Biomedical subjects

Laurence Fiddick

Publications and source records attributed to Laurence Fiddick.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2007

Are perceptions of fairness relationship-specific? The case of noblesse oblige.

Research in experimental economics suggests that decision making in strategic interactions is often guided by a concern for fairness. However, experimental economics studies routinely place participants of equal social status and no prior social history in anonymous interactions, a context that would tend to foster the adoption of an egalitarian fairness norm. Extensive research in anthropology (Fiske, 1991) and psychology (Bugental, 2000) suggests that social norms, including fairness norms, are relationship-specific, raising doubts about whether the concern for egalitarian fairness observed in the experimental economics literature would generalize to a wider range of social relations. In this paper we focus on an alternative social norm characteristic of hierarchical relationships: noblesse oblige--the obligation of high-ranking individuals to act honorably and beneficently towards subordinates. In a series of five experiments, we show that the norm of noblesse oblige predicts tolerance of free riding better than individual self-interest does.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Participant recruitment methods and statistical reasoning performance.

Optimal Bayesian reasoning performance has reportedly been elusive, and a variety of explanations have been suggested for this situation. In a series of experiments, it is demonstrated that these difficulties with replication can be accounted for by differences in participant-sampling methodologies. Specifically, the best performances are obtained with students from top-tier, national universities who were paid for their participation. Performance drops significantly as these conditions are altered regarding inducements (e.g., using unpaid participants) or participant source (e.g., using participants from a second-tier, regional university). Honours-programme undergraduates do better than regular undergraduates within the same university, paid participation creates superior performance, and top-tier university students do better than students from lower ranked universities. Pictorial representations (supplementing problem text) usually have a slight facilitative effect across these participant manipulations. These results indicate that studies should take account of these methodological details and focus more on relative levels of performance rather than absolute performance.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Detecting cheaters.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Biological Evolution↗

PubMed2005

Social contracts and precautions activate different neurological systems: an fMRI investigation of deontic reasoning.

We conducted an event-related, functional MRI investigation of 12 male's and 12 female's reasoning about conditional deontic rules, rules regulating people's behavior. We employed two different types of rules: social contracts and nonsocial, precautionary rules. Although the rules and the demands of the task were matched in terms of their logical structure, reasoning about social contracts and precautions activated a different constellation of neurological structures. The regions differentially activated by social contracts included dorsomedial PFC (BA 6/8), bilateral ventrolateral PFC (BA 47), the left angular gyrus (BA 39), and left orbitofrontal cortex (BA 10). The regions differentially activated by precautions included bilateral insula, the left lentiform nucleus, posterior cingulate (BA 29/31), anterior cingulate (BA 24) and right postcentral gyrus (BA 3). Collectively, reasoning about prescriptive rules activated the dorsomedial PFC (BA 6/8). The results reinforce the view that human reasoning is not a unified phenomenon, but is content-sensitive.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Domains of deontic reasoning: resolving the discrepancy between the cognitive and moral reasoning literatures.

Deontic reasoning has been studied in two subfields of psychology: the cognitive and moral reasoning literatures. These literatures have drawn different conclusions about the nature of deontic reasoning. The consensus within the cognitive reasoning literature is that deontic reasoning is a unitary phenomenon, whereas the consensus within the moral reasoning literature is that there are different subdomains of deontic reasoning. We present evidence from a series of experiments employing the methods of both literatures suggesting that people make a systematic distinction between two types of deontic rule: social contracts and precautions. The results call into question the prevailing opinion in the cognitive reasoning literature and provide further support for both an evolutionary view of deontic reasoning and the more domain-specific perspective found in the moral reasoning literature.

Adolescent↗