Our society is strongly divided between those who believe that matter is primary and consciousness is only a side effect of matter, and those who believe that consciousness is primary and created matter. Mainstream science favours matter as the primary force, while the opposite “spiritual” belief dominates in religion, popular culture, and with scientists who work at the borders of official sci...

In science and philosophy, there is still no general agreement on what ‘consciousness’ is. But how do normal people (with no education in psychology or philosophy) use the term in their everyday life? What is the folk understanding of the word “conscious”? We conducted an online study on how the general public uses the word “consciousness” in their daily life. Participants (n=445) answered the ...

Session overview What’s happening? What does the future hold? What keeps you awake at night? The times they are a-changin’. So sang Bob Dylan back in 1963. And those words still resonate today – whether in politics and society, or fundraising and the nonprofit sector. So what do advanced executives do? What cage-rattling questions (CRQs) do leaders ask? How do leaders use conversation as a core...

Can candidates spend their way into financial success? We propose that the 2007 presidential money primary offers unprecedented leverage to evaluate spending’s influence since it allows for sharper controls of confounding factors. Our results demonstrate that greater candidate spending on fundraisingrelated efforts is associated with significant future financial benefits. We estimate that, prio...

Reflective of income and wealth distributions, philanthropic gifting appears to follow an approximate power-law size distribution as measured by the size of gifts received by individual institutions. We explore the ecology of gifting by analysing data sets of individual gifts for a diverse group of institutions dedicated to education, medicine, art, public support, and religion. We find that th...

New immigrants have already changed Philadelphia's cultural scene—particularly in urban neighborhoods. This brief uses three types of evidence— a small-area database of cultural participation, a survey of residents of North Philadelphia and Camden, NJ, and a survey of artists living or working in the metropolitan area—to explore migrant cultural engagement. Taken together, SIAP’s evidence on ar...

A Chinese Auction is one of the most popular mechanisms at charity or other fundraising events. In a Chinese Auction, bidders buy lottery tickets, which are essentially chances to win items. Bidders may buy as many tickets as they like, and bid them on any item(s) they want by placing them in a basket or other container in front of the item(s) they are trying to win. At the conclusion of biddin...

Unconditional generosity in humans is a puzzle. One possibility is that individuals benefit from being seen as generous if there is competition for access to partners and if generosity is a costly-and therefore reliable-signal of partner quality [1-3]. The "competitive helping" hypothesis predicts that people will compete to be the most generous, particularly in the presence of attractive poten...

As James Madison would not hesitate to tell us, the scale of a polity or jurisdiction is one of the most basic factors organizing political life. By scale, I refer to the number of inhabitants (or, alternately, constituents or voters) in a political unit, although geographic size may also shape political behavior. Large jurisdictional scale implies that candidates for office must campaign in la...