Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory Correlates with Personality Characteristics of Organ Donation Advocates

Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and background questionnaire data were collected from a sample of men and women organ donation advocates (N = 362) as part of a national study to investigate their personality characteristics, temperaments, and attitudes about organ donation advocacy. Goals included identifying unique traits for advocates, and response consistency between the TCI and questionnaire. The TCI results included high scores on Cooperativeness and Self-Directedness, and low on Harm Avoidance dimensions. The questionnaire results indicated that most advocates were White, married, college-educated females, who typically spent less than 2 hr with potential donor families, were satisfied with life and job, and believed they would be in a donation position 2 years from the time surveyed. TCI and questionnaire measures were correlated for Self-Transcendence and Spirituality, Helpfulness and Job Satisfaction, and Compassion and Identification variables.     

The Reason to Contribute to Cooperative Schemes

Philosophical Studies -     

Agency and Virtue: Dimensions Underlying Subgroups of Women

Previous research indicates that the stereotype of women can be considered to have 3 subgroups: housewife, career woman, and sex object. In 2 samples (N = 19 and 35), we found evidence that these subgroups can be reliably distinguished in terms of 2 dimensions: agency and virtue. Participants sorted 27 feminine traits and then rated these traits in terms of their agency and virtue. Cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling with property fitting were used to identify subgroups, to fit virtue and agency dimensions to the subgroups, and to test for differences among the subgroups in terms of virtue and agency. Across both samples, agency and virtue fit the subgroups well (average R ² = .75), produced many significant differences among the subgroups, and are consistent with a system-justification perspective of sexism (Glick & Fiske, 2001) in which a belief in women's virtue and lack of agency reflects and maintains status differences between men and women.     

Episodic Learner Modeling

Modeling the learner is a central aspect of intelligent tutoring systems and knowledge-based help systems that support learners in complex problem-solving domains. In this article, the episodic learner model ELM is introduced as a hybrid system that analyses novices' solutions to programming tasks based on both rule-based and case-based reasoning. ELM behaves like to a human tutor. Initially, ELM is able to analyze problem solutions based only on its domain knowledge. With increasing knowledge about a particular learner captured in a dynamic episodic case base, it adapts to the learner's individual problem-solving behavior. Two simulation studies were performed to validate the system. The first study shows that the system can learn which rules are applied successfully to diagnose code produced by programmers and that using this information reduces the computational effort of diagnoses. Using information from the episodic learner model additionally speeds up the diagnostic process. The second study shows that ELM is able to predict individual solutions. Finally, correspondences and differences to related systems are discussed.     

Schaffer's Demon

Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has summoned a new sort of demon – which he calls the debasing demon – that apparently threatens all of our purported knowledge. We show that any debasing skeptical argument must attack the justification condition and can do so only if a plausible thesis about justification is false.