“Hands Off the Car, It’s Mine!” and “The Teacher Will Be Angry if We Don’t Play Nicely”: Gender-Related Preferences in the Use of Moral Rules and Social Conventions in Preschoolers’ Dyadic Play

The aim of the present study was to examine the moral and conventional rules in 40 same-sex and same-age 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers’ dyads during their play interaction. Significant gender differences were found both in the dominant social domain and in the prevailing types of rules within each domain. Boys referred to moral rules more often than girls did. In the category of moral rules, boys were significantly more likely to bring up justice and rights issues than girls were. In the category of conventional rules, girls focused on miscellaneous and general conventions and boys on the destruction of property. Moral rules were applied more frequently in conflict situations. Regardless of gender, the rules of justice were the most likely moral rules to engender conflicts.     

Rational Thought And Rational Behavior: A Review Of Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox.

Standard economic theory says that the rational approach to a decision is to weigh all alternatives on all relevant dimensions and then to select the one with the highest weight. Such a procedure would maximize subjective expected utility. But, because of constraints on time and available information, people and other animals often bypass this process by using “fast and frugal” heuristics to make decisions. Rationality is thus said to be “bounded” by time and information constraints. The articles in this book describe and organize common heuristics. They show that use of such heuristics is generally the best approach to many real world problems and therefore not irrational. Heuristics evolved, they say, not as deviations from rationality but as aids to rationality in cases where the standard model would have proved to be too slow or inefficient. Although the approach of almost all of the authors of these papers is that of cognitive psychology—a focus on internal cognitive mechanisms—their findings and even their theories may be interpreted in terms of reinforcement and punishment acting on behavioral patterns.     

Overcoming focusing failures in competitive environments

This paper attacks one of the chief limitations of the field of behavioral decision research—the past inability to use this literature to improve decision making. Building on the work of Thompson, Gentner, Loewenstein and colleagues (Loewenstein, Thompson, & Gentner, 1999; Thompson, Gentner, & Loewenstein, 2000; Gentner & Markman, 1997), the current paper finds that it is possible to reduce bias in one of the most robust problems in the decision literature, the Acquiring a Company Problem (Samuelson & Bazerman, 1985). Past research has shown that individuals make suboptimal offers as a result of the failure to think about the decisions of others and to incorporate a clear understanding of the rules of the game. In the current study, we find that by allowing study participants to see and understand differences in seemingly unrelated decision problems—versions of the Monty Hall Game (Nalebuff, 1987; Friedman, 1998) and Multiparty Ultimatum Game (Messick, Moore, & Bazerman, 1997; Tor & Bazerman, 2003)—study participants can learn to focus more accurately on the decisions of other parties and the rules of the game, the keys to solving the Acquiring a Company Problem. This research offers a new piece of evidence that comparative and analogical processes may be a successful direction for improving decision making. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A risk of confidentiality

The concept of confidentiality is examined from its absolute position espoused by some psychoanalysts to the many exceptions to this position allowed by others. The suggestion made in this paper is offered as a psychoanalytic one which urges us to see confidentiality as posing risks in both positions, that is, the absolute and the necessary exceptions. Confidentiality is representative of many, if not all, of the rules and methods that are implicit in the conduct of an analysis and thus may well be taken for granted. The suggestion offered is for a periodic re-examination of the implicit background of psychoanalysis.     

Prospect theory analysis of guessing in multiple choice tests

The guessing of answers in multiple choice tests adds random error to the variance of the test scores, lowering their reliability. Formula scoring rules that penalize for wrong guesses are frequently used to solve this problem. This paper uses prospect theory to analyze scoring rules from a decision‐making perspective and focuses on the effects of framing on the tendency to guess. In three experiments participants were presented with hypothetical test situations and were asked to indicate the degree of certainty that they thought was required for them to answer a question. In accordance with the framing hypothesis, participants tended to guess more when they anticipated a low grade and therefore considered themselves to be in the loss domain, or when the scoring rule caused the situation to be framed as entailing potential losses. The last experiment replicated these results with a task that resembles an actual test. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Accuracy,Verisimilitude, and Scoring Rules

Suppose that beliefs come in degrees. How should we then measure the accuracy of these degrees of belief? Scoring rules are usually thought to be the mathematical tool appropriate for this job. But there are many scoring rules, which lead to different ordinal accuracy rankings. Recently, Fallis and Lewis [2016] have given an argument that, if sound, rules out many popular scoring rules, including the Brier score, as genuine measures of accuracy. I respond to this argument, in part by noting that the argument fails to account for verisimilitude—that certain false hypotheses might be closer to the truth than other false hypotheses are. Oddie [forthcoming], however, has argued that no member of a very wide class of scoring rules (the so-called proper scores) can appropriately handle verisimilitude. I explain how to respond to Oddie's argument, and I recommend a class of weighted scoring rules that, I argue, genuinely measure accuracy while escaping the arguments of Fallis and Lewis as well as Oddie.     

Emotional display rules in Palestine: Ingroup/outgroup membership,status of interaction partner and gender

This study investigates emotional display rules within the Palestinian context, focusing on the seven basic emotions in a sample of 150 college students from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Overall, participants felt that it was more appropriate to express positive emotions (happiness and surprise) than negative powerful (anger, contempt and disgust) or negative powerless (fear and sadness) emotions. They also perceived it to be more appropriate to express positive and negative powerless emotions to ingroup than outgroup members and to express negative powerful emotions to lower status compared to higher status individuals. Gender differences were also found: men endorsed greater expression of both powerful and, surprisingly, powerless emotions than women, but only when interacting with outgroup members. Results are interpreted in terms of the cultural values of individualism–collectivism and power distance as well as cultural differences in emotional expressiveness between collectivistic societies. This study is one of the first to examine emotional display rules in an Arab population, thus expanding our current knowledge base.     

Transfers of stimulus function during roulette wagering

Twenty‐five recreational gamblers were initially asked to place bets on either red or black positions on a roulette board in a simulated casino setting. Each participant was then exposed to a stimulus pairing observing procedure which attempted to develop equivalence classes between one color (black or red) and traditionally positive words (e.g., love, happy, sex) and another color (black or red) and traditionally negative words (e.g., death, cancer, taxes), in the absence of consequence manipulations. Twenty‐one of the twenty‐five participants demonstrated greater response allocation to the color position on the roulette board that participated in a relational network with the positive words. Variations in sequencing of experimental conditions had no impact on poststimulus‐pairing wagers, but did impact tests for equivalence accuracy.     

On the Relation between Institutional Statuses and Technical Artifacts: A Proposed Taxonomy of Social Kinds

Technical artifacts do not seem particularly continuous with institutional statuses. If statuses are defined in terms of their constitutive rules, as Searle maintains, then disassociation is always possible – someone or something can satisfy those rules without being able to realize the functional effects that are associated with that status. The gap between technical artifacts and Searlean statuses suggests the possibility of an additional social kind, which I call, following Muhammad Ali Khalidi, a ‘real social kind’. However, the placement of real social kinds between technical artifacts and statuses recommends a reconfiguration of Khalidi’s most abstract characterization of the notion. This reconfiguration also lends support to his surprising claim that money is a real social kind.