Personality and attitude change through normative pressure

Includes bibliographical references.Some implications of the information content of expressed attitudes are discussed, and the literature on attitude change reviewed with this attitude-dimension in mind. 226 Ss responded to a scale measuring attitudes toward Africans, either on an individual basis in writing, or orally under pro- or anti-African normative pressure in an Asch-type situation. The confederates were successively replaced by naive Ss. Extreme attitude change was found, but the personality correlates of change were unclear. A laboratory analogue of the perpetuation of attitudinal norms was successfully provided. These and certain unexpected results are discussed

Your money or your life: Comparing judgements in trolley problems involving economic and emotional Harms, injury and death: Natalie gold et al

There is a long-standing debate in philosophy about whether it is morally permissible to harm one person in order to prevent a greater harm to others and, if not, what is the moral principle underlying the prohibition. Hypothetical moral dilemmas are used in order to probe moral intuitions. Philosophers use them to achieve a reflective equilibrium between intuitions and principles, psychologists to investigate moral decision-making processes. In the dilemmas, the harms that are traded off are almost always deaths. However, the moral principles and psychological processes are supposed to be broader than this, encompassing harms other than death. Further, if the standard pattern of intuitions is preserved in the domain of economic harm, then that would open up the possibility of studying behaviour in trolley problems using the tools of experimental economics. We report the results of two studies designed to test whether the standard patterns of intuitions are preserved when the domain and severity of harm are varied. Our findings show that the difference in moral intuitions between bystander and footbridge scenarios is replicated across different domains and levels of physical and non-physical harm, including economic harms

Explaining Strategic Coordination: Cognitive Hierarchy Theory, Strong Stackelberg Reasoning, and Team Reasoning Author Note

Abstract In common interest games, players generally manage to coordinate their actions on mutually optimal outcomes, but orthodox game theory provides no reason for them to play their individual parts in these seemingly obvious solutions and no justification for choosing the corresponding strategies. A number of theories have been suggested to explain coordination, among the most prominent being versions of cognitive hierarchy theory, theories of team reasoning, and social projection theory (in symmetric games). Each of these theories provides a plausible explanation but is theoretically problematic. An improved theory of strong Stackelberg reasoning avoids these problems and explains coordination among players who care about their co-players' payoffs and who act as though their co-players can anticipate their choices. Two experiments designed to test cognitive hierarchy, team reasoning, and strong Stackelberg theories against one another in games without obvious, payoff-dominant solutions suggest that each of the theories provides part of the explanation. Cognitive hierarchy Level-1 reasoning, facilitated by a heuristic of avoiding the worst payoff, tended to predominate, especially in more complicated games, but strong Stackelberg reasoning occurred quite frequently in the simpler games and team reasoning in both the simpler and the more complicated games. Most players considered two or more of these reasoning processes before choosing their strategies

Cultural differences in responses to real-life and hypothetical trolley problems

Trolley problems have been used in the development of moral theory and the psychological study of moral judgments and behavior. Most of this research has focused on people from the West, with implicit assumptions that moral intuitions should generalize and that moral psychology is universal. However, cultural differences may be associated with differences in moral judgments and behavior. We operationalized a trolley problem in the laboratory, with economic incentives and real-life consequences, and compared British and Chinese samples on moral behavior and judgment. We found that Chinese participants were less willing to sacrifice one person to save five others, and less likely to consider such an action to be right. In a second study using three scenarios, including the standard scenario where lives are threatened by an on-coming train, fewer Chinese than British participants were willing to take action and sacrifice one to save five, and this cultural difference was more pronounced when the consequences were less severe than death

Multi-heuristic strategy choice: Response to Krueger.

Social projection cannot adequately explain coordination in common interest games, and nothing resembling social projection underlies team reasoning or strong Stackelberg reasoning. Although our experiments suggest that cognitive hierarchy Level-1 reasoning was most influential in the games that we investigated, strong Stackelberg reasoning and team reasoning were also used quite frequently by the players

Learning to cooperate without awareness in multiplayer minimal social situations

a b s t r a c t Experimental and Monte Carlo methods were used to test theoretical predictions about adaptive learning of cooperative responses without awareness in minimal social situations-games in which the payoffs to players depend not on their own actions but exclusively on the actions of other group members. In Experiment 1, learning occurred slowly over 200 rounds in a dyadic minimal social situation but not in multiplayer groups. In Experiments 2-4, learning occurred rarely in multiplayer groups, even when players were informed that they were interacting strategically and were allowed to communicate with one another but were not aware of the game's payoff structure. Monte Carlo simulation suggested that players approach minimal social situations using a noisy version of the win-stay, lose-shift decision rule, deviating from the deterministic rule less frequently after rewarding than unrewarding rounds

Ventricular arrhythmias and sudden death in adults after a Mustard operation for transposition of the great arteries

Aims To examine the prevalence of sustained ventricular tachycardia (VT) and sudden death (SD) in adults with atrial repair of transposition of the great arteries (TGA) and to determine associated risk factors. Methods and results In a single-centre review, we studied the outcome of 149 adults (mean age 28 ± 7 years) who had undergone a Mustard operation for TGA. During a mean follow-up of 9 ± 6 years, sustained VT and/or SD occurred in 9% (13/149) of the cohort. Sustained VT/SD was more likely to occur in patients with associated anatomic lesions [hazard ratio (HR) 4.9, 95% CI 1.5-16.0], with NYHA class ≥III (HR 9.8, 95% CI 3.0-31.6) and with an impaired subaortic right ventricular (RV) ejection fraction (EF) (HR 2.2, 95% CI 1.2-4.0 per 10% decrease in EF). There was an inverse correlation between the RV-EF and both age and QRS duration. Patients with a QRS duration ≥140 ms were at highest risk of sustained VT/SD (HR 13.6, 95% CI 2.9-63.4). Atrial tachyarrhythmia was detected in 66 (44%) patients, but was not a statistically significant predictor of sustained VT/SD in our adult population (HR 2.7, 95% CI 0.6-13.0). Conclusion Sustained VT/SD in adults after a Mustard operation for TGA are more common than previously described. Age, systemic ventricular function, and QRS duration are interrelated and are associated with VT/SD. A QRS duration ≥140 ms helps to identify the high risk patien