ABSTRACTAfter co-occurrence of a neutral conditioned stimulus with an affective unconditioned stimulus, the evaluation of the CS acquires the US valence. This effect disappears when infor...

The Impacts of Lasting Occupation examines the effects that Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories have had on Israeli society. The consequences of occupation are evident in all aspects of Israeli life, including its political, social, legal, economic, cultural, and psychological spheres.

This collection, published in 1988, brings an innovative perspective to research in social cognition.

In our target article, we proposed that curiosity and creativity are both manifestations of the same novelty-seeking process. We received 29 commentaries from diverse disciplines that add insights to our initial proposal. These commentaries ultimately expanded and supplemented our model. Here we draw attention to five central practical and theoretical issues that were raised by the commentators: (1) The complex construct of novelty and associated concepts; (2) the underlying subsystems and possible mechanisms; (3) the different pathways and subtypes of curiosity (...) and creativity; (4) creativity and curiosity “in the wild”; (5) the possible link(s) between creativity and curiosity. (shrink)

Need for closure and cognitive structuring among younger and older adults The paper reported two correlational studies. The aim of the Study 1 was to examine the hypothesis that age moderates the relationship between need for closure and cognitive structuring. Results of the study revealed that aging with increased need for closure was associated with better recognition of irrelevant information than schema-relevant items, in testing hypotheses about the target person. These findings are interpreted as demonstrating the age-associated failure of cognitive (...) abilities, reducing tendency to behave according to the level of epistemic motivation. The results of Study 2 demonstrated that older participants are characterized by higher NFC but by lower EFNC than young participants. These results are consistent with the conclusion that the negative relationships between NFC and cognitive structuring demonstrated by the older participants in Study 1 can be attributed to their lower level of EFNC. (shrink)

Curiosity and creativity are central pillars of human growth and invention. Although they have been studied extensively in isolation, the relationship between them has not yet been established. We propose that both curiosity and creativity emanate from the same mechanism of novelty seeking. We first present a synthesis showing that curiosity and creativity are affected similarly by a number of key cognitive faculties such as memory, cognitive control, attention, and reward. We then review empirical evidence from neuroscience research, indicating that (...) the same brain regions are involved in both curiosity and creativity, focusing on the interplay between three major brain networks: the default mode network, the salience network, and the executive control network. After substantiating the link between curiosity and creativity, we propose a novelty-seeking model (NSM) that underlies them and suggests that the manifestation of the NSM is governed by one's state of mind. (shrink)

Influenza is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Although vaccination is an efficient means of prevention, low rates of vaccination are reported periodically. The study aimed to examine factors affecting acceptance of nurses' recommendations to take or avoid influenza vaccination. Study design was quasi‐experimental with a 2 × 2 between subjects design: two variables were manipulated and two were not. The research variables were expertise (of nurses and respondents), type of recommendation (to vaccinate or not) and respondents' a‐priori intention (...) to vaccinate. Data were collected from 374 respondents. The study was scenario based, differing in nurse expertise and type of recommendation. After each scenario, the respondents were requested to indicate their a‐priori intention to vaccinate and to complete questionnaires on epistemic authority (EA) attributed to the nurse, and of self‐epistemic authority (SEA). There is a general tendency to avoid vaccination. Intention to vaccinate correlated positively with nurse recommendations, respondent a‐priori intention and nurse expertise. A significant three‐way interaction between respondents' SEA, nurse recommendations and nurse expertise was found. The nurse's recommendation has the strongest effect when the nurse is an expert and the respondent perceives him/herself as having high self‐EA. The results highlight the importance of patients' sense of knowledge for assuring their co‐operation and compliance with medical recommendations. (shrink)

Volume 34, Issue 8, December 2020, Page 1690-1703.

Members of societies involved in an intractable conflict usually consider costs that stem from the continuation of the conflict as unavoidable and even justify for their collective existence. This perception is well-anchored in widely shared conflict-supporting narratives that motivate them to avoid information that challenges their views about the conflict. However, since providing information about such major costs as a method for moderating conflict-related views has not been receiving much attention, in this research, we explore this venue. We examine what (...) kind of costs, and under what conditions, exposure to major costs of a conflict affects openness to information and conciliatory attitudes among Israeli Jews in the context of the intractable Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Study 1 revealed that interventions based on messages providing information on mental health cost, economic cost, and cost of the conflict to Israeli democracy had no significant effect on perceptions of the participants of these prices, openness to new information about the conflict, or support for conciliatory policies. However, the existing perceptions that participants had about the cost of the conflict to Israeli democracy were positively associated with openness to alternative information about the conflict and support for conciliatory policies. Therefore, in Study 2, we tested whether providing information about future potential costs to the two fundamental characteristics of Israel, a democracy or a Jewish state, created by the continuation of the conflict, will induce attitude change regarding the conflict. The results indicate that information on the future cost to the democratic identity of Israel significantly affected the attitude of the participants regarding the conflict, while the effect was moderated by the level of religiosity. For secular participants, this manipulation created more openness to alternative information about the conflict and increased support for conciliatory policies, but for religious participants, it backfired. We discuss implications for the role of information about losses and the relationship between religiosity and attitudes regarding democracy and conflict. (shrink)

The main goal of our study was to investigate the role of insight into one’s own biases in the process of hypothesis validation in accordance to the two fundamental social perception domains on the example of confirmation bias. The study was conducted on a group of 593 participants with the use of a confirmation bias procedure, a free recall procedure and the Metacognitive Self scale. We manipulated with the domain and the value of information given to the respondents. We suspected (...) that individuals with a high metacognitive self, in opposition to low metacognitive self ones, would not process the given information according to the two fundamental social perception domains. The results verified the existence of an interaction effect of the metacognitive self and the domain of the information given about a perceived person on the susceptibility to follow the confirmation bias. Contrary to the low metacognitive self individuals, who show a higher tendency for the confirmation bias within the competence than the community domain, persons with a high insight into their own biases express the same level of confirmation bias in no respect to the domain of the information. The value of the information has no significant influence. (shrink)

BARNOY S, OFRA L and BAR‐TAL Y. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 128–133 [Epub ahead of print]What makes patients perceive their health care worker as an epistemic authority?Health care workers’ (HCW) perceived epistemic authority (EA) may have an effect on patient decision‐making and compliance. The present study investigated the hypotheses that higher EA is attributed to staff perceived to be experts; to physicians rather than nurses; to HCWs who recommend taking a test more than to the ones who make no recommendation. (...) The study was based on a factorial 2 × 2 × 2 within‐between subjects design. The questionnaire presented four scenarios, each illustrating a HCW presenting information on a devastating genetic disease. The three variables manipulated were: HCW expertise, HCW role, and making a recommendation or not. After each scenario participants were asked questions about the EA they attributed to the HCW in the scenario. The results show main effects for perceived expertise and recommendation/no recommendation on the level of EA attributed. Expert nurses were judged to have the same high EA as expert physicians. But expert physicians who recommended taking a test were judged as having significantly higher EA than expert physicians who made no recommendation. Among nurses who made no recommendation, expert nurses were evaluated as having significantly higher EA than novices. Since expert nurses were perceived to have equal expertise as expert physicians, it follows that information given by both nurses and physicians can reduce patient uncertainty. (shrink)

The goal of this experimental project was to investigate lay peoples’ perceptions of epistemic authority (EA) in the field of finance. EA is defined as the extent to which a source of information is treated as evidence for judgments independently of its objective expertise and based on subjective beliefs. Previous research suggested that EA evaluations are biased and that lay people tend to ascribe higher EA to experts who advise action (in the case of medical experts) or confirm clients’ expectations (...) (in the case of politicians). However, there has been no research into biases in lay evaluations of financial experts and this project is aimed to fill this gap. Experiment 1 showed that lay people tended to ascribe greater authority to financial consultants who gave more active advice to clients considering taking out a mortgage. Experiment 2 confirmed the action advice effect found in Experiment 1. However, the outcomes of Experiments 2 and – particularly – 3 suggested that this bias might also be due to clients’ desire to confirm their own opinions. Experiment 2 showed that the action advice effect was moderated by clients’ own opinions on taking loans. Lay people ascribed the greatest EA to the advisor in the scenario in which he advised taking action and where this coincided with the client’s positive opinion on the advisability of taking out a loan. In Experiment 3 only participants with a positive opinion on the financial product ascribed greater authority to experts who recommended it; participants whose opinion was negative tended to rate consultants who advised rejecting the product more highly. To conclude, these three experiments revealed that lay people ascribe higher EA to financial consultants who advise action rather than maintenance of the status quo, but this effect is limited by confirmation bias: when the client’s a priori opinion is salient, greater authority is ascribed to experts whose advice confirms it. In this sense, results presented in the present paper suggest that the action advice effect might be also interpreted as a specific manifestation of confirmation bias. (shrink)

Peacemaking is especially challenging in situations of intractable conflict. Collective narratives in this context contribute to coping with challenges societies face, but also fuel conflict continuation. We introduce the Informative Process Model, proposing that informing individuals about the socio-psychological processes through which conflict-supporting narratives develop, and suggesting that they can change via comparison to similar conflicts resolved peacefully, can facilitate unfreezing and change in attitudes. Study 1 established associations between awareness of conflict costs and conflict-supporting narratives, belief in the possibility (...) of resolving the conflict peacefully and support for pursuing peace among Israeli-Jews and Palestinians. Studies 2 and 3 found that exposure to IPM-based original videos led Israeli-Jews to deliberation of the information presented, predicting acceptance of the IPM-based message, which, in turn, predicted support for negotiations. Study 3 also found similar effects across IPM-based messages focusing on different conflict-supporting themes. We discuss the implications to attitude change in intractable conflicts. (shrink)

The years following Israel’s founding were formative ones for the development of philosophy as an academic discipline in this country. During this period, the distinction between philosophy seen as contiguous with the humanities and social sciences, and philosophy seen as adjacent to the natural and exact sciences began to make its presence felt in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This distinction, which was manifest in the curriculum, was by no means unique to the Hebrew University, but reflected the broader bifurcation (...) between two schools of Western philosophy in the twentieth century. In English-speaking countries, it is generally referred to as the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. What was special about the situation at the Hebrew University, however, was that the split manifested itself in a rather small department, being embodied, basically, in one prominent representative of each school – Nathan Rotenstreich and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. This article will focus on some key aspects of the lives and thought of Rotenstreich and Bar-Hillel. It will address their philosophical maturation as S.H. Bergmann’s students, their views on the goals of twentieth-century philosophy, on the philosopher’s role in public life, and the circumstances under which they started teaching in Jerusalem right after the founding of the State of Israel. (shrink)

This paper investigates the phenomena of de- and rehumanization. Daniel Bar-Tal has identified different societal activities and beliefs common in situations of protracted conflict, of which dehumanization is one. The reversal of dehumanization, namely rehumanization, is necessary in order to change a society from an ethos of conflict, to one with an ethos of peace. As the activity of dehumanization is complex, in order to understand how rehumanization can occur, the phenomenon of dehumanization is analyzed, and different types of dehumanization (...) discussed. The paper finally proposes a dialectical process of rehumanization utilizing imaginative understanding, with a focus on the interplay between treatment and perception. ‘All oppressive regimes become stronger through the degradation of the oppressed.’ Simone de Beauvoir (1962: p. 101). (shrink)

This paper draws attention to an increasingly common method of using computer simulations to establish evidential standards in physics. By simulating an actual detection procedure on a computer, physicists produce patterns of data (‘signatures’) that are expected to be observed if a sought-after phenomenon is present. Claims to detect the phenomenon are evaluated by comparing such simulated signatures with actual data. Here I provide a justification for this practice by showing how computer simulations establish the reliability of detection procedures. I (...) argue that this use of computer simulation undermines two fundamental tenets of the Bogen–Woodward account of evidential reasoning. Contrary to Bogen and Woodward’s view, computer-simulated signatures rely on ‘downward’ inferences from phenomena to data. Furthermore, these simulations establish the reliability of experimental setups without physically interacting with the apparatus. I illustrate my claims with a study of the recent detection of the superfluid-to-Mott-insulator phase transition in ultracold atomic gases. (shrink)

There is now considerable evidence that human sentence processing is expectation based: As people read a sentence, they use their statistical experience with their language to generate predictions about upcoming syntactic structure. This study examines how sentence processing is affected by readers' uncertainty about those expectations. In a self-paced reading study, we use lexical subcategorization distributions to factorially manipulate both the strength of expectations and the uncertainty about them. We compare two types of uncertainty: uncertainty about the verb's complement, reflecting (...) the next prediction step; and uncertainty about the full sentence, reflecting an unbounded number of prediction steps. We find that uncertainty about the full structure, but not about the next step, was a significant predictor of processing difficulty: Greater reduction in uncertainty was correlated with increased reading times. We additionally replicated previously observed effects of expectation violation, orthogonal to the effect of uncertainty. This suggests that both surprisal and uncertainty affect human RTs. We discuss the consequences for theories of sentence comprehension. (shrink)

a single life-span. Philosophers, then, do not see more or know more, and they do not see less or know less. They aim to see less detail and more of the abstract. Their details, if you like, are abstractions. Walking on God’s earth as a pedestrian, as a farmer working his fields or as a passer-by, one’s picture of one’s surroundings is every bit as intelligent as that of the pilot riding the sky. The views of the field are radically (...) different, however. One sees only a specific field and in all lively detail: the exact pattern of the land, or even the exact outline of a given leaf, grasshopper, grain of sand even. Acquaintance with minute detail is not without its price: details may stand in the way of conjuring the big picture. It may be difficult to compare whichever field one happens to be in with far off fields, with respect to their size or shape or any other quality. One may wish to inquire if far off fields were already planted, harvested, or even if they exist. A pedestrian may find it hard or even impossible to do so. The pedestrian view contains fine points that the pilot’s map never would, but it does not necessarily contain more information, for it lacks the general context. After all, there are only so many items that one can observe and account for at a single glance, a single map, a single book, a single life-span. (shrink)

Dorit Bar-On develops and defends a novel view of avowals and self-knowledge. Drawing on resources from the philosophy of language, the theory of action, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, she offers original and systematic answers to many long-standing questions concerning our ability to know our own minds. We are all very good at telling what states of mind we are in at a given moment. When it comes to our own present states of mind, what we say goes; an (...) avowal such as "I'm feeling so anxious" or "I'm thinking about my next trip to Paris," it is typically supposed, tells it like it is. But why is that? Why should what I say about my present mental states carry so much more weight than what others say about them? Why should avowals be more immune to criticism and correction than other claims we make? And if avowals are not based on any evidence or observation, how could they possibly express our knowledge of our own present mental states? Bar-On proposes a Neo-Expressivist view according to which an avowal is an act through which a person directly expresses, rather than merely reports, the very mental condition that the avowal ascribes. She argues that this expressivist idea, coupled with an adequate characterization of expression and a proper separation of the semantics of avowals from their pragmatics and epistemology, explains the special status we assign to avowals. As against many expressivists and their critics, she maintains that such an expressivist explanation is consistent with a non-deflationary view of self-knowledge and a robust realism about mental states. The view that emerges preserves many insights of the most prominent contributors to the subject, while offering a new perspective on our special relationship to our own minds. (shrink)

Davidson’s well-known language skepticism—the claim that there is no such a thing as a language—has recognizably Gricean underpinnings, some of which also underlie his continuity skepticism—the claim that there can be no philosophically illuminating account of the emergence of language and thought. My first aim in this paper is to highlight aspects of the complicated relationship between central Davidsonian and Gricean ideas concerning language. After a brief review of Davidson’s two skeptical claims and their Gricean underpinnings, I provide my own (...) take on how Davidson’s continuity skepticism can be resisted consistently with his rejection of the Gricean priority claim, yet without giving up some of Grice’s own insights regarding the origins of meaning. (shrink)

Contrary to the claim that measurement standards are absolutely accurate by definition, I argue that unit definitions do not completely fix the referents of unit terms. Instead, idealized models play a crucial semantic role in coordinating the theoretical definition of a unit with its multiple concrete realizations. The accuracy of realizations is evaluated by comparing them to each other in light of their respective models. The epistemic credentials of this method are examined and illustrated through an analysis of the contemporary (...) standardization of time. I distinguish among five senses of ‘measurement accuracy’ and clarify how idealizations enable the assessment of accuracy in each sense. (shrink)

The task of explaining language evolution is often presented by leading theorists in explicitly Gricean terms. After a critical evaluation, I present an alternative, non‐Gricean conceptualization of the task. I argue that, while it may be true that nonhuman animals, in contrast to language users, lack the ‘motive to share information’ understoodà laGrice, nonhuman animals nevertheless do express states of mind through complex nonlinguistic behavior. On a proper, non‐Gricean construal of expressive communication, this means that they show to their designated (...) audience (without intentionally telling)—and their designated audience recognizes (without rationally inferring)—both how things are in the world and how things are with them. Recognizing that our nonhuman predecessors were already proficient—though non‐Gricean—sharers of such information would free us to focus on the more tractable problem of explaining how linguistic expressive vehicles came to replace, augment, and transform the nonlinguistic expressive means to which nonhuman animals are consigned. (shrink)

Most theories and hypotheses in psychology are verbal in nature, yet their evaluation overwhelmingly relies on inferential statistical procedures. The validity of the move from qualitative to quantitative analysis depends on the verbal and statistical expressions of a hypothesis being closely aligned – that is, that the two must refer to roughly the same set of hypothetical observations. Here, I argue that many applications of statistical inference in psychology fail to meet this basic condition. Focusing on the most widely used (...) class of model in psychology – the linear mixed model – I explore the consequences of failing to statistically operationalize verbal hypotheses in a way that respects researchers' actual generalization intentions. I demonstrate that although the “random effect” formalism is used pervasively in psychology to model intersubject variability, few researchers accord the same treatment to other variables they clearly intend to generalize over (e.g., stimuli, tasks, or research sites). The under-specification of random effects imposes far stronger constraints on the generalizability of results than most researchers appreciate. Ignoring these constraints can dramatically inflate false-positive rates, and often leads researchers to draw sweeping verbal generalizations that lack a meaningful connection to the statistical quantities they are putatively based on. I argue that failure to take the alignment between verbal and statistical expressions seriously lies at the heart of many of psychology's ongoing problems (e.g., the replication crisis), and conclude with a discussion of several potential avenues for improvement. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The Self-Intimation thesis has it that whatever justificatory status a proposition has, i.e., whether or not we are justified in believing it, we are justified in believing that it has that status. The Infallibility thesis has it that whatever justificatory status we are justified in believing that a proposition has, the proposition in fact has that status. Jointly, Self-Intimation and Infallibility imply that the justificatory status of a proposition closely aligns with the justification we have about that justificatory status. Self-Intimation (...) has two noteworthy implications. First, assuming that we never have sufficient justification for a proposition and for its negation, we can derive Infallibility from Self-Intimation. Interestingly, there seems to be no equivalently simple way to derive Self-Intimation from Infallibility. This asymmetry provides reason for thinking that bottom-level justification rather than top-level justification drives the explanation for why the levels of justification align. Second, Self-Intimation suggests a counterintuitive treatment of information concerning what justificatory status a proposition has. It follows from Self-Intimation that we always have justification for the truth about whether a proposition is justified for us, and therefore, that higher-order evidence could change what we should believe on this matter only by misleading us. This permits forming beliefs about whether a proposition is justified for us without regard to higher-order evidence, and thus reveals a reason for thinking that top-level justification is evidentially inert. (shrink)