Judgement of Transport Security, Risk Sensitivity and Travel Mode Use in Urban Areas

The current study aims to examine judgement of security in public transport and, more specifically, the role of the priority of security and risk sensitivity in the use of public travel modes versus car among an urban public. The results are based on a self-completion questionnaire survey conducted among residents above 18 years of age in the six most urbanised areas in Norway (n = 1043). The respondents were randomly obtained from the Norwegian population registry. The results showed that priority of security as well as risk sensitivity was significant predictors of travel mode use among an urban public when demographic factors were controlled for. In studies carried out previously, risk sensitivity was conceived to be a predictor of risk perception. The large proportion of explained variance in perceived risk reported in previous studies could be partly due to the use of risk sensitivity as a predictor variable, which is coincident with the criterion variable. It is suggested that the risk perception concept could be replaced with perceived risk evaluations, which cover the intuitive cognitive judgements of probability of an event with negative consequences as well as the severity of consequences if such an event takes place. It is proposed that risk sensitivity could be the main concept, covering the perceived risk evaluations, including intuitive judgments of probability as well as severity of consequences across a set of risk sources.

What is ‘open-earedness’, and how can it be measured?

Recent years have seen some fundamental changes in the study of responses to music: the growth of neuroscientific approaches, in particular, is throwing new light on the role of imagination, affect and emotion. One focus has been on the nature of musical preferences in relation to other affective and cognitive judgements, and another has been on the issue of changes in musical preference across the lifespan. One explanatory concept which has proved useful in this respect is that of ‘open-earedness’, first formulated by Hargreaves in the suggestion that ‘younger children may be more “open-eared” to forms of music regarded by adults as unconventional; their responses may show less evidence of acculturation to normative standards of good taste than those of older subjects’. Louven recently published a critique of the ways in which this concept has been operationalized in subsequent research, proposing his own definition. In this paper we take a broad ranging view of ‘open-earedness’, proposing four different possible definitions, and ways in which these can be operationalized and measured. We use some data from a new test of preferences for musical genres and clips to test some of these operationalizations: the results suggest that the similarities between these four definitions are probably greater than the differences between them, but that they nevertheless provide a richer and more nuanced concept of open-earedness than hitherto.

Systematicity and Symbolisation in Kant's Deduction of Judgements of Taste

Kant's characterisation of judgements of taste, as expressing a disinterested pleasure and as being independent of concepts, defines the framework in which he attempts to justify or ‘deduce’ their claim to universal and necessary validity. In §38 of the Critique of Judgement, the ‘official’ deduction, the problem is to find a balance between the aim of grounding the judgements' validity on their relation to cognition and the danger of collapsing these aesthetic judgements into cognitive ones. Apparently, Kant's intention is to show that even though judgements of taste are not cognitive judgements, they are close enough to the conditions employed in all cognition to legitimize their claim to universal validity. Yet, in §59 of the Dialectic Kant seems to attempt another justification, this time by relating judgements of taste to morality. The problem now is to specify this relation so as to avoid reducing aesthetic to moral judgements. The justificatory projects in §38 and §59 are usually considered to be quite different. My aim in this paper is to clarify the relation between the two projects on the basis of an interpretation of what the pleasurable state of mind consists in, that is, the free harmonious play of the faculties in which everyone ought to share in the presence of beautiful objects. In the light of this interpretation I shall give a reconstruction of the argument of §38 which reveals its connection and contrast with §59.

Political Parties and Confidence in Government: A Comparison of Norway, Sweden and the United States

Comparable survey data from Norway, Sweden and the United States are used to examine trends in political trust for the period 1964–86. During the early part of that period trust declined in all three countries; later it recovered for Norway but continued to plummet in Sweden and the United States. Three major features of the party system are hypothesized to explain the difference in these trends for the three countries. These features are: the structural aspects of the party system; the public's cognitive judgements of the parties as representatives of the policy interests; and the possibility that a negative rejection of political parties as undesirable institutions may spill over to citizen evaluations of government more generally.