‘‘It is not the case,’’ Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote, ‘‘that men first stopped believing in God and in the authority of the Church, and then subsequently started behaving differently. It seems clear that men first of all lost any overall social agreement as to the right ways to live together, and so ceased to be able to make sense of any claims to moral authority.’’1 Religious faith and moral ...

The present study examined children’s responses to directives from teachers and student teachers in the classroom. According to previous interview data, children should demonstrate greater obedience to a teacher than to a student teacher due to her higher social position and greater knowledge. Seventeen second grade children were observed in their classroom as they interacted with the different...

Social media are media contributed by common users and distributed in social networks. There may exist thousands of answers to a single question provided by different users. However, it is difficult to evaluate the authority of a user to a specific question. We introduce a new method for identifying experts in social media. Both the structure of the social network and content of the media are u...

Conventional wisdom and decades of psychological research have linked the provision of choice to increased levels of intrinsic motivation, greater persistence, better performance, and higher satisfaction. This investigation examined the relevance and limitations of these findings for cultures in which individuals possess more interdependent models of the self. In 2 studies, personal choice gene...

We examined the influence of three social engineering strategies on users’ judgments of how safe it is to click on a link in an email. The three strategies examined were authority, scarcity and social proof, and the emails were either genuine, phishing or spear-phishing. Of the three strategies, the use of authority was the most effective strategy in convincing users that a link in an email was...

since the beginning of human history, one of the basic dilemmas that every political institution must solve is how to exercise legitimate authority- that is, how to govern with the consent. “you can’t sit on bayonets,” goes an old political expression. this is a way of saying that although a state can exercise its power through the use of police force or coercion, in the long run the use of for...

This essay develops a theory of relational authority in the most unpromising setting of international relations. Relational authority locates legitimacy in a social contract between a ruler, who provides a social order of value to the ruled, and the ruled who comply with the ruler's commands necessary to the production of that order. International politics are near universally assumed to be an ...

Prior work has established robust diversity in the extent to which different moral values are endorsed. Some people focus on values related to caring and fairness, whereas others assign additional moral weight to ingroup loyalty, respect for authority and established hierarchies, and purity concerns. Five studies explore associations between endorsement of distinct moral values and a suite of i...

People often make decisions in a social environment. The present work examines social influence on people's decisions in a sequential decision-making situation. In the first experimental study, we implemented an information cascade paradigm, illustrating that people infer information from decisions of others and use this information to make their own decisions. We followed a cognitive modeling ...