Is There a Cognitive Basis for Religious Belief?

This paper explores whether the psychological study of cognition can provide insight into how religious beliefs are formed and maintained. A review of illustrative findings from the research literature suggests three themes: First, regularities in our everyday experience are primarily identified through assessment of individual situations rather than through use of all relevant data. Second, preconceptions are highly important in shaping perceptions and interpretations of new experience. Finally, intense emotions often generate an inaccurate sense of certainty regarding beliefs congruent with these emotions. The applicability of these themes to the relationship between religious experience and religious belief is examined. The paper concludes by briefly discussing whether the increasing proportion of the population receiving statistical and scientific training will influence the level of religious belief in Western culture.     

Culture and Causal Cognition

East Asian and American causal reasoning differs significantly. East Asians understand behavior in terms of complex interactions between dispositions of the person or other object and contextual factors, whereas Americans often view social behavior primarily as the direct unfolding of dispositions. These culturally differing causal theories seem to be rooted in more pervasive, culture-specific mentalities in East Asia and the West. The Western mentality is analytic, focusing attention on the object, categorizing it by reference to its attributes, and ascribing causality based on rules about it. The East Asian mentality is holistic, focusing attention on the field in which the object is located and ascribing causality by reference to the relationship between the object and the field.     

Surprise and Motivation of Causal Search: How Are They Affected by Outcome Valence and Importance?

Two studies investigated whether the importance and valence of a target person's achievement outcome affect (a) the intensity of surprise an observer feels about the actual outcome and (b) the role surprise plays in the motivation of the search for a causal explanation for the target's outcome. The present experiments involved conditions controlling for the confounds among outcome valence, importance, and surprise. Both studies revealed that surprise intensity was affected by outcome valence and importance so that an important negative outcome elicits the highest surprise and unimportant success elicited the second highest surprise. Causal search was strong only after (unexpected) important failures. Results are explained in terms of an extended expectancy-disconfirmation approach.     

Calibration of Subjective Probability Judgments in a Naturalistic Setting

Results of previous calibration studies are used to identify features of the decision maker and the decision environment which might be expected to result in good calibration. Racetrack bettors and, in particular, the UK parimutuel betting market are identified as possessing such characteristics. In order to explore calibration in this setting, an analysis is undertaken of bets placed on 19,396 horses. A close correlation is observed between the subjective probability judgments of horses' success, implicit in the bettors' wagering activities, and the objective probability of success of the horses concerned. Explanations for the results are offered in terms of characteristics of racetrack bettors and the naturalistic setting, with particular reference to the operation of the betting market. The results contribute to an emergent school of thought which advocates naturalistic enquiry as a complement to laboratory-based experiments in further developing the understanding of decision making.     

Self-Reliance and Empathy: The Enemies of Poverty—and of the Poor

Starting with a brief review of why all post-industrial societies tend to be inegalitarian, this paper develops two main themes: (1) how the idea that people are individually responsible for their own fates reduces poverty but impedes redistribution, and (2) how both the loose ties of individuals to their societies and the selective nature of their empathy and pity for others reduces compassion for the poor, making redistribution unlikely. The first theme is elaborated through psychological research on dispositional versus circumstantial attributions, showing their effects on the widely shared belief in a just world and more generally on the prevailing theory of the justice of deserts. The attribution-affect-action model is used to show how dispositional attributes evoke either anger or pity for victims and, if anger, then unwillingness to help. The development of the second theme shows how people divorce their own fates from those of their nations, how the basic tendency to favor the familiar and similar limits support for redistribution, how converting concern regarding deprivations of the self to concern for (fraternal) deprivation of people like the self excludes those who most need help, how envy fails to lead to redistribution, and finally, how people's ideas of the privileged and the disadvantaged reflect market values and often mark the poor and the different as overprivileged.     

Do apes and children know what they have seen?

Chimpanzees and young children understand much about what other individuals have and have not seen. This study investigates what they understand about their own visual perception. Chimpanzees, orangutans, and 2.5-year-old children were presented with a finding game in which food or stickers were hidden in one of two or three tubes. We varied whether subjects saw the baiting of the tubes, whether subjects could see through the tubes, and whether there was a delay between baiting and presentation of the tubes to subjects. We measured not only whether subjects chose the correct tube but also, more importantly, whether they spontaneously looked into one or more of the tubes before choosing one. Most apes and children appropriately looked into the tubes before choosing one more often when they had not seen the baiting than when they had seen the baiting. In general, they used efficient search strategies more often than insufficient or excessive ones. Implications of subjects' search patterns for their understanding of seeing and knowing in the self are discussed. Accepted after revision: 7 January 2001 Electronic Publication     

Tactics to obtain a hidden food item in chimpanzee pairs (Pan troglodytes)

Five dyads of chimpanzees were tested in a competitive situation, as a pilot study to examine chimpanzees' understanding of conspecifics' knowledge. A human experimenter baited one of five containers in an outdoor enclosure. Chimpanzee A (witness) could see where the food was hidden, while chimpanzee B (witness-of-witness) could not see the baited place but could observe the chimpanzee A watching the food being hidden. Then the two were released into the enclosure. This procedure was repeated for a certain number of days along with a control condition in which neither could see the baited location. The witness-of-witness developed tactics to forestall the witness in two pairs. The witness misled the witness-of-witness by taking a route to an empty container in several cases. These episodes might represent examples of deception. Tactics and counter-tactics thus developed through the interaction between the witness and the witness-of-witness, illustrating the high social intelligence of chimpanzees. An examination of the changes in tactics suggests a possibility that the witness-of-witness understands the witness's knowledge of the location of hidden food. Accepted after revision: 22 May 2001 Electronic Publication     

Book Review

Book reviewed:
Eva Feder Kittay, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency     

基于场景记忆的参照系整合过程中的物体方位判断

以绝对方位中的物体方位判断为实验任务,并按照以往研究把判断过程进行分解为获取目标位置信息、获取前行方向信息和判断目标物体相对于参照物体的方位信息,旨在考察不同信息获取过程下的目标位置和前行方向如何影响基于场景记忆的参照系整合过程中的绝对方位判断。实验1的判断任务同时包括这三个过程;实验2和实验3中的判断任务分别独立于路径描述（即定位后判断,先获知目标位置信息,再进行方位判断）和自身定向（即定向后判断,先获取前行方向信息,再进行方位判断）。每个任务均为目标位置（R0o－前、R45o－左前/右前、R90o－左/右、R135o－左后/右后, R180o－后）×前行方向（北、东南西、斜方向）的组内设计、因变量为正确率和判断时间为主,共有60名大学生被试（男女各半）参与实验。发现：朝北优势效应只在实验1中明显;三个实验任务中均存在正方向－左右位置优势效应、以及0o和180o位置优势效应;目标位置对物体方位判断的影响程度要大于前行方向对判断的影响程度。结合以往的研究来看,场景记忆上的判断比视觉媒介上的同类判断受目标位置影响的程度要大,其他影响模式比较一致。从判断的信息获取过程上对结果进行了讨论,这有助于理解绝对方位判断的认知结构     

判断偏差分析的认知-生态取样途径

对判断偏差的研究曾主要侧重于考察个体的动机和认知缺陷,而近期从认知-生态取样角度对判断偏差进行的研究则表明,判断偏差源于人与环境的交互作用。从认知-生态取样角度分析人的判断偏差着重考察以下四方面的问题：基于样本的判断涉及的多个变量,现实环境中刺激的分布,取样过程及其结果,取样过程中的心理预设与限制。认知-生态取样角度的研究对判断偏差产生的原因提供了一种全新的解释,同时,它也存在一些亟待解决的问题