"You must be very intelligent...?": Gender and Science Subject Uptake

The reasons that fewer girls than boys choose to study physics have, with few national exceptions, been an on-going academic and policy concern. This paper considers how ‘common-sense’ ideas about subject choice are gendered and are based on notions of ‘natural’ interest and ‘natural’ abilities of boys and girls. It identifies instances of such reasoning in sociological theories, most recently Catherine Hakim’s preference theory. Drawing on ethnomethodology and Bourdieu’s framework for the analysis of modes of knowledge production, the paper argues that ‘common-sense’ reasoning produces and reproduces gendered understandings about ‘appropriate’ and ‘natural’ male and female interests and abilities. Secondary qualitative analysis from a study on science uptake demonstates how girls who express interest in physics have to justify such preferences

Neural Correlates of Post-Conventional Moral Reasoning: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Study

Going back to Kohlberg, moral development research affirms that people progress through different stages of moral reasoning as cognitive abilities mature. Individuals at a lower level of moral reasoning judge moral issues mainly based on self-interest (personal interests schema) or based on adherence to laws and rules (maintaining norms schema), whereas individuals at the post-conventional level judge moral issues based on deeper principles and shared ideals. However, the extent to which moral development is reflected in structural brain architecture remains unknown. To investigate this question, we used voxel-based morphometry and examined the brain structure in a sample of 67 Master of Business Administration (MBA) students. Subjects completed the Defining Issues Test (DIT-2) which measures moral development in terms of cognitive schema preference. Results demonstrate that subjects at the post-conventional level of moral reasoning were characterized by increased gray matter volume in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, compared with subjects at a lower level of moral reasoning. Our findings support an important role for both cognitive and emotional processes in moral reasoning and provide first evidence for individual differences in brain structure according to the stages of moral reasoning first proposed by Kohlberg decades ago

Sign language interpreters’ ethical discourse and moral reasoning patterns

This study investigates the ethical reasoning abilities of sign language interpreters in the US using two data sources, one that is qualitative and one that is quantitative. The twenty-five participants involved in this study were recruited after their completion of an online training session on interpreting ethics (unrelated to this study or the author). Their responses to six ethical scenarios (e.g., what would you do and why) were analysed through the lens of James Rest’s three tacit moral schemas: personal interest schema, maintaining norms schema, and post-conventional schema. These data were then compared to the results of Rest’s standardised instrument of moral reasoning, the Defining Issues Test, also based on these three schema preferences. These data show that the interpreter participants have a preference for a maintaining norms schema on both qualitative and quantitative data sources. This moral reasoning pattern found in the interpreter cohort is more typical of adolescent reasoning – a much younger profile than the actual age and education level of the participant pool. Furthermore, this reasoning preference does not coincide with the justice claims often made in the profession (e.g. the ally model). Justice as defined by collaboration by both moral psychologists and translation scholars is only weakly evident in the ethical discourse of the interpreter participants. These reasoning patterns that reveal an adolescent and non-collaborative approach are also evident in ethical documents and literature of the sign language interpreting profession. How the profession has come to conceive of and articulate ethics is explored as a potential limiting factor on the study participant’s abilities to express more sophisticated reasoning. In addition to moral judgement patterns evident in the quantitative and qualitative data, the study cohort’s qualitative data are examined for other psychological aspects of Rest’s Four Component Model (FCM). Findings indicate that sign language interpreters make many assumptions about service users’ needs, actions, and intentions. Further, they are more concerned for how decisions might impact them than the potential impact on service users. As a result, education interventions are indicated particularly for moral sensitivity and moral judgement

The Development of Reasoning About Beliefs: Fact, Preference, and Ideology

The beliefs people hold about the social and physical world are central to self-definition and social interaction. The current research analyzes reasoning about three kinds of beliefs: those that concern matters of fact (e.g., dinosaurs are extinct), preference (e.g., green is the prettiest color), and ideology (e.g., there is only one God). The domain of ideology is of unique interest because it is hypothesized to contain elements of both facts and preferences. If adults' distinct reasoning about ideological beliefs is the result of prolonged experience with the physical and social world, children and adults should reveal distinct patterns of differentiating kinds of beliefs, and this difference should be particularly pronounced with respect to ideological beliefs. On the other hand, if adults' reasoning about beliefs is a basic component of social cognition, children and adults should demonstrate similar belief representations and patterns of belief differentiation. Two experiments demonstrate that 5–10 year old children and adults similarly judged religious beliefs to be intermediate between factual beliefs (where two disagreeing people cannot both be right) and preferences (where they can). From the age of 5 years and continuing into adulthood, individuals distinguished ideological beliefs from other types of mental states and demonstrated limited tolerance for belief-based disagreements.Psycholog

Computing Diverse Optimal Stable Models

We introduce a comprehensive framework for computing diverse (or similar) solutions to logic programs with preferences. Our framework provides a wide spectrum of complete and incomplete methods for solving this task. Apart from proposing several new methods, it also accommodates existing ones and generalizes them to programs with preferences. Interestingly, this is accomplished by integrating and automating several basic ASP techniques - being of general interest even beyond diversification. The enabling factor of this lies in the recent advance of multi-shot ASP solving that provides us with fine-grained control over reasoning processes and abolishes the need for solver modifications and wrappers that were indispensable in previous approaches. Our framework is implemented as an extension to the ASP-based preference handling system asprin. We use the resulting system asprin 2 for an empirical evaluation of the diversification methods comprised in our framework

Team reasoning and intentional cooperation for mutual benefit

This paper proposes a concept of intentional cooperation for mutual benefit. This concept uses a form of team reasoning in which team members aim to achieve common interests, rather than maximising a common utility function, and in which team reasoners can coordinate their behaviour by following pre-existing practices. I argue that a market transaction can express intentions for mutually beneficial cooperation even if, extensionally, participation in the transaction promotes each party’s self-interest