Cognitive Biases and Political Party Affiliation in Intergroup Conflict

Employing the motivational basis of the false consensus bias, this study hypothesized that the degree of assumed similarity to in-group attitudes would differ among supporters of various political groups in intergroup conflict. We defined a conflict-maintaining bias, the adversary's extremity bias, and examined how the degree of the bias would also differ among supporters of various political groups. Data were gathered from Arab and Jewish high school and university students in Israel. Our hypotheses, that in intergroup conflict assumed similarity to in-group attitudes and the adversary's extremity bias would be greater among supporters of less conciliatory political parties than among supporters of more conciliatory political parties, were supported for one group in the conflict but not the other. Explanations of our findings are based on the differential power status of the 2 groups in the particular conflict.     

How Irish Citizens Negotiate Foreign Policy: A Social Representations Approach to Neutrality

The present study investigates the relationship between the foreign policy orientation of Irish neutrality and national identity using a social representations approach (Elcheroth, Doise, & Reicher, 2011; Moscovici, 1961/76). In four focus groups conducted in the Republic of Ireland, 22 participants discussed vignettes in which hypothetical conflicts were described. The findings pointed towards the dynamic relationship between neutrality and Irish national identity and more generally to the importance of macropolitical phenomena for identity construction. The process of categorization was key to participants' decision making regarding the hypothetical conflicts; the decision to support or oppose the Irish state's involvement in the conflicts frequently revolved around a reconsideration of the boundaries of the ingroup. Furthermore, social representations were laden with the possibility of social change; the construction of neutrality as morally ambivalent, motivated by pragmatism rather than principles, opened up a space for younger participants to resist dominant, pragmatic interpretations of the policy and offer alternatives. Theoretical and empirical implications of the findings are discussed. Taken together, the findings demonstrate the critical potential of extending a social representations approach to issues of political psychological significance.     

Does self-efficacy mediate transfer effects in the learning of easy and difficult motor skills?

The effect of task difficulty on inter-task transfer is a classic issue in motor learning. We examined the relation between self-efficacy and transfer of learning after practicing different versions of a stick balancing task. Practicing the same task or an easier version led to significant pre- to post-test transfer of learning, whereas practicing a more difficult version did not. Self-efficacy increased modestly from pre- to post-test with easy practice, but decreased significantly with difficult practice. In addition, self-efficacy immediately prior to the post-test was significantly lower after difficult practice than easy or intermediate practice. Self-efficacy immediately prior to the post-test, performance at the end of practice, and pre-test performance explained 75% of the variance in post-test performance. The mediating role of self-efficacy on transfer of learning offers an alternative explanation for recent findings on the superiority of easy-to-difficult transfer and may help clarify inconsistencies in earlier research.     

Meaning and Significant Intention in G. Ryle's Logical Thought

In spite of the prima facie differences between Spinoza and Heidegger, I argue that Heidegger's views in his 1929 lecture. Was ist Metaphysik?, are both consistent with, and supplemental to, the basic premise of Spinoza's ontological argument in Part One of his Ethics. According to this view, being held out into the nothing, in Heidegger's sense, is a condition without which substance can not be adequately conceived, while at the same time, being held out into the nothing does not preclude the possibility that substance, defined as an infinite being without negation, does exist.     

Degrees of freedom and motor planning in purposive movement

This paper presents empirical evidence suggesting that healthy humans can perform a two degree of freedom visuo-motor pursuit tracking task with the same response time delay as a one degree of freedom task. In contrast, the time delay of the response is influenced markedly by the nature of the motor synergy required to produce it. We suggest a conceptual account of this evidence based on adaptive model theory, which combines theories of intermittency from psychology and adaptive optimal control from engineering. The intermittent response planning stage has a fixed period. It possesses multiple optimal trajectory generators such that multiple degrees of freedom can be planned concurrently, without requiring an increase in the planning period. In tasks which require unfamiliar motor synergies, or are deemed to be incompatible, internal adaptive models representing movement dynamics are inaccurate. This means that the actual response which is produced will deviate from the one which is planned. For a given target-response discrepancy, corrective response trajectories of longer duration are planned, consistent with the principle of speed-accuracy trade-off. Compared to familiar or compatible tasks, this results in a longer response time delay and reduced accuracy. From the standpoint of the intermittency approach, the findings of this study help make possible a more integral and predictive account of purposive action.     

Ibsen's Nora and the Confucian Critique of the “Unencumbered Self”

Criticisms of the liberal‐individualist idea of the “unencumbered self” are not just a staple of communitarian thought. Some modern Confucian thinkers are now seeking to develop an ethically particular understanding of social roles in the family that is sensitive to gender‐justice issues, and that provides an alternative to liberal‐individualist conceptions of the “unencumbered self” in relation to family roles. The character of Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House seemingly exemplifies such conceptions of the unencumbered self in her rejection of her housewife role for a more authentic selfhood. Drawing upon the capabilities approach to justice, and positive early Japanese bluestockings’ responses to Ibsen's play, I argue that Nora's character is better understood as exemplifying an ethically compelling disencumbered self in potentially cross‐cultural circumstances: a self criticizing and rejecting social roles that are found to be unjust according to universal, as opposed to particularist, “Confucian” ethical standards.     

Coordination of the ankle joint complex during walking.

A simple model of the joint between the leg and the rearfoot is that of two hinges each with one degree of freedom. The superior hinge at the talocrural joint caters for most of the sagittal plane motion due to its mediolateral orientation. Motion in the transverse and coronal planes is largely taken up by the subtalar joint which has an inclination of 42 degrees to the transverse plane and deviates 23 degrees to the medial side. It could be expected from the orientation of this joint that rearfoot motion in the coronal plane (inversion/eversion) would be tightly coupled to motion in the transverse plane (adduction/abduction). A simple, non-viscous mechanical hinge joint would produce an in-phase, fixed gain relationship between inversion/eversion and adduction/abduction. This relation could be adequately quantified by Pearson's product moment correlation (r(P)). In contrast, muscular control of the joint, which introduces visco-elastic elements and time-delayed control lines and feedback loops, could be characterised by more complex phase and gain relations among the frequency components of the signals. These relations can be characterised by a transfer function relation (gain and phase angle) computed using a dynamic analysis. In the present study, both Pearson's correlation and linear systems analysis were employed. For 43 normal adults, five trials of one walking stride (stance and swing phases) were videographed at 30 Hz with three markers placed on each of the leg and rearfoot. Using inversion/eversion as the input and adduction/abduction as the output, the proportion of the total variance accounted for by a dynamic relation was measured by the coherence square function, which is analogous to the correlation squared (r(P)(2)). The mean r(P)(2) was 0.26, whereas the mean overall coherence was 0.62, thus accounting for more than twice the variance. This result suggests that while there may be a degree of simple mechanical coupling between inversion/eversion and adduction/abduction during walking, the major control is via muscular and/or visco-elastic passive elements.     

Metabolic and attentional energy costs of interlimb coordination

The authors investigated metabolic and attentional energy costs as participants (N = 6) practiced in-phase, antiphase, and 90 degrees -phase cycling (order counterbalanced) on independent bicycle ergometers, with resistance (40 W/ergometer) and frequency (40 rpm) held constant. Coordination stabilized and became more accurate for all 3 cycling modes, as shown by measures of relative phase, but that collective variable could not account for other relevant attributes of the multifaceted motor behavior observed across the 3 coordination modes. In-phase and antiphase cycling were similar in stability and accuracy, but antiphase had the lowest metabolic and attentional energy costs. Because both homologous muscle action and perceptually symmetrical oscillations coincided in the in-phase mode, the absence of predominance of the inphase pattern showed that neither of those musculoskeletal and perceptual factors exclusively determined the strongest attractor of the coordination dynamics. Both metabolic and attentional costs declined with practice, consistent with the hypothesis that adaptive motor behavior is guided by sensory information concerning the energy demands of the task. Attentional cost was influenced not only by the information-processing demands of kinematic stability but also by the metabolic energy demands. Metabolic energy cost appeared to be the crucial determinant of the preferred solution for this coordination task.     

Reading the Public: Political Action and Its Relationship to Constructions of Political Disagreement and Opinion Climate in the Context of Brexit

This study applied a social representations approach to investigate the ways in which constructions of perceived political disagreement and the prevailing opinion climate were implicated in people's construals of political participation in the context of the United Kingdom European Union referendum of 2016. Interviews were conducted with 19 residents of the United Kingdom who voted to remain in the referendum, located in constituencies which represented diverse opinion climates in relation to the referendum. Thematic analysis of the data revealed that public opinion was a dilemmatic social representation; it was inscrutable and often ill-informed but also volatile and disruptive, which left open the possibility of it moving towards a more pro-EU position. Importantly, constructions of a polarized and dysfunctional political system worked to sustain a mode of political engagement which prioritized and positioned as efficacious individual rather than collective anti-Brexit political behavior. This implies that people may prefer different types of political participation depending on the opinion climate which they occupy and the way in which they construe it. Findings are discussed in relation to previous work linking meta-representations to political behavior and expression, and the implications of the findings for emergent forms such as Brexit are elaborated.