Do observer ratings validate self-reports of intergroup contact?: A round-robin analysis

Two studies used a round-robin design to examine whether the observers made consensual judgments of targets' degree and quality of intergroup contact, and whether these consensual judgments were correlated with the targets' own self ratings, and moderated by the observability of the contact. Study 1 revealed projection/assumed similarity, with participants rating others as similar to themselves to a large extent, but also yielded evidence for the validity of whites' self-reports of direct, but not extended, intergroup contact with Asians, even when controlling for extraversion and perceived attitudes. Study 2 replicated the main results, using both Asians and Gay men as outgroups, and showed that participants' ratings discriminated between the two discrete outgroups, with measures of contact and attitude being only meaningfully related within, but not between, outgroups. Overall, these findings help to validate self-report measures of direct intergroup contact.     

How Exposure to the Confederate Flag Affects Willingness to Vote for Barack Obama

Leading up to the 2008 U.S. election, pundits wondered whether Whites, particularly in Southern states, were ready to vote for a Black president. The present paper explores how a common Southern symbol—the Confederate flag—impacted willingness to vote for Barack Obama. We predicted that exposure to the Confederate flag would activate negativity toward Blacks and result in lowered willingness to vote for Obama. As predicted, participants primed with the Confederate flag reported less willingness to vote for Obama than those primed with a neutral symbol. The flag did not affect willingness to vote for White candidates. In a second study, participants primed with the Confederate flag evaluated a hypothetical Black target more negatively than controls. These results suggest that exposure to the Confederate flag results in more negative judgments of Black targets. As such, the prevalence of this flag in the South may have contributed to a reticence for some to vote for Obama because of his race.     

Traditional prejudice and justice judgments: Does bias suppression moderate the relationship?

This research investigated how the relationship between prejudice and intergroup inequalities with justice judgments is modulated by individual differences in self-regulation of bias through suppression. The first study conducted among 170 White British adolescents revealed that the link between racism and intergroup inequality in justice judgments was moderated by bias suppression. Prejudice, bias suppression, and blatant as well as subtle justice judgments were assessed in a second study carried out with 103 Canadian White adolescents. Bias suppression moderated the link between racist beliefs toward Aboriginals and intergroup inequality in punitive rulings. Racism translated into intergroup inequality in the potential for rehabilitation, irrespective of the level of bias suppression. The role of bias suppression is discussed.     

Between Remembering and Forgetting the Years of Political Violence: Psychosocial Impact of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru

This article analyzes the association between knowledge of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), evaluation of TRC's achievements, experience of victimization, attitudes toward remembering and forgetting past political violence, perceptions of socioemotional climate (SEC), belief in forgiveness and attitudes toward violence in Peru based on a study conducted in three Peruvian cities with different rates of victimization due to political violence during 1980–2000 (n = 1200). Results showed that a positive attitude toward remembering the past of political violence was predominant and related to a positive evaluation of TRC's achievements. Attitude toward remembering also has an ambivalent collective effect increasing both positive and negative SECs, and it is less accepted by victims of political violence. On the other hand, attitude toward forgetting is less accepted by participants, and it also has an ambivalent effect by increasing positive and negative SECs. Attitude toward forgetting has more societal costs, since it is related to attitudes toward violence and decreased knowledge and a positive evaluation of TRC. In general, findings suggest that remembering traumatic events has an emotional cost, but also it is shown that remembering seems to be more beneficial for society in the long‐term than forgetting.     

Matching the message source to attitude functions: Implications for biased processing

A study was conducted to examine the hypothesis that matching (vs. mismatching) the source of a persuasive message to the functional basis of recipients’ attitudes may lead to positively biased processing. Under conditions conducive to effortful processing, high and low self-monitors were presented with a persuasive message ascribed to a source that either matched or mismatched the functional basis of their attitudes (i.e., an expert source for low self-monitors and an attractive source for high self-monitors). The message content was either unambiguous strong, unambiguous weak, or ambiguous. As predicted, given an ambiguous message biased processing led to more agreement when the source matched (vs. mismatched) attitude functions. In contrast, an unambiguous strong message led to more agreement than an unambiguous weak message regardless of source matching (unbiased processing). Results are discussed with respect to the role of the activation and use of heuristics in biased processing.     

詹姆士真理观中的休谟因素

与常识的和传统的符合论真理观相比,由詹姆士第一次明确阐述的实用主义真理观有着诸多不同的特点,以及体现在这些特点中的不同的哲学内涵。这些特点和内涵都是怎样产生的呢?在认识论发展的历史进程中有无其根源?该文拟通过联系休谟的经验主义,尤其是他的因果理论,来追溯实用主义真理观的认识论根源。     

Trustworthy media news content retrieval from web using truth content discovery algorithm

Nowadays, the internet plays a major role in online information retrieval. As, we are well aware the web provides information related all the fields like national, lifestyle, movies, shopping, spirituality, sports, entertainment and much more. One cannot assume that the web retrieved information is believable or trustworthy due to multiple answers to the same query. The paper aims to study many research articles which are related to truth information discovery. However, the paper found that there is no proper research to find trustworthiness of news content which is extracted from multiple information sources with minimum misclassification error and retrieval time. To alleviate these issues, the truth content discovery algorithm is proposed to produce trustworthy information with minimal time along with multiple domain news information. The system provides reliable information from a various source of news provider with minimum classification error. The proposed method ranked the news content index based on query matches from extracted information. It minimizes the query retrieval time and classification error. Based on the experimental evaluation, proposed TCD + J48 algorithm produced the best result compared to existing approaches. It minimizes reduces 7.54 ms the query retrieval time (QRT), 5% Error rate (ER) and 0.98 and Mean Normalized Absolute Distance (MNAD).     

Supervaluationism and Logical Consequence: A Third Way

It is often assumed that the supervaluationist theory of vagueness is committed to a global notion of logical consequence, in contrast with the local notion characteristic of modal logics. There are, at least, two problems related to the global notion of consequence. First, it brings some counterexamples to classically valid patterns of inference. Second, it is subject to an objection related to higher-order vagueness. This paper explores a third notion of logical consequence, and discusses its adequacy for the supervaluationist theory. The paper proceeds in two steps. In the first step, the paper provides a deductive notion of consequence for global validity using the tableaux method. In the second step, the paper provides a notion of logical consequence which is an alternative to global validity, and discusses i) whether it is acceptable to the supervaluationist and ii) whether it plays a better role in a theory of vagueness in the face of the problems related to the global notion.     

Linguistic communication and the semantics/pragmatics distinction

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between (context-invariant) encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on semantics are explored and found wanting: Kent Bach’s view that there is a narrow semantic notion of context which is responsible for providing semantic values for a small number of indexicals, and Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s view that semantics includes the provision of values for all indexicals, even though these depend on the speaker’s communicative intentions. Finally, some implications are considered for the favoured semantics/pragmatics distinction of the fact that there are linguistic elements (lexical and syntactic) which do not contribute to truth-conditional content but rather provide guidance on pragmatic inference.