How the threat of losses makes people <Emphasis Type="Italic">explore</Emphasis> more than the promise of gains

Until recently, loss aversion has been inferred exclusively from choice asymmetries in the loss and gain domains. This study examines the impact of the prospect of losses on exploratory search in a situation in which exploration is costly. Taking advantage of the largest available data set of decisions from experience, analyses showed that most people explore payoff distributions more under the threat of a loss than under the promise of a gain. This behavioral regularity thus occurs in both costly search and cost-free search (see Lejarraga, Hertwig, & Gonzalez, Cognition, 124, 334–342, 2012). Furthermore, a model comparison identified the simple win-stay-lose-shift heuristic as a likely candidate mechanism behind the loss–gain exploration asymmetry observed. In contrast, models assuming loss aversion failed to reproduce the asymmetry. Moreover, the asymmetry was not simply a precursor of loss aversion but a phenomenon separate from it. These findings are consistent with the recently proposed notion of intensified vigilance in the face of potential losses.     

Seeing behind the surface: communicative demonstration boosts category disambiguation in 12‐month‐olds

In their first years, infants acquire an incredible amount of information regarding the objects present in their environment. While often it is not clear what specific information should be prioritized in encoding from the many characteristics of an object, different types of object representations facilitate different types of generalizations. We tested the hypotheses that 1‐year‐old infants distinctively represent familiar objects as exemplars of their kind, and that ostensive communication plays a role in determining kind membership for ambiguous objects. In the training phase of our experiment, infants were exposed to movies displaying an agent sorting objects from two categories (cups and plates) into two locations (left or right). Afterwards, different groups of infants saw either an ostensive or a non‐ostensive demonstration performed by the agent, revealing that a new object that looked like a plate can be transformed into a cup. A third group of infants experienced no demonstration regarding the new object. During test, infants were presented with the ambiguous object in the plate format, and we measured generalization by coding anticipatory looks to the plate or the cup side. While infants looked equally often towards the two sides when the demonstration was non‐ostensive, and more often to the plate side when there was no demonstration, they performed more anticipatory eye movements to the cup side when the demonstration was ostensive. Thus, ostensive demonstration likely highlighted the hidden dispositional properties of the target object as kind‐relevant, guiding infants’ categorization of the foldable cup as a cup, despite it looking like a plate. These results suggest that infants likely encode familiar objects as exemplars of their kind and that ostensive communication can play a crucial role in disambiguating what kind an object belongs to, even when this requires disregarding salient surface features.     

Teachers’ sense of responsibility for educational outcomes and its associations with teachers’ instructional approaches and professional wellbeing

Teachers’ formal accountability and duties have been the focus of high-stakes educational reforms, for instance in the context of national accountability systems. Yet, teachers’ sense of personal (rather than formal) responsibility and willingness to assume responsibility for their teaching and students remains an understudied area. The main purpose of this study was to investigate contextual and person-specific predictors of teachers’ sense of personal responsibility, as well as the potential implications of teachers’ personal responsibility for their instructional approaches and wellbeing. A path analysis indicated that high school teachers (n = 287) who felt responsible for their teaching and students reported higher levels of work engagement and job satisfaction than less responsible teachers, and were more likely to endorse mastery-oriented instructional practices that emphasized student effort, task mastery, and individual growth. Teachers’ perceptions of their school’s social climate (teachers’ evaluations of their relationships with students), their sense of teaching self-efficacy, and incremental beliefs of intelligence emerged as positive predictors of teacher responsibility. Teacher responsibility partially mediated the positive effects of these predictors on teachers’ wellbeing and mastery-oriented instructional practices. The results suggest that both contextual (e.g., school climate) and person-specific (e.g., self-efficacy) factors can contribute to teachers’ sense of personal responsibility, and that responsibility, in turn, can have positive implications for teachers’ wellbeing and instructional practices. Directions for future research and practical implications are considered.     

Gratitude,Rights, and Moral Standouts

Many maintain that if a beneficiary has a right to a benefit provided by his benefactor, then the former cannot owe the latter gratitude for that benefit. In this paper I argue against that view. I provide examples in which benefactors provide others with benefits to which they have a right even though most others are denying them that right. These benefactors are moral standouts; they do what is right when most similarly situated agents fail to do so. I then spell out some of the features of these benefactors’ actions that make them worthy of gratitude.     

But for the Grace of God: Abortion and Cognitive Disability,Luck and Moral Status

Many theories of moral status that are intended to ground pro-choice views on abortion tie full moral status to advanced cognitive capabilities. Extant accounts of this kind are inconsistent with the intuition that the profoundly cognitively disabled have full moral status. This paper improves upon these extant accounts by combining an anti-luck condition with Steinbock’s stratification of moral status into two levels. On the resulting view, a being has full moral status if and only if (1) she has moral status and (2) (a) has had advanced cognitive capacities, (b) has the potential to develop such capacities, or (c) would have had such capacities were it not for luck. I argue that modal accounts of luck provide a non-speciesist basis for attributing the lack of advanced cognitive capacities in humans to luck without doing the same for non-human animals.     

Situationism,Manipulation, and Objective Self-Awareness

Among those taking the implications of situationism seriously, some have suggested exploiting our tendency to be shaped by our environments toward desirable ends. The key insight here is that if experimental studies produce reliable, probabilistic predictions about the effects of situational variables on behavior—for example, how people react to the presence or absence of various sounds, objects, and their placement—then we should deploy those variables that promote prosocial behavior, while avoiding or limiting those that tend toward antisocial behavior. Put another way, some have suggested that we tweak situations to nudge or influence others toward good behavior. A question arises: Isn’t this manipulative? In this paper, I describe some existing proposals in the literature and consider the manipulation worry. Drawing on classical Confucian ethics, I argue that, when all is considered, it is chimerical to think we can refrain from influencing or manipulating others. We must rather accept that influence (whether intended or not) is part of social existence. Once we accept this, the only remaining question is how to influence others. I suggest that this should make us conceive ourselves in an objective fashion.     

Thinking love: Heidegger and Arendt

“Thinking Love: Heidegger and Arendt” explores the problematic nature of romantic love as it developed between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, whom Heidegger later called “the passion of his life.” I suggest that three different ways of understanding love can be found at work in Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship, namely, the perfectionist, the unconditional, and the ontological models of love. Explaining these different ways of thinking romantic love, this paper shows how the distinctive problems of the perfectionist and unconditional models played out in Heidegger and Arendt’s relationship and how that relationship eventually gave rise to the third, ontological understanding of love. This ontological vision of love combines some of the strengths of the perfectionist and unconditional views while avoiding their worst problems, and so emerges as perhaps the most important philosophical lesson about romantic love to be drawn from studying the lifelong love affair between two of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.     

The Forgotten Ones: Siblings of Substance Abusers

Although factors shaping sibling relationships and the developmental dynamics of such consanguinity have been addressed by various scholars, investigations questioning how the risky behaviors of one sibling, specifically substance abuse, may impact brothers versus sisters are few. The current study explored non–substance-abusing siblings’ reports of their mood, attitudes, feelings of social support, and emotions if one of their brothers or sisters was perceived to be a substance abuser. Surprisingly, 22% of a college-aged convenience sample (N = 312) described one or more of their siblings as a substance abuser and reported being exposed to drugs at an earlier age than their non–substance-abusing counterparts, in addition to other differences. Sisters, more than brothers, were also affected. These exploratory findings, although limited by potential sampling bias, highlight potential areas for future research that could clarify and perhaps improve the experience of the “forgotten” siblings in a risky family constellation.     

Holos: A collaborative environment for similarity-based holistic approaches

Through this article, we aim to introduce Holos—a new collaborative environment that allows researchers to carry out experiments based on similarity assessments between stimuli, such as in projective-mapping and sorting tasks. An important feature of Holos is its capacity to assess real-time individual processes during the task. Within the Holos environment, researchers can design experiments on its platform, which can handle four kinds of stimuli: concepts, images, sounds, and videos. In addition, researchers can share their study resources within the scientific community, including stimuli, experimental protocols, and/or the data collected. With a dedicated Android application combined with a tactile human–machine interface, subjects can perform experiments using a tablet to obtain similarity measures between stimuli. On the tablet, the stimuli are displayed as icons that can be dragged with one finger to position them, depending on the ways they are perceived. By recording the x,y coordinates of the stimuli while subjects move the icons, the obtained data can reveal the cognitive processes of the subjects during the experiment. Such data, named digit-tracking data, can be analyzed with the SensoMineR package. In this article, we describe how researchers can design an experiment, how subjects can perform the experiment, and how digit-tracking data can be statistically analyzed within the Holos environment. At the end of the article, a short exemplary experiment is presented.     

Obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome increases source‐confusion errors: A pilot study

We explored external source monitoring (i.e., discrimination between memories of two externally derived sources) in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS). Our specific aim was to ascertain whether, relative to controls, patients exhibit more source‐confusion errors when there are similarities between two external memory sources. We recruited 22 patients with OSAS and 22 controls matched for sex, age, and education. The experimental procedure we used came in three phases. First, participants viewed a target film. Second, they were shown a mixed set of photographs, some taken from the film (target photographs), others not (photographs taken from other films not viewed by participants; lures). Lures differed either conceptually or perceptually from the target film. Third, the following day, participants were shown a set of photographs and urged to determine whether the photographs were taken from the target film or whether they were images they had seen for the first time in Phase 2. Patients correctly attributed the same number of target photographs to the target film as controls. By contrast, they incorrectly attributed more lures to the target film than controls did, especially when the lures were semantically similar to the film (perceptual lures). Both perceptual and conceptual source‐confusion errors were significantly correlated with oxygen desaturation during sleep. Results suggest that the higher number of source‐confusion errors observed in patients with OSAS was linked to an impaired ability to recollect specific perceptual details of the study items and that hypoxia is the main contributing factor to this deficit.