Evidence and Sensibility

This chapter derives from a book symposium on Doris’ (2002), Lack of Character, and responds to commentary by Annas, Arplay, and Solomon. The responses defend Doris’ situationist skepticism about character from a variety of objections. Among the topics considered are: standards of evidence in moral psychology, the role of empirical considerations in normative thought, the role of traits in psychological explanation, the appropriate conceptualization of character, the role of character in interpersonal relationships, and the relation of culture and character.

Social capital and perceived tenure security of informal housing: Evidence from Beijing, China

Perceived tenure security is recognised to affect the socioeconomic behaviours and wellbeing of informal settlement dwellers. The provision of perceived tenure security is centred on the developmental agenda as a key policy alternative of tenure legalisation. Despite the consensus about its importance, the reason perceived tenure security is different amongst dwellers remains unclear. To fill this gap, we introduce social capital theory to understand the formation of and disparity in perceived tenure security. The hypotheses are that dwellers living in informal settlements with higher collective social capital and having higher individual social capital tend to feel more secure on their tenure because of higher backing power attained to deter the threats of eviction. We examine the hypotheses using a structural equation model approach to a dataset collected from three small property rights housing communities, which are emerging informal settlements in urban China. Modelling results support our hypotheses and suggest that female, low-income and migrant dwellers tend to feel less secure on their tenure because of the lack of social capital to deter the threats to their tenure. This study contributes to a new sociological explanation for the disparity in perceived tenure security other than the established psychological explanation. Empirically, this study contributes to the understanding of the rapid development of small property rights housing developments in China from the perspective of how dwellers develop security on informal tenure.

Attributes of Soviet Childhood: History of Transformation (On the Example of Illustrative Material Children’s Magazines 1920–1990s)

The article is analyzes the images of the children's characteristics on illustrations for children’s magazines of the Soviet Union in the context of three periods: the period of experiments (1920–1930), military-sports period (1930–1950) and familytime (1950–1980). The characteristics of kids, in this case, are considered not only as certain features that are inherent for them on the images but also wider – as a child’s symbol that indicates the attitude towards childhood in certain social, cultural and political conditions. Since the visual children’s culture, and especially children’s media, are a matter of high interest now, this study and its main achievements, including contribution to the establishing correlation of the visual representation of children's characteristics and the cultural content of childhood of a certain era, have wide applicability. The article presents a cultural-semantic and socio-psychological explanation of the visual component of children’s illustrated periodicals in the conclusion section.

The Blame Game: Narratives of Electoral Defeat and Party Change. The Case of Four Polish Political Parties

The purpose of the article is to present party elites’ narratives about electoral defeat in order to identify characteristics of the narratives which may inhibit or facilitate party change. The opening sections explain theoretical approach and methodology adopted for the research. The next paragraphs reconstruct and compare narratives of four Polish political parties, which experienced electoral defeat in 2011 and 2015 parliamentary elections, and give a psychological explanation for their emergence. As a result, four narrative strategies were identified of which only one seems to have potential to facilitate party change. Its distinctive feature is internalization of blame, whereas the others reveal tendency to denial or personalize and externalize blame.

Consumers Buying Behaviour and Challenges Faced by Consumers During COVID-19 Pandemic Regarding FMCG Products ( During Indian Lockdown)

Pandemics are the imminent health challenges for consumers whereby fear and panic are integral human responses historically. Panic behavior during pandemic is an expected response consumer threatens the ability to cope and destroy the existing balance in life. Consumers develop much-unexplained behavior which differs from region to region, culture to culture. Panic buying / increased buying behavior has been observed during public health emergencies since the ancient period. However, the exact psychological explanation responsible for it has not sought systematically. Therefore, the study is to intend a thrust to identify the possible psychological explanations behind the consumer buying behavior during pandemics. A perception of scarcity is strongly linked with the consumer buying behavior during pandemics, and collecting & saving behaviors increases if the scarcity develops for the immediate necessaries. It also creates a feeling of insecurity which in turn activates another mechanism to collect things. Panic buying also has been linked with perceived feeling of insecurity and instability of certain situations. Furthermore, supply disruption, a condition where normal product supply in supply chain interrupted, has been frequently observed during a disaster or other unwanted calamities. This also led to a feeling of insecurity. The objective of study is to analyze how pandemic affect consumer buying pattern and sentiments.

Item Characteristic Curve Asymmetry: A Better Way to Accommodate Slips and Guesses Than a Four-Parameter Model?

Four-parameter models have received increasing psychometric attention in recent years, as a reduced upper asymptote for item characteristic curves can be appealing for measurement applications such as adaptive testing and person-fit assessment. However, applications can be challenging due to the large number of parameters in the model. In this article, we demonstrate in the context of mathematics assessments how the slip and guess parameters of a four-parameter model may often be empirically related. This observation also has a psychological explanation to the extent that both asymptote parameters may be manifestations of a single item complexity characteristic. The relationship between lower and upper asymptotes motivates the consideration of an asymmetric item response theory model as a three-parameter alternative to the four-parameter model. Using actual response data from mathematics multiple-choice tests, we demonstrate the empirical superiority of a three-parameter asymmetric model in several standardized tests of mathematics. To the extent that a model of asymmetry ultimately portrays slips and guesses not as purely random but rather as proficiency-related phenomena, we argue that the asymmetric approach may also have greater psychological plausibility.

Predictive modeling of religiosity, prosociality, and moralizing in 295,000 individuals from European and non-European populations

Why do moral religions exist? An influential psychological explanation is that religious beliefs in supernatural punishment is cultural group adaptation enhancing prosocial attitudes and thereby large-scale cooperation. An alternative explanation is that religiosity is an individual strategy that results from high level of mistrust and the need for individuals to control others’ behaviors through moralizing. Existing evidence is mixed but most works are limited by sample size and generalizability issues. The present study overcomes these limitations by applying k-fold cross-validation on multivariate modeling of data from >295,000 individuals in 108 countries of the World Values Surveys and the European Value Study. First, this methodology reveals no evidence that European and non-European religious people invest more in collective actions and are more trustful of unrelated conspecifics. Instead, the individuals’ level of religiosity is found to be weakly but positively associated with social mistrust and negatively associated with the production of behaviors, which benefit unrelated members of the large-scale community. Second, our models show that individual variation in religiosity is well explained by the interaction of increased levels of social mistrust and increased needs to moralize other people’s sexual behaviors. Finally, stratified k-fold cross-validation demonstrates that the structures of these association patterns are robust to sampling variability and reliable enough to generalize to out-of-sample data.

Theory Before the Test: How to Build High-Verisimilitude Explanatory Theories in Psychological Science

Drawing on the philosophy of psychological explanation, we suggest that psychological science, by focusing on effects, may lose sight of its primary explananda: psychological capacities. We revisit Marr’s levels-of-analysis framework, which has been remarkably productive and useful for cognitive psychological explanation. We discuss ways in which Marr’s framework may be extended to other areas of psychology, such as social, developmental, and evolutionary psychology, bringing new benefits to these fields. We then show how theoretical analyses can endow a theory with minimal plausibility even before contact with empirical data: We call this the theoretical cycle. Finally, we explain how our proposal may contribute to addressing critical issues in psychological science, including how to leverage effects to understand capacities better.

Critical Review: Emotion: A Religio-Psychological Explanation Of Human Emotions In The Qur’an From Darwis Hude

The dissertation written by M. Darwis Hude entitled "Human Emotions in the Qur’an: Study through a Psychological Approach" is an effort to explore and formulate the concept of emotions that exist in the Qur’an. This study aims to conduct a critical review of the work of Darwis Hude in order to develop a scientific concept, particularly on the study of emotions in the Qur’an. This research is a qualitative research with a critical review study method which aims to evaluate, review, interpret and analyze the contents of an article or book by considering the strengths and the weaknesses of a work. The results of the study found that Hude's dissertation which is explicitly psychological and theological in nature becomes the spirit of studying the essence and noble values ​​of the Qur’an. In terms of the preparation and writing of the book, it is quite interesting to study but it needs a comprehensive development with other branches of science. In addition, Hude in explaining verses related to emotions tends not to use the interpretation or views of the cleric. In terms of number of pages, there are several chapters that are less efficient but the last two chapters are quite ideal for important discussions. Then in terms of references Hude has balanced using relevant references, including books. It's just that the views of the clerics or their interpretations are less emphasized.

Rethinking creative intelligence: comparative psychology and the concept of creativity

The concept of creativity is a central one in folk psychological explanation and has long been prominent in philosophical debates about the nature of art, genius, and the imagination. The scientific investigation of creativity in humans is also well established, and there has been increasing interest in the question of whether the concept can be rigorously applied to non-human animals. In this paper, I argue that such applications face serious challenges of both a conceptual and methodological character, reflecting deep controversies within both philosophy and psychology concerning how to define and apply the concept of creativity. After providing a brief review of some of the leading theories of creativity (Section 2) and discussing some of the strongest putative cases of creative intelligence in non-human animals (Section 3), I examine some of the more worrisome difficulties faced by attempts to use these theories to answer the question of whether animals are truly creative (Section 4). I conclude by examining how we might overcome them, and suggest that one approach worth taking seriously is to adopt what I term a Strong Rejectionist view of creativity, eschewing use of the term entirely in the scientific study of comparative cognition.