The strength of sensitivity to ambiguity

We report an experiment where each subject’s ambiguity sensitivity is measured by an ambiguity premium, a concept analogous to and comparable with a risk premium. In our design, some tasks feature known objective risks and others uncertainty about which subjects have imperfect, heterogeneous, information (“ambiguous tasks”). We show how the smooth ambiguity model can be used to calculate ambiguity premia. A distinctive feature of our approach is estimation of each subject’s subjective beliefs about the uncertainty in ambiguous tasks. We find considerable heterogeneity among subjects in beliefs and ambiguity premia; and that, on average, ambiguity sensitivity is about as strong as risk sensitivity.     

Responsiveness to feedback as a personal trait

We investigate individual heterogeneity in the tendency to under-respond to feedback (“conservatism”) and to respond more strongly to positive compared to negative feedback (“asymmetry”). We elicit beliefs about relative performance after repeated rounds of feedback across a series of cognitive tests. Relative to a Bayesian benchmark, we find that subjects update on average conservatively but not asymmetrically. We define individual measures of conservatism and asymmetry relative to the average subject, and show that these measures explain an important part of the variation in beliefs and competition entry decisions. Relative conservatism is correlated across tasks and predicts competition entry both independently of beliefs and by influencing beliefs, suggesting it can be considered a personal trait. Relative asymmetry is less stable across tasks, but predicts competition entry by increasing self-confidence. Ego-relevance of the task correlates with relative conservatism but not relative asymmetry.     

“应得”传统的历史叙事

对“应得”概念的讨论可以追溯至古希腊时期。亚里士多德等人认为所谓“应得”是根据公民的“德性”分配公共职务,启蒙运动宣扬的自由、平等与民主等理念改变了“应得”的历史传统,它赋予公民以“自治”和权利意识,让人们意识到可以依凭个体的自主行动来“应得”社会的基本益品。当代正义理论家罗尔斯等人区分了“应得”和“反应得”,将超出个人控制、受运气因素影响的“应得”（如自然天赋、社会地位等）排除在分配正义之外。罗尔斯等人的区分深化了“应得”理论的思考。当代社会对“应得”的讨论还进一步扩展到人类与动物、当代人与未来世代以及民族国家和全球共同体之间。     

价值的科学——韦伯社会科学方法论再探

面对现代社会中理性与非理性、主观与客观、事实与价值之间的紧张,马克斯·韦伯的社会科学方法论力图在对立双方之间搭建起关联并在研究中往复运动,借助包含价值的历史个体和理想类型,通过超越主客观对立的价值阐释,说明历史、文化与社会的各种独特现象,发现各民族和时代中人们的价值理想,理解先辈如何去坚持和实践它们,进而指导现代人在今天继承和实现这些价值。历史和社会科学,既要用理性的方法培养学人清明的理智,也要使人看到超越理性的价值信念,从而帮助人在高度抽象的现代社会中,以理性的态度去守护和坚持各种文明的价值核心,避免走向僵死的理性和狂热的非理性两个极端。     

The Cultural Discovery and Practical Implications of “Chinese Values”*

The social reforms in China since the late 1970s represent an arduous process in which the Chinese nation, in its own way, has reflected upon the many disadvantages of the “civilization of modernity,” and has explored, created and practiced “Chinese values,” pursuing and shaping new spiritual convictions and new (rational) value beliefs for its national culture. In a deeper sense, “Chinese values” are endowed with a marked orientation toward practice and follow the logic of genuinely implementing society's “public values” on the basis of the intrinsic and organic integration of the personal and public and the national and cosmopolitan. This manifests the pursuit of a noble belief in justice and a commitment to a universal and genuine good life for the Chinese populace today. What “Chinese values” seek to forge is an image of “the Chinese” that manifests not only the disposition and breadth of vision of a contemporary “citizen of the world,” but also the fine traits of tolerance, benevolence, responsibility, and courage, as well as self-esteem, self-improvement, confidence, and self-reliance.     

Practical beliefs vs. scientific beliefs: two kinds of maximization

There are two kinds of beliefs. If the ultimate objective is wellbeing (utility), the generated beliefs are “practical.” If the ultimate objective is truth, the generated beliefs are “scientific.” This article defends the practical/scientific belief distinction. The proposed distinction has been ignored by standard rational choice theory—as well as by its two major critics, viz., the Tversky/Kahneman program and the Simon/Gigerenzer program. One ramification of the proposed distinction is clear: agents who make errors with regard to scientific beliefs (e.g., the conjunction fallacy) should not be taken as committing irrationality—because they are most probably engaging the other kind of maximization, the pursuit of wellbeing.     

Subjective beliefs and confidence when facts are forgotten

Forgetting can be a salient source of uncertainty for subjective beliefs, confidence, and ambiguity attitudes. To investigate this, we run several experiments where people bet on propositions (facts) that they cannot recall with certainty. We use betting preferences to infer subjects’ revealed beliefs and their revealed confidence in these beliefs. Forgetting is induced via interference tasks and time delays (up to one year). We observe a natural memory decay pattern where beliefs become less accurate and confidence is reduced as well. Moreover, we find a form of comparative ignorance where subjects are more ambiguity averse when they cannot recall the truth rather than never having learnt it. In a different vein, we identify an overconfidence pattern: on average, subjects overpay for bets on propositions that they believe in, but underpay for the opposite bets. We formulate a two-signal behavioral model of forgetting that generates all of these patterns. It suggests new testable hypotheses that are confirmed by our data.

     

“Like Two Musketeers”: Socialization beliefs about toddler's friendships among Dominican,Mexican, and African American mothers

Parental ethnotheories shape socialization beliefs around childrearing more broadly, and children's friendships more specifically. While prior work has examined aspects of parental socialization of friendships among school-aged children and adolescents, no studies have examined beliefs held around the function of friendships among ethnically diverse mothers of toddlers from low-socioeconomic contexts. Toddlerhood marks a point in development when the concept of “friendship” gains impact and relevance due to leaps in children's social, cognitive, and motor skills, as well as children's increasing access to contexts where they organically encounter peers. Toddlerhood is also a time when caregivers may initially consider the influence of peers on their children, beliefs that could eventually guide and shift how they navigate socialization practices around friendship. In the present study, we document U.S. Dominican American, African American, and Mexican American mothers’ socialization beliefs around functions of friendship for their 2-year-old children. We found that mothers emphasized a variety of friendship functions, including learning of social skills and morality, and communicating and experiencing emotions. A majority of mothers viewed their children's friendships as unidirectional, and framed their children as undiscerning in their engagement with social information from peers. Findings are discussed in relation to mothers’ orientation to children and “childhood” via cultural and developmental beliefs.     

中国人的信仰认同模式:以儒教信仰为中心

英语中的“宗教”,就西方基督教而言,是一种制度宗教;汉语中的“宗教”,则不一定指称宗教制度。中国儒教当然不等同于西方语义中的制度宗教,但无疑是一种具有宗教特征的信仰结构。杨庆堃所谓“扩散宗教”的概念,与本文讨论的中国“信仰”,及其在权力秩序和制度宗教之外那种私人、扩散式的信仰认同模式非常相似。为此,本文把儒教的信仰认同模式作为个人信仰与他人信仰、儒教信徒与其他社会成员的互动结果,并以信仰“认同”作为儒教的行动单位,同时亦作为一种分析工具,经由对儒教信仰认同规则的考察,讨论儒教信仰及其信仰群体的建构逻辑,进而分析儒教信仰经纬中中国社会的模式及其演变路径。     

香港市民阶层流动意识探析:结构与认同下难圆的“香港梦”

1960年代香港经济的腾飞给香港市民带来了乐观的阶层流动意识,“香港梦”成了描述香港社会阶层结构相对开放的一个大众话语。但1980年代中期以来,阶层结构进入一个稳定的时期,客观的远距离阶层流动消失,这种乐观感也随之消失,1990年代的金融风暴和住房泡沫的破灭,使香港进入了一个“中下流”社会。本文基于阶层化的理论,以经验数据为准,发现中下层的市民客观阶层与主观阶层定位都处于低下地位,而拥有比较悲观的向上流动意识,这反过来又制约他们向上流动,“香港梦”失去了现实的社会基础。     

Re-examining the law of iterated expectations for Choquet decision makers

Yoo (Economic Letters 37:145–149, 1991) argues that the law of iterated expectations must be violated if the probability measure of a Choquet decision maker is non-additive. In this article, we prove the positive result that the law of iterated expectations is satisfied for Choquet decision makers whenever they update their non-additive beliefs in accordance with the Sarin and Wakker (Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 16:223–250, 1998) update rule. The formal key to this result is the act-dependence of the Sarin–Wakker update rule, which does not hold for the update rules considered by Yoo (1991).     

A theory of “popular political legitimation”: A dual-process model approach to legitimation and political socialization

How do everyday people—or actors who do not occupy positions of political authority—legitimate political systems? Responding to this question, I use work from sociology, political science, and cognitive science to build a theory of “Popular Political Legitimation” (PPL)—defined as everyday people's legitimation of a political system. To answer how PPL happens, we must answer two sub-questions that address legitimacy as a normative phenomenon: 1) What are the processes of socialization through which individuals learn the norms, widely held beliefs, and values that legitimate a political system? 2) How do individuals subsequently use these norms, widely held beliefs, and/or values in their own legitimations of a political system? Thus, we see that a model of socialization is central to understanding how PPL happens. I proceed in four steps. First, I review the literature on political legitimation. Next, I review the literature on political socialization. Third, to address gaps in the two aforementioned literatures concerning a model of socialization that explains legitimation, I turn to neuroscience (for reviews see Greene, 2017; Cushman, 2020) and psychology to review models of socialization and rationalization. Finally, I synthesize these literatures to develop a theory of political socialization and how it generates PPL.     

Feddersen and Pesendorfer meet Ellsberg

The Condorcet Jury Theorem formalises the “wisdom of crowds”: binary decisions made by majority vote are asymptotically correct as the number of voters tends to infinity. This classical result assumes like-minded, expected utility maximising voters who all share a common prior belief about the right decision. Ellis (Theor Econo 11(3): 865–895, 2016) shows that when voters have ambiguous prior beliefs—a (closed, convex) set of priors—and follow maxmin expected utility (MEU), such wisdom requires that voters’ beliefs satisfy a “disjoint posteriors” condition: different private signals lead to posterior sets with disjoint interiors. Both the original theorem and Ellis’s generalisation assume symmetric penalties for wrong decisions. If, as in the jury context, errors attract asymmetric penalties then it is natural to consider voting rules that raise the hurdle for the decision carrying the heavier penalty for error (such as conviction in jury trials). In a classical model, Feddersen and Pesendorfer (Am Politi Sci Rev 92(1):23–35, 1998) have shown that, paradoxically, raising this hurdle may actually increase the likelihood of the more serious error. In particular, crowds are not wise under the unanimity rule: the probability of the more serious error does not vanish as the crowd size tends to infinity. We show that this “Jury Paradox” persists in the presence of ambiguity, whether or not juror beliefs satisfy Ellis’s “disjoint posteriors” condition. We also characterise the strictly mixed equilibria of this model and study their properties. Such equilibria cannot exist in the absence of ambiguity but may exist for arbitrarily large jury size when ambiguity is present. In addition to uninformative strictly mixed equilibria, analogous to those exhibited by Ellis (Theor Econo 11(3): 865–895, 2016), there may also exist strictly mixed equilibria which are informative about voter signals.

     

A Study of the Development of Alcohol Use Disorder in Muslim Immigrant Workers in Korea

Abstract

This study examines the process by which Muslim immigrant workers, prohibited by their religion from drinking, develop alcohol use disorder when working in Korea. Participants were seven male immigrant workers who have lived in Korea for 6–10?years and all experienced a change in immigrant status, shifting from registered to unregistered. Utilizing grounded theory devised by Strauss and Corbin, 87 concepts, 24 subcategories, and 10 categories were derived as a result. By converting these categories into a paradigm model, participants moved through stages of “self-monitoring,” “confusion,” “self-despair,” and “daily collapse” as they developed alcohol use disorder, and began to take on an existence as drifters, not settling into life in Korea. Their “learning experiences of drinking to survive turning into experiences of causing social death” is considered a core category. The study’s results suggest that a rehabilitation program for immigrant workers needs to be developed wherein the program not only enables them to reflect on their current existence but also allows them to develop specific coping skills. Future research should be broadened to consider social support mechanisms and viewpoints of other people, including female immigrant workers, and local community members in close contact with Muslim immigrant workers.     

实证、诠释与话语：以现代化研究为例

实证主义的“现代化”分析模式将“现代化”过程视为一种纯粹给定的、独立于社会成员个人主观意识之外的“客观性现实”,诠释学（或现象学）的“现代化”分析模式则将“现代化”过程视为一种由社会成员个人的主观意识建构出来的“主观性现实”;与它们都不同,多元话语分析学者则将“现代化”视为一种由社会成员在特定话语系统的约束和引导之下、借助于一些特定的话语策略而建构出来的“话语性现实”。与此相应,实证主义“现代化”分析模式的支持者们在对“现代化”过程进行研究时总是致力于探究支配着“现代化”过程形成和变化的“客观规律”,诠释学（或现象学）分析模式的支持者们则总是致力于考察导致“现代化”过程的那些个体行动及其行动者在从事这些行动时赋予其行动之上的那些主观意识,而多元话语分析学者们则主张致力于探讨人们将我们现在称为“现代化”的那种社会变迁过程建构为“现代化”过程的那些话语策略及其背后的话语系统（话语构成规则）。     

Ambiguity framed

In his exposition of subjective expected utility theory, Savage (1954) proposed that the Allais paradox could be reduced if it were recast into a format which made the appeal of the independence axiom of expected utility theory more transparent. Recent studies consistently find support for this prediction. We consider a salience-based choice model which explains this frame-dependence of the Allais paradox. We then derive the novel prediction that the presentation format responsible for reductions in Allais-style violations of expected utility theory will also reduce Ellsberg-style violations of subjective expected utility theory. This format makes the appeal of Savage’s “sure thing principle” more transparent. We design an experiment to test this prediction and find strong support for such frame-dependence of ambiguity aversion in Ellsberg-style choices. In particular, we observe markedly less ambiguity-averse behavior in Savage’s matrix format than in a more standard “prospect” format. This finding poses a new challenge for the leading models of ambiguity aversion.     

无须德性的伦理生活——黑格尔论现代社会的理念

比较黑格尔的伦理概念与古代伦理概念的区别有助于澄清现代社会的理念。在亚里士多德那里,“伦理”是一个借助习惯、法律和政制搭建起来的、旨在塑造人的欲求和欲望的生活方式。对于处在自然德性和思虑德性之间的伦理空间而言,习惯、法律和制度并不是自足的,它们着眼并取决于德性。相比之下,在黑格尔那里,现代人无须具备多么高的德性,仅仅通过服从健全的法律和制度就能够驯化自己的欲望,从而赢得他人的承认和自由。不过,我们需要反思,在法律和制度的健全和完备之外是否还有其他可能性？或许,这仍然取决于我们能否在自身的文明传统中再度唤醒某种伦理特质,去驾驭这些理性化的法律和制度,营造出一种值得欲求的共同生活。     

生命与伦理:齐美尔生命哲学基础上的个体法则

以其早年对货币经济下的个体处境及两种个体主义的思考为背景，晚年的齐美尔在生命哲学的基础上集中阐述了有关伦理准则的个体法则。西方的主导伦理思想视伦理为普遍法则对个体行动的约束，普遍法则的合法性建立在一种二元对立的、机械的、理性的、目的论的视角之上。个体法则却以作为应该的个体生命为源泉，打破了以康德为代表的西方伦理思想中的各种视角局限，同时回应了齐美尔早年有关货币经济、文化悲剧和个体主义的思考，提供了一种与功利主义、利己主义等不同的个体主义话语。