Goals, Plans, and Action Models

The messages spoken in everyday conversation are influenced by participants’ goals. Interpersonal scholars have distinguished two types of goals thought to influence the wording of a message: instrumental goals (primary goals) and secondary goals. An instrumental goal is related to a speaker’s primary reason for designing the message. Instrumental goals would include goals such as to ask for a favor, seek information, apologize, give advice, or change the other person’s opinion. Secondary goals pertain to more general concerns. They include goals such as to manage one’s impression, avoid offending the hearer, and act consistently with one’s values. The ability to design a message that pursues an instrumental goal effectively while also addressing (or at least not conflicting with) relevant secondary goals is associated with greater communication competence. Considerable research has sought to explain differences in the ability to design messages that effectively address multiple goals. One such factor appears to be the extent to which a speaker can adapt the language of a message to the communication-relevant features of a specific situation or hearer. If a speaker’s primary goal is to seek a favor, relevant situation features may include the speaker’s right to ask, expected resistance, and qualities of the speaker–hearer relationship. A second behavior associated with the ability to produce multiple-goal messages is suggested by research on cognitive editing. The latter research indicates that the likelihood of producing a message that addresses relevant secondary goals will sometimes depend upon whether a speaker becomes aware, prior to speaking, that a planned message could have an unwanted outcome (e.g., the message may offend the hearer). When such outcomes are anticipated in advance, the message may be left unspoken or edited prior to speaking. The ability to produce a message that achieves a speaker’s goals may also depend on the type of planning that precedes the design of a message. The plan-based theory of strategic communication views plans as hierarchical structures that specify goals and actions at different levels of specificity. The theory holds that a person pursuing a goal first tries to retrieve from memory a preexisting plan that could be modified for the current situation. When that is not possible, speakers must formulate a novel plan. Research employing indicants of fluency suggests that formulating a novel plan (which requires changes at a higher, more abstract level of a plan) makes heavier demands on limited capacity than does modifying an existing plan at a lower level of the hierarchy (e.g., speaking more slowly). Insight into how persons plan what to say has also come from research on imagined interactions, conflict management, anticipating obstacles to compliance, and verbal disagreement tasks. In an effort to better understand the design of messages in interpersonal settings, a number of scholars have proposed models of the cognitive processes and structures thought to be involved in designing, editing, and producing such messages. Action models of this sort, which generate testable hypotheses, draw from work in artificial intelligence, cognitive models of language production, and research on social cognition. Three such models are action assembly theory, the cognitive rules model, and the implicit rules model.

Altruistic Punishment: The Golden Keystone of Human Cooperation and Social Stability?

‘Altruistic punishment’ (i.e., costly punishment that serves no instrumental goal for the punisher) could serve, as suggested by the pertinent experimental literature, as a powerful enforcer of social norms. This paper discusses foundations, extensions, and, in particular, limits and open questions of this concept-and it does so mostly based on experimental evidence provided by the author. Inter alia, the paper relates the (standard) literature on negative emotions as a trigger of second party punishment to more recent experimental findings on the phenomenon of ‘spontaneous cooperation’ and ‘spontaneous punishment’ and demonstrates its (tight) emotional basis. Furthermore, the paper discusses the potential for free riding on altruistic punishment. While providing valuable insights into the understanding of social order, ‘altruistic punishment’ is thus not the golden keystone of social stability.

Motivated cognition, conspiratorial epistemology, and bullshit: A model of post-factual political discourse

We propose a definition of post-factual political discourse as a discursive attitude that consists of three components: Motivated reasoning, conspiratorial epistemology, and bullshit. Motivated reasoning means that any piece of new information will never weaken pre-existing beliefs; it is a form of confirmation bias. Conspiratorial epistemology occurs when information that contradicts pre-existing beliefs is automatically dismissed because it was allegedly manufactured by some conspiracy; evidence for that conspiracy and for the falsity of the dismissed information is not presented. Bullshit is a speach act with which the speaker aims to achieve only some instrumental goal; whether the uttered speech act is true or not is of no consequence to the speaker. Post-factual political discourse is a challenge for democracy because it erodes the epistemic dimension of democracy (thereby making it difficult, if not impossible to identify and solve societal problems) and because it erodes bridging social capital (thereby increasing polarization and tribalization).

How to Find It

When we help someone in need, we also benefit. If benefiting the person in need is an instrumental goal on the way to the ultimate goal of getting some self-benefit, our motivation is egoistic. If benefiting the person in need is the ultimate goal and the resultant self-benefits are unintended consequences, our motivation is altruistic. To search for such altruism, a four-step research strategy is proposed: The first step is to identify a possible source of altruistic motivation. The most likely source is empathic concern. The second, to identify the plausible egoistic ultimate goal or goals from this source. The prime egoistic suspect is removing our empathic concern. The third is to vary the situation so that either the altruistic goal or the egoistic goal, but not both, can be better reached without having to help. Experiments make this possible. The fourth, to see whether this variation reduces helping.

Probability theory and epistemology

The primary uses of probability in epistemology are to measure degrees of belief and to formulate conditions for rational belief and rational change of belief. The degree of belief a person has in a proposition A is a measure of their willingness to act on A to obtain satisfaction of their preferences. According to probabilistic epistemology, sometimes called ‘Bayesian epistemology’, an ideally rational person’s degrees of belief satisfy the axioms of probability. For example, their degrees of belief in A and -A must sum to 1. The most important condition on changing degrees of belief given new evidence is called ‘conditionalization’. According to this, upon acquiring evidence E a rational person will change their degree of belief assigned to A to the conditional probability of A given E. Roughly, this rule says that the change should be minimal while accommodating the new evidence. There are arguments, ‘Dutch book arguments’, that are claimed to demonstrate that failure to satisfy these conditions makes a person who acts on their degrees of belief liable to perform actions that necessarily frustrate their preferences. Radical Bayesian epistemologists claim that rationality is completely characterized by these conditions. A more moderate view is that Bayesian conditions should be supplemented by other conditions specifying rational degrees of belief. Support for Bayesian epistemology comes from the fact that various aspects of scientific method can be grounded in satisfaction of Bayesian conditions. Further, it can be shown that there is a close connection between having true belief as an instrumental goal and satisfaction of the Bayesian conditions. Some critics of Bayesian epistemology reject the probabilistic conditions on rationality as unrealistic. They say that people do not have precise degrees of belief and even if they did it would not be possible in general to satisfy the conditions. Some go further and reject the conditions themselves. Others claim that the conditions are much too weak to capture rationality and that in fact almost any reasoning can be characterized so as to satisfy them. The extent to which Bayesian epistemology contributes to traditional epistemological concerns of characterizing knowledge and methods for obtaining knowledge is controversial.

Aging and Performance of Home Tasks

Household behaviors must be understood in terms of a hierarchy of behavioral competence within which complexity determines the location of behaviors that can be evaluated in terms of basic health and social-normative criteria. Older people's household behaviors as well as higher-order behaviors are schematized in terms of physical and instrumental activities of daily living (ADL). Data on impairment rates for ADLs and time budget studies are cited to emphasize the importance of the home environment. Other behaviors that represent needs for autonomy, support, and proactivity are discussed, as are research needs, both for development of measures of microbehaviors and for the study of behaviors designed to achieve alternative routes to an instrumental goal whose preferred means of attainment has been disturbed by physical impairment.