How children tell a (prosocial) lie from an (ironic) joke: The role of shared knowledge

Understanding counterfactual utterances is a major challenge for children, because of the many ways in which they can be interpreted (pretence, errors, figures of speech, lies). In the present study, 7-year-olds and adults determined whether counterfactual utterances were prosocial lies or irony, depending on whether the counterfactuality was known only to the speaker (unshared knowledge) or to both interlocutors (shared knowledge). When the counterfactuality was shared by the interlocutors, both the 7-year-olds and the adults were less likely to interpret the speaker's counterfactual utterance as an attempted lie, and more likely to conclude that the speaker was being ironic. Adults were better than children at distinguishing irony from lies, but both age groups exhibited the same response pattern, namely a bias toward lying. This bias did not prevent the adults from deciding that the speaker was being ironic when the counterfactuality was shared, whereas children responded at chance level. In children, the association between task performance and theory-of-mind skills was nonsignificant, with a very small effect size. We discuss the possibility that, contrary to widespread belief, distinguishing irony from lies does not necessarily involve theory of mind (ToM).     

From Consultation to Participation

Empirical research in the literature on accountability of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) toward their beneficiaries is scarce, and the available studies have a number of limitations. Our study attempts to overcome some of them and focuses on one specific component of accountability toward beneficiaries: beneficiary impact on organizational decision making and output. Data were collected by surveying general managers of 790 Belgian NPOs in fourteen industries. Results show that most NPOs implement some mechanisms to involve beneficiaries and their representatives in organizational policy making, mechanisms that vary between and within industries. Despite the existence of such mechanisms, their perceived association with impact on policy making and associated potential organizational effects is weak, though positive.     

Age cohort differences in the developmental milestones of gay men

As the social context in which gay men live changes due to greater visibility, greater acceptance, and easier access to gay subculture, gay males may self-identify and take part in gay social activities at earlier ages than in the past. This study examined whether developmental milestones associated with sexual orientation for gay men have changed over the past several decades. A large and diverse sample of 2,402 gay men who responded to a 1994 survey published in a national magazine provided retrospective information on the age at which they reached individual psychological, social, and sexual behavior developmental milestones. We found evidence that individual psychological and sexual behavior milestones (e.g., awareness of attraction to males, having an orgasm with other male) are slowly moving toward earlier chronological ages (by 1 year of age every 8-25 years, p < 0.05), whereas social milestones (e.g., coming out) are moving more rapidly in a similar direction (by 1 year of age every 2-5 years, p < 0.001). The authors perform an innovative sensitivity test to demonstrate the persistence of the finding after correcting for the bias attributable to underrepresentation of those who have not yet self-identified as gay in such samples.     

Axioms for Shapley values in games with quarrelling

Four axioms, based on Shapley's original development of the Shapley value, are proposed for values of cooperative games with quarrelling. The collection of all values satisfying these axioms is shown to be the collection of values determined by a construction utilizing the proper choices of several parameters. This facilitates the proof of several common properties of all these values which are analogous to properties of the usual Shapley value. Finally, the parameters corresponding to the two specific values for games with quarrelling proposed in [2], are presented.     

Children’s Nonverbal Displays of Winning and Losing: Effects of Social and Cultural Contexts on Smiles

We examined the effects of social and cultural contexts on smiles displayed by children during gameplay. Eight-year-old Dutch and Chinese children either played a game alone or teamed up to play in pairs. Activation and intensity of facial muscles corresponding to Action Unit (AU) 6 and AU 12 were coded according to Facial Action Coding System. Co-occurrence of activation of AU 6 and AU 12, suggesting the presence of a Duchenne smile, was more frequent among children who teamed up than among children who played alone. Analyses of the intensity of smiles revealed an interaction between social and cultural contexts. Whereas smiles, both Duchenne and non-Duchenne, displayed by Chinese children who teamed up were more intense than those displayed by Chinese children who played alone, the effect of sociality on smile intensity was not observed for Dutch children. These findings suggest that the production of smiles by children in a competitive context is susceptible to both social and cultural factors.     

Revolution and the Whip of Reaction: Technicians of Power and the Dialectic of Radicalisation

This article argues that sociologically informed studies of revolution tend to underestimate the importance of counter‐revolution and ‘reaction’ in generating radicalisation. Revolutions are inherently political. Most accounts recognise this, but emphasise the executive organs of state – such as monarch, cabinet or ministers – at the expense of the intermediary ‘technicians of power’. Revolutions, however, typically seek to refashion an entire technocracy of power, and in so doing struggle against embedded and powerful sites of reaction. Central to the dynamic of revolution is the ‘purge’ of the technocracy of power. As governing structures are not easily transformed at a stroke, revolutions may be seen as punctuating long processes of struggle. Historically, the governing apparatus has been most effectively revolutionised under conditions of military occupation. The thesis is illustrated here by a narrative of revolution in Europe from the English Civil War to the Liberation of the 1940s, with a coda on ’68.     

A parameter expansion version of the SAEM algorithm

The EM algorithm and its extensions are very popular tools for maximum likelihood estimation in incomplete data setting. However, one of the limitations of these methods is their slow convergence. The PX-EM (parameter-expanded EM) algorithm was proposed by Liu, Rubin and Wu to make EM much faster. On the other hand, stochastic versions of EM are powerful alternatives of EM when the E-step is untractable in a closed form. In this paper we propose the PX-SAEM which is a parameter expansion version of the so-called SAEM (Stochastic Approximation version of EM). PX-SAEM is shown to accelerate SAEM and improve convergence toward the maximum likelihood estimate in a parametric framework. Numerical examples illustrate the behavior of PX-SAEM in linear and nonlinear mixed effects models.