‘Would I be happier if I moved?’ Retirement status and cultural variations in the anticipated and actual levels of happiness

Should one give up the comforts of home in exchange for more leisure opportunities or a desirable climate? The present research examined the anticipated and actual levels of happiness among non-retirees and retirees in the US and Korea. Both American and Korean non-retirees overestimated the importance of novelty factors (e.g., climate, recreational opportunities) in making a retirement prediction, compared with retirees’ reports. Non-retirees believed that a place with nice weather and plenty of cultural and recreational opportunities would make them happy in their retirement. However, the actual retirees who placed importance on the novelty factor when they made the retirement location decision were not happier than those who placed less importance on this factor. Instead, the retirees who placed more importance on the practicality factor (e.g., easy access to medical services, daily convenience) felt happier and more peaceful than other retirees.     

论技术主义对人类道德责任的消解

技术主义流行于 2 0世纪的工业社会之中 ,成为支配人们思维方式和生活方式的意识形态。“知识就是力量”的技术主义知识立论 ,在学理层面上消解了人的道德责任 ;技术意志取代人的自由意志 ,在伦理层面上消解了人的道德责任 ;社会生产领域和政治领域的标准化和科层制 ,在操作层面上颠覆了人的道德责任 ;人与自然关系问题上的人类中心主义拒斥了对自然的道德责任。     

On having very long arms: how the availability of technological means affects moral cognition

Modern technological means allow for meaningful interaction across arbitrary distances, while human morality evolved in environments in which individuals needed to be spatially close in order to interact. We investigate how people integrate knowledge about modern technology with their ancestral moral dispositions to help relieve nearby suffering. Our first study establishes that spatial proximity between an agent's means of helping and the victims increases people's judgement of helping obligations, even if the agent is constantly far personally. We then report and meta-analyse 20 experiments elucidating the cognitive mechanisms behind this effect, which include inferences of increased efficaciousness and personal involvement. Implications of our findings for the scientific understanding of ancestral moral dispositions in modern environments are discussed, as well as suggestions for how these insights might be exploited to increase charitable giving. Our meta-analysis provides a practical example for how aggregating across all available data, including failed replication attempts, allows conclusions that could not be supported in single experiments.     

Understanding dynamic and static displays: using images to reason dynamically

We examined expert meteorologists as they created a weather forecast while working in a naturalistic environment. We examined the type of external representation they chose to examine (a static image, a sequence of static images, or a dynamic display) and the kind of information they extracted from those representations (static or dynamic). We found that even though weather is an extremely dynamic domain, expert meteorologists examined very few animations, examining primarily static images. However, meteorologists did extract large amounts of dynamic information from these static images, suggesting that they reasoned about the weather by mentally animating the static images rather than letting the software do it for them.     

自我控制行为中的情绪因素

对冲动行为的控制及失控(放任)会产生不同的情绪结果,并形成两种自我控制的两难:失控后可能产生的愉悦与内疚、成功自控后可能产生的自豪与遗憾。自控行为-情绪结果的联结,使个体能自发地基于预期情绪选择当前行为。情绪预测会受到情境、个体差异等的影响,并有一定的误差。     

Some promising dimensions for behavioral community technology

In recent years, the search for effective and replicable approaches to planned change in communities has escalated. Applied behavior analysts have participated in these efforts to remedy existing community problems and to increase the capacities of community residents to meet their goals. Examples of behavioral technologies for community settings are described and their advantages are noted. Criteria for more contextually appropriate community technologies are suggested and strategies for developing behavioral methods according to these criteria are described. This paper outlines some promising dimensions for behavioral community technology and discusses several possible limitations to a behavioral approach to addressing societal problems.     

Individual and group advice taking in judgmental forecasting: Is group forecasting superior to individual forecasting?

We examined how individuals and groups behave in making judgmental forecasts when they are given external forecast advice. We compare individual and group advice-taking behavior under different conditions: (a) when advice quality is fixed, (b) when advice quality is randomly varied, and (c) when there is feedback on advice quality or not. Participants in Study 1 received fixed advice of either reasonable or unreasonable quality while making their decisions. Participants in Study 2 randomly received both reasonable and unreasonable advice. We found in both studies that groups feel more confident than individuals. This greater confidence decreased the groups' reliance on advice. We also found that groups are better than individuals at discerning the quality of advice. In the group treatment, the group's reliance on advice increased according to the degree of disagreement with the initial decisions of the group members. In Study 3, participants randomly received both reasonable and unreasonable advice, and in addition, they received feedback on actual realizations that enabled them to learn about the quality of advice. In the presence of feedback on random advice quality, groups are no longer less receptive to advice than individuals; with feedback, both individuals and groups discount advice more than they do without feedback. Nevertheless, groups are still better than individuals at discerning the quality of advice. We conclude that group forecasting is better than individual forecasting across various conditions that we investigate except when advice quality is known to be consistently reliable.     

Optimism and Hope After Multiple Disasters: Relationships to Health-Related Quality of Life

Natural and technological disasters are devastating events for individuals and communities. The authors examined the role of optimism and hope in predicting health indicators in a sample of disaster survivors who were exposed to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Participants were noncoastal residents, current coastal residents, and current coastal fishers who were also economically impacted by the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. All participants completed measures of optimism, hope, and the SF-36 Health Survey, which provides summary scores for mental and physical health. Logistic regressions indicated that optimism and hope were independently and positively associated with better mental health (OR = 1.21; 95% CI: 1.10, 1.32 and OR = 1.11; 95% CI: 1.05, 1.17 respectively). Neither optimism nor hope were significantly associated with physical health when considered alone. However, optimism interacted with prior lifetime trauma, where optimism only significantly predicted physical health for those with higher previous trauma scores. These results provide new evidence of optimism and hope as protective factors that may positively impact mental health after multiple disasters.     

Affective forecasts and the Valentine's Day shootings at NIU: People are resilient,but unaware of it

People overestimate the extent to which emotion-producing life events affect subsequent affect. However, research has yet to conclusively demonstrate that this phenomenon occurs following significant trauma affecting entire communities, or whether it applies to predictions of discrete emotions. Exploring such issues, student reports of emotion states were collected both before and after the oncampus Valentine's Day, 2008 shootings at Northern Illinois University (NIU). A separate group of students not on campus when the shootings occurred provided emotion state reports and predictions of the emotions they would expect to experience 2 weeks after a shooting occurred. Examination of these data suggests that: (1) emotion states of NIU students reflected resilience, and (2) students made affective forecasting errors indicating that this resilience was unexpected. These data confirm results of prior affective forecasting studies, extending them to cases of traumatic experiences, and suggest that such studies can expand their focus to explore specific post-event emotions.     

Don't Predict the Future–Direct it! Comments on the intellectual history,the Logical and Applicative Visibility,and the Underlying Assumptions of Directed Evolution (DE)

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

—Alan Kay ¹ 1. Alan Kay is one of the inventors of the Smalltalk programming language and one of the originators of the idea of Object Oriented Programming. He is the conceiver of the laptop computer and the architect of the modern windowing GUI.

It is obvious that there are patterns of cultural change—evolution in the neutral sense—and any theory of cultural change worth more than a moment's consideration will have to be Darwinian in the minimal sense of being consistent with the theory of evolution by natural selection of Homo sapiens.

—Daniel Dennett ² 2. Daniel C. Dennett is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of several books, including Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), and Kinds of Minds (1996). This quote is taken from his forward to Darwinizing Culture (Aunger 2000 Aunger, R. 2000. Darwinizing culture: The status of memetics as a science, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.  [Google Scholar], ix).

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.

—William Gibson ³ 3. In the early 1980s William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, coining the term “cyberspace” to describe computer-generated virtual realities long before we saw the similarities with today's Internet.

It is the magician's wand, by means of which he may summon into life whatever form and mould he pleases.

—Charles Darwin commenting on the power of artificial selection ⁴ 4. Here Darwin is explaining the power of artificial selection and its potential for the directed evolution of biological systems (domestication and commercially oriented breeding) in his Origin of Species (1859, 68).