Social Dominance Theory: Its Agenda and Method

The theory has been misconstrued in four primary ways, which are often expressed as the claims of psychological reductionism, conceptual redundancy, biological reductionism, and hierarchy justification. This paper addresses these claims and suggests how social dominance theory builds on and moves beyond social identity theory and system justification theory.     

Innovation in open source communities through processes of variation and selection

This article concerns the question how innovation is achieved in open source communities. Open source communities are collections of geographically distributed individuals, who volunteer or are paid to participate in the development of highly innovative software programs. These communities are argued to be self-organizing systems in which high levels of variation are achieved. Next, this article focuses on selection as part of innovation. It is shown that selection is achieved through a rather simple principle of copying and following tags. Four tags are identified and discussed and it is demonstrated how they lead to the selection of software among the great level of variety. Ruben van Wendel de Joode is a Ph.D. student. He is part of Betade, which is one of the Delft interfaculty research centers; and the Dutch Institute of Government (NIG), the research school for public administration and political science. His Ph.D. research, scheduled to be finished mid 2004, focuses on open source. He has published numerous articles on OSS.     

Evolutionary theory in the administrative sciences: Introduction

The term “evolution” is often used in the administrative sciences to designate dynamic processes of change in general. In biology, evolution has a very specific meaning, namely the application of a generative variation-selective retention scheme to change. Applying this to the administrative sciences is more exacting: describing what the variation consists of, how replication of the generated variation occurs and delineating the population from which the selection is made are far from easy. While it is the intention of this special issue as a whole to provide some empirical examples of evolutionary change in the public and private sectors, this introduction will lay out the main lines of thought in what is often referred to as universal Darwinism and what this means in the administrative sciences. Key concepts here are generative variation, selective retention, and selective institutional environment. According to the authors, the Darwinian scheme of evolutionary theory focuses on how new ideas or concepts arise, how they propagate and influence wider actor thinking and on how the institutional environment in which they operate affects their differential survival. This evolutionary process is an interplay between actors and replicators (sounds, images, and in this context mostly words) in which it cannot be said in advance which one is fooling the other. Martin De Jong is associate professor of public management. Haiko Van der Voort is a research associate who lectures and publishes on a wide range of issues including process management and system innovations.     

Response inhibition in children with conduct disorder and borderline intellectual functioning.

The aim of the study was to investigate impulse control in children with conduct disorder (CD) plus borderline intellectual functioning (BIF), in children with BIF-only, and in a control group with a normal IQ. For this purpose, a Go-No-Go test with varying inter-stimulus-intervals was used. The group CD plus BIF made more errors of commission than the group with BIF only. Therefore, it was concluded that poor impulse control in the group CD plus BIF was associated with CD, not with IQ level. Poor impulse control in the group CD plus BIF was independent of the presentation rate of the stimuli.     

从语言到思想:基于指称问题考察分析哲学的范式转移

本文通过追溯当代内容理论的语言哲学和现象学起源,以指称性概念和意向性概念为核心,简要刻画了指称理论和内容理论的发展线索。在此基础上,本文试图借助语言指称问题和心理指称问题的平行关系,为当代分析哲学的主流从语言哲学到心灵哲学的范式转移的动机和方法勾勒出一个考察纲要。     

Antecedents and Components of Majority Attitudes toward Multiculturalism in the Netherlands

Les prédicteurs et les composantes des attitudes envers le multiculturalisme ont étéétudies chez 341 Néerlandais tout‐venant. Les attitudes relèvent d’une structure unidimensionnelle, mais le niveau d’adhésion au multiculturalisme varie significativement selon les domaines. Le niveau culturel et le fait de vivre en ville avec peu d’immigrés étaient les seules variables positivement corrélées avec l’adhésion au multiculturalisme. Un modèle en pistes causales s’est révélé pertinent, les attitudes et les comportements dépendant des variables psychologiques suivantes; connaissances, satisfaction générale, perspectives d’avenir, désirabilité sociale et perception des normes sociales favorables au multiculturalisme ou en faisant au contraire une menace. Globalement, l’exclusion était désapprouvée par la majorité des Néerlandais, mais le pluralisme culturel nétait pas ressenti comme étant un atout précieux pour leur société, et ils nétaient pas disposés à faire beaucoup d’efforts pour faciliter l’intégration des minorités. Predictors and components of attitudes toward multiculturalism were studied in 341 native Dutch people. Attitudes were found to have a unidimensional structure, but the level of support for multiculturalism was found to vary significantly over societal domains. Level of education and living in city districts with few non‐natives were the only background variables that were (positively) related to support for multiculturalism. A path model, with psychological background variables (knowledge, life satisfaction, life opportunities, perceived social norms about multiculturalism as a threat and support for multiculturalism, and social desirability) predicting attitudes and behavior, showed a good fit. Generally, exclusionist positions were not endorsed by majority Dutch, but cultural pluralism was not seen as a valuable asset of their society, and they are not inclined to put much effort into minority integration.     

Normative data on the familiarity and difficulty of 196 Spanish word fragments.

In this article, normative data on the familiarity and difficulty of 196 single-solution Spanish word fragments are presented. The database includes the following indices: difficulty, familiarity, frequency, number of meanings, number of letters given in the fragment, first and/or last letters given, and ratio of letters to blanks. A factor analysis was performed on difficulty, and two factors were obtained. Frequency, familiarity, and number of meanings loaded highly on the first factor, which we consider to measure lexical processes, whereas number of letters in the fragment, first and/or last letters given, and ratio of letters to blanks loaded highly on the second factor, which we judge to be determined by perceptual information. Regression analyses using factor scores as predictors showed that both factors accounted for a significant part of the completion probability scores. The full set of these norms may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Pretrauma Neuroticism, Negative Appraisals of Intrusions, and Severity of PTSD Symptoms

Earlier studies found that self-reported posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms are correlated with negative appraisals of symptoms and with neuroticism. It is unclear whether the latter two are associated. Possibly, an overarching trait such as neuroticism mediates the relationship between PTSD symptoms and negative appraisals of symptoms. Data from a previous study (see I. M. Engelhard, M. A. van den Hout, M. Kindt, A. Arntz, & E. Schouten, 2003) were used in the present effort to address these issues. Neuroticism scores were obtained from 1,372 pregnant women. One hundred and twenty-six women experienced a pregnancy loss, and 117 of them were assessed for PTSD symptoms and negative appraisals of symptoms. The 3 variables of interest were all significantly correlated. The data indicate that negative appraisals of symptoms explain and predict PTSD symptoms independently of neuroticism.