People often hold extreme political attitudes about complex policies. We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do (the illusion of explanatory depth) and that polarized attitudes are enabled by simplistic causal models. Asking people to explain policies in detail both undermined the illusion of explanatory depth and led to attitudes that were more moderate (Experiments 1 and 2). Although these effects occurred when people were asked to generate a mechanistic explanation, they did not occur when people were instead asked to enumerate reasons for their policy preferences (Experiment 2). Finally, generating mechanistic explanations reduced donations to relevant political advocacy groups (Experiment 3). The evidence suggests that people's mistaken sense that they understand the causal processes underlying policies contributes to political polarization.

The following theorem is the principal result of this paper.Let (M, d) be a metric space and T a self-mapping of M satisfying the condition for x,y ∊ M1where a, b, c, e,f are nonnegative and we set α=a+b+c+e+f.

The SPWT is presented as a feasible and reproducible criterion measure of walking capacity for use with LSS patients. Although a strong relationship was demonstrated between the treadmill protocol and the SPWT, a systematic bias was observed with patients walking significantly further in the SPWT (36% in mean).

The Canadian Forces Firefighter Physical Fitness Maintenance Evaluation (FF PFME) requires firefighters in full fire-protective ensemble, including self-contained breathing apparatus, to correctly complete 10 work-related tasks on a measured and calibrated course. Fitness for duty is inferred from completion time of the course. We hypothesized that completion time may be dependent on pacing strategy and day-to-day fluctuations in biological function. To examine variability in performance, 20 females and 31 males (mean ± SD; age, 27.6 ± 10.5 years; height, 176.7 ± 8.3 cm; mass, 77.3 ± 13.4 kg) were familiarized with the FF PFME and then completed the test on 6 separate days. Pre-test behaviours (e.g., sleep, diet) and test conditions (e.g., calibration, time of day) were consistent. Repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant decrease in completion time between tests 1 and 6 (18.7%) and between all sequential pairs (e.g., tests 1 and 2). There was also a small but significant increase in the fraction of total test time for task completion and a corresponding decrease in the time to transition between tasks. The performance improvements cannot be explained by differences in effort (heart rate and perceived exertion). Coefficient of variation for tests 1, 2, and 3 was 7% and for tests 4, 5, and 6 was 2.6%. The results indicate the importance of practice on performance and the potential for false-positive or false-negative decision errors if biological variability is not taken into account.

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Paltering is the active use of truthful statements to convey a misleading impression. Across 2 pilot studies and 6 experiments, we identify paltering as a distinct form of deception. Paltering differs from lying by omission (the passive omission of relevant information) and lying by commission (the active use of false statements). Our findings reveal that paltering is common in negotiations and that many negotiators prefer to palter than to lie by commission. Paltering, however, may promote conflict fueled by self-serving interpretations; palterers focus on the veracity of their statements ("I told the truth"), whereas targets focus on the misleading impression palters convey ("I was misled"). We also find that targets perceive palters to be especially unethical when palters are used in response to direct questions as opposed to when they are unprompted. Taken together, we show that paltering is a common, but risky, negotiation tactic. Compared with negotiators who tell the truth, negotiators who palter are likely to claim additional value, but increase the likelihood of impasse and harm to their reputations. (PsycINFO Database Record

What happens when speakers try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? In 4 studies, we show that listeners can fail to detect dodges when speakers answer similar-but objectively incorrect-questions (the "artful dodge"), a detection failure that goes hand-in-hand with a failure to rate dodgers more negatively. We propose that dodges go undetected because listeners' attention is not usually directed toward a goal of dodge detection (i.e., Is this person answering the question?) but rather toward a goal of social evaluation (i.e., Do I like this person?). Listeners were not blind to all dodge attempts, however. Dodge detection increased when listeners' attention was diverted from social goals toward determining the relevance of the speaker's answers (Study 1), when speakers answered a question egregiously dissimilar to the one asked (Study 2), and when listeners' attention was directed to the question asked by keeping it visible during speakers' answers (Study 4). We also examined the interpersonal consequences of dodge attempts: When listeners were guided to detect dodges, they rated speakers more negatively (Study 2), and listeners rated speakers who answered a similar question in a fluent manner more positively than speakers who answered the actual question but disfluently (Study 3). These results add to the literatures on both Gricean conversational norms and goal-directed attention. We discuss the practical implications of our findings in the contexts of interpersonal communication and public debates.