Showing papers on "Surprise published in 1991"

The Dimensionality of Consumption Emotion Patterns and Consumer Satisfaction

Abstract: Although both consumption emotion and satisfaction judgments occur in the post-purchase period, little is known about their correspondence. This article investigates the interrelationships between the two constructs by way of taxonomic and dimensional analyses to identify patterns of emotional response to product experiences. Five discriminable patterns of affective experience were uncovered, which were based on three independent affective dimensions of hostility, pleasant surprise, and interest. The results extend prior findings of a simple bidimensional affective-response space and reveal that satisfaction measures vary in their ability to represent the affective content of consumption experiences.

Now out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989

Abstract: Like many major revolutions in history, the East European Revolution of 1989 caught its leaders, participants, victims, and observers by surprise. This paper offers an explanation whose crucial feature is a distinction between private and public preferences. By suppressing their antipathies to the political status quo, the East Europeans misled everyone, including themselves, as to the possibility of a successful uprising. In effect, they conferred on their privately despised governments an aura of invincibility. Under the circumstances, public opposition was poised to grow explosively if ever enough people lost their fear of exposing their private preferences. The currently popular theories of revolution do not make clear why uprisings easily explained in retrospect may not have been anticipated. The theory developed here fills this void. Among its predictions is that political revolutions will inevitably continue to catch the world by surprise.

The Culture of Pain

Abstract: This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe - as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought - that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate.

Pleased and surprised: Children's cognitive theory of emotion

Abstract: This study looks at two emotions that are determined by whether a person's mental state matches or mismatches the state of the world. Results show that children from 3 years understand that being ‘pleased’ is a function of the match or mismatch between desire and reality. That is between what a person wants and what a person gets. A structurally similar problem is presented by the emotion ‘surprise’. ‘Surprise’ is a function of the match or mismatch between belief and reality. That is between what a person believes or expects to be the case and what actually is the case. It is shown that ‘surprise’ is not understood until children are 5 years old at the earliest. This developmental discrepancy can partly be explained by the fact that ‘surprise’ requires an understanding of belief as a misrepresentation. This is not typically understood before children reach 4 years of age. However, children younger than 4 years can understand ‘pleased’ as the result of reaching or not reaching a desired situation. Results also show that it is not until 5 years of age that children understand ‘happiness’ when ‘happiness’ is made dependent on belief about reality and not on reality itself. The fact that children understand ‘surprise’ and belief-based ‘happiness’ later than 4 years indicates a general lag between understanding belief and its role in determining emotion.

Mind and emotion: Children's understanding of the emotional consequences of beliefs and desires

Abstract: We investigated preschool children's understanding of mind and emotion by examining their understanding that emotions such as happiness and surprise depend on the actor's desires and beliefs. We report four investigations: a study of 3-year-olds' ratings of actors' happiness and surprise, a natural language analysis of adults' use of the word surprise in conversation to a preschool child, and two studies of 3-and 4-year-olds' abilities to explain the causes of desire-dependent and belief-dependent emotional reactions, such as happiness and surprise respectively. We demonstrate that children as young as 3 years appropriately understand the relevant mental states underlying happiness, sadness, surprise and curiosity, although they misunderstand the usage of some related lexical terms, especially surprise. The findings are discussed with regard to the early development of children's understanding of emotion and their understanding of mind, including children's early understanding of the notion of belief and their ability to distinguish beliefs from desires.

Security in Anarchy: Utopian Realism in Theory and Practice

Abstract: Realism-the view that war is inescapable in a system where sovereign states compete for power and advantage to one another's detriment-still dominates thinking about international relations. Ken Booth argues that, as world politics continue to surprise us, a worldview in which war is seen as a rational policy choice is unacceptable. It is too soon in history to conclude that the international system is necessarily a 'war system'. As states become less important in what has been called the 'new medievalism', he arguesfor decentralizing power evenfurther towards a global civil society and a global community of communities. He quotes Oscar Wilde: 'A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at.'

An experimental analysis of surprise

Abstract: We investigated the effects of a schema-discrepant event on three characteristics of surprise: delay in the execution of a simple action (measured by reaction times), involuntary focusing of attention toward the surprising stimulus (measured by memory performance), and subjective experience of surprise (measured by the subjects' ratings). The experimental procedure in each of the four experiments reported here was related to a technique introduced by McLeod, Mathews, and Tata (1986). In each trial 2 words were displayed simultaneously, one above the other, on a computer screen (for 3sec). Either together with the onset of the word display or 0.5sec, 1sec, and 2sec later a dot appeared for 0.1sec, either above the upper or below the lower word. Subjects were instructed to respond to the position of the dot by pressing one of two keys. In the experimental groups, in Trials 1–29 both words were presented as black letters on a white ground. This procedure was expected to establish a schema for the mo...

The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War

Abstract: IntroductionPART I: "THE BIG VICTORY, THE GREAT TASK" 1. The Communist Debate over Strategy 2. Preparations, and Objectives of the Tet OffensivePART II: THE ORIGINS OF SURPRISE 3. The Sources of American Biases 4. Missing the Signals: July-November 1967 5. Missing the Signals: December 1967-30 January 1968 6. Reacting to the Tet OffensiveConclusion: Explaining the Failure of IntelligenceBibliography Index

Some Aspects of the Changing Situation of Women in Hungary

Abstract: H E C O L L A P SE of the communist regimes in East-Central Europe has revealed significant differences in the situation of women in the respective countries, differences which have been strengthened by varied economic and political developments in the region in the last two or three years. The existence of these remarkable differences is a surprise in itself: one would have expected that the uniformity of political structure, the similarities of economy, and the impact of the same ruling ideology would have led to more "standardization" in social relations as well.

The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians

Abstract: During the brutal and destructive King Philip's War, the New England Indians combined new European weaponry with their traditional use of stealth, surprise, and mobility

The Patients’ View

Abstract: Medicines are taken for illness; so it comes as a surprise to discover that, in Britain at any rate, the majority of drugs are bought by healthy people. The biggest users are women over 50 who are in the upper socioeconomic groups, so on all these counts I am typical of the UK drug user. What these figures really tell us, though, is that taking pills and medicines is part of our normal way of life, and not just something we resort to in extreme emergency.

Rhetoric as Hermeneutic.

Abstract: A friend of mine who has for some time devoted his intellectual energies to teaching himself and his young colleagues to teach writing and who recognizes the political imperative to draw out the practical implications of theory was warned not long ago by a colleague who noticed that instead of his literature seminar my friend was offering one on rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy: "Stay away from that stuff! It'll rot your brain!" This man, a distinguished critic and litterateur, had not earned the right to make that judgment, having retreated to the defensive position so attractive to cynics and the lazy, as well as to despairing men of good will, viz, nobody can teach anybody to write His warning is nonetheless cogent: the tenor of rhetorical theory is often as not thin and pretentious; reading articles which set it forth can be a stale and profitless enterprise My suspicion is, however, that this professor would not have recognized sound, well-argued theory if he'd come across it The idea that there is such a thing as respectable rhetorical theory comes as a surprise to those of his persuasion Those who try to keep up with theory and practice as they are set forth in our journals might have another criticism: there is a great deal of pendulumswinging We go from sentence combining to free writing and back again to the formal outline; from vague notions of "pre-writing" to vaguer notions of heuristics; from rigid rubrics to the idea of no writing at all Some might celebrate this uncertainty as evidence of pluralism and a lack of dogmatism in the field, but it could also be characterized as a distracted, purposeless, despairing adhocism An idea which one year is everywhere hailed and celebrated vanishes the next without a trace In its place appears another which may or may not be consonant, may or may not be antithetical The new idea is not introduced in the context of preceding discussion, perhaps because its sponsors realize that its time in the spotlight is limited: no floodlights please! Thus we

Thoughts on building an academic career

Abstract: We have many routes to success in agricultural economics: extension education, resident teaching, advising, research, public service. In selecting problems to study we must be sensitive to needs of all our clientele. Several production economics concepts are relevant to allocating our own efforts. Noticing, recognizing, and experiencing surprise aid scientific discovery. We need to use heuristics, intuition, deduction, and induction, though consideration of science's ideal and real types shows that all these mental processes are fallible. We need special theories that have broad application. Replication deserves high priority. A few thoughts on the manuscript review process are presented.

Strategy and time in Clausewitz's on war and in Sun Tzu's the art of war

Abstract: Is there a link between the characteristics of Western strategy and the West's worldview? A concurrent study of time and strategy (assuming that time is a constitutive element in a civilization's worldview) is the first step toward exploring this link between strategy and worldview. With this objective in mind, a comparison of Clausewitz's On War and Sun Tzu ‘s The Art of War reveals some striking differences. In On War, instant conception, prolonged engagements, restricted flexibility and foreknowledge, emphasis on tactics over strategy, and surprise as an obstacle all characterize strategy. In The Art of War, strategy is conceived over a longer period of time and constantly revised, engagements are quick when they are absolutely unavoidable, advantage can be gained through surprise, flexibility and foreknowledge are critical, and strategy itself is emphasized over tactics. The concepts of time in each work are also very different. All of the evidence strongly suggests a link between each civili...

Understanding differential diagnostic disagreement in pathology.

Abstract: The Diagnostic Encyclopedia Workstation (DEW) was developed to support pathologists in diagnosing ovarian tumors. In this evaluation study, we had pathologists at several levels of experience diagnose a number of cases using either books or the DEW. In the context of this study, we needed a standard by which to measure performance of these pathologists. We, therefore, had experts enumerate for each test case the diagnoses they considered morphologically similar. To our surprise, the resulting lists of the experts varied considerably. The differential diagnosis of a disease based on its morphological characteristics, however, constitutes important reference knowledge in solving diagnostic problems. The question rose why the experts differed so much in their differential diagnostic knowledge. The ontogeny of a pathologist's personal knowledge is discussed and used to derive a model that can explain the limited consensus in differential diagnosis. The model helps to identify factors that may cause pathologists to diverge and others that may cause them to converge with respect to their knowledge. Strategies are proposed that are useful in achieving a better (differential) diagnostic consensus.

Teaching Argument as a Criteria-Driven Process.

Abstract: A recently published article on student argumentative writing may have caught some of us by surprise. According to the author, students as early as sixth grade display some understanding of argument (McCann 1989). The surprise, of course, arises from our experience with twelfth graders who experience major difficulty comprehending the task of persuasive writing. Thomas M. McCann's study, however, clearly acknowledges the difficulties young students experience when writing argument. He states, for example, that students "have difficulty providing their own prompts to guide the elaboration that will assist the reader in understanding an argument" (71). Our approach to teaching argument derives from both the hope and the mandate of these findings-namely, that students have the potential to write argumentatively but that significant assistance is required to enable them to be self-critical in their elaboration of ideas.

Belief and surprise: a belief-function formulation

Abstract: We motivate and describe a theory of belief in this paper. This theory is developed with the following view of human belief in mind. Consider the belief that an event E will occur (or has occurred or is occurring). An agent either entertains this belief or does not entertain this belief (i.e., there is no "grade" in entertaining the belief). If the agent chooses to exercise "the will to believe" and entertain this belief, he/she/it is entitled to a degree of confidence c (1 ≥ c > 0) in doing so. Adopting this view of human belief, we conjecture that whenever an agent entertains the belief that E will occur with c degree of confidence, the agent will be surprised (to the extent c) upon realizing that E did not occur.

Surprised by Common Sense: Local ~nderstandings and the Management of Conflict on-Tobi, Republic of Belau

Abstract: Conflict management is only possible in connection with conflict analysis.' This analysis may be an explicit, conscious, project; if not, it will be undertaken unconsciously and on the basis of unexamined assumptions. But, willy nilly, an analysis will be made. Just as the partidpants in a conflict must make it sensible to themselves, so must anyone else who is interested in it. Thw, every outaida involved with the diapute (whether researcher, obse~er, mediator, fadlitator, arbitrator, or judge) carries out some kind of analysis. The question then arises: What prerequisites, if any, exist for a successful third party analysis of conflict? It seems to me that an awareness of the possibility of fundamental differences in deep cultural presuppositions is likely to yield productive understandings. This response raises another, methodological, question: How can the analyst discover the cultural assumptions about being and action at work in a given conftict? One answer to this question takes advantage of the capacity for introspection and self-awareness that is as much a feature of the humanity that the analyst shares with the parties as is the need to constitute social reality through cultural means. Much can be learned about both sets of cultural presuppositions in use (the analyst's and the parties') if the analyst remains as alert to his or her own internal world as to the actions and statements of the parties. For when the assumptions about being and behavior with which the analyst is interpreting actions or statements are radically different from those that the parties are using in constituting those statements and behaviors, the analyst is bound to be sutgrised at some point in the proceedings. It is this surprise that is the main

The paradox of the surprise test

Abstract: The announced surprise test has long been a source of puzzlement among laymen and mathematicians alike. On the one hand, it is asserted “There will be exactly one test next week” and, on the other, it is asserted “The day of the test will be a surprise”. Simple logical analysis suggests that these two statements are in contradiction, yet, of course, when the test comes the class is surprised. By 1977, Martin Gardner had published a summary of solutions to the paradox gleaned from over 20 articles in the mathematical and philosophical literature. Most of the views expounded by Gardner admit the contradiction and implicitly invoke the logical rule that asserts that anything whatever can follow from a contradiction. This is also the approach of one of Gardner’s readers who purports to prove that the egg (the paradox of the unexpected egg, hanging, test, etc are all isomorphic) must be in box 5, yet his proof works as well for any other box! Others assume that perhaps the teacher (judge, friend with the eggs) may not be telling the truth, whereas one respondent understands "expected" in the statistical sense of “expected value”.

University, research, development

Abstract: discipline closely linked to formal logic); (b) a strong case is made for the sciences of observation; (c) there are calls for a revival of mechanics ('hiyal'); and (d) from within mathematics itself, there is demand for a doubling of geometry courses at the expense of algebra Thus, we find that the problem is deeper and more widespread than we had thought and that the root of the problem lies perhaps in our natural inclination to favour the subjective over the objective, which confirms the observations I made about the hypothetical example given at the beginning of this article At this point, I would like to make an observation of a general nature, namely that the adoption of a theoretical approach, even if pushed to its limits, is not usually detrimental in countries where an experimental science establishment already exists On the contrary, it increases their power For this very reason, although the American model is often held up as an example to follow, it seems to me that it is an inappropriate one because, in my view, the United States today is more in need of philosophers than scientists The theoretical approach, however, is harmful in countries that lack experience in the field of natural science and laboratory experimentation This is because they are held captive by their own subjectivism, under the influence of ideas which, though outwardly scientific and modern, are in fact other-worldly and antiquated It is no surprise that there are Indians and Arabs who excel in modem algebra, however remote this discipline might now be from its older form Neither is it surprising to see them discover hidden truths in new-found schemes of numbers and letters However, within the context of wealth creation, what they need is practice in trigonometry and the like, that is, to translate numbers of all kinds into geometrical shapes Rather than mere verbal expression, therefore, what is required to achieve this result is comprehensive and balanced training of the mind, the eye and the hand

The Greening of Probation Officers in Their New Role

Abstract: At the recent Chiefs and Deputies biennial meeting in Alexandria, an old colleague from another district queried me confidentially, "But isn't it fun to see how many points you can apply?" This unexpected interest in the guidelines for themselves is shared by many probation officers across the country. In fact, this aspect of guidelines application took most of us by surprise; thus when we admit to being smitten by the guidelines, it is with an apologetic, confessional tone.