Two experiments examined a form of singleton bias deducible from lexicographic choice and Tversky... more Two experiments examined a form of singleton bias deducible from lexicographic choice and Tversky's theory of elimination by aspects. In Experiment 1, 100 decision makers who chose from a set of job applicants defined by equal numbers of equally important qualifications tended to ignore the singleton defined by possession of a relevant attribute but tended to rank-order the attributes as predicted by lexicographic choice theory and showed various forms of singleton bias. In Experiment 2, 100 decision makers who chose from sets of unspecified alternatives, universities, and houses/apartments defined by attributes that they had individually rated as equally important ignored the attribute-defined singleton in every alternative set but manifested a different singleton bias in favor of the middle option of the on-screen display.
Thomas C. Schelling's most influential contributions include focal points in coordination games, ... more Thomas C. Schelling's most influential contributions include focal points in coordination games, commitment and credible threats in bargaining, the theory of social dilemmas, and anticipatory self-command in intertemporal choice. His spatial proximity models are early prototypes of cellular automata. Contributions to this special issue were inspired by a few of these theoretical ideas.
A significant increase in the probability of an action resulting from observing that action perfo... more A significant increase in the probability of an action resulting from observing that action performed by another agent cannot, on its own, provide persuasive evidence of imitation. Simple models of social influence based on two-person sequential games suggest that both imitation and pseudo-imitation can be explained by a process more fundamental than priming, namely, subjective utility maximization.
Psychological game theory encompasses formal theories designed to remedy game-theoretic indetermi... more Psychological game theory encompasses formal theories designed to remedy game-theoretic indeterminacy and to predict strategic interaction more accurately. Its theoretical plurality entails second-order indeterminacy, but this seems unavoidable. Orthodox game theory cannot solve payoff-dominance problems, and remedies based on interval-valued beliefs or payoff transformations are inadequate. Evolutionary game theory applies only to repeated interactions, and behavioral ecology is powerless to explain cooperation between genetically unrelated strangers in isolated interactions. Punishment of defectors elucidates cooperation in social dilemmas but leaves punishing behavior unexplained. Team reasoning solves problems of coordination and cooperation, but aggregation of individual preferences is problematic. I am grateful to commentators for their thoughtful and often challenging contributions to this debate. The commentaries come from eight different countries and an unusually wide range of disciplines, including psychology, economics, philosophy, biology, psychiatry, anthropology, and mathematics. The interdisciplinary character of game theory and experimental games is illustrated in Lazarus's tabulation of more than a dozen disciplines studying cooperation. The richness and fertility of game theory and experimental games owe much to the diversity of disciplines that have contributed to their development from their earliest days. The primary goal of the target article is to argue that the standard interpretation of instrumental rationality as expected utility maximization generates problems and anomalies when applied to interactive decisions and fails to explain certain empirical evidence. A secondary goal is to outline some examples of psychological game theory, designed to solve these problems. Camerer suggests that psychological and behavioral game theory are virtually synonymous, and I agree that there is no pressing need to distinguish them. The examples of psychological game theory discussed in the target article use formal methods to model reasoning processes in order to explain powerful intuitions and empirical observations that orthodox theory fails to explain. The general aim is to broaden the scope and increase the explanatory power of game theory, retaining its rigor without being bound by its specific assumptions and constraints. Rationality demands different standards in different domains. For example, criteria for evaluating formal arguments and empirical evidence are different from standards of rational decision making (Manktelow & Over 1993; Nozick 1993). For rational decision making, expected utility maximization is an appealing principle but, even when it is combined with consistency requirements, it does not appear to provide complete and intuitively convincing prescriptions for rational conduct in all situations of strategic interdependence. This means that we must either accept that rationality is radically and permanently limited and riddled with holes, or try to plug the holes by discovering and testing novel principles. In everyday life, and in experimental laboratories, when orthodox game theory offers no prescriptions for choice, people do not become transfixed like Buridan's ass. There are even circumstances in which people reliably solve problems of coordination and cooperation that are insoluble with the tools of orthodox game theory. From this we may infer that strategic interaction is governed by psychological game-theoretic principles that we can, in principle, discover and understand. These principles need to be made explicit and shown to meet minimal standards of coherence, both internally and in relation to other plausible standards of rational behavior. Wherever possible, we should test them experimentally. In the paragraphs that follow, I focus chiefly on the most challenging and critical issues raised by commentators. I scrutinize the logic behind several attempts to show that the problems discussed in the target article are spurious or that they can be solved within the orthodox theoretical framework, and I accept criticisms that appear to be valid. The commentaries also contain many supportive and elaborative observations that speak for themselves and indicate broad agreement with many of the ideas expressed in the target article. I am grateful to Hausman for introducing the important issue of rational beliefs into the debate. He argues that games can be satisfactorily understood without any new interpretation of rationality, and that the anomalies and problems that arise in interactive decisions can be eliminated by requiring players not only to choose rational strategies but also to hold rational beliefs. The only requirement is that subjective probabilities "must conform to the calculus of probabilities." Rational beliefs play an important role in Bayesian decision theory. Kreps and Wilson (1982b) incorporated them into a refinement of Nash equilibrium that they called perfect Bayesian equilibrium, defining game-theoretic equilibrium for the first time in terms of strategies and beliefs. In perfect Bayesian equilibrium, strategies are best replies to one another, as in standard Nash equilibrium, and beliefs are sequentially rational in the sense of specifying actions that are optimal for the players, given those beliefs. Kreps and Wilson defined these notions precisely using the conceptual apparatus of Bayesian decision theory, including belief updating according to Bayes' rule. These ideas prepared the ground for theories of rationalizability (Bernheim 1984; Pearce 1984), discussed briefly in section 6.5 of the target article, and the psychological games of Geanakoplos et al. (1989), to which I shall return in section R7 below. Hausman invokes rational beliefs in a plausible -though I believe ultimately unsuccessful -attempt to solve the payoff-dominance problem illustrated in the Hi-Lo Matching game (Fig. in the target article). He acknowledges that a player cannot justify choosing H by assigning particular probabilities to the co-player's actions, because this leads to a contradiction (as explained in section 5.6 of the target article). 1 He therefore offers the following suggestion: "If one does not require that the players have point priors, then Player I can believe that the probability that Player II will play H is not less than one-half, and also believe that Player II believes the same of Player I. Player I can then reason that Player II will definitely play H, update his or her subjective probability accordingly, and play H." This involves the use of interval-valued (or set-valued) probabilities, tending to undermine Hausman's claim that it "does not need a new theory of rationality." Intervalvalued probabilities have been axiomatized and studied ), but they are problematic, partly because stochastic independence, on which the whole edifice of probability theory is built, cannot be satisfactorily defined for them, and partly because technical problems arise when Bayesian updating is applied to interval-valued priors. Leaving these problems aside, the proposed solution cleverly eliminates the contradiction that arises when a player starts by specifying a point probability,
The aim of this investigation was to gauge the comparative research performance of university dep... more The aim of this investigation was to gauge the comparative research performance of university departments of psychology in Britain. The performance indicator was the number of publications per departmental staff member in the journals of the British Psychological Society (BPS) during the seven-year period 1983-1989. The contents of these journals were thoroughly searched, and articles written by members of university psychology departments in Britain were counted. The number of publications of each psychology department was divided by the size of the department in the corresponding year and the resulting annual figures were summed to determine the number of publications in BPS journals per departmental staff member over the seven-year period. These research performance figures correlated significantly with an earlier measure of departmental research performance based on publications in the seven European psychological journals with the highest citations per published article and with recent performance indicators based on other criteria.
The research performance of 41 British university politics departments was evaluated through an a... more The research performance of 41 British university politics departments was evaluated through an analysis of articles published between 1987 and 1992 in nine European politics journals with the highest citation impact factors. Annual performance scores were obtained by dividing each department's number of publications in these journals in each year (departmental productivity) by the corresponding departmental size. These scores were summed to obtain a research performance score for each department over the period of assessment. They correlate significantly with research performance scores from two previous studies using different methodologies: Crewe's per capita simple publication count for the years 1978 to 1984, and the Universities Funding Council's research selectivity ratings covering the years 1989 to 1992.
In the theories of team reasoning of Sugden, and Bacharach, players are assumed to be motivated i... more In the theories of team reasoning of Sugden, and Bacharach, players are assumed to be motivated in some circumstances to maximize collective rather than individual utilities. An experiment was performed to asses whether preferences underlying such collective payoff maximization occur. An opportunistic sample of 50 undergraduate and graduate students, 7 men and 43 women aged 19 to 42 years (M = 23.0, SD = 5.4), expressed preferences among the outcomes of strategic decisions presented in vignettes designed to engage social value orientations of individualism, altruism, competitiveness, equality seeking, or collective preferences. In the vignettes designed to engage collective preferences, and significantly less frequently in the other vignettes, preferences were biased toward outcomes maximizing collective payoffs, and respondents invariably gave team-reasoning explanations for their preferences. These results provide evidence for collective preferences according to theories of team reasoning and empirical support for one of the essential assumptions of these theories.
Previous investigations have provided evidence for positive ("mere exposure"), negative, and inve... more Previous investigations have provided evidence for positive ("mere exposure"), negative, and inverted-U functional relationships between familiarity and liking for various categories of stimuli. The preferencefeedback hypothesis offers an explanation for these seemingly contradictory findings; two experiments designed to test the hypothesis directly are reported in this paper. In both experiments, as predicted by the hypothesis, mere exposure effects were found for Class A stimuli, whose cultural prevalence is determined partly by their popularity; but the hypothesized nonmonotonic familiarity-liking relationship did not emerge for Class B stimuli, whose cultural prevalence is unresponsive to their popularity. Four possible explanations of these findings are discussed.
Personality and Individual Differences, Dec 1, 2016
Hans Eysenck was one of the earliest protagonists in the controversy over race and intelligence. ... more Hans Eysenck was one of the earliest protagonists in the controversy over race and intelligence. He believed that the observed variability in IQ scores is genetically determined to a high degree (80% heritability) and that, in consequence, the Black-White IQ gap in the US is due predominantly to genetic factors. Subsequent investigations have confirmed that IQ is indeed heritable, though at a level substantially below 80%, and a deeper understanding of population genetics has shown that race differences in IQ could be determined entirely by environmental factors even if its heritability were as high as Eysenck believed it to be. Several lines of research, notably racial admixture studies, racial crossing studies involving interracial parenting or adoption, and especially investigations using more recent techniques of molecular genetics, have provided evidence suggesting that the Black-White IQ gap is not determined significantly by genetic factors.
Preparation of this article was supported by a Grant No. L122251002 to the first author from the ... more Preparation of this article was supported by a Grant No. L122251002 to the first author from the Economic and Social Research Council as part of the research programme on Economic Beliefs and Behaviour. We are grateful to Ron Blackburn and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the article.
Getting started (including definitions of what psychology is not) beyond common sense: a self-ass... more Getting started (including definitions of what psychology is not) beyond common sense: a self-assessment quiz the subject matter of psychology research methods and statistics the origins and development of psychology psychology as a profession.
A n d t h a t t h e b u d g e t f o r b u i l d i n g t h e w o r l d ' s f i n e s t s p e c t r... more A n d t h a t t h e b u d g e t f o r b u i l d i n g t h e w o r l d ' s f i n e s t s p e c t r oh e l i o g r a p h i n 1 8 9 9 w a s s o sm a l l t h a t o n e o f t h e l e n s e s h a d t o b e b o u g h t f r om a p a w n b r o k e r . A l t h o u g h G l a s s d o e s n ' t c omm e n t o n i t , h i s b o o k d o e s im p l i c i t l y r a i s e t h e q u e s t i o n o f w h e t h e r o r n o t t h e f u t u r e w i l l b e v e r y d i f f e re n t . O n e h a s o n l y t o l o o k a t T h e A s t r o p h y s i c a l J o u r n a l n o w t o r e a l i z e t h a t t h e d a y o f t h e l o n e r e s e a r c h e r i s o v e r : l a r g e t e am s a r e t h e o r d e r o f t h e d a y , a n d i t ' s d o u b t f u l w h e t h e r i n d i v i d u a l s w i l l e v e r b e a s i n f l u e n t i a l a s t h e y u s e d t o b e . M e a n w h i l e , G l a s s h a s w r i t t e n a n a b s o r b i n g b o o k , w h i c h I s t r o n g l y r e c omm e n d .
The Wilson-Patterson Attitude Inventory, Eysenck's Social and Political Attitude Inventory, Rokea... more The Wilson-Patterson Attitude Inventory, Eysenck's Social and Political Attitude Inventory, Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale, and the Lee-Warr Balanced F Scale were administered to 48 recruit police constables at the beginning and end of their basic training, 36 probationer constables with an average of 20 months' police experience, and 30 control subjects matched with the police groups in socioeconomic status. All subjects also gave open-ended responses to questions on controversial issues. Compared with control subjects, the recruits' and probationers' scores were significantly more conservative and authoritarian, and the probationers' open-ended responses on the death penalty and coloured immigration were rated significantly more illiberal/intolerant. The probationers' responses on coloured immigration were also rated significantly more illiberal/intolerant than those of the recruits. Among the recruits. basic training was followed by a reduction in conservatism and authoritarianism. The fmdings suggest that the police force attracts conservative and authoritarian personalities. that basic training has a temporarily liberalizing effect, and that continued police service results in increasingly illiberal/intolerant attitudes towards coloured immigration.
Rational choice theory enjoys unprecedented popularity and influence in the behavioral and social... more Rational choice theory enjoys unprecedented popularity and influence in the behavioral and social sciences, but it generates intractable problems when applied to socially interactive decisions. In individual decisions, instrumental rationality is defined in terms of expected utility maximization. This becomes problematic in interactive decisions, when individuals have only partial control over the outcomes, because expected utility maximization is undefined in the absence of assumptions about how the other participants will behave. Game theory therefore incorporates not only rationality but also common knowledge assumptions, enabling players to anticipate their co-players' strategies. Under these assumptions, disparate anomalies emerge. Instrumental rationality, conventionally interpreted, fails to explain intuitively obvious features of human interaction, yields predictions starkly at variance with experimental findings, and breaks down completely in certain cases. In particular, focal point selection in pure coordination games is inexplicable, though it is easily achieved in practice; the intuitively compelling payoff-dominance principle lacks rational justification; rationality in social dilemmas is self-defeating; a key solution concept for cooperative coalition games is frequently inapplicable; and rational choice in certain sequential games generates contradictions. In experiments, human players behave more cooperatively and receive higher payoffs than strict rationality would permit. Orthodox conceptions of rationality are evidently internally deficient and inadequate for explaining human interaction. Psychological game theory, based on nonstandard assumptions, is required to solve these problems, and some suggestions along these lines have already been put forward.
Two experiments examined a form of singleton bias deducible from lexicographic choice and Tversky... more Two experiments examined a form of singleton bias deducible from lexicographic choice and Tversky's theory of elimination by aspects. In Experiment 1, 100 decision makers who chose from a set of job applicants defined by equal numbers of equally important qualifications tended to ignore the singleton defined by possession of a relevant attribute but tended to rank-order the attributes as predicted by lexicographic choice theory and showed various forms of singleton bias. In Experiment 2, 100 decision makers who chose from sets of unspecified alternatives, universities, and houses/apartments defined by attributes that they had individually rated as equally important ignored the attribute-defined singleton in every alternative set but manifested a different singleton bias in favor of the middle option of the on-screen display.
Thomas C. Schelling's most influential contributions include focal points in coordination games, ... more Thomas C. Schelling's most influential contributions include focal points in coordination games, commitment and credible threats in bargaining, the theory of social dilemmas, and anticipatory self-command in intertemporal choice. His spatial proximity models are early prototypes of cellular automata. Contributions to this special issue were inspired by a few of these theoretical ideas.
A significant increase in the probability of an action resulting from observing that action perfo... more A significant increase in the probability of an action resulting from observing that action performed by another agent cannot, on its own, provide persuasive evidence of imitation. Simple models of social influence based on two-person sequential games suggest that both imitation and pseudo-imitation can be explained by a process more fundamental than priming, namely, subjective utility maximization.
Psychological game theory encompasses formal theories designed to remedy game-theoretic indetermi... more Psychological game theory encompasses formal theories designed to remedy game-theoretic indeterminacy and to predict strategic interaction more accurately. Its theoretical plurality entails second-order indeterminacy, but this seems unavoidable. Orthodox game theory cannot solve payoff-dominance problems, and remedies based on interval-valued beliefs or payoff transformations are inadequate. Evolutionary game theory applies only to repeated interactions, and behavioral ecology is powerless to explain cooperation between genetically unrelated strangers in isolated interactions. Punishment of defectors elucidates cooperation in social dilemmas but leaves punishing behavior unexplained. Team reasoning solves problems of coordination and cooperation, but aggregation of individual preferences is problematic. I am grateful to commentators for their thoughtful and often challenging contributions to this debate. The commentaries come from eight different countries and an unusually wide range of disciplines, including psychology, economics, philosophy, biology, psychiatry, anthropology, and mathematics. The interdisciplinary character of game theory and experimental games is illustrated in Lazarus's tabulation of more than a dozen disciplines studying cooperation. The richness and fertility of game theory and experimental games owe much to the diversity of disciplines that have contributed to their development from their earliest days. The primary goal of the target article is to argue that the standard interpretation of instrumental rationality as expected utility maximization generates problems and anomalies when applied to interactive decisions and fails to explain certain empirical evidence. A secondary goal is to outline some examples of psychological game theory, designed to solve these problems. Camerer suggests that psychological and behavioral game theory are virtually synonymous, and I agree that there is no pressing need to distinguish them. The examples of psychological game theory discussed in the target article use formal methods to model reasoning processes in order to explain powerful intuitions and empirical observations that orthodox theory fails to explain. The general aim is to broaden the scope and increase the explanatory power of game theory, retaining its rigor without being bound by its specific assumptions and constraints. Rationality demands different standards in different domains. For example, criteria for evaluating formal arguments and empirical evidence are different from standards of rational decision making (Manktelow & Over 1993; Nozick 1993). For rational decision making, expected utility maximization is an appealing principle but, even when it is combined with consistency requirements, it does not appear to provide complete and intuitively convincing prescriptions for rational conduct in all situations of strategic interdependence. This means that we must either accept that rationality is radically and permanently limited and riddled with holes, or try to plug the holes by discovering and testing novel principles. In everyday life, and in experimental laboratories, when orthodox game theory offers no prescriptions for choice, people do not become transfixed like Buridan's ass. There are even circumstances in which people reliably solve problems of coordination and cooperation that are insoluble with the tools of orthodox game theory. From this we may infer that strategic interaction is governed by psychological game-theoretic principles that we can, in principle, discover and understand. These principles need to be made explicit and shown to meet minimal standards of coherence, both internally and in relation to other plausible standards of rational behavior. Wherever possible, we should test them experimentally. In the paragraphs that follow, I focus chiefly on the most challenging and critical issues raised by commentators. I scrutinize the logic behind several attempts to show that the problems discussed in the target article are spurious or that they can be solved within the orthodox theoretical framework, and I accept criticisms that appear to be valid. The commentaries also contain many supportive and elaborative observations that speak for themselves and indicate broad agreement with many of the ideas expressed in the target article. I am grateful to Hausman for introducing the important issue of rational beliefs into the debate. He argues that games can be satisfactorily understood without any new interpretation of rationality, and that the anomalies and problems that arise in interactive decisions can be eliminated by requiring players not only to choose rational strategies but also to hold rational beliefs. The only requirement is that subjective probabilities "must conform to the calculus of probabilities." Rational beliefs play an important role in Bayesian decision theory. Kreps and Wilson (1982b) incorporated them into a refinement of Nash equilibrium that they called perfect Bayesian equilibrium, defining game-theoretic equilibrium for the first time in terms of strategies and beliefs. In perfect Bayesian equilibrium, strategies are best replies to one another, as in standard Nash equilibrium, and beliefs are sequentially rational in the sense of specifying actions that are optimal for the players, given those beliefs. Kreps and Wilson defined these notions precisely using the conceptual apparatus of Bayesian decision theory, including belief updating according to Bayes' rule. These ideas prepared the ground for theories of rationalizability (Bernheim 1984; Pearce 1984), discussed briefly in section 6.5 of the target article, and the psychological games of Geanakoplos et al. (1989), to which I shall return in section R7 below. Hausman invokes rational beliefs in a plausible -though I believe ultimately unsuccessful -attempt to solve the payoff-dominance problem illustrated in the Hi-Lo Matching game (Fig. in the target article). He acknowledges that a player cannot justify choosing H by assigning particular probabilities to the co-player's actions, because this leads to a contradiction (as explained in section 5.6 of the target article). 1 He therefore offers the following suggestion: "If one does not require that the players have point priors, then Player I can believe that the probability that Player II will play H is not less than one-half, and also believe that Player II believes the same of Player I. Player I can then reason that Player II will definitely play H, update his or her subjective probability accordingly, and play H." This involves the use of interval-valued (or set-valued) probabilities, tending to undermine Hausman's claim that it "does not need a new theory of rationality." Intervalvalued probabilities have been axiomatized and studied ), but they are problematic, partly because stochastic independence, on which the whole edifice of probability theory is built, cannot be satisfactorily defined for them, and partly because technical problems arise when Bayesian updating is applied to interval-valued priors. Leaving these problems aside, the proposed solution cleverly eliminates the contradiction that arises when a player starts by specifying a point probability,
The aim of this investigation was to gauge the comparative research performance of university dep... more The aim of this investigation was to gauge the comparative research performance of university departments of psychology in Britain. The performance indicator was the number of publications per departmental staff member in the journals of the British Psychological Society (BPS) during the seven-year period 1983-1989. The contents of these journals were thoroughly searched, and articles written by members of university psychology departments in Britain were counted. The number of publications of each psychology department was divided by the size of the department in the corresponding year and the resulting annual figures were summed to determine the number of publications in BPS journals per departmental staff member over the seven-year period. These research performance figures correlated significantly with an earlier measure of departmental research performance based on publications in the seven European psychological journals with the highest citations per published article and with recent performance indicators based on other criteria.
The research performance of 41 British university politics departments was evaluated through an a... more The research performance of 41 British university politics departments was evaluated through an analysis of articles published between 1987 and 1992 in nine European politics journals with the highest citation impact factors. Annual performance scores were obtained by dividing each department's number of publications in these journals in each year (departmental productivity) by the corresponding departmental size. These scores were summed to obtain a research performance score for each department over the period of assessment. They correlate significantly with research performance scores from two previous studies using different methodologies: Crewe's per capita simple publication count for the years 1978 to 1984, and the Universities Funding Council's research selectivity ratings covering the years 1989 to 1992.
In the theories of team reasoning of Sugden, and Bacharach, players are assumed to be motivated i... more In the theories of team reasoning of Sugden, and Bacharach, players are assumed to be motivated in some circumstances to maximize collective rather than individual utilities. An experiment was performed to asses whether preferences underlying such collective payoff maximization occur. An opportunistic sample of 50 undergraduate and graduate students, 7 men and 43 women aged 19 to 42 years (M = 23.0, SD = 5.4), expressed preferences among the outcomes of strategic decisions presented in vignettes designed to engage social value orientations of individualism, altruism, competitiveness, equality seeking, or collective preferences. In the vignettes designed to engage collective preferences, and significantly less frequently in the other vignettes, preferences were biased toward outcomes maximizing collective payoffs, and respondents invariably gave team-reasoning explanations for their preferences. These results provide evidence for collective preferences according to theories of team reasoning and empirical support for one of the essential assumptions of these theories.
Previous investigations have provided evidence for positive ("mere exposure"), negative, and inve... more Previous investigations have provided evidence for positive ("mere exposure"), negative, and inverted-U functional relationships between familiarity and liking for various categories of stimuli. The preferencefeedback hypothesis offers an explanation for these seemingly contradictory findings; two experiments designed to test the hypothesis directly are reported in this paper. In both experiments, as predicted by the hypothesis, mere exposure effects were found for Class A stimuli, whose cultural prevalence is determined partly by their popularity; but the hypothesized nonmonotonic familiarity-liking relationship did not emerge for Class B stimuli, whose cultural prevalence is unresponsive to their popularity. Four possible explanations of these findings are discussed.
Personality and Individual Differences, Dec 1, 2016
Hans Eysenck was one of the earliest protagonists in the controversy over race and intelligence. ... more Hans Eysenck was one of the earliest protagonists in the controversy over race and intelligence. He believed that the observed variability in IQ scores is genetically determined to a high degree (80% heritability) and that, in consequence, the Black-White IQ gap in the US is due predominantly to genetic factors. Subsequent investigations have confirmed that IQ is indeed heritable, though at a level substantially below 80%, and a deeper understanding of population genetics has shown that race differences in IQ could be determined entirely by environmental factors even if its heritability were as high as Eysenck believed it to be. Several lines of research, notably racial admixture studies, racial crossing studies involving interracial parenting or adoption, and especially investigations using more recent techniques of molecular genetics, have provided evidence suggesting that the Black-White IQ gap is not determined significantly by genetic factors.
Preparation of this article was supported by a Grant No. L122251002 to the first author from the ... more Preparation of this article was supported by a Grant No. L122251002 to the first author from the Economic and Social Research Council as part of the research programme on Economic Beliefs and Behaviour. We are grateful to Ron Blackburn and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the article.
Getting started (including definitions of what psychology is not) beyond common sense: a self-ass... more Getting started (including definitions of what psychology is not) beyond common sense: a self-assessment quiz the subject matter of psychology research methods and statistics the origins and development of psychology psychology as a profession.
A n d t h a t t h e b u d g e t f o r b u i l d i n g t h e w o r l d ' s f i n e s t s p e c t r... more A n d t h a t t h e b u d g e t f o r b u i l d i n g t h e w o r l d ' s f i n e s t s p e c t r oh e l i o g r a p h i n 1 8 9 9 w a s s o sm a l l t h a t o n e o f t h e l e n s e s h a d t o b e b o u g h t f r om a p a w n b r o k e r . A l t h o u g h G l a s s d o e s n ' t c omm e n t o n i t , h i s b o o k d o e s im p l i c i t l y r a i s e t h e q u e s t i o n o f w h e t h e r o r n o t t h e f u t u r e w i l l b e v e r y d i f f e re n t . O n e h a s o n l y t o l o o k a t T h e A s t r o p h y s i c a l J o u r n a l n o w t o r e a l i z e t h a t t h e d a y o f t h e l o n e r e s e a r c h e r i s o v e r : l a r g e t e am s a r e t h e o r d e r o f t h e d a y , a n d i t ' s d o u b t f u l w h e t h e r i n d i v i d u a l s w i l l e v e r b e a s i n f l u e n t i a l a s t h e y u s e d t o b e . M e a n w h i l e , G l a s s h a s w r i t t e n a n a b s o r b i n g b o o k , w h i c h I s t r o n g l y r e c omm e n d .
The Wilson-Patterson Attitude Inventory, Eysenck's Social and Political Attitude Inventory, Rokea... more The Wilson-Patterson Attitude Inventory, Eysenck's Social and Political Attitude Inventory, Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale, and the Lee-Warr Balanced F Scale were administered to 48 recruit police constables at the beginning and end of their basic training, 36 probationer constables with an average of 20 months' police experience, and 30 control subjects matched with the police groups in socioeconomic status. All subjects also gave open-ended responses to questions on controversial issues. Compared with control subjects, the recruits' and probationers' scores were significantly more conservative and authoritarian, and the probationers' open-ended responses on the death penalty and coloured immigration were rated significantly more illiberal/intolerant. The probationers' responses on coloured immigration were also rated significantly more illiberal/intolerant than those of the recruits. Among the recruits. basic training was followed by a reduction in conservatism and authoritarianism. The fmdings suggest that the police force attracts conservative and authoritarian personalities. that basic training has a temporarily liberalizing effect, and that continued police service results in increasingly illiberal/intolerant attitudes towards coloured immigration.
Rational choice theory enjoys unprecedented popularity and influence in the behavioral and social... more Rational choice theory enjoys unprecedented popularity and influence in the behavioral and social sciences, but it generates intractable problems when applied to socially interactive decisions. In individual decisions, instrumental rationality is defined in terms of expected utility maximization. This becomes problematic in interactive decisions, when individuals have only partial control over the outcomes, because expected utility maximization is undefined in the absence of assumptions about how the other participants will behave. Game theory therefore incorporates not only rationality but also common knowledge assumptions, enabling players to anticipate their co-players' strategies. Under these assumptions, disparate anomalies emerge. Instrumental rationality, conventionally interpreted, fails to explain intuitively obvious features of human interaction, yields predictions starkly at variance with experimental findings, and breaks down completely in certain cases. In particular, focal point selection in pure coordination games is inexplicable, though it is easily achieved in practice; the intuitively compelling payoff-dominance principle lacks rational justification; rationality in social dilemmas is self-defeating; a key solution concept for cooperative coalition games is frequently inapplicable; and rational choice in certain sequential games generates contradictions. In experiments, human players behave more cooperatively and receive higher payoffs than strict rationality would permit. Orthodox conceptions of rationality are evidently internally deficient and inadequate for explaining human interaction. Psychological game theory, based on nonstandard assumptions, is required to solve these problems, and some suggestions along these lines have already been put forward.
1. Clinical and Counselling Psychology by Graham E Powell, University of Surrey, UK 2. Education ... more 1. Clinical and Counselling Psychology by Graham E Powell, University of Surrey, UK 2. Education (School) Psychology by David Fontana, University of Wales, Cardiff, UK 3. Industrial (Occupational) and Organisational Psychology by Wendy Holloway, University of Bradford, UK 4. Forensic Psychology by Clive R Hollin, University of Birmingham, UK 5. Psychoanalysis by Peter Fonagy, University College London, UK
1. Experimental Design by David D Stretch, University of Leicester, UK 2. Analysis of Variance De... more 1. Experimental Design by David D Stretch, University of Leicester, UK 2. Analysis of Variance Designs by Brian S Everitt, Institute of Psychiatry University of London, UK 3. Descriptive and Inferential Studies by A W MacRae, University of Birmingham, UK 4. Quasi-Experiments and Correlational Studies by Michael L Raulin and Anthony M Graziano, State University of New York, USA 5. Survey Methods, Naturalistic Observations and Case Studies by Francis C Dane, Mercer University, USA 6. Ethical Issues in Psychological Research by Anthony Gale University of Southampton, UK
This article is devoted to explaining and justifying the choice of salient equilibria or focal po... more This article is devoted to explaining and justifying the choice of salient equilibria or focal points in pure coordination games --games in which players have identical preferences over the set of possible outcomes. Focal points, even when they arise as framing effects based on the labelling of options, are intuitively obvious choices, and experimental evidence shows that people often coordinate successfully by choosing them. In response to arguments that focusing is not rationally justified, a qualified justification and psychological explanation is offered in terms of a form of reasoning called the Stackelberg heuristic, which has been used to explain the selection of payoff-dominant (Pareto-optimal) equilibria in common-interest games. Pure coordination games, if appropriately modelled, are shown to be reducible to common-interest games with payoff-dominant equilibria, and it is argued that focusing can therefore be explained by the Stackelberg heuristic.
Game theory is concerned with rational choice in decisions involving two or more interdependent d... more Game theory is concerned with rational choice in decisions involving two or more interdependent decision makers. Its range of applicability is broad, including all decisions in which an outcome depends on the actions of two or more decision makers, called players, each having two or more ways of acting, called strategies, and sufficiently well-defined preferences among the possible outcomes to enable numerical payoffs reflecting these preferences to be assigned. Decision theory has a certain logical primacy in psychology, because decision making drives all deliberate behaviour, and game theory is the portion of decision theory dealing with decisions involving strategic interdependence. This chapter focuses on reasoning in games, and in particular on theoretical problems of specifying and understanding the nature of rationality in strategic interaction. These problems are far from trivial, because even simple games present deep and mysterious dilemmas that are imperfectly understood and have not been solved convincingly. The notion of rationality underlying game theory is instrumental rationality, according to which rational agents choose the best means to achieve their most preferred outcomes. This means-end characterization of rational choice is conspicuously neutral regarding an agent's preferences or desires, a point that was stressed by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in a frequently quoted passage of his Treatise of Human Nature: 'Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.. .. A passion can never, in any sense, be call'd unreasonable, but when founded on a false supposition, or when it chuses means insufficient for the design'd end.' (1739-40, 2.III.iii). Hume conceded only that preferences based on 'false supposition' are unreasonable or irrational. Contemporary philosophers and game theorists take an even more permissive view, requiring only that preferences should be consistent. Although everyday language contains both internal reason statements (P has a reason for doing x) and external reason statements (There is a reason for P to do x), the philosopher Bernard Williams (1979) has shown that 'external reason statements, when definitely isolated as such, are false, or incoherent, or really something else misleadingly expressed' (p. 26). A person's reasons for acting in a particular way are invariably internal, hence an action is instrumentally rational, relative to the agent's knowledge and beliefs at the time of acting, if it is the best means to achieve the most preferred outcome, provided only that the knowledge and beliefs are not inconsistent or incoherent. Thus, if I am thirsty, and I come upon a jar of powder that I believe to be cocoa but is actually rat poison, I act rationally, relative to my knowledge and beliefs, if I dissolve the powder in hot milk and drink the infusion, even though my preference for doing so is based on a 'false supposition'. Instrumental rationality is formalized in expected utility theory, introduced as an axiomatic system by
The theory of games seems to me to provide the most promising alternative to the traditional theo... more The theory of games seems to me to provide the most promising alternative to the traditional theories of social behaviour. Gaming modelS are inherently social in character (an individual's strategy choice in a game cannot even be properly defined without reference to at least one other individual) and they represent a radical departure from the "social stimulus - individual response" approach. They sean, furthermore, to be the only models which can adequately conceptualize an important (and large) class of social behaviours which arise from deliberate free choice. (From preface
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