Since the pioneering work of Eaves and Eysenck (1974) appeared in Nature some 40 years ago, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, and behavioral geneticists have investigated the effects of nature and nurture on the formation of social attitudes. It has consistently been found that manifestations of social attitudes (i.e., preferences, values, and beliefs pertaining to things like ...

One of the defining trends of the Holocene has been the emergence of complex societies. Two essential features of complex societies are intensive resource use and sociopolitical hierarchy. Although it is widely agreed that these two phenomena are associated cross-culturally and have both contributed to the rise of complex societies, the causality underlying their relationship has been the subje...

Let us start from a simple and common sense definition of the concept of a „problem‟: One has a problem when one experiences a gap or disparity between a moral standard and an image of a present or future state of the world. Someone who claims to be plagued by a problem, implicitly or explicitly passes a moral judgment. One uses a standard involving value or worthlessness, desirability or undes...

This study considers the implications of corporate political activity and political risk on asset pricing. It is found that firms which operate an affiliated political action committee (PAC) outperform firms that do not. Among firms that operate a PAC, we find that those that spend relatively less on politics outperform those that spend more and that political risk is successfully hedged by fir...

Political correctness (PC) norms are highly controversial and have been subject to political and philosophical debate for decades. Yet, surprisingly little empirical research has been conducted to understand if they have any impact at all and, in particular, if and how they affect the perception of and interaction between social groups. In this chapter, we will argue that PC language has tangib...

n fall 1997, the democratic movement in Russia will celebrate its tenth anniversary. In November 1987, a group of young intelligentsia from Moscow (creators of the then unknown historical-educational organization Memorial) marched to Arbat to collect signatures. Those signatures were not calling for the dissolution of the Soviet system, but for the creation of a memorial to the victims of Stali...

Unlike his theory of justice as fairness, John Rawls’s political liberalism has generally been spared from critiques regarding what is due to the disabled. This paper demonstrates that, due to the account of the basic ideas of society and persons provided by Rawls, political liberalism requires that the interests of numerous individuals with disabilities should be put aside when the most fundam...

Modeling a complex phenomenon such as the mind presents tremendous computational complexity challenges. Modeling field theory (MFT) addresses these challenges in a non-traditional way. The main idea behind MFT is to match levels of uncertainty of the model (also, a problem or some theory) with levels of uncertainty of the evaluation criterion used to identify that model. When a model becomes mo...