The Self-Organization of Explicit Attitudes

ABSTRACT— How do minds produce explicit attitudes over several hundred milliseconds? Speeded evaluative measures have revealed implicit biases beyond cognitive control and subjective awareness, yet mental processing may culminate in an explicit attitude that feels personally endorsed and corroborates voluntary intentions. We argue that self-reported explicit attitudes derive from a continuous, temporally dynamic process, whereby multiple simultaneously conflicting sources of information self-organize into a meaningful mental representation. While our participants reported their explicit (like vs. dislike) attitudes toward White versus Black people by moving a cursor to a "like" or "dislike" response box, we recorded streaming x - and y -coordinates from their hand-movement trajectories. We found that participants' hand-movement paths exhibited greater curvature toward the "dislike" response when they reported positive explicit attitudes toward Black people than when they reported positive explicit attitudes toward White people. Moreover, these trajectories were characterized by movement disorder and competitive velocity profiles that were predicted under the assumption that the deliberate attitudes emerged from continuous interactions between multiple simultaneously conflicting constraints.     

Meaning and the External World

Realism, defined as a justified belief in the existence of the external world, is jeopardized by ‘meaning rationalism,’ the classic theory of meaning that sees the extension of words as a function of the intensions of individual speakers, with no way to ensure that these intensions actually correspond to anything in the external world. To defend realism, Ruth Millikan (1984, 1989a, b, 1993, 2004, 2005) offers a biological theory of meaning called ‘teleosemantics’ in which words, without requiring any contribution from the speaker’s intensions, are supposedly matched directly with their extensions by external norms. But even if one granted as a theoretical possibility that word meaning might possibly be stabilized through an external process, nonetheless, realists who wish to appeal to teleosemantics for a semantic proof of the external world must be capable of identifying these external norms, something that Millikan describes as highly fallible. Furthermore, because they can be aware of these norms only as these are internally represented, it would also be necessary for realists to verify that these internal representations accurately reflect the norms as they occur in the external world. But given that this is virtually the same stumbling block to realism found in meaning rationalism, it is concluded that teleosemantics is not likely to restore faith in this worldview.

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Natural born killers: The genetic origins of extreme violence

The current article examines the influence of genetics and evolution on acts of extreme and criminal violence among human primates. Moderate aggression can function to increase an organism's reproductive success; extreme violence can place the organism at unnecessary risk. Genetic polymorphisms that have been linked to extreme acts of violence are reviewed as is research elucidating how genetic risk and environmental stress may interact to increase risk of extreme violence. Extreme violence is viewed as high-end variance in an evolutionarily adaptive process in which the propensity for aggression and violent behavior, in moderate doses, has been adaptive for individual humans.     

The control of social attention from 1 to 4 months

The control of social attention during early infancy was investigated in two studies. In both studies, an adult turned towards one of two targets within the infant's immediate visual field. We tested: (a) whether infants were able to follow the direction of the adult's head turn; and (b) whether following a head turn was accompanied by further gaze shifts between experimenter and target. In the first study, 1‐month‐olds did not demonstrate attention following at the group level. In addition, those infants who turned towards the same target remained fixed on it and did not shift attention again. In Study 2, we tested infants longitudinally at 2–4 months. At the group level, infants followed the adult's head turn at 3 and 4 months but not at 2 months. Those infants who turned towards the same target at 3 and 4 months also shifted gaze back and forth between experimenter and target. By 3 months, infants seem able to capitalize on the social environment to disengage and distribute attention more flexibly. The results support the claim that the control of social attention begins in early infancy, and are consistent with the hypothesis that following the attention of other people is dependent on the development of disengagement skills.     

An appraisal of the validity of the factor loadings employed in the construction of the primary social attitude scales

In this article the authors examine the effect of including alternate test forms in a factor matrix upon the validity of the resultant factor loadings, finding that in this particular instance the effect is negligible. Comparisons of the factor loadings derived from matrices in which only one of the alternate test forms is included with those in which both forms are included reveal practically no difference in the magnitude of either the original or rotated factor loadings, or in that of the computed communalities.     

The factorial interpretation of test difficulty

This paper discusses the influence of test difficulty on the correlation between test items and between tests. The greater the difference in difficulty between two test items or between two tests the smaller the maximum correlation between them. In general, the greater the number of degrees of difficulty among the items in a test or among the tests in a battery, the higher the rank of the matrix of intercorrelations; that is, differences in difficulty are represented in the factorial configuration as additional factors. The suggestion is made that if all tests included in a battery are roughly homogeneous with respect to difficulty existing hierarchies will be more clearly defined and meaningful psychological interpretation of factors more readily attained.