Does social motivation mitigate fear caused by a sudden sound in horses?

Animal Cognition - Living in a herd has multiple advantages for social species and is a primary survival strategy for prey. The presence of conspecifics, identified as a social buffer, may mitigate...     

Objective and epistemic gradability: Is the new angle on the Knobe effect empirically grounded?

According to the New Angle, any explanation of the Knobe effect must be gradable and asymmetric. It has been argued that only Hindriks’ approach meets both criteria. First, we argue that Holton’s hypothesis also meets the criteria. Second, we show that the authors are not justified in taking the criteria to be empirically justified. We have failed to replicate the asymmetry result in two experiments. Moreover, gradability can be objective or epistemic. We show that the New Angle presupposes objective gradability. In our experiments, the patterns of responses to questions about epistemic and objective gradability are the same, irrespective of whether the feature is objectively gradable (e.g., blameworthiness) or not (e.g., intentionality). Our results thus question the extent to which the New Angle is empirically grounded. Moreover, they raise doubt whether the answers to questions about epistemic and objective gradability can be taken at face value at all.

Abbreviations: NRH - normative reasons hypothesis; NVH - norm violation hypothesis; DQ - degree question; DAQ - degree of agreement question     

On the Autonomy of Educational Studies as a Second-Level Discipline

Studies in Philosophy and Education - This article addresses the issue of the disciplinary status of Educational Studies, which both in the theoretical discourse and in the practice of this area is...     

Entrepreneurial Risk Taking Is Related to Mental Imagery: A Fresh Look at the Old Issue of Entrepreneurship and Risk

This paper contributes to the debate concerning determinants of willingness to take entrepreneurial risks and proposes a new approach to this issue. Our theoretical model predicts that entrepreneurs differ from non-entrepreneurs in their willingness to accept business risks because the former produce more vivid and more positive mental images of the consequences of risk taking than the latter. We investigated the psychological processes behind willingness to take business and non-business risks in groups of entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs. First, we measured basic risk attitudes. Next, participants were presented with risky scenarios and asked to: (1) produce mental images; (2) evaluate their positivity and vividness; and (3) assess fearfulness evoked by the scenarios as well as risk level and willingness to take risk. Entrepreneurs did not differ from non-entrepreneurs in either their basic risk attitudes or willingness to take non-business risks. However, entrepreneurs declared a greater readiness to take business risks and produced more positive and vivid mental images of business risks. We found that an indirect effect of vividness of mental imagery on declared business risk taking only occurred for entrepreneurs. On a theoretical level, our results show that mental imagery might determine entrepreneurs’ willingness to take business risk.     

Seeking a Common Framework for Research on Narcissism: An Attempt to Integrate the Different Faces of Narcissism Within the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits

The current paper presents a proposal for integrating different narcissism constructs (grandiose, vulnerable, communal, and collective) within the Circumplex of Personality Metatraits (CPM), an integrative model of personality structure that could also be used to accommodate the narcissism spectrum model. The study was conducted on a community sample (N = 781 adults). The theoretically predicted locations of the different narcissism constructs within the CPM space were empirically verified using the structural summary method. We found that grandiose, vulnerable, and communal narcissism can be meaningfully located within the CPM, while the status of collective narcissism remains unclear. Thus, the CPM can serve as a personality matrix explaining the differences and similarities between the various faces of narcissism. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology