Comparisons in research and reasoning: Toward an integrative theory of social induction

Strong scientific theories give coherence to a body of research findings, make precise predictions about key phenomena, and guide the search for new discoveries. In social psychology, some contemporary theories fall short of this ideal. Mini-theories are prevalent (cf. Van Lange, Higgins, & Kruglanski, 2011), many predictions are merely directional (like this one!) and theorizing post-hoc. Guided by experimental reasoning, many researchers emphasize—and reify—empirical differences. Taking the experimental method as an epistemological gold standard, they regard comparative thinking as a criterion of rational thinking. Using examples from social judgment and decision making, we show how comparative reasoning can constrain theoretical development and bias assessments of human rationality. To encourage movement toward stronger theory, we describe a model of inductive reasoning in social contexts.     

Parents' Explanations of Their Child's Performance in Mathematics and Reading: A Replication and Extension of Yee and Eccles

This study was conducted to examine whether Finnish parents would endorse the the classic gender-related attribution pattern and explain their son's mathematical performance in terms of talent and their daughter's in terms of effort. In addition, we examined whether the pattern of attributions would be the opposite in regard to parental explanations of their child's reading performance. A group of parents (N = 486), both mothers and fathers, were requested to assess the level of competence of their 1st grader in mathematics and reading. The parents were also asked to recall events from their child's 1st school year in which the child succeeded and failed in mathematics and reading; they were then asked to evaluate the importance of talent, effort, and task to the child's outcomes. The parents of boys assessed their child's mathematical competence to be higher than did the parents of girls. Furthermore, the parents of boys rated talent as a more important reason for their child's mathematical success than did the parents of girls. In contrast, the parents of girls rated effort as a more important reason for their child's mathematical success. Although the girls were perceived to surpass boys in reading, the girls' positive outcomes in reading were explained by effort more than the boys' outcomes, and at the highest level of assessed competence, the boys' verbal talent was rated as a more significant cause of success in reading than the girls' verbal talent. In sum, our results suggested that in both mathematics and reading, girls were not entitled to ability-based attribution to the same extent as were boys.     

组织中的申述

组织中的申述指发生在组织环境中的解释。在理论上,研究者采用印象管理和归因、互动公正以及公平理论三种视角探讨申述对缓和组织困境的作用。在方法上,研究者除了使用关键事件调查和实验室实验法之外,发展了“置于情境的实验”方法。在研究成果上,发现申述除了具有积极作用之外,有时也具有反作用和副作用。文章还讨论了申述的应用价值     

Ambiguous probabilities: when does p=0.3 reflect a possibility,and when does it express a doubt?

Verbal phrases denoting uncertainty are usually held to be more vague than numerical probability statements. They are, however, directionally more precise, in the sense that they are either positive, suggesting the occurrence of a target outcome, or negative, drawing attention to its non‐occurrence. A numerical probability will, in contrast, sometimes be perceived as positive and sometimes as negative. When asked to complete sentences such as ‘The operation has a 30% chance of success, because’ some people will give reasons for success (‘the doctors are expert surgeons’), whereas others will give reasons for failure (‘it is a difficult operation’). It is shown in two experiments that positive reasons are given more often than negative ones, even for p values below 0.5, especially when the probability is higher than expected, and the target outcome is non‐normal, undesirable, and phrased as a negation. We conclude that the directionality of numerical probabilities (as opposed to verbal phrases) is context‐dependent, but biased towards a positive interpretation. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interdisziplinarität und Wissensentwicklung

Interdisciplinarity and the Development of Knowledge. The author is engaged in the question how to explain the development of scientific meanings of facts which does not coincide with producing them rather with processes of the scientists' public communication. So long as the facts are adjustable to the conventional theories of those discipline which the researcher belongs to this connection does not reveal perfectly clear. More instructive is a consideration of so-called anomalies. The author demonstrates with an example of the history of science that researchers in case of new phenomena use to borrow concepts from other disciplines for resolving the interpretative problems. It emerges a loose net-work of concepts. In this way the researchers are producing a disciplinary mixed public at the same time. This process is seen as an important phase of the development of new theories and, complementary, new disciplines.     

The touch of King Midas: Collingwood on why actions are not events

It is the ambition of natural science to provide complete explanations of reality. Collingwood argues that science can only explain events, not actions. The latter is the distinctive subject matter of history and can be described as actions only if they are explained historically. This paper explains Collingwood’s claim that the distinctive subject matter of history is actions and why the attempt to capture this subject matter through the method of science inevitably ends in failure because science explains events, not actions. It argues that Collingwood’s defence of the methodological autonomy of history vis-à-vis natural science is not based on a commitment to human exceptionalism, i.e. the exclusion of human beings and their doings from the rest of nature, but on the view that explanations which appeal to norms are different in kind from explanations which appeal to empirical regularities. Given the close relationship between the method and the subject matter of a form of inquiry, actions elude any attempt to explain them through the scientific method because the application of this method entails that what is thus explained is not an action but an event.     

An agentive non-intentionalist theory of self-deception

The self-deception debate often appears polarized between those who think that self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves (‘intentionalists’), and those who think that intentional actions are not significantly involved in the production of self-deceptive beliefs at all. In this paper I develop a middle position between these views, according to which self-deceivers do end up self-deceived as a result of their own intentional actions, but where the intention these actions are done with is not an intention to deceive oneself. This account thus keeps agency at the heart of self-deception, while also avoiding the paradox associated with other agency-centered views.     

CAN WE STILL TALK ABOUT “TRUTH” AND “PROGRESS” IN INTERDISCIPLINARY THINKING TODAY?

On a cultural level, and for Christian theology as part of a long tradition in the evolution of religion, evolutionary epistemology “sets the stage,” as it were, for understanding the deep evolutionary impact of our ancestral history on the evolution of culture, and eventually on the evolution of disciplinary and interdisciplinary reflection. In the process of the evolution of human knowledge, our interpreted experiences and expectations of the world (and of the ultimate questions we humans typically pose to the world) have a central role to play. What evolutionary epistemology also shows us is that we humans can indeed take on cognitive goals and ideals that cannot be explained or justified in terms of survival‐promotion or reproductive advantage only. Therefore, once the capacities for rational knowledge, moral sensibility, aesthetic appreciation of beauty, and the propensity for religious belief have emerged in our biological history, they cannot be explained only in biological/evolutionary terms. Finally, in this way a door is opened for seeing problem solving as a central activity of our research traditions. As philosophers of science have argued, one of the most important shared rational resources between even widely divergent disciplines is problem solving as the most central and defining activity of all research traditions. As will become clear, the very diverse reasoning strategies of theology and the sciences clearly overlap in their shared quests for intelligible problem solving, including problem solving on an empirical, experiential, and conceptual level.     

Young children's psychological explanations and their relationship to perception‐ and intention‐understanding

The present study examined two key aspects of young children's ability to explain human behaviour in a mentalistic way. First, we explored desires that are of a level of difficulty comparable with that of false beliefs. For this purpose, the so‐called ‘alternative desires’ were created. Second, we examined how children's psychological explanations are related to their understanding of perception and intention. A perception‐understanding task, an intention‐understanding task and a psychological‐explanation task were administered to 80 three‐year‐olds. Results offer support for the thesis that the level of difficulty of belief and desire explanations is comparable. Moreover, children's psychological explanations are related to their understanding of perception and intention. The results lend support to the idea that mentalistic explanations are an explicit manifestation of children's level of theory of mind. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.