404 research outputs found
Liking but devaluing animals: emotional and deliberative paths to speciesism
We explore whether priming emotion versus deliberation affects speciesism—the tendency to prioritize certain individuals over others on the basis of their species-membership (three main and two supplementary studies; four pre-registered; N = 3,288). We find that the tendency to prioritize humans over animals (anthropocentric speciesism) decreases when participants were asked to think emotionally compared to deliberately. In contrast, the tendency to prioritize dogs over other animals (pet speciesism) increases when participants were asked to think emotionally compared to deliberately. We hypothesize that, emotionally, people like animals in general, and dogs in particular; however, deliberatively, people attribute higher moral status to humans than animals, and roughly equal status to dogs, chimpanzees, elephants and pigs. In support of this explanation, participants tended to discriminate between animals based on likability when thinking emotionally and based on moral status when thinking deliberately. These findings shed light on the psychological underpinnings of speciesism
"Do the right thing" for whom? An experiment on ingroup favouritism, group assorting and moral suasion
In this paper we investigate the effect of moral suasion on ingroup favouritism. We report a well-powered, pre-registered, two-stage 2x2 mixed-design experiment. In the first stage, groups are formed on the basis of how participants answer to a set of questions, concerning non-morally relevant issues in one treatment (assorting on non-moral preferences), and morally relevant issues in another treatment (assorting on moral preferences). In the second stage, participants choose how to split a given amount of money between participants of their own group and participants of the other group, first in the baseline setting and then in a setting where they are told to do what they believe to be morally right (moral suasion). Our main results are: (i) in the baseline, participants tend to favour their own group to a greater extent when groups are assorted according to moral preferences, compared to when they are assorted according to non-moral preferences; (ii) the net effect of moral suasion is to decrease ingroup favouritism, but there is also a non-negligible proportion of participants for whom moral suasion increases ingroup favouritism; (iii) the effect of moral suasion is substantially stable across group assorting and four pre-registered individual characteristics (gender, political orientation, religiosity, pro-life vs pro-choice ethical convictions)
The effect of norm-based messages on reading and understanding COVID-19 pandemic response governmental rules
The new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) threatens the lives of millions of people around the world, making it the largest health threat in recent times. Billions of people around the world are asked to adhere to strict shelter-in-place rules, finalised to slow down the spread of the virus. Appeals and messages are being used by leaders and policy-makers to promote pandemic response. Given the stakes at play, it is thus important for social scientists to explore which messages are most effective in promoting pandemic response. In fact, some papers in the last month have explored the effect of several messages on people’s intentions to engage in pandemic response behaviour. In this paper, we make two contributions. First, we explore the effect of messages on people’s actual engagement, and not on intentions. Specifically, our dependent variables are the level of understanding of official COVID-19 pandemic response governmental informative panels, measured through comprehension questions, and the time spent on reading these rules. Second, we test a novel set of appeals built through the theory of norms. One message targets the personal norm (what people think is the right thing to do), one targets the descriptive norm (what people think others are doing), and one targets the injunctive norm (what people think others approve or disapprove of). Our experiment is conducted online with a representative (with respect to gender, age, and location) sample of Italians. Norms are made salient using a flier. We find that norm-based fliers had no effect on comprehension and on time spent on the panels. These results suggest that norm-based interventions through fliers have very little impact on people’s reading and understanding of COVID-19 pandemic response governmental rules
Timelapse
We discuss the existence in an arbitrary frame of a finite time for the
transformation of an initial quantum state into another e.g. in a decay.
This leads to the introduction of a timelapse in analogy with
the lifetime of a particle. An argument based upon the Heisenberg uncertainty
principle suggests the value of . Consequences for the
exponential decay formula and the modifications that introduces
into the Breit-Wigner mass formula are described.Comment: 5 pages [2 figs], ReV-Te
People making deontological judgments in the Trapdoor dilemma are perceived to be more prosocial in economic games than they actually are
Why do people make deontological decisions, although they often lead to overall unfavorable outcomes? One account is receiving considerable attention: deontological judgments may signal commitment to prosociality and thus may increase people’s chances of being selected as social partners–which carries obvious long-term benefits. Here we test this framework by experimentally exploring whether people making deontological judgments are expected to be more prosocial than those making consequentialist judgments and whether they are actually so. In line with previous studies, we identified deontological choices using the Trapdoor dilemma. Using economic games, we take two measures of general prosociality towards strangers: trustworthiness and altruism. Our results procure converging evidence for a perception gap according to which Trapdoor-deontologists are believed to be more trustworthy and more altruistic towards strangers than Trapdoor-consequentialists, but actually they are not so. These results show that deontological judgments are not universal, reliable signals of prosociality
Aqueye optical observations of the Crab Nebula pulsar
We observed the Crab pulsar in October 2008 at the Copernico Telescope in
Asiago - Cima Ekar with the optical photon counter Aqueye (the Asiago Quantum
Eye) which has the best temporal resolution and accuracy ever achieved in the
optical domain (hundreds of picoseconds). Our goal was to perform a detailed
analysis of the optical period and phase drift of the main peak of the Crab
pulsar and compare it with the Jodrell Bank ephemerides. We determined the
position of the main peak using the steepest zero of the cross-correlation
function between the pulsar signal and an accurate optical template. The pulsar
rotational period and period derivative have been measured with great accuracy
using observations covering only a 2 day time interval. The error on the period
is 1.7 ps, limited only by the statistical uncertainty. Both the rotational
frequency and its first derivative are in agreement with those from the Jodrell
Bank radio ephemerides archive. We also found evidence of the optical peak
leading the radio one by ~230 microseconds. The distribution of phase-residuals
of the whole dataset is slightly wider than that of a synthetic signal
generated as a sequence of pulses distributed in time with the probability
proportional to the pulse shape, such as the average count rate and background
level are those of the Crab pulsar observed with Aqueye. The counting
statistics and quality of the data allowed us to determine the pulsar period
and period derivative with great accuracy in 2 days only. The time of arrival
of the optical peak of the Crab pulsar leads the radio one in agreement with
what recently reported in the literature. The distribution of the phase
residuals can be approximated with a Gaussian and is consistent with being
completely caused by photon noise (for the best data sets).Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and
Astrophysic
Benevolent characteristics promote cooperative behaviour among humans
Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly
observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments
with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they
should deviate from the collective interest and act so as to maximise their own
individual payoff. However, there is typically heterogeneity across subjects:
some may cooperate, while others may not. Since individual factors promoting
cooperation could be used by institutions to indirectly prime cooperation, this
heterogeneity raises the important question of who these cooperators are. We
have conducted a series of experiments to study whether benevolence, defined as
a unilateral act of paying a cost to increase the welfare of someone else
beyond one's own, is related to cooperation in a subsequent one-shot anonymous
Prisoner's dilemma. Contrary to the predictions of the widely used inequity
aversion models, we find that benevolence does exist and a large majority of
people behave this way. We also find benevolence to be correlated with
cooperative behaviour. Finally, we show a causal link between benevolence and
cooperation: priming people to think positively about benevolent behaviour
makes them significantly more cooperative than priming them to think
malevolently. Thus benevolent people exist and cooperate more
People making deontological judgments in the Trapdoor dilemma are perceived to be more prosocial in economic games than they actually are
Why do people make deontological decisions, although they often lead to overall unfavorable outcomes? One account is receiving considerable attention: deontological judgments may signal commitment to prosociality and thus may increase people’s chances of being selected as social partners–which carries obvious long-term benefits. Here we test this framework by experimentally exploring whether people making deontological judgments are expected to be more prosocial than those making consequentialist judgments and whether they are actually so. In line with previous studies, we identified deontological choices using the Trapdoor dilemma. Using economic games, we take two measures of general prosociality towards strangers: trustworthiness and altruism. Our results procure converging evidence for a perception gap according to which Trapdoor-deontologists are believed to be more trustworthy and more altruistic towards strangers than Trapdoor-consequentialists, but actually they are not so. These results show that deontological judgments are not universal, reliable signals of prosociality
- …