Suchergebnisse

Findings from the multinational Beliefs in Government Study, which comprised exhaustive analysis of survey data on mass beliefs & attitudes in the West, indicate, in spite of considerable socioeconomic change in recent decades, political stability, continuity, & adaptability in Western Europe. It is suggested that political scientists should pay more attention to pressures for inertia & continuity in Western democracies. 5 References. Adapted from the source document.

In this stimulating dialogue these two great men, who stand on opposite sides of the church door, discuss some of the most controversial issues of the day. One is a respected scholar and one of the pre-eminent ecumenical churchmen of Europe; the other the world famous author of The Name of the Rose , a scholar, philosopher and self-decalred secularist, a man who writes with equal ease about Thomas Aquinas and James Joyce, computers and the medieval Templars. Often adversarial but always amicable, their debate will fascinate many

AbstractA belief in alien abduction is an emotional belief, but so is a belief that Iran intends to build nuclear weapons, that one's country is good, that a sales tax is unjust, or that French decision makers are irresolute. Revolutionary research in the brain sciences has overturned conventional views of the relationship between emotion, rationality, and beliefs. Because rationality depends on emotion, and because cognition and emotion are nearly indistinguishable in the brain, one can view emotion as constituting and strengthening beliefs such as trust, nationalism, justice or credibility. For example, a belief that another's commitment is credible depends on one's selection (and interpretation) of evidence and one's assessment of risk, both of which rely on emotion. Observing that emotion and cognition co-produce beliefs has policy implications: how one fights terrorism changes if one views credibility as an emotional belief.

The idea that the borders between different natural species can be easily bridged by metamorphoses was central to the ancient worldview. Humans were believed to be able to undress their human appearance and to transform into any beast whichever, or, conversely, animals were believed to appear as human beings. This belief permeated daily life and ritual practice. The notion of metamorphosis was also central to ancient metaphysics: it affected ideas regarding creation and maintenance of the cosmos, as well as birth and death of living beings. This article demonstrates that developmental psychology can explain both the universal existence of this belief in premodern societies and its disappearance in modern societies. People staying on the preoperational stage cannot avoid believing in metamorphosis because it is an inevitable part of the cognitive patterns of this stage. People staying on the concrete and formal operational stages are in fact no more able to share these ideas because the notion of the invariance of natural kinds is an inevitable part of higher psychological stages. The article points to the fundamental importance of developmental psychology for ethnological research, especially for the study of ancient worldview.

This article conveys the general findings of the multi-national, multi-volume Beliefs in Government research project, perhaps the most exhaustive analysis of mass beliefs and attitudes conducted in the west. In spite of considerable socio-economic change in recent decades, the study provides evidence of political stability, continuity and adaptability in west European countries. This suggests that political scientists should pay more attention than hitherto to pressures for inertia and continuity in western democracies.

In this paper, we consider a number of different ways of reasoning about voting as a problem of conciliating contradictory interests. The mechanisms that do the reconciliation are belief revision and belief merging. By investigating the relationship between different voting strategies and their associated counterparts in revision theory, we find that whereas the counting mechanism of the voting process is more easily done at the meta-level in belief merging, it can be brought to the object level in base revision. In the former case, the counting can be tweaked according to the aggregation procedure used, whereas in base revision, we can only rely on the notion of minimal change and hence the syntactical representation of the voters' preferences plays a crucial part in the process. This highlights the similarities between the revision approaches on the one hand and voting on the other, but also opens up a number of interesting questions.

This study used canonical correlation to examine the relationship of 11 individual difference variables to two measures of beliefs in conspiracies. Undergraduates were administered a questionnaire that included these two measures (beliefs in specific conspiracies and attitudes toward the existence of conspiracies) and scales assessing the 11 variables. High levels of anomie, authoritarianism, and powerlessness, along with a low level of self‐esteem, were related to beliefs in specific conspiracies, whereas high levels of external locus of control and hostility, along with a low level of trust, were related to attitudes toward the existence of conspiracies in general. These findings support the idea that beliefs in conspiracies are related to feelings of alienation, powerlessness, hostility, and being disadvantaged. There was no support for the idea that people believe in conspiracies because they provide simplified explanations of complex events.