differed in beliefs about physical and personal time, but they did not differ in beliefs about duration experiences. This evidence does not support simplistic views of racial or cultural influences. Culture may differentially influence beliefs about physical time and personal time. Beliefs about duration experiences may represent an ethnic factor that transcends cultures.     

Reliability among Senior Managers of the Marlowe–Crowne Short-Form Social Desirability Scale

The majority of scholarly management studies are based on self-report surveys. Consequently, the need to control for social desirability response is important, although few management studies in fact include the use of relevant scales commonly incorporated in psychology research. The full Marlowe–Crowne scale is disaffectingly long for senior-manager sample usage, so one of its short forms is more practical. However, the reliability of the most popular of these, the Strahan–Gerbasi scale, has not been tested with senior-manager samples. This study tests the scale amongst several senior-manager samples and finds it consistently lacks adequate reliability and unidimensionality.     

Teaching pigeons to commit base-rate neglect

Whereas humans display base-rate neglect in a behavioral analogue of the base-rate problem, pigeons have been shown to behave optimally in a comparable task, appropriately weighting base-rate and case-cue information. Previous studies have shown that prior experience may interfere with optimal decisions for human subjects, a result consistent with the position that poor and illogical decisions often follow from the misapplication of learned rules. The present study shows that pigeons will also display base-rate neglect if given extensive pretraining with informative case cues. Two experiments with pigeons, in a matching-to-sample procedure designed to mimic the classic base-rate problem, show that pigeons display base-rate neglect after extensive pretraining with the matching task.