Genetically modified organisms are a technology now used with increasing frequency in agriculture. Genetically modified seeds have the special characteristic of being living artefacts that can reproduce and spread; thus it is difficult to control where they end up. In addition, genetically modified seeds may also bring about uncertainties for environmental and human health. Where they will go a...

Heroism represents the ideal of citizens transforming civic virtue into the highest form of civic action, accepting either physical peril or social sacrifice. While implicit theories of heroism abound, surprisingly little theoretical or empirical work has been done to better understand the phenomenon. Toward this goal, we summarize our efforts to systematically develop a taxonomy of heroic subt...

BACKGROUND The National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (CASEN) was modified in the year 2000, to include an assessment of the inequalities in the access to health services. AIM To analyze the health issues of year 2000 survey database. MATERIAL AND METHODS During 2000, 38338 urban and 26698 rural dwellings were surveyed, totaling 240000 people analyzing ascription to public or privat...

As e-communities grow in both quality and quantity, their online users require more appropriate tools to suite their needs in such environments. Many such tools are not explicitly needed in real-world communities where humans directly interact with each other. Trust making and reputation ascription are among the most important examples of such tools. Humans often build trust relationships throu...

A widely discussed discovery has been the influence of norms on causal selection. Confronted with scenarios in which 2 agents contribute equally to an effect, adult participants tend to choose the agent who is violating a norm over an agent who is conforming to a norm as the cause of the outcome. To date, this effect has been established only in adult populations, so its developmental course is...

The cognitive appraisal of an event is crucial for the elicitation and differentiation of emotions, and causal attributions are an integral part of this process. In an interdisciplinary project comparing Tonga and Germany, we examined how cultural differences in attribution tendencies affect emotion assessment and elicitation. Data on appraising causality and responsibility and on emotional res...

Knowing whether an object is owned and by whom is essential to avoid costly conflicts. We hypothesize that everyday interactions around objects are influenced by a minimal sense of object ownership grounded on respect of possession. In particular, we hypothesize that tracking object ownership can be influenced by any cue that predicts the establishment of individual physical control over object...

The standard response to engineering disasters like the Deepwater Horizon case is to ascribe full moral responsibility to individuals and to collectives treated as individuals. However, this approach is inappropriate since concrete action and experience in engineering contexts seldom meets the criteria of our traditional moral theories. Technological action is often distributed rather than indi...