We reconsider the role of an inflation conservative central banker in a setting with distortionary taxation. To do so, we assume monetary and fiscal policy are decided by independent authorities that do not abide to past commitments. If the two authorities make policy decisions simultaneously, inflation conservatism causes fiscal overspending. But if fiscal policy is determined before monetary ...

The words we use matter. The concept of a social norm exists in many social and behavioral science disciplines and research traditions (1). Because the general term “social norm” is a hypernym, an explicit definition is crucial to discussions of its place and usefulness in solving complex social–environmental issues (cf. ref. 2). In their discussion of incentives, Lubchenco et al. (3) suggest t...

BACKGROUND An exclusive focus on individual or family coping strategies may be inadequate for people whose major point of concern may be collective healing on a more communal level. METHODS To our knowledge, the current study is the first to make use of ethnographic fieldwork methods to investigate this type of coping as a process in a natural setting over time. Participant observation was em...

Australian Government aged care policy documents emphasise healthy ageing. Even though death in the aged care setting is a common occurrence, minimal policy exists to underpin activities that surround dying in this setting. Issues and practices about caring well for the dying remain a hidden discourse in aged care policy, the literature and therefore in practice. A discourse analysis of aged ca...

In contrast to individual tasks, a specific social setting is created when two partners work together on a task. How does such a social setting affect memory for task-related information? We addressed this issue in a distributed joint-action paradigm, where two team partners respond to different types of information within the same task. Previous work has shown that joint action in such a task ...

Although mobile learning is a popular topic in current research, it is not well conceptualised. Many researchers rely on under-theorised conceptions of the topic, and those who have tried to refine the ideas involved have found this to be complex and difficult. In this paper, a new interpretation of the concept of ‘mobile learning’ is offered, drawing on the tradition of activity theory. The in...

In interpersonal encounters, individuals often exhibit changes in their own facial expressions in response to emotional expressions of another person. Such changes are often called facial mimicry. While this tendency first appeared to be an automatic tendency of the perceiver to show the same emotional expression as the sender, evidence is now accumulating that situation, person, and relationsh...