Why Do Women Endorse Honor Beliefs? Ambivalent Sexism and Religiosity as Predictors

Cultures of honor, such as Turkey, prioritize defending individual and family reputations, but in gender-specific ways (Nisbett and Cohen 1996). Men maintain honor via reputations for toughness, aggression, control over women, and avenging insults. Women maintain honor through obedience to men, sexual modesty, and religious piety. Honor beliefs support women’s subordination, justifying violence against them (Sev’er and Yurdakul, Violence against Women, 7, 964–998, 2001) and therefore should be challenged. Understanding honor beliefs’ ideological correlates may inform such efforts. We hypothesized that benevolent sexism, a subjectively favorable system-justifying ideology, would more strongly, positively predict Turkish women’s (versus men’s) honor beliefs; whereas hostile sexism, which is openly antagonistic toward women, would more strongly, positively predict Turkish men’s (versus women’s) honor beliefs. Additionally, due to justifications for gender inequality embedded in Islamic religious teachings, we expected Islamic religiosity to positively predict honor beliefs for both genders. A convenience sample of Turkish undergraduates (313 women and 122 men) in Ankara completed the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, Religious Orientation Scale, and Honor Endorsement Index. Regression analyses revealed that benevolent (but not hostile) sexism positively predicted women’s honor beliefs, whereas hostile (but not benevolent) sexism positively predicted men’s honor beliefs. Islamic religiosity positively predicted honor beliefs for both genders, but (unexpectedly) did so more strongly for men than women. We suggest that combating benevolent sexism and promoting feminist interpretations of Islamic religiosity may help to empower Turkish women to challenge honor beliefs.     

A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Coaches’ Observed Emotion-Behavior Profiles and Adolescent Athletes’ Self-Reported Developmental Outcomes

This investigation explored the relationship between coaches’ emotions and adolescent athletes’ psychosocial development. Participants were 9 male soccer coaches and their female athletes (N = 134, M_age = 14.54). Systematic observation was used to assess coaches’ emotions during practice and athletes completed questionnaires evaluating developmental outcomes. Cluster analyses revealed 2 groups: “calm, inquisitive coaches” (n = 6) and “intense, hustle coaches” (n = 3). Athletes of calm, inquisitive coaches reported significantly more prosocial behaviors and less antisocial behaviors directed toward opponents than athletes of intense, hustle coaches. Thus, coaches’ emotions during practice may be associated with young athletes’ moral behaviors.     

Comparing species decisions in a dichotomous choice task: adjusting task parameters improves performance in monkeys

In comparative psychology, both similarities and differences among species are studied to better understand the evolution of their behavior. To do so, we first test species in tasks using similar procedures, but if differences are found, it is important to determine their underlying cause(s) (e.g., are they due to ecology, cognitive ability, an artifact of the study, and/or some other factor?). In our previous work, primates performed unexpectedly poorly on an apparently simple two-choice discrimination task based on the natural behavior of cleaner fish, while the fish did quite well. In this task, if the subjects first chose one of the options (ephemeral) they received both food items, but if they chose the other (permanent) option first, the ephemeral option disappeared. Here, we test several proposed explanations for primates’ relatively poorer performance. In Study 1, we used a computerized paradigm that differed from the previous test by removing interaction with human experimenters, which may be distracting, and providing a more standardized testing environment. In Study 2, we adapted the computerized paradigm from Study 1 to be more relevant to primate ecology. Monkeys’ overall performance in these adapted tasks matched the performance of the fish in the original study, showing that with the appropriate modifications they can solve the task. We discuss these results in light of comparative research, which requires balancing procedural similarity with considerations of how the details of the task or the context may influence how different species perceive and solve tasks differently.     

Social influence on metacognitive evaluations: The power of nonverbal cues

Metacognitive evaluations refer to the processes by which people assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goal. Little is known about whether this process is susceptible to social influence. Here we investigate whether nonverbal social signals spontaneously influence metacognitive evaluations. Participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice task, which was followed by a face randomly gazing towards or away from the response chosen by the participant. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation of their response by rating their confidence in their answer. In Experiment 1, the participants were told that the gaze direction was irrelevant to the task purpose and were advised to ignore it. The results revealed an effect of implicit social information on confidence ratings even though the gaze direction was random and therefore unreliable for task purposes. In addition, nonsocial cues (car) did not elicit this effect. In Experiment 2, the participants were led to believe that cue direction (face or car) reflected a previous participant's response to the same question—that is, the social information provided by the cue was made explicit, yet still objectively unreliable for the task. The results showed a similar social influence on confidence ratings, observed with both cues (car and face) but with an increased magnitude relative to Experiment 1. We additionally showed in Experiment 2 that social information impaired metacognitive accuracy. Together our results strongly suggest an involuntary susceptibility of metacognitive evaluations to nonverbal social information, even when it is implicit (Experiment 1) and unreliable (Experiments 1 and 2).     

When pursuing bad goals for good reasons makes it even worse: a social value approach to performance-avoidance goal pursuit

Consistently in achievement goal research, pursuing performance-avoidance goals has been associated with a decrease in achievement. Less is known to what extent this effect depends on the reasons underlying these goals’ endorsement. The present research uses a social value approach to assess how do performance-avoidance goals’ effects on achievement depend on the reasons anchored in social utility (goal endorsed in order to succeed) and in social desirability (goal endorsed in order to please one’s teachers). Based on five correlational samples meta-analyzed in Study 1, results showed that perceiving performance-avoidance goals as socially useful increased the negative effect of these goals on achievement. This moderating effect was replicated experimentally in Study 2. These findings support the relevance of studying achievement goal complexes and illustrate that performance-avoidance goals may lead to deleterious consequences even when endorsed for seemingly good reasons.

     

Inquisitive Heyting Algebras

In this paper we introduce a class of inquisitive Heyting algebras as algebraic structures that are isomorphic to algebras of finite antichains of bounded implicative meet semilattices. It is argued that these structures are suitable for algebraic semantics of inquisitive superintuitionistic logics, i.e. logics of questions based on intuitionistic logic and its extensions. We explain how questions are represented in these structures (prime elements represent declarative propositions, non-prime elements represent questions, join is a question-forming operation) and provide several alternative characterizations of these algebras. For instance, it is shown that a Heyting algebra is inquisitive if and only if its prime filters and filters generated by sets of prime elements coincide and prime elements are closed under relative pseudocomplement. We prove that the weakest inquisitive superintuitionistic logic is sound with respect to a Heyting algebra iff the algebra is what we call a homomorphic p-image of some inquisitive Heyting algebra. It is also shown that a logic is inquisitive iff its Lindenbaum–Tarski algebra is an inquisitive Heyting algebra.

     

Semiorders with separability properties

We analyze different separability conditions that characterize the numerical representability of semiorders through a real-valued function and a strictly positive threshold. Any necessary and sufficient condition for the numerical representability of an interval order by means of two real-valued functions is proved to also characterize the Scott–Suppes representability of semiorders provided that a key additional condition of regularity with respect to sequences holds.     

Different kinds of bilinguals: different kinds of brains: the neural organisation of two languages in one brain

The aim of this study was to determine whether the type of bilingualism affects neural organisation. We performed identification experiments and mismatch negativity (MMN) registrations in Finnish and Swedish language settings to see, whether behavioural identification and neurophysiological discrimination of vowels depend on the linguistic context, and whether there is a difference between two kinds of bilinguals. The stimuli were two vowels, which differentiate meaning in Finnish, but not in Swedish. The results indicate that Balanced Bilinguals are inconsistent in identification performance, and they have a longer MMN latency. Moreover, their MMN amplitude is context-independent, while Dominant Bilinguals show a larger MMN in the Finnish context. These results indicate that Dominant Bilinguals inhibit the preattentive discrimination of native contrast in a context where the distinction is non-phonemic, but this is not possible for Balanced Bilinguals. This implies that Dominant Bilinguals have separate systems, while Balanced Bilinguals have one inseparable system.