Human Natures: Psychological Essentialism in Thinking about Differences between People

‘Psychological essentialism’ is the belief that members of a category share deep‐seated properties that determine their identity. In the case of social categories, such beliefs have a variety of important implications. We review recent research that shows a central role for essentialist thinking in stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Special attention is paid to beliefs about race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, mental disorder, and personality. Lingering questions about essentialist thinking are discussed, and several directions for future research are suggested.     

The Doomsday Argument Adam & Eve,UN++, and Quantum Joe

The Doomsday argument purports to show that the risk of the human species going extinct soon has been systematically underestimated. This argument has something in common with controversial forms of reasoning in other areas, including: game theoretic problems with imperfect recall, the methodology of cosmology, the epistemology of indexical belief, and the debate over so-called fine-tuning arguments for the design hypothesis. The common denominator is a certain premiss: the Self-Sampling Assumption. We present two strands of argument in favor of this assumption. Through a series of thought experiments we then investigate some bizarre prima facie consequences – backward causation, psychic powers, and an apparent conflict with the Principal Principle.     

In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism

I argue against Kendall Walton's argument against formalism, in his 'Categories of Art', that we must always take the history of production into account in ascribing aesthetic properties to works of art. I concede that he is right about representational properties and about what I call 'contextual' properties of works of art. But that conclusion cannot be generalized to abstract and non-contextual art, and it cannot be generalized to the non-representational and non-contextual features of representational and contextual works of art. I then dispute Walton's intriguing 'guernicas' example. I also consider his other counter-examples. I argue that art-historical categories can be put to one side when we consider the aesthetic nature of abstract and non-contextual abstract works of art. However, there is no doubt that many other works of art possess significant non-formal aesthetic values.     

Commodification in law: ideologies,intractabilities, and hyperboles

In this paper I first aim to identify, from a perspective mindful of both analytic and Continental traditions, the central normative issues at stake in the various debates concerning commodification in law. Although there now exists a wealth of thoughtful literature in this area, I often find myself disoriented within the webs of moral criteria used to analyze the increasingly ubiquitous practice of converting legal goods into monetary values. I therefore attempt to distinguish and organize these often conflated conceptual distinctions across several registers of moral analysis. Second, I formulate what I consider the most illuminating questions regarding the criteria used to evaluate commodification in law. Critiques of commodification in law face what I call problems of ideology, intractability, and hyperbole, and identifying these issues helps to explain the momentum of the law and economics movement.

Negative affect and hindsight bias

The relationship between hindsight bias and individual differences in negative affect, or ‘dysphoria’, was investigated in a naturalistic study. In a first session, 76 undergraduates predicted their grades prior to a midterm exam. In a second session, after having received feedback from the exam, they attempted to recall their predictions and predicted their grades on a second exam. Dysphoria was associated with hindsight bias whether initial predictions were overly optimistic or pessimistic. In the former case, the standard hindsight bias was modal for the sample, whereas a ‘reverse hindsight’ bias was modal in the latter. This asymmetry suggests that hindsight bias is influenced by motivational or affective factors. The bias did not hinder the improvement of predictions between the first and second exams, and therefore could not have mediated a hypothesized adaptive learning impairment among dysphoric subjects.     

Distributional Information: A Powerful Cue for Acquiring Syntactic Categories

Many theorists have dismissed a priori the idea that distributional information could play a significant role in syntactic category acquisition. We demonstrate empirically that such information provides a powerful cue to syntactic category membership, which can be exploited by a variety of simple, psychologically plausible mechanisms. We present a range of results using a large corpus of child-directed speech and explore their psychological implications. While our results show that a considerable amount of information concerning the syntactic categories can be obtained from distributional information alone, we stress that many other sources of information may also be potential contributors to the identification of syntactic classes.     

The Adolescent Psychotherapy Q-Set (APQ): A Validation Study

This article reports the validation of the Adolescent Psychotherapy Q-set (APQ), a newly developed instrument, adapted from the well-established Psychotherapy Q-Set (PQS) and the Child Psychotherapy Q-set (CPQ). The APQ aims to describe the psychotherapy process in the treatment of adolescents in a form suitable for quantitative comparison and analysis. The validation was conducted with the ratings of 70 audio-recorded youth psychotherapy sessions from a range of therapists, patients, and treatment stages, using two therapeutic approaches (Short-Term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). Data analysis included intraclass correlation coefficients, Q-factor analysis, nonparametric mean differences, and Pearson correlations. Results suggest that the APQ has good levels of interrater reliability, is able to identify differences and similarities of two therapeutic approaches, and good convergent and discriminant validity with a widely-used measure of therapist behaviors (the Comparative Psychotherapy Process Scale). The APQ reported good levels of validity and reliability. It is hoped that it will contribute to new ways of investigating the mechanisms of therapeutic change for those working with adolescents.