Culture and Probability Judgment

Many, if not most, real-life decisions depend heavily on judgments, which are opinions as to what was, is, or will be the state of some relevant aspect of the world. Thus, for instance, physicians’ medical treatment decisions are often predicated on judgments as to the true cause of the patient’s symptoms, and jurors’ verdicts rest on their beliefs about whether the defendant actually committed the crime in question. Studies have shown that the kinds of judgments that inform people’s decisions can differ substantially and surprisingly according to the cultural backgrounds (e.g., Chinese versus Japanese versus American) of those rendering the judgments, particularly judgments expressed as probabilities (e.g., “There’s a 75% chance that that will happen”). This article reviews major cultural variations in key characteristics of probability judgments (e.g., their overconfidence) and why those differences exist. It also discusses the theoretical and practical implications of the findings, including for collaborations among decision makers from distinct cultures.     

Risk Taking in Decision Making for Others Versus the Self1

In two studies, we examined people's level of risk taking when making monetary decisions for other people rather than for themselves. Experiment 1 examined the role of regret in these situations; results show that regret concerns led to increased risk avoidance both when participants made decisions for other people as well as when making decisions for themselves. Experiment 2 tested whether skill tasks would lead to greater risk avoidance when the decision was for another person versus for oneself. This hypothesis was not supported, although men were more risk seeking than were women in both situations. Taken together, these studies suggest that many of the findings from risk research on individual decision making regarding financial situations generalize to decision making for others.     

EMERGENCE, DOWNWARDS CAUSATION AND THE COMPLETENESS OF PHYSICS

The 'completeness of physics' is the key premise in the causal argument for physicalism. Standard formulations of it fail to rule out emergent downwards causation. I argue that it must do this if it is to feature in a valid causal argument for physicalism. Drawing on the notion of conferring causal power, I formulate a suitable principle, 'strong completeness'. I investigate the metaphysical implications of distinguishing this principle from emergent downwards causation, and I argue that categoricalist accounts of properties are better equipped to sustain the distinction than dispositional essentialist accounts. Finally, I argue that the additional evidence needed for strong completeness renders the causal argument otiose for any properties amenable to scientific reduction.     

The Bureaucratization of Spirituality[1]

This paper examines some of the critical contexts within which spiritual, moral, social and cultural education is to be realized. First, I examine the nature of school as a modernist bureaucratic institution. I argue that schools are bound in a self‐referential reality and barely connect with the late modem world. I then discuss the cultural sources of education policy and particularly the employment of nostalgia as a legitimation for neo‐conservative policy and practice. I then discuss school knowledge and in particular the end of liberalism and its replacement with rationalism. I next turn to spiritual, moral and social education and critically discuss its cultural and political formation. Finally, I argue that school is unable to accommodate the spiritual dimension and that critical to its successful inclusion is the re‐establishment of teachers as knowledgeable professionals with their practice grounded in the contemporary world and the real conditions of pupils' lives.

     

Conditions for Piagetian Stage IV search errors in a task using transparent occluders

In a Piagetian Stage IV search task in which the object was in plain view under transparent covers, Butterworth (1977) obtained errors from nearly half the infants but noted few errors when the object was uncovered. This study investigates the possibility that errors arise in the former case because novel transparent covers present a particular distraction. Butterworth's results with transparent covers were replicated under his conditions of administration, but virtually no errors were obtained when infants were familiarized with the covers prior to testing. From this and other results it is suggested that errors in search for a visible object only occur when the infant's attention is drawn by other features of the array.     

Processes operative during delay of gratification

Sixty-four middle-class preschool children chose between waiting for a preferred item and receiving a less desired item immediately. The items were of different classes, i.e., one food and one toy, and subjects waited with one, both, or neither of the rewards available for viewing. The likelihood that a subject would continue waiting for the delayed reward was found to increase as a function of previous waiting time rather than decrease or remain constant as required by two current theories of delay of gratification processes, an aversive affect model implied by Mischel and Ebbesen (1970) and Atkinson and Birch's (1970) dynamics of action. Although display of rewards impaired successful delay, replicating previous results, dynamics of action predictions of differential effects for display of immediately available and delayed outcomes of different classes were not confirmed. Systematic observation of spontaneous subject activities during the delay period offered additional support for the notion that distraction facilitates successful waiting behavior. A decision-attention model is proposed to account for the present results as well as those of previous studies of delay of gratification.We would like to thank the director, Mr. Jack Lewis, and the staff of the Red Bell Nursery of Plymouth, Michigan, for helping us obtain subjects for this study and providing access to their facilities. We are also grateful to Ms. Shirley St. Peter and Ms. Carolyn Jagacinski for their work as experimenters.