Stolen elections: How conspiracy beliefs during the 2020 American presidential elections changed over time

Conspiracy beliefs have been studied mostly through cross-sectional designs. We conducted a five-wave longitudinal study (N = 376; two waves before and three waves after the 2020 American presidential elections) to examine if the election results influenced specific conspiracy beliefs and conspiracy mentality, and whether effects differ between election winners (i.e., Biden voters) versus losers (i.e., Trump voters) at the individual level. Results revealed that conspiracy mentality kept unchanged over 2 months, providing first evidence that this indeed is a relatively stable trait. Specific conspiracy beliefs (outgroup and ingroup conspiracy beliefs) did change over time, however. In terms of group-level change, outgroup conspiracy beliefs decreased over time for Biden voters but increased for Trump voters. Ingroup conspiracy beliefs decreased over time across all voters, although those of Trump voters decreased faster. These findings illuminate how specific conspiracy beliefs are, and conspiracy mentality is not, influenced by an election event.     

The Persistent Interlocutor

A Persistent Interlocutor (PI) is someone who, in argumentative contexts, does not cease to question her opponent’s premises. The epistemic relevance of the PI has been debated throughout the history of philosophy. Pyrrhonians famously claim that our inability to dialectically vindicate our claims against a PI implies scepticism. Adam Leite disagrees (2005). Michael Resorla argues that the debate is based on a false premise (2009). In this paper, I argue that these views all fail to accurately account for the epistemic relevance of the PI. I then briefly present an account that aims to do better in this regard, based on the modal notion of safety. On the account proposed, the PI does not violate epistemic or dialectical norms. Rather, her behaviour tends to be epistemically perverse in the sense that it wastes cognitive resources. Perhaps surprisingly, this defect turns out not to be unique to the PI.

     

Developing the social identity theory of leadership: Leader agency in leader group prototypicality

The social identity theory of leadership is a unique perspective in leadership research in capturing how responses to leadership are informed by how the leader is perceived through the lens of the group identity shared by leaders and followers. I review the theory in broad strokes to make the case that a particularly valuable future development of the theory is to complement the theory's emphasis on group member (follower) perceptions of leader group prototypicality, the extent to which the leader is perceived to embody the group identity, with theory and evidence speaking to leader agency in influencing such perceptions.     

Are moods cognitive?: A critique of Schmitt on Heidegger

Conclusion If, as Schmitt suggests, Heidegger bases the claim that moods are cognitive on the philosophical distinction between theoretical and non-theoretical knowing, then much of what Heidegger says in this connection turns out to be either unclear, trivially true, or else false. Yet Schmitt himself only occasionally seems to recognize how dubious this account really is. Moreover, in attempting to help Heidegger say what he means, Schmitt's interpretation in Chapter 5 falters. It falters because(1) the emphatic likening of moods to skills,(2) the introduction of the bizzare notion knowing how occurrently, and (3) the misconceiving of self-deception, are not to be found in Sein und Zeit. They represent, rather, an imposition upon Sein und Zeit from without. This fact means either that Schmitt's interpretation is faulty or else that it is as much reconstructive as explicative. And if reconstructive, then several conceptual mistakes are attributable to him more than to Heidegger. In spite of these difficulties Martin Heidegger on Being Human is a prize book. It attempts to understand a thinker better than he understood himself. And according to Schleiermacher this is the goal of every hermeneutic.In contrast to the successful parts of the book, the chapter on moods fails to make sense out of Heidegger's view - one reason being, I would guess, that Heidegger is, after all, equivocating on the German word Stimmung. Sometimes he uses it to refer specifically to states such as being depressed, being serene, being anxious. At other times he uses it to refer vaguely to Dasein's attunement to the world. If the human being is always already (immer schon) attuned to the world, and if such a posture toward the world is also considered a mood, then in some imprecise way one's being in a mood might be a necessary condition for any belief to affect him emotionally. But, of course, mood in this broad sense would indicate an ontologically, and not a causally, necessary condition. And so, it would not follow that every belief which affected one emotionally need have some specific mood (e.g., depression, serenity, anxiety) as its necessary causal antecedent. Nor would it follow that, as a matter of fact, a change of belief could not effect a specific change of mood.I fear that with regard to some topics the sense in which one understands Heidegger better than he understood himself may well be the original Socratic sense: one knows what Heidegger himself does not know, viz., that the conceptions of Sein und Zeit are not always intelligible. And one wonders whether any philosophical midwifery can really be of aid - at least with respect to the claim that moods are cognitive.     

Schedule control of the vocal behavior of Cebus monkeys

The vocal behavior of three Cebus monkeys was maintained by fixed-ratio schedules of response dependent reinforcement at values between fixed-ratio 1 and fixed-ratio 15. In one monkey that was exposed to variable-interval, fixed-interval, and conjunctive fixed-ratio fixed-interval schedules of reinforcement, vocal responding occurred at a low rate, but schedule-appropriate patterns were maintained. The rates and patterns of responding engendered indicated that the vocal operant can be brought under schedule control in the monkey by the use of response-dependent reinforcement.     

Early judgments of semantic and syntactic acceptability by children

Judgments of the acceptability of correct, word order reversed, and semantically anomalous sentences were elicited from 2- and 3-year-old children in a game played with hand puppets. All of the sentences used were simple imperatives and each child was asked to correct those he called wrong. Performance on the judgment task was correlated with each child's mean length of utterance and with his comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences. Only the linguistically most advanced children were able to make a significant number of appropriate judgments and corrections of reversed word order imperatives. Less developed children could appropriately judge and correct semantically anomalous but not incorrect word order imperatives. The importance of semantic as opposed to syntactic factors in children's judgments of the acceptability of sentences is stressed.This research was supported in part by PHS Grant HD-02908 from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. Roger Brown is the principal investigator.     

Parent and child perceptions of Boszormenyi-Nagy's ethical dimensions of the parent-child relationship

The parent-child relationship plays an important role in Boszormenyi-Nagy's contextual therapy. This article presents the results of four interview studies of the opinions of parents and children about their ethical relationship.The children in these studies were five-to-seven-year-olds, 10-to-12 year olds and 15-year-olds. In one study only the mothers were interviewed, in the other three both parents participated. In all 73 children, 62 mothers, and 43 fathers were interviewed. The majority of parents and children agreed with most aspects of Nagy's theory about the parent-child relation, but there were some notable exceptions. Very few shared Nagy's ideas about entitlement. The age of the child had a clear effect on the opinions of the children on the dimensions of trust/reliability, loyalty and shifting of the balance with age of the child and on the opinions of the parents on the dimensions of childrens' rights, parents' rights, and balance of fairness. The sex of the interviewee had some effect: Mothers and fathers differ on the dimension of parents' rights and adolescent girls and boys differ on the dimensions of childrens' rights and parents' duties.     

Shape from stereo: A systematic approach using quadratic surfaces

We used quadratic shapes in several psychophysical shape-from-stereo tasks. The shapes were elegantly represented in a 2-D parameter space by the scale-independentshape index and the scale-dependentcurvedness. Using random-dot stereograms to depict the surfaces, we found that the shape of hyperbolic surfaces is slightly more difficult to recognize than the shape of elliptic surfaces. We found that curvedness (and indirectly, scale) has little or no influence on shape recognition.