Mistrust of others may build upon perceptions of the self as vulnerable, consistent with an association of paranoia with perceived lower social rank. Height is a marker of social status and authority. Therefore we tested the effect of manipulating height, as a proxy for social rank, on paranoia. Height was manipulated within an immersive virtual reality simulation. Sixty females who reported pa...

with regard to the evidences of the rule, what is inferred from the qur’an and the tradition (sunna) about the matter of authority over possessions, is the impermissibility of other’s invasion of human self, which is totally unrelated to the assertion of one’s authority over oneself. the realm and the quality of human’s authority over his own organs are not known to the wise, as the relevant po...

This paper develops and defends an internalist account of having authority for one’s claim. It begins with Robert Brandom’s pragmatist account of thinking which locates the root notion of reasoning in a primitive language game of asking for and giving reasons. The idea is that the authority of a claim can be spelled out pragmatically in terms of the social practice of undertaking commitments an...

How do women gain authority in patriarchal religious social movements and how does their authority differ from that of men? This paper examines the authority of female preachers in the Islamist Salafi movement through an analysis of 21,000 texts by 172 men and 43 women on the Salafi-oriented website saaid.net. Salafi gender ideology is not friendly to women’s authority, so why are so many women...

Our main interest research is focused on reaching a decentralized form of social order through the usage of social norms in virtual communities. In this paper, we analyze the effects of different sets of social norms within a society. The simulation scenario used for the experiments is a metaphor of a resourcegatherer prehistoric society. Finally, we obtain a qualitative ranking of all the poss...

May-June 2012 To the Editor: In the SeptemberOctober 2011 issue, Daniel Groll addresses the question of what health care providers can know about patients’ interests (“What Health Care Providers Know”). He offers helpful refinements to my claim in Patient, Heal Thyself (Oxford, 2008) that generally health providers cannot know what serves patient interests. I am honored that a careful student o...

This study examined the relationship between exteriors of police department facilities and participants’ ratings of the buildings’ Authority, Professionalism, and Approachability. After a pilot study, research was conducted with 122 participants who were undergraduate students from a small, liberal arts college in the Northeast. On each of three characteristics (Authority, Professionalism, and ...