The origins of belonging : Social motivation in infants and young children

Our reliance on our group members has exerted a profound influence over our motivation: successful group functioning requires that we are motivated to interact, and engage, with those around us. In other words, we need to belong. In this article, I explore the developmental origins of our need to belong. I discuss existing evidence that, from early in development, children seek to affiliate with others and to form long-lasting bonds with their group members. Furthermore, when children are deprived of a sense of belonging, it has negative consequences for their well-being. This focus on social motivation enables us to examine why and in what circumstances children engage in particular behaviours. It thus provides an important complement to research on social cognition. In doing so, it opens up important questions for future research and provides a much-needed bridge between developmental and social psychology

Empirical Analysis of Factors Affecting Confirmation Bias Levels of Software Engineers

Confirmation bias is defined as the tendency of people to seek evidence that verifies a hypothesis rather than seeking evidence to falsify it. Due to the confirmation bias, defects may be introduced in a software product during requirements analysis, design, implementation and/or testing phases. For instance, testers may exhibit confirmatory behavior in the form of a tendency to make the code run rather than employing a strategic approach to make it fail. As a result, most of the defects that have been introduced in the earlier phases of software development may be overlooked leading to an increase in software defect density. In this paper, we quantify confirmation bias levels in terms of a single derived metric. However, the main focus of this paper is the analysis of factors affecting confirmation bias levels of software engineers. Identification of these factors can guide project managers to circumvent negative effects of confirmation bias, as well as providing guidance for the recruitment and effective allocation of software engineers. In this empirical study, we observed low confirmation bias levels among participants with logical reasoning and hypothesis testing skills

Conditions for the acceptance of deontic conditionals

Recent psychological research has investigated how people assess the probability of an indicative conditional. Most people give the conditional probability of q given p as the probability of if p then q. Asking about the probability of an indicative conditional, one is in effect asking about its acceptability. But on what basis are deontic conditionals judged to be acceptable or unacceptable? Using a decision theoretic analysis, we argue that a deontic conditional, of,the form if p then must q or if p then may q, will be judged acceptable to the extent that the p R q possibility is preferred to the p R not-q possibility. Two experiments are reported in which this prediction was upheld. There was also evidence that the pragmatic suitability of permission rules is partly determined by evaluations of the not-p R q possibility. Implications of these results for theories of deontic reasoning are discussed

Cycles of maximin and utilitarian policies under the veil of ignorance

International audienc

How the construction of mental models improves learning

Mental models, Learning, Gestures, Cognitive conflict,

Reasoning, judgement and pragmatics

rather 'the experimenter knows how to find the answer and she wants to know whether I know how to find it1. The interpretation of the question is determined in part and revealed b