Is the victim Max (Planck) or Moritz? How victim type and social value orientation affect dishonest behavior

Does the potential victim of dishonest behavior—a family or a bank, a pensioner or an insurance firm—affect the propensity to engage in such behavior? We investigate the effect of victim type—an individual person or an impersonal institution—on dishonest behavior and test whether it interacts with potential perpetrators' social value orientation (prosocial or proself). In a between‐subjects design, we allowed experimental participants (N = 368) to misreport private information in order to increase (decrease) their profit (loss) at the expense of either another participant or the experimenter's budget. Both prosocials and proselfs engaged in dishonesty, but proselfs did so much more. Furthermore, prosocials reduced their dishonesty when the victim was another person, rather than an institution, but proselfs did not. A direct implication is that the dishonesty of prosocials may be curbed by increasing the salience of the adverse effect their dishonesty has on other individual people but that such interventions will not be effective for proselfs. In contrast with recent results, we did not find a general effect of increased dishonesty under a loss (vs. gain) frame.     

Stuck in the middle: the psychophysics of goal pursuit

The classic goal-gradient hypothesis posits that motivation to reach a goal increases monotonically with proximity to the desired end state. However, we argue that this is not always the case. In this article, we show that motivation to engage in goal-consistent behavior can be higher when people are either far from or close to the end state and lower when they are about halfway to the end state. We propose a psychophysical explanation for this tendency to get "stuck in the middle." Building on the assumption that motivation is influenced by the perceived marginal value of progress toward the goal, we show that the shape of the goal gradient varies depending on whether an individual monitors progress in terms of distance from the initial state or from the desired end state. Our psychophysical model of goal pursuit predicts a previously undiscovered nonmonotonic gradient, as well as two monotonic gradients.     

Testing reward-cue attentional salience: Attainment and dynamic changes

A great wealth of studies has investigated the capacity of motivationally relevant stimuli to bias attention, suggesting that reward predicting cues are prioritized even when reward is no longer delivered and when attending to such stimuli is detrimental to reward achievement. Despite multiple procedures have been adopted to unveil the mechanisms whereby reward cues gain attentional salience, some open questions remain. Indeed, mechanisms different from motivation can be responsible for the capture of attention triggered by the reward cue. In addition, we note that at present only a few studies have sought to address whether the cue attractiveness dynamically follows changes in the associated reward value. Investigating how and to what extent the salience of the reward cue is updated when motivation changes, could help shedding light on how reward-cues attain and maintain their capacity to attract attention, and therefore on apparent irrational attentive behaviors.     

Taking Up Thagard’s Challenge: A Formal Model of Conceptual Revision

Journal of Philosophical Logic - Thagard (1992) presented a framework for conceptual change in science based on conceptual systems. Thagard challenged belief revision theorists, claiming that...     

Are the Bundle Theory and the Substratum Theory Really Twin Brothers?

In a recent paper, Jiri Benovsky argues that the bundle theory and the substratum theory, traditionally regarded as ‘deadly enemies’ in the metaphysics literature, are in fact ‘twin brothers’. That is, they turn out to be ‘equivalent for all theoretical purposes’ upon analysis. The only exception, according to Benovsky, is a particular version of the bundle theory whose distinguishing features render unappealing. In the present reply article, I critically analyse these undoubtedly relevant claims, and reject them.

Influence of time-of-day on joint Navon effect

The shared attention theory suggests that people devote greater cognitive resources to those features co-attended simultaneously with others, determining better performance in several types of tasks. When co-actors performed a go/no-go Navon task attending different features of target letters, the performance was impaired, reflecting a joint Navon effect (the representation of a co-actor’s attentional focus made it more difficult to select and apply one’s own focus of attention), probably due to asynchronous co-attention with a decrease in cognitive resources involved. Researches in chronobiology and chronopsychology demonstrated that not only selective attention (involved in a Navon task), but also cognitive resources have a daily fluctuations, mainly paralleling the circadian rhythm of body temperature (i.e. increasing values from the morning to evening with a subsequent decline in the night). The study was conducted to assess whether the presence of joint attention, as measured by the joint Navon effect, was influenced by the time-of-day. Sixteen pairs of participants sitting next to each other were required to respond to the identity letters in a go/no-go Navon task twice: in the morning (09:00–10:00) and early afternoon (13:00–14:00). The results showed a joint Navon effect in the morning session only, suggesting that joint attention was affected by the time-of-day effect on cognitive resources.     

Linguistic prejudice and electoral discrimination: What can political theory learn from sociolinguistics?

Normative political theorists working in the field of linguistic justice generally believe that participation in democratic life in linguistically diverse societies requires a shared lingua franca (e.g., Patten 2009; Van Parijs 2011). Even when a shared lingua franca is present, however, there is likely to be a variety of ways in which people speak it, due to variations in accent, pitch, register, and lexicon. This paper examines the implications of intra-linguistic diversity for democracy and political representation. More specifically, by drawing on Andrew Rehfeld's (2010) work and on relevant sociolinguistics research, the paper argues that widespread unconscious linguistic prejudice constitutes a constraint on some citizens' right to run for political office that is incompatible with democratic equality. The argument is illustrated via a number of examples concerning Australian politicians.     

Formal Ontology and Mathematics. A Case Study on the Identity of Proofs

We propose a novel, ontological approach to studying mathematical propositions and proofs. By “ontological approach” we refer to the study of the categories of beings or concepts that, in their practice, mathematicians isolate as fruitful for the advancement of their scientific activity (like discovering and proving theorems, formulating conjectures, and providing explanations). We do so by developing what we call a “formal ontology” of proofs using semantic modeling tools (like RDF and OWL) developed by the computer science community. In this article, (i) we describe this new approach and, (ii) to provide an example, we apply it to the problem of the identity of proofs. We also describe open issues and further applications of this approach (for example, the study of purity of methods). We lay some foundations to investigate rigorously and at large scale intellectual moves and attitudes that underpin the advancement of mathematics through cognitive means (carving out investigationally valuable concepts and techniques) and social means (like communication, collaboration, revision, and criticism of specific categories, inferential patterns, and levels of analysis). Our approach complements other types of analysis of proofs such as reconstruction in a deductive system and examination through a proof-assistant.

     

Effects of decision-phase time constraints on emotion-based learning in the Iowa Gambling Task

Research employing the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has frequently shown that learning is impaired in various clinical populations. However, precisely what constitutes "unimpaired" control group learning remains unclear. In order to understand some of the possible factors underlying variability in control group IGT performance, the present study sought to manipulate features of the task to intentionally disrupt learning. Specifically, the present study investigated the effects of time constraints on emotion-based learning during automated administration of the IGT. For two groups of participants, a time-constraint of either 2-s or 4-s was implemented during the critical decision making period, while a control group received no time constraint. We also evaluated participants' subjective experience after every block of 20 trials. Results demonstrated that the 2-s group differed significantly from the control group. Subjective experience measures revealed rapid development of awareness of the advantageous and disadvantageous decks among all three groups. Overall, our findings demonstrate, for the first time, the effects of decision-phase time constraints on emotion-based learning and indicate that the IGT reward/punishment schedules are to some extent cognitively penetrable.