A comparative survey on perceptions of issues pertaining to nuclear energy was carried out in the United States of America and in France. In each country, 1500 persons responded to a 155 item questionnaire. France was chosen as a significant country for comparison with the USA in the light of the widespread assumption that the French show higher levels of acceptance for nuclear power production on their territory. The results of the study may be unexpected in this regard. Indeed, the level of concern with regard to nuclear power is highly comparable in France and in the USA. An interesting overall tendency of the French is to overestimate various types of risks compared with respondents in the USA. The most significant differences between the populations are those in the levels of trust in authorities and technical experts, and in the feeling of control over health risks. The explanatory power of these socio-cultural factors for the dynamics of acceptance, their implications for risk management and future research directions are considered. (author). 13 refs, 5 figs.
When disaster strikes, compassion fades as the number of victims increases. What causes this compassion fade? We propose that as the number of victims increases, attention to each victim declines, which may help explain compassion fade. In an online experiment, participants (N=452) read a brief story about a recent earthquake in Indonesia with an image showing children who were displaced by the earthquake. After the story, participants made hypothetical donations an organization that provides emergency services to the region. We manipulated the number of children in the image and also the content of the story. Specifically, the image contained 1, 2, or 3 children, and the story contained either statistics of victims and damages in the local region, or not. We used the BubbleView technique to measure visual attention while participants were reading the story and the image. Specifically, the story and the image were initially blurred and participants had to use their cursor to reveal the underlying content via a fovea-like circular area around the mouse. The location of the cursor was tracked as a proxy for visual attention. We found that participants looked less at each child as the number children in the image increased, or when there were statistics in the story compared to no statistics. Importantly, attention sharply declined when the image contained more than one child. In fact, the proportional dwell time per child decreased by 26% from one child to two children, which corresponds to a 12% drop in donations. These results suggest that compassion fade may be driven by divided attention. Each additional victim receives less attention, which reduces the compassion experienced for the victim. The current study offers a novel attentional account for psychic numbing and compassion fatigue.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Since February 2003, hundreds of thousands of people in the Darfur region of western Sudan have been murdered by government-supported local militias, and millions forced to flee their burnt-out villages for the dubious safety of refugee camps. It is genocide by any definition, yet the world looks away.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Simple technical analysis cannot capture the complex scope of preferences or values of society and individuals. However, decision making needs to be sustained by formal analysis. The paper describes a policy framework which incorporates both technical analysis and aspects of public values. The framework can be used as a decision supporting tool and helps decision makers to make more informed and more transparent decisions about safety issues.
A non-extensional theory of preference, called Sign Theory, is proposed and tested. Sign Theory considers preference construction as an evidence-building process, in which local valuation of evidence combines additively to form a global judgment. At the heart of this treatment is the notion that local evaluation generates positive or negative valuation outcomes (signs). Thus, signs are building blocks for preference construction. Study 1 confirmed the notion that valuation processes are based on signs derived from reference points. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated the robustness and importance of the sign-frequency effect, which shows that the attractiveness of an option is positively related to the number of the positive signs, but negatively related to the number of negative signs. Studies 4 and 5 were designed to reduce the sign-frequency effect. Study 4 provided information about attribute weights to help participants appreciate the part-whole relationship between partitioned attributes and summarized attributes. In Study 5, decision makers were clearly informed about the two display formats of the same information. Nevertheless, in both studies, the presence of sign-frequency effects remained evident.
GENERAL COMMENTARY article Front. Psychol., 18 April 2017Sec. Emotion Science Volume 8 - 2017 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00542
No abstract is provided for this article.
Three experiments demonstrate how the processing of negations is contingent on the evaluation context in which the negative information is presented. In addition, the strategy used to process the negations induced different affective reactions toward the stimuli, leading to inconsistency of preference. Participants were presented with stimuli described by either stating the presence of positive features (explicitly positive alternative) or negating the presence of negative features (non-negative alternative). Alternatives were presented for either joint (JE) or separate evaluation (SE). Experiment 1 showed that the non-negative stimuli were judged less attractive than the positive ones in JE but not in SE. Experiment 2 revealed that the non-negative stimuli induced a less clear and less positive feeling when they were paired with explicitly positive stimuli rather than evaluated separately. Non-negative options were also found less easy to judge than the positive ones in JE but not in SE. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that people process negations using two different models depending on the evaluation mode. Through a memory task, we found that in JE people process the non-negative attributes as negations of negative features, whereas in SE they directly process the non-negative attributes as positive features.
In industrialized societies, the question “How safe is safe enough?” has emerged as one of the major policy issues of the 1980s. The frequent discovery of new hazards and the widespread publicity they receive is causing more and more individuals to see...
Empathic responses, such as sympathy towards others, are a key ingredient in the decision to provide help to those in need. The determinants of empathic responses are usually thought to be the vividness, similarity, and proximity of the victim. However, recent research highlights the role that attention plays in the generation of feelings. We expanded on this idea by investigating whether sympathy depends on cognitive mechanisms such as attention. In two studies we found that sympathy responses were lower and reaction times were longer when targets were presented with distractors. In addition, online sympathy judgments that allow attentional focusing on a target lead to greater affective responses than judgments made from memory. We conclude that attention is an ingredient in the generation of sympathy, and discuss implications for research on prosocial behaviour and the interaction between attention and emotions.
A number of proposals have been put forth regarding the proper way to model the societal impact of fatal accidents. Most of these proposals are based on some form of utility function asserting that the social cost (or disutility) of N lives lost in a single accident is a function of N α . A common view is that a single large accident is more serious than many small accidents producing the same number of fatalities, hence α > 1. Drawing upon a number of empirical studies, we argue that there is insufficient justification for using any function of N fatalities to model societal impacts. The inadequacy of such models is attributed, in part, to the fact that accidents are signals of future trouble. The societal impact of an accident is determined to an important degree by what it signifies or portends. An accident that causes little direct harm may have immense consequences if it increases the judged probability and seriousness of future accidents. We propose that models based solely on functions of N be abandoned in favor of models that elaborate in detail the significant events and consequences likely to result from an accident.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Choosing a short-form measure of conspiracist ideation is fraught. Despite there being numerous scales to choose from, little work has been done to compare their psychometric properties. To address this shortcoming, we compared the internal consistency, two-week test-retest reliability, criterion validity, and construct validity of five short-form conspiracist ideation measures: the Generic Conspiracist Beliefs Scale – 5 (GCB-5), Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ), General Measure of Conspiracism (GMC), American Conspiracy Thinking Scale (ACTS), and One-Item Conspiracy Measure (1CM). The results of our investigation indicated that all five of the scales are reliable and valid measures of conspiracist ideation. That said, the GCB-5 tended to perform the best while the 1CM tended to perform the worst. We conclude our investigation by discussing trade-offs among the five scales, as well as providing recommendations for future research.
Die Fähigkeit, Gefahren aus der Umwelt zu erkennen und zu vermeiden, ist für fast alle Lebewesen zur Verbesserung ihrer Überlebenschancen nützlich. Die Fähigkeit, Erfahrungen im Umgang mit der Umwelt zu bewahren und daraus zu lernen,...
