Applying the reciprocity instinct to monetary transactions implies that the reaction to monetary debt and monetary credit are similar. However, evidence suggests an asymmetry. I suggest that the “autonomy instinct” fits better with human behavior towards money. I show that people value autonomy, and I show how money can serve this instinct. (Published Online April 5 2006).

The resource-based model of self-regulation provides a pessimistic view of self-regulation that people are destined to lose their self-control after having engaged in any act of self-regulation because these acts deplete the limited resource that people need for successful self-regulation. The cognitive control theory, however, offers an alternative explanation and suggests that the depletion effect reflects switch costs between different cognitive control processes recruited to deal with demanding tasks. This account implies that the depletion effect will not occur once people (...) have had the opportunity to adapt to the self-regulatory task initially engaged in. Consistent with this idea, the present study showed that engaging in a demanding task led to performance deficits on a subsequent self-regulatory task only when the initial demanding task was relatively short but not when it was long enough for participants to adapt. Our results were unrelated to self-efficacy, mood, and motivation. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory has gained some ground in the social sciences, but not without resistance. It must be said that at least some of the resistance on the part of social scientists is justified insofar as social and cultural phenomena such as sports are often much more complex than many evolutionary theorists seem to think. We propose in this paper an evolutionary approach to sports that takes into account its profoundly cultural character, thereby overcoming the traditional nature-culture dichotomies in the sociology (...) of sport. We argue that there are good reasons to view sports as culturally evolved signaling systems which serve a function similar to courtship rituals in other animals. Our approach combines the insights of evolutionary psychology, which states that biological adaptations determine the boundaries for the types of sport that are possible, and pure cultural theories, which describe the mechanism of cultural evolution without once referring to sport’s biological base. We substantiate this integrative theoretical framework by identifying several biological and cultural factors which may moderate the direct effect that signaling value has on a sport’s viability or popularity. A discussion of this framework’s implications for future theoretical and empirical research concludes this essay. (shrink)

A large-scale field experiment in Rotterdam, Netherlands, tested whether nudging could increase public transport use. During one work week, 4000 commuters on six bus lines, received a free travel card holder. On the three bus lines in the experimental condition, the card holders displayed a social label that branded bus passengers as sustainable travelers because of their bus use. On the three bus lines in the control condition, there was no such message on the card holders. Analysis of the number (...) of rides per hour showed that the intervention led to a change from pre-intervention to post-intervention period that was estimated to be 1.18 rides per day greater on experimental lines than on control lines. This experiment shows that public transport operators can increase public transport use by incorporating messages that positively label passengers as sustainable travelers in their communication strategies. (shrink)

Dispositional essentialism is a non-Humean view about the essences of certain fundamental or natural properties that looms large in recent metaphysics , not least because it promises to explain neatly the natural modalities such as laws of nature, counterfactuals, causation and chance. In the current paper, however, several considerations are presented that indicate a serious tension between its essentialist core thesis and natural “metaphysical” interpretations of its central explanatory claims.

My topic will be philosophical and, more precisely still, ontological. If we wish to conceive of what is at stake in the ‘dehumanization of the world’ and if we want to oppose it, we need to widen our perspective and take in not only the destiny of the human but the status of things and beings in general.The thesis I am going to put forward, which is still quite daring given the current stage of my thinking, is a hunch and (...) a hypothesis that I am trying gradually to clarify. My theory is that there was a kind of originating decision, a primal ontological choice made by the Greco-Latin as well as the Judeo-Christian West about the way of viewing beings in general; a decision in favour of differentiated forms and against the representation of a real, supposed to be composed in the final analysis of a basic single substrate whose differentiated forms were merely states, pure appearances without substance. I am also putting forward the notion that this primal choice, which is or was our choice and remains my own, was not absolutely necessary; it was a contingent free opting in favour of something and against another possible option. (shrink)

In an overview of developments spanning the past seventy years, Siegfried Zielinski discusses how the means of technology-based communication assumed a systemic character and how theory, art, and criticism were operative in this process. [... After the Media] advocates for a distinction to be made between online existence and offline being.

Musik ist anders. Durch Sprechen und Schreiben ist sie nicht zu ersetzen. Dennoch erzeugt sie den Wunsch nach Verständigung: über Musik selbst und über Zusammenhänge, die sie zu dem werden lassen, was sie ist. Auch wenn sie sich medial stets autonom verwirklicht, so ist Musik nicht isoliert. Die klingende Kunst reagiert - auf andere Musik, aber auch auf soziale oder ästhetische Bedingungen ihrer Zeit, wenngleich mit eigenen Mitteln. Der Band versammelt 35 Beiträge zur Musik von der Renaissance bis zum Bebop (...) und Techno, die aus musik- und literaturwissenschaftlichen, theologischen, philosophischen, philologischen und analytischen Perspektiven an diesen Gedanken anschliessen. (shrink)

Summary Young people differ widely in their sports behavior and show high drop-out rates from organized sports. One explanation from socialization theory refers to the transgenerational mediation of sports behavior and orientations toward sports within the family. The present study investigates the relevance of orientations toward sports and behavioral patterns within the family to young people’s sports behavior. Using methodological triangulation between multiple linear regression and qualitative interviews of young people between the ages of 15 and 20, the study investigates (...) the relationship between individual sports behavior and family influences such as the importance of sports, regularity of sports activity within the family, social support, sports-related health awareness, and communication about sports in the family. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the popular claim that laws of nature explain their instances creates a philosophical puzzle when it is combined with the widely held requirement that explanations need to be underpinned by ‘wordly’ relations. We argue that a “direct solution” to the puzzle that accounts for both explanatory laws and explanatory realism requires endorsing at least a radical metaphysics. Then, we examine the ramifications of a “skeptical solution”, i.e., dissolving it by giving up at least one (...) of these two claims, and argue that adopting it is more favorable to Humean reductionists than to anti-reductionists about laws of nature. (shrink)