Showing papers on "Surprise published in 1985"

Toward a More Human Science of the Person

Abstract: This article grew out of my concern that humanistic psychology is having relatively little impact on mainstream psychology in the United States. The major reason seems to be the lack of significant humanistically oriented research. Humanistic psychologists have been dissatisfied with the logical-positivism that is traditional in experimental psychology. I, and others, have for many years insisted on the need for new models of science. To my surprise and delight, a surge of new books and articles in the past five years has been supplying those new models, and I briefly describe a number of them. They all agree that the mechanistic operationalism is one mode of gaining new knowlege, but only one. Under various labels they present new ways, all based on an "indwelling" of the investigator in the feelings, attitudes, and perceptions of those being studied and in the data collected. There is clearly no one best method for all investigations. One must choose the means or model best adapted to the particular que...

Cross-Gender-Identified Children

Abstract: It may come as a surprise to some that this well-known retrospective researcher was sensitive to the method’s limitations. Despite their shortcomings, retrospective methods have made important contributions to the domains of developmental psychology and psychopathology. Their widespread use may be largely attributable to the acceptance by most students of development of the view that early experiences affect later behavior. Retrospective methods, for better or for worse, have played a major role in appraising the idea of continuity in development.

Surprise price shifts, tax changes and the supply behaviour of resource extracting firms*

Abstract: It is shown that a surprise increase in the current price (due to, say, a change in the tariff rate) may cause a resource firm to increase or decrease its current rate of extraction, depending on its expectation of future changes in the price. The key parameters are the rate of price change in the absence of the surprise shock, the rate of interest, and the rate of change of the tax rates. Copyright 1985 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd/University of Adelaide and Flinders University of South Australia

Tales of the Unexpected: Surprises Experienced by Graduates in the Early Months of Employment

Abstract: Although newcomers to work organisations attempt to anticipate what will happen to them, there are often unexpected events and perceptions which can have a major impact. These surprises are an important aspect of their experiences. The incidence and nature of surprises experienced by 104 graduates in their first few months of employment, and the role of surprises in making sense of the new work environment, are explored. The general atmosphere at work was the most commonly reported source of surprise, whilst the nature of the work and the respondents' own feelings and reactions were least commonly reported as surprising. However, these latter two sources of surprise were relatively frequently reported as sources of graduates' single most surprising experience. Illustrations are given of the role of surprise in adjustment to work, and the results are discussed with particular reference to their implications for careers counselling.

A Contrast/Surprise Model for Updating Beliefs

Abstract: : Although the updating of beliefs is a central concern in many fields, empirical research has produced complex and conflicting results. We first present a psychological model of updating that assumes equal attention is given to all information. The model is based on an anchoring-and-adjustment process that incorporates a contrast or surprise effect; in particular, the larger the current opinion, the more it is discounted by negative evidence and the less it is increased by positive evidence. The model predicts strong recency effects for conflicting evidence and, no order effects for consistent evidence. These predictions are contrasted with those of alternative models and tested in a series of six experiments involving the evaluation of written scenarios containing varying amounts and types of information. Thereafter, we generalize the model to include the effects of differential attention and show the conditions under which attention decrement can lead to primacy rather than recency. Specifically, under attention decrement, people with strong prior beliefs are more prone to primacy than those with weak priors. We then discuss our theoretical framework and results with respect to procedural variables that can affect judgment, the optimal inattention problem, comparisons with alternative models of updating (e.g., Bayesian models), and limitations and extensions of the present approach. (Author)

Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History

Abstract: The provocative sequel to At Dawn We Slept that continues Prange's masterful analysis of the attack on Pearl Harbor, delving further to examine the underlying causes and to ask whether the event that plunged America into World War II was really a surprise to President Roosevelt.

Medicine—A Profession in Trouble?

Abstract: It should come as no great surprise to our medical readers in the United States that we, the aggregate medical profession, are in big trouble with the public at large, and thus, of course, with its elected representatives at federal and state levels. What may come as a surprise is the rapidity with which our position of public trust is eroding. Never in modern history has the medical profession been stronger. There are more of us than ever before, and we are better trained and more competent to deal with practically every kind of treatment problem and prevention strategy. Our research and technology are advancing at an astonishing rate, and our successes are on the front page of the national newspapers and newsmagazines practically every day. Our society is expending more resources for health and medical care than ever before, and our population life span is again increasing substantially. Our

Socialization of Affect Communication

Abstract: The investigation of affect communication constitutes an ideal domain in which to study the interaction of biological and social factors in the genesis of complex human behavior. Facial expressions of emotion are among the few socially relevant actions for which strong evidence exists to support claims of species specificity. Research conducted in both Western and non-Western societies (Ekman, 1972, 1977; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Izard, 1971) shows significant agreement in the identification of facial expressions for at least six emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. At the same time, anthropologists (Birdwhistell, 1970; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1972; Ekman, 1972, 1976; Klineberg, 1938; LaBarre, 1947) have provided numerous examples of cross-cultural variability in the use of these facial expressions. This variability suggests that environmental factors also have an important influence on affect expression. Thus, to understand the development of emotion communication, one must consider how it is socialized or shaped in the course of the child’s interactions with other members of society.

Shifts in Soviet Views on the Proper Focus of Military Development

Abstract: There is a widespread view in the West that Soviet strategic doctrine has not changed much since the early 1960s, and still concentrates on fighting and winning an all-out nuclear war. The Soviets are said to be reluctant to recognize thresholds, and therefore have no limited nuclear options, much less a true conventional war-fighting option. To the extent they do have a conventional option, it is contingent on surprise and a two-week blitzkrieg; if the war is not won quickly, they will have to escalate.

Identifying the eliciting situations of six fundamental emotions

Abstract: We examined the capacity of human subjects to accurately identify the emotional content in verbal descriptions of various situations. Six emotions were studied: happiness, surprise, fear, ...

Brain Time and Mind Time

Abstract: For centuries, scientists and philosophers have struggled with conceptual problems posed by the self, by consciousness and will. Now that theological questions no longer play an important part in this struggle, and with the rise of various exact sciences, mechanistic notions have tended to overshadow the tremendous fact we have to start with: that within limits that seem to us very broad, we have a sense of freedom in choosing what we shall do next. To my surprise these mechanistic notions seem to originate not with chemists and physicists, as one might expect, but within the scientific communities which concern themselves with brain and behavior. In this chapter, as we think about Time, Mind, and Behavior, I shall assume two things. The first is that nobody needs to explain to us what it feels like to be free, and the second is that the task of science is to explain the world in terms which, as far as possible, relate to our experience of it. We interpret the world scientifically to our prescientific selves, and in this process the question what is the exact truth often seems less important than the question how we ought to tell it. This is so much the case that one very rarely hears claims of truth anymore in experimental or theoretical science or even in mathematics, and it is quite remarkable how easily we get along without them. Rather than over the correctness of a theory we tend to argue over the validity of a model, and one of the requirements for validity is that the model should help us feel that we understand.

The historical roots of the democratic challenge to authoritarian management

Abstract: Democracy is among the most misused words in our vocabulary and one of the most evanescent and slippery operational concepts. Sadly, although it should not come as a surprise, theory and reality often fail to mesh. This article provides an historical perspective on the participative management movement, based on the works of such theorists as Trist, Chandler, Taylor, and Fayol among others. It takes a critical look at the real problem facing managers today: How do we accommodate efficiency with democracy in a world where economic giants are subverting historical political sovereignties?

Models of Child Language Development

Abstract: To those individuals interested in the nature of child language development, the major controversy of the twentieth century involved the class of two distinct schools of thought: behaviorism and nativism. The controversy came to the fore in 1957 with the publication of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior and Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures. Emerging from different philosophical and scientific traditions, Skinner and Chomsky presented highly contrasting points of view. Skinner, on the one hand, came from the empiricist tradition. This tradition stressed the idea that theories could only be derived after documented observation of perceptible events. One did not begin an inquiry with a theory to test. Rather, one carefully observed repeated instances of events and from these data formulated a theory. Thus, knowledge was derived from the information that one could perceive and measure. Coming from this milieu, it is no surprise that Skinner (1957) viewed language as simple, one more form of human behavior, albeit verbal, that one could observe, count, and quantify.

Posing and Judging Facial Expressions of Emotion: The Effects of Social Skills

Abstract: Thirty-tour college women nominated by their peers as being either highly socially skilled or markedly lacking in social skills were videotaped while nonverbally portraying six emotions. Senders also rated the realism of their own poses. Fifty-eight female undergraduates labeled each pose and Judged its realism. Socially skilled and unskilled senders did not differ significantly in their portrayal abilities. Poses judged as more realistic were generally also Judged more accurately. Senders' social skill levels and judges' realism ratings interacted significantly in predicting the accuracy of judgment for surprise poses. Judges tended to rate low-skill senders' poses as more realistic than those of high-skill senders. Senders' social skills and senders' ratings of the realism of their own poses interacted significantly in predicting the realism ratings judges assigned to sadness poses. It is suggested that socially unskilled normals, unlike socially deficient patients, may possess basic verbal communicatio...

Computers and Education

Abstract: What's the future of computers in American education? A boom or a bust or somewhere in the middle? Let's look at the issue in context. The present goals of American education at all levels are largely concerned with static knowledge. That is, they are concerned with the reception and storage of information and associations. In general, learners are viewed as receptors. Therefore, transmission, repetition, and reward are the principal means of education. The student is a passive entity, and knowledge is seen as "stuff" to be stored and brought up at test time. Teachers focus on more efficient ways to transmit associations and school administrators focus on numerical data purporting to measure students' retrieval of associations, facts and conventions. The problem is that it works! Organisms-we are all organismsadapt. Students learn the game and we are all the poorer. It is the rare teacher above fourth grade who reports that children are eager, inquisitive, and willing to tackle new problems. Kids are b-o-r-e-d and are labeled lazy. From fourth grade through graduate school, students often won't tackle an original problem. A physics professor from a prestigious university tells me, "My students won't work on a problem unless they can slip a ready-made formula out of their hip pocket." How did such a situation come about? Much of the thinking about goals and means of American education comes directly from the assembly lines of 1910 when American school administrators embraced the Ford Motor Company as a model for education, adopting factory-oriented thinking with three themes: (1) mass production policies and practices; (2) cost-effectiveness; and (3) time/motion "efficiency" research. Read Raymond L. Callahan's classic Education and the Cult of Efficiency and weep. Psychological research is a second influence on education. Many studies involve brute memory with meaning deliberately banished in order to ensure "scientific" cleanliness. Much of the research is not only concerned with performance under various external conditions of reward and punishment, but it involves animals rather than children. A third prop to American education is perhaps the weakest and most disturbing. American education has seen a parade of fads and bandwagons. Remember the Initial Teaching Alphabet? Programmed instruction? Modern math? Behavioral objectives? Performance-based contracting? The open classroom? The talking typewriter? Each of these innovations was proclaimed the be-all and end-all of educational solutions and the fact that none of them lasted attests to educators' short attention span, to their unwillingness to look at underlying issues, and to the resiliency of the factory/stimulus-response model of education. Are computers in education another bandwagon? There is, in fact, a body of research on education quite different from the brute memory/nonsense syllable/external reward tradition. Sixty years' research by Jean Piaget and collaborators throughout the world show knowledge to be an active construction, a growing fabric of ideas and relationships rather than an inert collection of facts and associations. In this view, one's fabric of knowledge constantly interacts with the outside world, and the outside world acts on the fabric modifying it to incorporate the new reality. The reality so organized by the mind tends toward coherence, stability, economy, and generalizability. Two other aspects of this theory are worth noting. The fabrics of a sixyear-old are smaller and less numerous than those of most adults, of course, but-more important-they are intrinsically different from ours. A child's cup of knowledge is not only less full than an adult's but it consists of different stuff. Second, one's fabric of ideas doesn't only interact with reality but tends to develop and grow. If the conditions permitting and provoking extension and elaboration of the fabric are available, development takes place. If not, growth is stunted and the organism seeks fruitful interaction with other realities. The key to learning according to this theory is dissonance, i.e. mismatch between where we are and where we want or need to be. The dissonance must involve a moderate mismatch with the fabric. If it's too small, boredom sets in. If the dissonance is too great, (differential equations for the average 12-year-old) there's more boredom and a move to arenas in which moderate mismatch obtains. But given moderate dissonance, we act as though pre-wired. Dissonance is irresistibly engaging. There are many aspects of dissonance that lend themselves to educational situations. A major aspect of dissonance-widely employed in present schooling-is competition. But what about self-competition? Challenge? Surprise? Regularity and its absence? Novelty? Mystery? Uncertainty? Complexity? Ambiguity? Curiosity? Quest? Where in the educational literature, or in teachers' guides, has attention been given to these issues, except to warn against such stuff? All of this sets the stage for several points about computers, interactivity and dissonance: Computers in the classroom and the home can provide individual children and children in small groups with moderate dissonance at the child's level of choice, thus making learning an active construction rather than a passive warehousing. Contrast this situation with the traditional classroom where all children work the same textbook, often the same page! Computers can transcend local space/budget constraints and reach

Meaning and the Idol of Origins

Abstract: In respect of any practice more or less deeply rooted in the past, whether the Cargo Cults, or exchanging presents at Christmas, or Frazer's (or is it Wittgenstein's?) notorious Beltane Fire Festival, it is possible to ask questions like: What is the origin of this practice, and how has it changed with the passage of time? Genetic and developmental enquiries of this kind may prove troublesome for all sorts of reasons, some of them more familiar and straightforward than others. Thus, it may be difficult to unearth information about the early stages of a practice in which we are interested; or it may be that we find ourselves unable to decide between a number of genetic or developmental accounts all of which seem equally plausible; or an account which at first looked convincing turns out to be hopelessly wide of the mark. Embarrassments such as these come as no surprise, for they are chiefly though never undilutedly empirical in kind. However, their frequency should not encourage us to suppose that hypothesizing about historical origins is a formally more relaxed business than is hypothesizing about other matters. The truth is that in this area we are inclined to indulge more readily in, and we probably more often get away with, speculation and conjecture. However, at a less familiar and routine level we confront difficulties of a rather different order: those of continuity and identity. For a determination of where to start looking for origins sometimes requires us to take, no matter how tentatively and provisionally, decisions about what shall be accounted one and the same practice, and hence which items shall be identified as antecedents and which, by contrast, as first (or early) stages. Rousseau deftly locates the problem area, giving to the philosopher the more awkward task:

The Estimation of 'Surprise' Models and the 'Surprise' Consumption Function

Abstract: In the first part of the paper we outline a method for estimating a class of models in which news or surprises appear and expectations are formed rationally. The method is an extension of the errors-in-variables method of McCallum and Wickens. As a by-product some of Pagan's results on the circumstances under which the commonly use two-step method of estimating surprise models is efficient are shown to be a consequence of well-known theorems on the efficiency of sub-system estimation when a subset of equations is exactly identified. In the second part of the paper the method is applied to Hall's random-walk model of consumption, which is extended to allow for stochastic interest rates and for leisure and government spending to be substitutes for private spending. The extended formulation is a great deal more successful at capturing the salient features of the data. We also derive approximate restrictions across the parameters of the model due to the rational expectations hypothesis but find that they are marginally rejected by the data. Finally, we evaluate the ability of the life-cycle with rational expectations model to encompass alternative models.

This month Surprise and delight: statistical methods in ergonomics

Abstract: (1985). This month Surprise and delight: statistical methods in ergonomics. Ergonomics: Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 529-530.

Toward a Theory of Business Level Strategy Research

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to call for sensitivity about what the nature of theory is (or could be) in the field of strategic management. The author presents the view that strategy is part orderly and therefore is amenable to stipulating causal mechanisms and it is also part "art" which will demand different thinking and methods. One example is given of a theory of business level strategy and research that could blend both views. A larger purpose is to make a call for having authors state clearly what the key features of their theories are so that open debate about them can be accomplished. TOWARD A THEORY OF BUSINESS LEVEL STRATEGY RESEARCH The term theory from the title above stems from the Greek word (theoria) which means enlightened reflection from a ground of a set of first premises. To the more modern thinker, the term theory usually suggests a structure of first premises, coupled with a set of causal laws or mechanisms such that if initial conditions are known, a conclusion can be made. For example, if we have 1. Newton's Laws (Premise and Causal Laws) 2. Position of the Seven Planets and the Relation to the Sun (Initial Conditions) Therefore, posit another planet Neptune (Kuhn, 1957:261) The term strategy stems from the Greek word (strategos) meaning the art of the general. The three main terms presented in the definitions above theory, strate~ and art portray an underlying tension in the modern academic study of business strategy. The science in academic research ought to, if not, does strive for theories. Here, premises are laid open for inspection, causal laws are hypothesized from previous theory or hunches and then tested, so that reasoned, calculated and probability constrained conclusions can be drawn. The art in the definition of strategy, on the other hand, drives us to consider surprise, crisis, novelty, uniqueness, disorder and chaos-sort of an effervescence which is ever in the process of becoming (May, 1975; Arieti, 1976). Therein is the tension: if theory drives us to consider what is orderly and art drives us to consider what is chaotic or disorderly, can there ever be a reconcilement? Does one necessarily preclude the other? In fact, if we are

Reply to Ayers and Manser

Abstract: I have just received a letter from a French colleague, expressing surprise about this conference. “Il y a donc, meme au pays de Russell and Moore, un tel interet pour ‘l’histoire de la philosophie’ qu’une conference puisse se tenir pendant trois jours...?” he writes. Interest in the history of philosophy is indeed unusual amongst analytical philosophers; and it is worth reflecting on its growth in recent years.

Notes to My Daughter, the New English Teacher.

Abstract: It was a surprise to hear that you switched majors from journalism to English Education, and you chose to teach in high school. That's great. Becoming an English teacher is a noble pursuit. Unfortunately some teachers spend a lifetime getting kids to hate English. This is one obstacle you'll have to overcome. Allow me to give you some advice that your undergraduate and graduate schools might have overlooked.

The Deducible and the Real

Abstract: In Chapter 11 we noted how surprised and even a bit disturbed the relativist is to witness the disappearance of reality, even though this is the direct consequence of his deductions. This surprise and uneasiness sometimes reach considerable proportions and lead to consequences that are worthy of note because they can enlighten us on the very essence of the concepts we are investigating.

Music, the Will and Ideas

Abstract: When Bruno Walter first came to know Mahler during the years 1894–6, he found the composer to be much influenced by a writer – not of musical theory or history, but of philosophy. The philosopher was Schopenhauer, a complete edition of whose works Walter once received as a Christmas present from Mahler.1 It is a fact that need cause us little initial surprise. Highly literate and literary a musician as he was, Mahler, who had in his youth been an almost fanatically devoted Wagnerian, would naturally have found his way sooner or later to those works which Wagner described as having come to him “like a gift from heaven”2 in 1854. Many aspects of the programmatic basis of the Third Symphony – largely composed during the summers of 1895 and 1896 – suggest that Mahler’s volumes of Schopenhauer were perhaps never far from hand during those years. Some of his recorded comments support this view, and the sections dealing with music seem to have held particular significance for him.