Variations in judgments of intentional action and moral evaluation across eight cultures

Individuals tend to judge bad side effects as more intentional than good side effects (the Knobe or side- effect effect). Here, we assessed how widespread these findings are by testing eleven adult cohorts of eight highly contrasted cultures on their attributions of intentional action as well as ratings of blame and praise. We found limited generalizability of the original side-effect effect, and even a reversal of the effect in two rural, traditional cultures (Samoa and Vanuatu) where participants were more likely to judge the good side effect as intentional. Three follow-up experiments indicate that this reversal of the side-effect effect is not due to semantics and may be linked to the perception of the status of the protagonist. These results highlight the importance of factoring cultural context in our understanding of moral cognition

Sharing and fairness in development

PostprintPeer reviewe

An Account of the Systematic Error in Judging What Is Reachable

An account of the postural determinants of perceived reachability is proposed to explain systematic overestimations of the distance at which an object is perceived to be reachable. In this account, these errors are due to a mapping of the limits of prehensile space onto a person\u27s perceived region of maximum stretchability, in the context of a whole-body engagement. In support of this account, 6 experiments on the judged reachability of both static and dynamic objects are reported. We tentatively conclude that the mental imagery of action is grounded and calibrated in reference to multiple skeletal degrees of behavioral freedom. Accordingly, this calibration is a source of systematic error in reachability judgments

Emerging Signs of Strong Reciprocity in Human Ontogeny

Strong reciprocity is considered here as the propensity to sacrifice resources to be kind or to punish in response to prior acts, a behavior not simply reducible to self-interest and a likely force behind human cooperation and sociality. The aim was to capture emerging signs of strong reciprocity in human ontogeny and across highly contrasted cultures. Three- and 5-year-old middle class American children (N = 162) were tested in a simple, multiple round, three-way sharing game involving the child, a generous puppet, and a stingy puppet. At the end of the game, the child was offered an opportunity to sacrifice some of her personal gains to punish one of the puppets. By 3 years, American children demonstrate a willingness to engage in costly punishment. However, only 5-year-olds show some evidence of strong reciprocity by orienting their punishment systematically toward the stingy puppet. Further analyses and three additional control conditions demonstrate that such propensity is not simply reducible to (a) straight imitation, or (b) inequity aversion. To assess the relative universality of such development, a group of 5- to 6-year-old children from rural Samoa (N = 14) were tested and compared to age and gender-matched American children. Samoan children did not manifest the same propensity toward strong reciprocity. The results are interpreted as pointing to (1) the developmental emergence of an ethical stance between 3 and 5 years of age, and (2) that the expression of such stance by young children could depend on culture

Primacy of action in early ontogeny

Much of the recent research on infant cognition is framed around a critique of Piaget's theory regarding The Origins of Intelligence (1936Intelligence ( /1952 and The Construction of Reality in the Child (1937Child ( /1954. The article of Müller and Overton provides a humbling reexamination of this critique, bringing back to us how much has been thought and is accounted for in the monumental work Piaget left behind. But who can afford a thorough reading of Piaget in the current 'publish or perish' culture of academia? Müller and Overton seem to have managed, providing an eloquent demonstration that Piaget's action-centered view on cognitive development cannot be easily dismissed when considering it as a whole, not as a collection of discrete claims. More importantly, it challenges the current Zeitgeist that presumes prewiring, modularity, unsuspected cognitive processes and sophistication at the outset of development. Whether or not we agree with the long argument proposed by the authors, their discussion reminds us that developmental questions regarding transitions and the role of action in early ontogeny cannot be ignored. Many infancy researchers (including ourselves) have based a great deal of their work on disproving Piaget's claims regarding the developmental timing of certain competencies (e.g., the notion of a permanent object) and demonstrations of precocious spatial and physical knowledge that elude the fundamental questions of their developmental origin and the process underlying their rapid growth. In the frenzy of emerging new experimental techniques and paradigms for the study of infants, we have developed a formidable appetite for demonstrations of discrete sophistication in specific domains at the youngest age possible. But what are we left with and what kind of baby are we building in theory? Is it a mere collection of precocious abilities mysteriously accruing in development? We share the concerns of Müller and Overton that the recent neonativist stance inspiring much of the current theories and research in infancy might have thrown out the baby with the bath water. We will briefly suggest here that it is time to reconsider infants as developing actors in a meaningful environment, not as born philosophers contemplating a Cartesian world. If infants eventually develop as little philosophers, this development is grounded in their primary experience as actors in a resourceful environment

Fairness and distributive justice by 3- to 5-year-old Tibetan children

We asked whether young children raised in an environment strongly promoting compassion for others, as in the case of Tibetan Buddhism, would show less proclivity toward self-maximizing in sharing. We replicated the procedure of Rochat et al. with a group of 3- and 5-year-old Tibetan children living in exile and attending a traditional Buddhist school where the Dalai Lama resides. We report that Tibetan children, like children of seven other cultures, start from a marked self-maximizing propensity at 3 years of age, becoming significantly more fair by 5 years. These data confirm that the developing sense of equity by young children is comparable in the context of a compassion-based culture.PostprintPeer reviewe

Proxys Internet avancés

Since the 90's, the Internet has tremendously evolved in terms of number and diversity of available services. In this trend, proxies are playing a central role and are spread all over the net. Today, the only functionality of proxies is to speed content access through caching only considering statistics based on use made by a user group, all together. Nowadays, evolutions are focusing on two main trends: specific infrastructures that do not comply anymore with the Web universality or individual applications like filtering. We propose to make proxies evolve from simple passive intermediaries to an open platform with advanced caching functionalities stressing on maintaining a high level of compatibility with existing paradigms. We ground our developments on two qualities already available in proxies, widely spread over the Net: the privileged position (plesiocentrism) within the network infrastructures and the perceptivity we extend to new dimensions, more specifically semantic (engnose). In a first step, we elaborate a new Web resources indexation binding to the documents a semantic space, based on the absolute position defined from the URL and a relative position defined with the links that connect those resources. We extend the usage statistics to those new dimensions to build up a topological space that take into account the localization of the documents and the user browsing into that space. We present algorithms and functionalities to build, maintain and take advantage of this topology. With the aim of accelerating web browsing, we use this statistical space to implement a prefetching system based on Markov's model. To extend the proxy perceptivity upstream to the users, we propose a mechanism to maintain a session, based on proxy-cookies. Therefore, we propose two new HTTP directives similar to those used for cookies. This paradigm also allows us to install personalized services with the support of the interaction concept and user profile. This last one allows us to tackle with mobility problems and to install proxies independently of physical network infrastructures. In a second move, we study how the proxy could take into account new dimensions in the semantic web and ontology context. The new technologies emerging like XML and annotations bring new information. That information can easily be processed by a computer system. As for the annotations, they considerably enrich the available informations in the proxy's perception through the classification or resources in ontology. We underline the opportunity for proxys, regarding their situation, to integrate functionalities of annotation server. We demonstrate what can be acquired that way and advantages to be won with the engnose definition as a new proxy quality that become perceptive to web disseminated knowledge. We present a new cache management based on virtual multi-level cache. We present an algorithm able to switch automatically to the correct domain regarding the ontological value of currently visited resources. Last, to demonstrate the validity of our propositions, we define the I3 platform (Intelligent Interactive Intermediaries): an architecture that supports all the various mechanisms presented above, but preserving integration with a minimum of impact on existing infrastructures. We define the concept of proxlet that is an intermediary agent generalization and allow the development of new user services. We demonstrate the value of our proposition by presenting opportunities brought by our platform. We take advantage of the interaction allowed by the session concept to implement functionalities also made possible by an advanced cache model based on topology, semantic and ontology. This platform allows the implementation of services such as browsing help, mobility filtering and service integration