Terror management and reactions to undocumented immigrants: mortality salience increases aversion to culturally dissimilar others

The authors examine the idea, derived from Terror Management Theory, that concerns about undocumented immigrants stem from the need to protect death-buffering cultural values against the symbolic threat posed by dissimilar others. It is hypothesized that reminders of death will intensify aversion to culturally dissimilar immigrants. Forty-six university students were randomly assigned to a mortality salience or a control condition prior to evaluating either an illegal alien named Ben Johnson from Vancouver or Carlos Suarez from Mexico City. Consistent with the hypothesis, reactions to the Canadian target did not differ in the control and mortality salience conditions, whereas reactions to the Mexican immigrant were more negative in the mortality salience than in the control condition.     

On the supposed limits of physicalist theories of mind

Is physicalism compatible with either panpsychism or so-called “fundamental mentality”? Minimal physicalism, I contend, is compatible with both. We should therefore jettison the “No Fundamental Mentality” constraint, a proposed constraint on the definition of “the physical”, not to mention the false limits it places on physicalist theories of mind.     

Dynamics we can believe in: a view from the Amsterdam School on the centenary of Evert Willem Beth

Logic is breaking out of the confines of the single-agent static paradigm that has been implicit in all formal systems until recent times. We sketch some recent developments that take logic as an account of information-driven interaction. These two features, the dynamic and the social, throw fresh light on many issues within logic and its connections with other areas, such as epistemology and game theory.     

Rater Wealth Predicts Perceptions of Outgroup Competence

National income has a pervasive influence on the perception of ingroup stereotypes, with high status and wealthy targets perceived as more competent. In two studies we investigated the degree to which economic wealth of raters related to perceptions of outgroup competence. Raters’ economic wealth predicted trait ratings when (1) raters in 48 other cultures rated Americans’ competence and (2) Mexican Americans rated Anglo Americans’ competence. Rater wealth also predicted ratings of interpersonal warmth on the culture level. In conclusion, raters’ economic wealth, either nationally or individually, is significantly associated with perception of outgroup members, supporting the notion that ingroup conditions or stereotypes function as frames of reference in evaluating outgroup traits.     

How Exposure to the Confederate Flag Affects Willingness to Vote for Barack Obama

Leading up to the 2008 U.S. election, pundits wondered whether Whites, particularly in Southern states, were ready to vote for a Black president. The present paper explores how a common Southern symbol—the Confederate flag—impacted willingness to vote for Barack Obama. We predicted that exposure to the Confederate flag would activate negativity toward Blacks and result in lowered willingness to vote for Obama. As predicted, participants primed with the Confederate flag reported less willingness to vote for Obama than those primed with a neutral symbol. The flag did not affect willingness to vote for White candidates. In a second study, participants primed with the Confederate flag evaluated a hypothetical Black target more negatively than controls. These results suggest that exposure to the Confederate flag results in more negative judgments of Black targets. As such, the prevalence of this flag in the South may have contributed to a reticence for some to vote for Obama because of his race.     

The Flynn effect puzzle: A 30-year examination from the right tail of the ability distribution provides some missing pieces

The Flynn effect is the rise in IQ scores across the last eighty or more years documented in the general distribution of both industrialized and developing nations primarily on tests that require problem solving and non-verbal reasoning. However, whether the effect extends to the right tail (i.e., the top 5% of ability) remains unknown. The present study uses roughly 1.7 million scores of 7th-grade students on the SAT and ACT as well as scores of 5th- and 6th-grade students on the EXPLORE from 1981 to 2010 to investigate whether the effect operates in the right tail. The effect was found in the top 5% at a rate similar to the general distribution, providing evidence for the first time that the entire curve is likely increasing at a constant rate. The effect was also found for females as well as males, appears to still be continuing, is primarily concentrated on the mathematics subtests of the SAT, ACT, and EXPLORE, and operates similarly for both 5th and 6th as well as 7th graders in the right tail. These findings help clarify the nature of the effect and may suggest ways that potential causes can now be more meaningfully offered and evaluated.     

Amodal causal capture in the tunnel effect

In addition to identifying individual objects in the world, the visual system must also characterize the relationships between objects, for instance when objects occlude one another or cause one another to move. Here we explored the relationship between perceived causality and occlusion. Can one perceive causality in an occluded location? In several experiments, observers judged whether a centrally presented event involved a single object passing behind an occluder, or one object causally launching another (out of view and behind the occluder). With no additional context, the centrally presented event was typically judged as a non-causal pass, even when the occluding and disoccluding objects were different colors--an illusion known as the 'tunnel effect' that results from spatiotemporal continuity. However, when a synchronized context event involved an unambiguous causal launch, participants perceived a causal launch behind the occluder. This percept of an occluded causal interaction could also be driven by grouping and synchrony cues in the absence of any explicitly causal interaction. These results reinforce the hypothesis that causality is an aspect of perception. It is among the interpretations of the world that are independently available to vision when resolving ambiguity, and that the visual system can 'fill in' amodally.     

No-go trials can modulate switch cost by interfering with effects of task preparation

It has recently been shown that the cost associated with switching tasks is eliminated following ‘no-go’ trials, in which response selection is not completed, suggesting that the switch cost depends on response selection. However, no-go trials may also affect switch costs by interfering with the effects of task preparation that precede response selection. To test this hypothesis we evaluated switch costs following standard go trials with those following two types of non-response trials: no-go trials, for which a stimulus is presented that indicates no response should be made (Experiment 1); and cue-only trials in which no stimulus is presented following the task cue (Experiment 2). We hypothesized that eliminating no-go stimuli would reveal effects of task preparation on the switch cost in cue-only trials. We found no switch cost following no-go trials (Experiment 1), but a reliable switch cost in cue-only trials (i.e., when no-go stimuli were removed; Experiment 2). We conclude that no-go trials can modulate the switch cost, independent of their effect on response selection, by interfering with task preparation, and that the effects of task preparation on switch cost are more directly assessed by cue-only trials.     

Simplifying reading: applying the simplicity principle to reading

Debates concerning the types of representations that aid reading acquisition have often been influenced by the relationship between measures of early phonological awareness (the ability to process speech sounds) and later reading ability. Here, a complementary approach is explored, analyzing how the functional utility of different representational units, such as whole words, bodies (letters representing the vowel and final consonants of a syllable), and graphemes (letters representing a phoneme) may change as the number of words that can be read gradually increases. Utility is measured by applying a Simplicity Principle to the problem of mapping from print to sound; that is, assuming that the "best" representational units for reading are those which allow the mapping from print to sounds to be encoded as efficiently as possible. Results indicate that when only a small number of words are read whole-word representations are most useful, whereas when many words can be read graphemic representations have the highest utility.