5,383 research outputs found

    Causal explanations - how to generate, identify, and evaluate them

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    The main goal of this dissertation is to provide a solid foundation for a formalization of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE). This foundation consists of three major components. First, an intuitively adequate and formally precise model of causal explanation. Secondly, an intuitively adequate and formally precise measure of (causal) explanatory power. And third, an intuitively adequate and formally precise criterion of proportionality that is able to identify the most appropriate level of specificity for a causal explanation. While the first component makes it possible to generate and identify causal explanations reliably, the second and third components make it possible to evaluate the strength or quality of causal explanations, which is crucial for identifying the best of a set of competing causal explanations

    It’s a matter of (change over) time: the role of police conduct on the dynamics of attitudes towards legal authority

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    This thesis draws on procedural justice theory and work into legal socialisation and legal cynicism to investigate the dynamics of public perceptions of trustworthiness and legitimacy of legal authority over time. Illustrating how longitudinal data can be theoretically fruitful in studies on public-police relations, I rely upon several analytic strategies that exploit panel data to examine attitudinal change over time. To examine the development of legitimacy judgements during adolescence, the mutual reproduction of different aspects of police trustworthiness over time, and the degree to which police contact leads to attitudinal change, I draw on data from three longitudinal surveys, which are representative of the adult population living in selected neighbourhoods in S˜ao Paulo, Brazil, adolescents who live in S˜ao Paulo, and the adult population living in Australia. At the heart of the thesis are four empirical papers. The first paper suggests that perceptions of overpolicing and underpolicing undermine legitimacy judgements and mutually reproduce each other over time, with implications for people’s recognition of the ruling power of the law. The second paper focuses on the development of legitimacy judgements among adolescents, and shows that exposure to neighbourhood and police violence may damage the process of healthy legal socialisation. The third paper examines whether police-citizen encounters are teachable moments, with the potential of leading to either positive or negative attitudinal change depending upon the perceived appropriateness of the interaction. The fourth paper addresses the issue of causality – an important gap in the procedural justice literature. Analysis suggests that aggressive police stops (e.g., at gunpoint) have a shortterm effect on perceived police fairness and a long-term effect on perceived overpolicing. Overall, results indicate that reliance on coercive policing strategies have several social costs, including public detachment and alienation from from the law. Adolescents who witness cases of police brutality show diminished development in legitimacy judgements, and the experience or expectation that police officers repeatedly intrude in the lives of people (overpolicing) and fail to ensure public safety (underpolicing) undermine people’s recognition of the state’s monopoly of violence. Yet, there is room for improvement. Perceptions of procedural fairness seem to enhance police trustworthiness and legitimacy. In sum, results indicate that people develop legal attitudes throughout the life course, but police (mis)conduct can lead to attitudinal change over time

    Science and corporeal religion: a feminist materialist reconsideration of gender/sex diversity in religiosity

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    This dissertation develops a feminist materialist interpretation of the role the neuroendocrine system plays in the development of gender/sex differences in religion. Data emerging from psychology, sociology, and cognitive science have continually indicated that women are more religious than men, in various senses of those contested terms, but the factors contributing to these findings are little understood and disciplinary perspectives are often unhelpfully siloed. Previous scholarship has tended to highlight socio-cultural factors while ignoring biological factors or to focus on biological factors while relying on problematic and unsubstantiated gender stereotypes. Addressing gender/sex difference is vital for understanding religion and how we study it. This dissertation interprets this difference by means of a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach. This approach builds upon insights from the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion, affect theory and affective neuroscience, and social neuroendocrinology, and it is rooted in the foundational insights of feminist materialism, including that cultural and micro-sociological forces are inseparable from biological materiality. The dissertation shows how a better way of understanding gender/sex differences in religion emerges through focusing on the co-construction of biological materiality and cultural meanings. This includes deploying a gene-culture co-evolutionary explanation of ultrasociality and an understanding of the biology of performativity to argue that religious behavior and temperaments emerge from the enactment and hormonal underpinnings of six affective adaptive desires: the desires for (1) bonding and attachment, (2) communal mythos, (3) deliverance from suffering, (4) purpose, (5) understanding, and (6) reliable leadership. By hypothesizing the patterns of hormonal release and activation associated with ritualized affects—primarily considering oxytocin, testosterone, vasopressin, estrogen, dopamine, and serotonin—the dissertation theorizes four dimensions of religious temperament: (1) nurturant religiosity, (2) ecstatic religiosity, (3) protective/hierarchical religiosity, and (4) antagonistic religiosity. This dissertation conceptualizes hormones as chemical messengers that enable the diversity emerging from the imbrication of physical materiality and socio-cultural forces. In doing so, it demonstrates how hormonal aspects of gender/sex and culturally constructed aspects of gender/sex are always already intertwined in their influence on religiosity. This theoretical framework sheds light on both the diversity and the noticeable patterns observed in gender/sex differences in religious behaviors and affects. This problematizes the terms of the “women are more religious than men” while putting in place a more adequate framework for interpreting the variety of ways it appears in human lives

    Individual differences in early instructed language learning

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    Variability in predispositions for language learning has attracted scholarly curiosity for over 100 years. Despite major changes in theoretical explanations and foreign/second language teaching paradigms, some patterns of associations between predispositions and learning outcomes seem timelessly robust. This book discusses evidence from a research project investigating individual differences in a wide variety of domains, ranging from language aptitude over general cognitive abilities to motivational and other affective and social constructs. The focus lies on young learners aged 10 to 12, a less frequently investigated age in aptitude research. The data stem from two samples of multilingual learners in German-speaking Switzerland. The target languages are French and English. The chapters of the book offer two complementary perspectives on the topic: On the one hand, cross-sectional investigations of the underlying structure of these individual differences and their association with the target languages are discussed. Drawing on factor analytical and multivariable analyses, the different components are scrutinized with respect to their mutual dependence and their relative impact on target language skills. The analyses also take into account contextual factors such as the learners’ family background and differences across the two contexts investigated. On the other hand, the potential to predict learner’s skills in the target language over time based on the many different indicators is investigated using machine learning algorithms. The results provide new insights into the stability of the individual dispositions, on the impact of contextual variables, and on empirically robust dimensions within the array of variables tested

    COVID-19 Outbreak and Beyond

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    The COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed our lifestyle when, on 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. Since then, many governments have introduced unprecedented containment measures, hoping to slow the spread of the virus. International research suggests that both the pandemic and the related protective measures, such as lockdown, curfews, and social distancing, are having a profound impact on the mental health of the population. Among the most commonly observed psychological effects, there are high levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic symptoms, along with boredom and frustration. At the same time, the behavioral response of the population is of paramount importance to successfully contain the outbreak, creating a vicious circle in which the psychological distress impacts the willingness to comply with the protective measures, which, in turn, if prolonged, could exacerbate the population’s distress. This book includes: i) original studies on the worldwide psychological and behavioral impact of COVID-19 on targeted individuals (e.g., parents, social workers, patients affected by physical and mental disorders); ii) studies exploring the effect of COVID-19 using advanced statistical and methodological techniques (e.g., machine learning technologies); iii) research on practical applications that could help identify persons at risk, mitigate the negative effects of this situation, and offer insights to policymakers to manage the pandemic are also highly welcomed

    Sustainability Analysis and Environmental Decision-Making Using Simulation, Optimization, and Computational Analytics

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    Effective environmental decision-making is often challenging and complex, where final solutions frequently possess inherently subjective political and socio-economic components. Consequently, complex sustainability applications in the “real world” frequently employ computational decision-making approaches to construct solutions to problems containing numerous quantitative dimensions and considerable sources of uncertainty. This volume includes a number of such applied computational analytics papers that either create new decision-making methods or provide innovative implementations of existing methods for addressing a wide spectrum of sustainability applications, broadly defined. The disparate contributions all emphasize novel approaches of computational analytics as applied to environmental decision-making and sustainability analysis – be this on the side of optimization, simulation, modelling, computational solution procedures, visual analytics, and/or information technologies

    Contemporary Teacher Education: A Global Perspective

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    The research in this Special Issue is an international collection of studies focusing on the current challenges and possibilities in teacher education. The contributors examine teacher education with theoretical and empirical approaches including both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The studies demonstrate that future teachers need high-level ethical and pedagogical skills to cope with the new challenges in education. With a research-based and holistic approach, we can educate good teachers for tomorrow's schools. Contributors to this collection of eleven articles reflect global issues in teacher education originating from Australia, Estonia, Finland, England, Portugal, and Sweden
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