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Annalen der Philosophie -     

A Purely Recombinatorial Puzzle

A new puzzle of modal recombination is presented which relies purely on resources of first‐order modal logic. It shows that naive recombinatorial reasoning, which has previously been shown to be inconsistent with various assumptions concerning propositions, sets and classes, leads to inconsistency by itself. The context sensitivity of modal expressions is suggested as the source of the puzzle, and it is argued that it gives us reason to reconsider the assumption that the notion of metaphysical necessity is in good standing.     

An inferential approach to the knew-it-all-along phenomenon

Two studies tested the hypothesis that the knew-it-all-along effect may be the result of an inferential process. Specifically, that individuals use their feelings and experiences (e.g., "This question seems so familiar to me, surely I would have known the answer!") to infer their judgement. Drawing on subjective feelings such as certainty or perceptual fluency, individuals can use a provided actual value as an informational cue and draw inferences from it. Thus, the occurrence of the knew-it-all-along effect is expected to depend on the experienced feeling of confidence with a question. This feeling may indicate to an individual that he or she did know the answer; a total lack of such a feeling may suggest that he or she never would have known the answer. In the reported studies we both measured feelings of confidence (Study 1) and induced them by manipulating perceptual fluency (Study 2) to show that the knew-it-all-along effect proves to be a phenomenon of inferences based on these experienced feelings. Participants experiencing high confidence or high perceptual fluency more strongly assimilated their judgements to the provided values, than did participants experiencing low confidence or low perceptual fluency.     

Effects of Gender, Education, and Age upon Leaders’ Use of Influence Tactics and Full Range Leadership Behaviors

Relationships of gender, age, and education to leadership styles and leaders’ influence tactics were examined with 56 leaders and 234 followers from a variety of organizations. Leadership behaviors were measured with the Multi-factor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ—rater version). Influence tactics were measured with Yukl’s Influence Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ). Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was used to test behavioral differences attributed to leaders’ gender, age, and education groups, as well as the interaction of age and education with gender. Results show that gender produced a small direct effect on leadership behaviors. The interaction of gender and education produced consistent differences in leadership behaviors. Implications for future research are provided, and a call for re-analysis of previously published work is advised.     

Fact and Fiction in Implicit Personality Theory

ABSTRACT This article reports two studies, where the accuracy of implicit personality theory (IPT) was investigated using on-line behavior counts as well as retrospective frequency estimates as standards of comparison Eight discussion groups, each comprising six members, were videotaped Their act frequencies with respect to 16 types of behavior were judged on-line using two coding schemes, each one being applied by two independent raters Five other judges estimated the act frequencies retrospectively Furthermore, judges revealed their IPT by estimating the conditional likelihood of these types of behavior It turned out that (a) retrospective judges perceive different base rates accurately, (b) the correlations among retrospectively estimated and among on-line recorded act frequencies show high correspondences, (c) IPT accurately mirrors the correlations among retrospectively estimated as well as among on-line recorded act frequencies, and (d) judges do not appropriately consider perceived base rates when estimating conditional probabilities It is concluded that IPT is considerably accurate in those respects that are important for the validity and structural fidelity of personality ratings