Testing the relationship between personality characteristics,contextual factors and entrepreneurial intentions in a developing country

Drawing upon the theory of planned behaviour (TPB ), we developed and tested a conceptual model which integrates both internal personality factors and external contextual factors to determine their associations with motivational factors and entrepreneurial intentions (EIs ). We then investigated if the model of EI applies in a developing country, namely Iran. We also set out to identify the most relevant factors for EI within this developing country context. Do distal predictors of EI including personality factors (i.e. need for achievement, risk taking and locus of control) and contextual factors (i.e. perceived barriers and support) significantly relate to EI via proximal predictors including motivational factors (i.e. attitudes towards entrepreneurship and perceived behavioural control [PBC])? Data were collected on 331 students from 7 public universities. The findings support the TPB for EI in Iran. All three motivational factors related to EI , but PBC showed the strongest association, which is different than in developed country contexts. Possible explanations for these differences are discussed. All three personality characteristics indirectly related to EI via the proximal attitudes towards entrepreneurship and PBC . Perceived contextual support and barriers indirectly related to EI via proximal PBC while perceived barriers also directly related to EI .     

Deliberate self-harm in 15-year-old adolescents: a pilot study with a modified version of the Deliberate Self-Harm Inventory

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the rate of deliberate self-harm in 15-year-old Swedish adolescents, gender differences in this behavior, and possible associations with self-esteem and mindfulness. For this purpose, we developed a simplified version of Gratz's (2001) Deliberate Self-Harm Inventory (DSHI), and carried out a pilot study with 123 adolescents from three different schools in southern Sweden. The results showed that 65.9% of the adolescents reported having engaged in some kind of deliberate self-harm at least once; 41.5% reported at least one kind of self-harm more than once; and 13.8% reported at least one kind of deliberate self-harm behavior "many times". Although there were no overall gender differences in self-harm, the girls reported significantly more of cutting wrists, arms and other body areas than the boys. High rates of deliberate self-harm were associated with low self-esteem and low mindfulness.     

Radicalizing numerical cognition

In recent decades, non-representational approaches to mental phenomena and cognition have been gaining traction in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. In these alternative approach, mental representations either lose their central status or, in its most radical form, are banned completely. While there is growing agreement that non-representational accounts may succeed in explaining some cognitive capacities (e.g. perception), there is widespread skepticism about the possibility of giving non-representational accounts of cognitive capacities such as memory, imagination or abstract thought. In this paper, I will critically examine the view that there are fundamental limitations to non-representational explanations of cognition. Rather than challenging these arguments on general grounds, I will examine a set of human cognitive capacities that are generally thought to fall outside the scope of non-representational accounts, i.e. numerical cognition. After criticizing standard representational accounts of numerical cognition for their lack of explanatory power, I will argue that a non-representational approach that is inspired by radical enactivism offers the best hope for developing a genuine naturalistic explanatory account for these cognitive capacities.

     

Detecting deception: adversarial problem solving in a low base-rate world

The work presented here investigates the process by which one group of individuals solves the problem of detecting deceptions created by other agents. A field experiment was conducted in which twenty-four auditors (partners in international public accounting firms) were asked to review four cases describing real companies that, unknown to the auditors, had perpetrated financial frauds. While many of the auditors failed to detect the manipulations in the cases, a small number of auditors were consistently successful. Since the detection of frauds occurs infrequently in the work of a given auditor, we explain success by the application of powerful heuristics gained from experience with deceptions in everyday life. These heuristics implement a variation of Dennett's intentional stance strategy, which is based on interpreting detected inconsistencies in the light of the Deceiver's (i.e., management's) goals and possible actions. We explain failure to detect deception by means of perturbations (bugs) in the domain knowledge of accounting needed to apply these heuristics to the specific context of financial statement fraud. We test our theory by showing that a computational model of fraud detection that employs the proposed heuristics successfully detects frauds in the cases given to the auditors. We then modify the model by introducing perturbations based on the errors made by each of the auditors in the four cases. The resulting models account for 84 of the 96 observations (i.e., 24 auditors × four cases) in our data.     

European Public Deliberation on Brain Machine Interface Technology: Five Convergence Seminars

We present a novel procedure to engage the public in ethical deliberations on the potential impacts of brain machine interface technology. We call this procedure a convergence seminar, a form of scenario-based group discussion that is founded on the idea of hypothetical retrospection. The theoretical background of this procedure and the results of five seminars are presented.     

Winners love winning and losers love money

Salience and satisfaction are important factors in determining the comparisons that people make. We hypothesized that people make salient comparisons first, and then make satisfying comparisons only if salient comparisons leave them unsatisfied. This hypothesis suggests an asymmetry between winning and losing. For winners, comparison with a salient alternative (i.e., losing) brings satisfaction. Therefore, winners should be sensitive only to the relative value of their outcomes. For losers, comparison with a salient alternative (i.e., winning) brings little satisfaction. Therefore, losers should be drawn to compare outcomes with additional standards, which should make them sensitive to both relative and absolute values of their outcomes. In Experiment 1, participants won one of two cash prizes on a scratch-off ticket. Winners were sensitive to the relative value of their prizes, whereas losers were sensitive to both the relative and the absolute values of their prizes. In Experiment 2, losers were sensitive to the absolute value of their prize only when they had sufficient cognitive resources to engage in effortful comparison.     

Non-representationalist cognitive science and realism

Embodied and extended cognition is a relatively new paradigm within cognitive science that challenges the basic tenet of classical cognitive science, viz. cognition consists in building and manipulating internal representations. Some of the pioneers of embodied cognitive science have claimed that this new way of conceptualizing cognition puts pressure on epistemological and ontological realism. In this paper I will argue that such anti-realist conclusions do not follow from the basic assumptions of radical embodied cognitive science. Furthermore I will show that one can develop a form of realism that reflects rather than just accommodates the core principles of non-representationalist embodied cognitive science.     

The multiculturalism debate in Canadian newspapers: The harbinger of a political storm?

A contentious debate in Canadian newspapers preceded the enactment of the country’s Multiculturalism Act. This article traces the varying cultural perspectives of journalists writing in five Canadian newspapers from 1980 to 1988. Whereas this period is generally viewed as being one of growth for official multiculturalism in Canada, the press criticism against it seems to have been a harbinger of the political opposition to the policy that attained prominence in the early 1990s. Consequently, the bureaucratic structures established to support the multiculturalism policy were reduced significantly. However, the legislation remains intact.