Identifying causal mechanisms is a fundamental goal of social science. Researchers seek to study not only whether one variable affects another but also how such a causal relationship arises. Yet commonly used statistical methods for identifying causal mechanisms rely upon untestable assumptions and are often inappropriate even under those assumptions. Randomizing treatment and intermediate vari...

This article reexamines the assumptions underlying the disease problem used by Tversky and Kahneman (1981) to illustrate gain– loss formulation effects. It is argued that their reported effect may have been due to asymmetries in the ambiguity of the sure and risky prospects and to the entanglement of two distinct types of formulation manipulations: one having to do with the expected outcomes th...

IMPACTS OF WORLDVIEW, IMPLICIT ASSUMPTIONS, BIASES, AND GROUPTHINK ON ISRAELI OPERATIONAL PLANS IN 1973, by MAJ Barry L. Johnson 46 pages. This monograph examines some cognitive constructs such as worldview, implicit assumptions, and groupthink. Further, the monograph discusses biases such as anchoring, status quo bias, confirmation bias, sunk-cost bias, framing trap, halo and pitchfork effect,...

Members of newly formed design teams have different frames – implicit values, goals and assumptions – each of them hold about what problems are important and how they are best addressed. In the early, informal phases of design projects, these frames, and the degree to which they are shared within the team, have substantial consequences. However, little is known about the interactions and activi...

Framing effects occur when different descriptions of the same decision problemgive rise to divergent decisions. They can be seen as a violation of the decisiontheoretic version of the principle of extensionality (PE). The PE in logic means that two logically equivalent sentences can be substituted salva veritate. We explore what this notion of extensionality becomes in decision contexts. Violat...

results all the frames that were examined leaded to significant framing effects: when the asia disease problem was described in a positive frame, the participants preferred the conservative frame than the risky one, while if in a negative frame, the preference reversed (p < 0.01). if the drug effect was described as “of 100 patients taking this kind of medicine, 70 patients became better”, peop...

Sociology has seen a renewed interest in the study of morality. However, a theory of the self that explains individual variation in moral behavior and emotions is noticeably absent. In this study, we use identity theory to explain this variability. According to identity theory, actors are self-regulating entities whose goal is to verify their identities. An individual’s moral identity—wherever ...

Abstract The article explores the complicity of children’s picturebooks in construction and critique world politics. Focusing on Gruffalo , it argues that this spectacularly successful book: (1) stories international as a pessimistic, anarchical populated by self-interested, survival-seekers; (2) disrupts reading its assumptions through evocation social production threat; and, (3) provides more...

New results on the groundstate energy of tight, magnetic knots are presented. Magnetic knots are defined as tubular embeddings of the magnetic field in an ideal, perfectly conducting, incompressible fluid. An orthogonal, curvilinear coordinate system is introduced and the magnetic energy is determined by the poloidal and toroidal components of the magnetic field. Standard minimization of the ma...