The Easy Way Out?

No Easy Way Out (Or in)

In retrospect, when Jardetzky (1966) published a " simple allosteric model for membrane pumps, " he initiated a conceptual movement away from the (then still) prevailing anthropomorphic view of transporters and pumps as " carriers " in the literal sense, membrane-bound entities that somehow made their way across the membrane, loaded with cargo. The idea of an " alternating access " model (as it...

No Easy Way Out ( or In )

Taking the Easy Way Out: How the GED Testing Program Induces Students to Drop Out.

The option to obtain a General Education Development (GED) certificate changes the incentives facing high school students. This paper evaluates the effect of three different GED policy innovations on high school graduation rates. A six point decrease in the GED pass rate due to an increase in passing standards produced a 1.3 point decline in overall dropout rates. The introduction of a GED cert...

Conversational inferences: the hard way and the easy way

This paper proposes a general theory of conversational inferences which distinguishes two kinds of inferences: the hard way and the easy way. The theory accounts for a wider range of non-literal utterance meanings than Gricean and relevance theories and is motivated by the types of utterances in which the hearer fails to infer non-

Taking the Easy Way Out: Effects of Feedback on Children's Metacognitive Control

It is a well-known finding that adults are “cognitive misers,” in that they optimize performance by reducing effort whenever possible. We examined how this tendency emerges in the course of development. We incentivized participants to acquire as many points for correct responses as possible, and allowed them to choose between two games of differential difficulty on every trial. Whereas adults s...