Fundamental Questions in Personality

The network perspective represents a novel contribution to personality theory by conceptualising personality traits as emerging from the mutual dependencies between fundamental and causal affective, behavioural, and cognitive components. We argue that incorporating a more nuanced biological and developmental perspective to causality and a more precise approach to affective, behavioural, cognitive and motivational components may serve to enrich the network perspective. Although the graphical approach to modelling personality is aesthetically pleasing, analytic techniques are not yet available to put network models to the (quantitative) test. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Integrating immigrant minorities: developing a scale to measure majority members' attitudes toward their own proactive efforts

The present study is based on the premise that the integration of ethnic minorities may involve more than the majority's expression of tolerance. In order to promote inclusion, the majority may have to play a more active role in the integration process. We describe the development and validation of a new psychometric scale which assesses majority members' attitudes toward their own proactive contribution to the integration of immigrants within three domains: cultural and structural efforts, and openness to diversity. The scale is investigated by analyses of internal structure and exploration of construct validity in relation to relevant social psychological and personality constructs in a sample of 486 Norwegian university students (28% male, mean age = 26.5, SD = 6.08). Factor analyses supported a unidimensional structure and the estimated reliability of an additive scale was satisfactory (Cronbach's α = 0.91). The scale correlated negatively with measures of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, and positively with global identity. It was weakly related to the personality traits agreeableness, intellect, extraversion, and conscientiousness. The potential utility of the scale in both applied and experimental social psychological studies are discussed.     

National Injustice,Caring Institutions and Cosmopolitan Motivation

Res Publica - This paper examines the relationship between strategies of cosmopolitan education intended to motivate citizens of affluent countries to care about distant others facing injustice,...     

Bootstrapping in a language of thought: a formal model of numerical concept learning

In acquiring number words, children exhibit a qualitative leap in which they transition from understanding a few number words, to possessing a rich system of interrelated numerical concepts. We present a computational framework for understanding this inductive leap as the consequence of statistical inference over a sufficiently powerful representational system. We provide an implemented model that is powerful enough to learn number word meanings and other related conceptual systems from naturalistic data. The model shows that bootstrapping can be made computationally and philosophically well-founded as a theory of number learning. Our approach demonstrates how learners may combine core cognitive operations to build sophisticated representations during the course of development, and how this process explains observed developmental patterns in number word learning.     

Aliens behaving badly: children's acquisition of novel purity-based morals

The traditional cognitive developmental perspective on moral acquisition posits that children actively construct moral beliefs by assessing the negative impacts of antisocial behaviors. This account is not easily applied to actions that are considered immoral despite lacking consequences for others' welfare. We studied the moralization of behaviors without tangible impacts, specifically examining the independent and joint roles of feelings and norms in children's acquisition of purity-based morals. Seven-year-olds were shown pictures of anthropomorphic aliens engaged in unfamiliar activities and were asked to judge whether these actions were wrong or OK. Relative to a control condition matched for valence and informational complexity, children made elevated wrongness judgments when they were either disgusted or led to believe that the behaviors were unnatural. However, it was only in a condition that included both disgust induction and information about unnaturalness that children exhibited robust tendencies to judge the actions as wrong. This research therefore demonstrates that feelings and norms work in concert such that purity morals are most readily acquired when both factors are involved. The implications for accounts of moral development are discussed.