Dvir, Maayan. M.S., Purdue University, August 2014. The Effect of Ostracism by Strangers on Romantic Relationship Evaluations. Major Professor: Kipling D. Williams. One behavioral consequence of ostracism is to seek and strengthen connections with others. The current research tests whether a brief episode of ostracism by strangers strengthens targeted individuals’ perceptions of their romantic ...

Traditional theories of animal rights are based upon the argument that species membership is a morally arbitrary feature in ethical reasoning. Rather than base moral standing upon common humanity, animal rights theorists have claimed that all sentient creatures, or creatures above a certain level of sentience, belong to the same ethical community, and thus are rights bearers. In this way, anima...

The ‘dear enemy phenomenon’ (DEP) is a form of neighbour–stranger discrimination in which resident territorial individuals respond less agonistically to intrusions by known neighbouring conspecifics than they do to strangers. We tested philopatric female yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) for the presence of DEP. We hypothesized that dominant females discriminated between the anal gl...

A more robust view of the diversity of prokaryotes has come from sequencing rRNAs amplified directly from environmental samples. This approach has now been used to examine microbial communities in the human body, revealing populations rich in undescribed species whose impact on humans remains to be determined.

There is a bizarre piece of medical hypocrisy : in the preface, the names and qualifications of the doctors concerned are splendidly rolled out. In the text, however, they are given pseudonyms, " in the best and most scrupulous tradition of the medical profession Both men must be a shade too gentle since they left their patient at large after she had attempted to strangle her daughter. Surprisi...

The trust building process is basic to social science. We investigate it in a laboratory setting using a novel multi-stage trust game where social gains are achieved if players trust each other in each stage. And in each stage, players have an opportunity to appropriate these gains or be trustworthy by sharing them. Players are strangers because they do not know the identity of others and they ...

Increased connectivity and data availability enable new ways of conducting business, but they also create new security vulnerabilities. For example, to streamline a financial transaction, an organization might want to give certain strangers — that is, parties from outside its security domain — access to some of its local resources. Before doing so, however, the organization must establish firm ...

An optimistic learning bias leads people to update their beliefs in response to better-than-expected good news but neglect worse-than-expected bad news. Because evidence suggests that this bias arises from self-concern, we hypothesized that a similar bias may affect beliefs about other people's futures, to the extent that people care about others. Here, we demonstrated the phenomenon of vicario...