The present article offers a conceptual model for how the cognitive processes associated with perspective-taking facilitate social coordination and foster social bonds. We suggest that the benefits of perspective-taking accrue through an increased self-other overlap in cognitive representations and discuss the implications of this perspective-taking induced self-other overlap for stereotyping and prejudice.
This paper investigates the effect of decision-makers'culture on their implicit choice of how to make decisions. In a content analysis of major decisions described in American and Chinese twentieth-century novels, we test a series of hypotheses based on prior theoretical and empirical investigations of cross-cultural variation in human motivation and decision processes.
We develop a general equilibrium model of a production economy which has a risky production technology as well as a growth option to expand the scale of the productive sector of the economy. We show that when confronted with growth options, the representative consumer may sharply alter consumption rates to improve the likelihood of investment. This reduction in consumption is accompanied by an erosion of the option value of waiting to invest, leading to investment near the zero NPV threshold.
An unanswered question in the debate on public sector inefficiency is whether reforms other than government divestiture can effectively substitute for privatization. Using a 1981–1995 panel dataset of all public and private manufacturing establishments in Indonesia, we analyze whether public sector inefficiency is primarily due to agency-type problems or to the environment in which public sector enterprises operate, as measured by the soft budget constraint and the degree of internal and external competition.
Most models of how perceivers infer the widespread attitudes and qualities of social groups revolve around either the self (social projection, false consensus) or stereotypes (stereotyping). I suggest people rely on both of these inferential strategies, with perceived general similarity moderating their use, leading to increased levels of projection and decreased levels of stereotyping.
While recent research has emphasized the desirability of studying effects of changes in marginal tax rates on taxable income, broadly defined, there has been comparatively little analysis of effects of marginal tax rate changes on entrepreneurial entry. This margin is likely to be important both because of the likely greater elasticity of entrepreneurial decisions with respect to tax changes (relative to decisions about hours worked) and because of recent research linking entrepreneurship, mobility, and household wealth accumulation.
In this paper, we examine how people evaluate unusual objects and how they intuit whether others will like those objects. We focus on two predictions. First, we believe that an object's uniqueness is susceptible to framing by drawing attention toward or away from the object's unusualness. We expect such "uniqueness framing" interacts with needs for uniqueness (NFU): high NFU perceivers will like the same objects (e.g., neckties, names) more when asked to dwell on the object's uniqueness vs. typicality while low NFU perceivers will like them less.
Sometimes multiple tools may be used simultaneously or in succession in everyday mindreading. Yet surely we rely on somoe tools at some times more than others. The central question I wish to address here, and that I suggest is not well answered, is "Which tool is used when?" More complex and elegant answers to this question await us, but in the meantime I develop several claims in this chapter about which-tool-when contingencies.
Age differences in intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the relationships of each to academic outcomes were examined in an ethnically diverse sample of 797 3rd-grade through 8th-grade children. Using independent measures, the authors found intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to be only moderately correlated, suggesting that they may be largely orthogonal dimensions of motivation in school.