Two Egocentric Sources of the Decision to Vote: The Voter's Illusion and the Belief in Personal Relevance

The decision to vote in a national election requires a choice between serving a social good and satisfying one's self-interest. Viewed as a cooperative response in a social dilemma, casting a vote seems irrational because it cannot have a discernible effect on the electoral outcome. The findings of two studies with undergraduate samples suggest that some people vote not because they set aside self-interest, but because they expect their own behaviors to matter. Two psychological processes contribute to this belief: the voter's illusion (the projection of one's own choice between voting and abstention to supporters of the same party or candidate), and the belief in personal relevance (the belief that one's own vote matters regardless of its predictive value for the behavior of others). The rationality of these two egocentric mechanisms depends on the normative framework invoked. Their relevance for actual voting behavior is indicated by their ability to account for four types of variation in turnout rates.     

Prospect theory analysis of guessing in multiple choice tests

The guessing of answers in multiple choice tests adds random error to the variance of the test scores, lowering their reliability. Formula scoring rules that penalize for wrong guesses are frequently used to solve this problem. This paper uses prospect theory to analyze scoring rules from a decision‐making perspective and focuses on the effects of framing on the tendency to guess. In three experiments participants were presented with hypothetical test situations and were asked to indicate the degree of certainty that they thought was required for them to answer a question. In accordance with the framing hypothesis, participants tended to guess more when they anticipated a low grade and therefore considered themselves to be in the loss domain, or when the scoring rule caused the situation to be framed as entailing potential losses. The last experiment replicated these results with a task that resembles an actual test. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does excusable ignorance absolve of liability for costs?

Excusable ignorance not only undermines moral culpability but also agent-responsibility. Therefore, excusable ignorance absolves of liability for costs. Specifically, it defeats liability that is meant to be derived from causal responsibility wherever strict liability cannot be justified. To establish these claims this paper (1) assesses the potential of arguments for liability of excusably ignorant agents and thereby demarcates the proper domain of strict liability and (2) traces the intuition that seemingly supports strict liability accounts to more general principles. The paper concludes that liability cannot be justified in cases of excusable ignorance. Finally, it (3) stresses that although excusable ignorance defeats the link from causal responsibility to liability for costs this does not imply that victims are left to fend for themselves.     

Is Mathematics a Domain for Philosophers of Explanation?

In this paper we discuss three interrelated questions. First: is explanation in mathematics a topic that philosophers of mathematics can legitimately investigate? Second: are the specific aims that philosophers of mathematical explanation set themselves legitimate? Finally: are the models of explanation developed by philosophers of science useful tools for philosophers of mathematical explanation? We argue that the answer to all these questions is positive. Our views are completely opposite to the views that Mark Zelcer has put forward recently. Throughout this paper, we show why Zelcer’s arguments fail.     

Face recognition and aging: Effects of target age and memory load

In the present study, we investigated age-related decline in face recognition memory and whether this decline is moderated by the age of the target faces and by the number of faces that the participant must learn (memory load). Thirty-two participants in each of three age groups (18-39 years, 60-75 years, and 76-96 years) completed a face recognition task. Signal detection analyses confirmed that face recognition accuracy declined with age. However, this finding was qualified by an interaction between participant age and target age, which revealed that the age-related decline in face recognition accuracy occurred only for young target faces. Increased memory load was associated with comparable performance decrements across all age groups. However, memory load appears not to be the cause of these decrements. Instead, they appear to be a product of recognition load (the number of stimuli presented in the recognition phase).     

Thinking around the corner: the development of planning abilities

The ability to plan and search ahead is essential for problem solving in most situations in everyday life. To investigate the development of planning and related processes, a sample of four- and five-year-old children was examined in a variant of the Tower of London, a frequently used neuropsychological assessment tool of planning abilities. The applied problems either required searching ahead for optimal solution or were solvable by pure step-by-step forward processing. Furthermore, the ambiguity of subgoal ordering was varied.Results revealed an age-related effect of search depth: the four-year olds’ planning accuracy was particularly decreased in problems demanding search ahead, while five-year olds mastered both problem types equally well. Interestingly, this interaction between age and search depth could not be accounted for by measures of working memory and inhibition. Differential effects of age were also found for subgoal ordering with respect to initial planning and movement execution times. In sum, planning abilities showed considerable development during late kindergarten age that appeared to be specifically associated with the integration and back-validation of the anticipated consequences of internally modeled actions. The present study demonstrates that a careful consideration of problem structure may greatly enhance the insights gained from the application of a routinely used assessment tool, the Tower of London. This may be especially advantageous when addressing specific subpopulations such as children or clinical samples.     

Perfectionism in school teachers: relations with stress appraisals, coping styles, and burnout

Many school teachers suffer from stress and burnout, and perfectionism is a personality characteristic that has been associated with increased stress, maladaptive coping, and burnout. Recent findings, however, show that perfectionism has both positive and negative facets. To investigate how these facets are related to stress, coping, and burnout in teachers, a sample of 118 secondary school teachers completed multidimensional measures of perfectionism, stress appraisals, coping styles, and burnout. Multiple regression analyses showed that striving for perfection was positively related to challenge appraisals and active coping and inversely to threat/loss appraisals, avoidant coping, and burnout whereas negative reactions to imperfection were positively related to threat/loss appraisals, avoidant coping, and burnout and inversely to challenge appraisals and active coping. Perceived pressure to be perfect showed differential relationships depending on the source of pressure: Whereas pressure from students was positively related to loss appraisals and pressure from students' parents was positively related to burnout, pressure from colleagues was inversely related to threat appraisals and burnout. The findings suggest that striving for perfection and perceived pressure from colleagues do not contribute to stress and burnout in teachers, whereas negative reactions to imperfection and perceived pressure from students and students' parents may be contributing factors.     

Perceptions of self and other in the prisoner's dilemma: outcome bias and evidential reasoning

In the prisoner's dilemma, self-interest clashes with collective interest. The way players resolve this conflict affects how others view them. Cooperators are seen as more moral than defectors, and, when there is no information about the other player's choice, cooperators and defectors are seen as equally competent. However, players who are defected against are seen as less competent, especially if they themselves cooperated (Experiments 1 and 2). Similarly, cooperators see themselves as more moral, but not as less competent, than defectors do (Experiments 3). Independent of concerns about reputation and self-image maintenance, evidential reasoning contributes to cooperative behavior. Players who project their own attitudes onto others are more likely to cooperate (Experiments 3). Compared with classic game theory, a theory of reputational concerns and evidential reasoning is better equipped to explain empirical patterns of choice behavior in social dilemmas.