The Dual Effects of Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Relationships to Research Productivity and Career Outcomes in Academe

Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has been shown to be important for organizational effectiveness, yet less is known about the relationship between OCB and objective outcomes for individuals. We investigate the relationship between OCB and both short-term and longer term outcomes within the context of an outcome-based reward system. We also investigate a type of OCB specific to professional occupations, namely, professional service OCB. Using resource allocation and social exchange theories, we hypothesize that OCB directed internally to the employing organization may have a negative impact on individuals’ productivity and career outcomes while engaging in professional service OCB would be positively related to these outcomes. Results from a survey of 622 faculty members in research universities provide support for these hypotheses. Future research directions are discussed.     

Mathematics in Economics: An Austrian Methodological Critique

Even the briefest and most superficial perusal of leading mainstream economics journals will attest to the degree that mathematical formalism has captured the economics profession. Whereas up to the early 20th century virtually all of the output of the dismal scientists was in the literary format, by the early 21st century this is not at all any longer the case. Mathematical formalism is supposed to serve economics, and yet now true economic insight has been crowded out by the math. If mainstream neoclassical economics is to come back to its proper path, a far less central role for mathematical economics, statistics and econometrics will have to be fashioned.     

How cognitive load affects duration judgments: A meta-analytic review

A meta-analysis of 117 experiments evaluated the effects of cognitive load on duration judgments. Cognitive load refers to information-processing (attentional or working-memory) demands. Six types of cognitive load were analyzed to resolve ongoing controversies and to test current duration judgment theories. Duration judgments depend on whether or not participants are informed in advance that they are needed: prospective paradigm (informed) versus retrospective paradigm (not informed). With higher cognitive load, the prospective duration judgment ratio (subjective duration to objective duration) decreases but the retrospective ratio increases. Thus, the duration judgment ratio differs depending on the paradigm and the specific type of cognitive load. As assessed by the coefficient of variation, relative variability of prospective, but not retrospective, judgments increases with cognitive load. The prospective findings support models emphasizing attentional resources, especially executive control. The retrospective findings support models emphasizing memory changes. Alternative theories do not fit with the meta-analytic findings and are rejected.     

ATTENTION AND MENTAL PAINT1

Much of recent philosophy of perception is oriented towards accounting for the phenomenal character of perception—what it is like to perceive—in a non‐mentalistic way—that is, without appealing to mental objects or mental qualities. In opposition to such views, I claim that the phenomenal character of perception of a red round object cannot be explained by or reduced to direct awareness of the object, its redness and roundness—or representation of such objects and qualities. Qualities of perception that are not captured by what one is directly aware of or by representational content are instances of what Gilbert Harman has called “mental paint” ( Block, 1990 ; Harman, 1990 ). The claim of this paper is that empirical facts about attention point in the direction of mental paint. The argument starts with the claim (later modified) that when one moves one's attention around a scene while keeping one's eyes fixed, the phenomenology of perception can change in ways that do not reflect which qualities of objects one is directly aware of or the way the world is represented to be. These changes in the phenomenology of perception cannot be accounted for in terms of awareness of or representation of the focus of attention because they manifest themselves in experience as differences in apparent contrast, apparent color saturation, apparent size, apparent speed, apparent time of occurrence and other appearances. There is a way of coping with these phenomena in terms of vague contents, but vague contents cannot save direct realism or representationism because the kind of vagueness required clashes wth the phenomenology itself.     

Shape‐ and Trait‐Congruency: Using Appearance‐based Cues as a Basis for Product Recommendations

This research demonstrates that a consumer's physical appearance—and, more specifically, his or her body size—predictably influences the product(s) that the consumer is recommended. Four studies conducted in both field and lab settings show that agents more frequently recommend round (vs. angular) shaped products to heavier targets, notably for products and categories in which body size is irrelevant (e.g., lamps and perfume). We attribute this to a combination of shape‐congruency and trait‐congruency, whereby individuals choose products for others based on shared dimensions of the person and product.     

Kinesthesia: An extended critical overview and a beginning phenomenology of learning

Continental Philosophy Review - This paper takes five different perspectives on kinesthesia, beginning with its evolution across animate life and its biological distinction from, and relationship...