Genetic essentialism: On the deceptive determinism of DNA.

This article introduces the notion of genetic essentialist biases: cognitive biases associated with essentialist thinking that are elicited when people encounter arguments that genes are relevant for a behavior, condition, or social group. Learning about genetic attributions for various human conditions leads to a particular set of thoughts regarding those conditions: they are more likely to be perceived as (a) immutable and determined, (b) having a specific etiology, (c) homogeneous and discrete, and (d) natural, which can lead to the naturalistic fallacy. There are rare cases of “strong genetic explanation” when such responses to genetic attributions may be appropriate; however, people tend to overweigh genetic attributions compared with competing attributions even in cases of “weak genetic explanation,” which are far more common. The authors reviewed research on people's understanding of race, gender, sexual orientation, criminality, mental illness, and obesity through a genetic essentialism lens, highlighting attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral changes that stem from consideration of genetic attributions as bases of these categories. Scientific and media portrayals of genetic discoveries are discussed with respect to genetic essentialism, as is the role that genetic essentialism has played (and continues to play) in various public policies, legislation, scientific endeavors, and ideological movements in recent history. Last, moderating factors and interventions to reduce the magnitude of genetic essentialism, which identify promising directions to explore in order to reduce these biases, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Grouping and gambling: A Gestalt approach to understanding the gambler's fallacy.

The gambler's fallacy was examined in terms of grouping processes. The gambler's fallacy is the tendency to erroneously believe that for independent events, recent or repeated instances of an outcome (e.g., a series of "heads" when flipping a coin) will make that outcome less likely on an upcoming trial. Grouping was manipulated such that a critical trial following a run of heads or tails was grouped together with previous trials (i.e., the last trial of "Block 1") or was the first trial of another group (the first trial of "Block 2"). As predicted, the gambler's fallacy was evident when the critical trial was grouped with the previous trials, but not when it was arbitrarily grouped with the next block of trials. Discussion centres on the processes underlying the gambler's fallacy and practical implications of these findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How to Psychoanalyze a Robot: Unconscious Cognition and the Evolution of Intentionality1

According to a common philosophical distinction, the `original' intentionality, or `aboutness' possessed by our thoughts, beliefs and desires, is categorically different from the `derived' intentionality manifested in some of our artifacts –- our words, books and pictures, for example. Those making the distinction claim that the intentionality of our artifacts is `parasitic' on the `genuine' intentionality to be found in members of the former class of things. In Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness, Daniel Dennett criticizes that claim and the distinction it rests on, and seeks to show that ``metaphysically original intentionality' is illusory by working out the implications he sees in the practical possibility of a certain type of robot, i.e., one that generates `utterances' which are `inscrutable to the robot's designers' so that we, and they, must consult the robot to discover the meaning of its utterances. I argue that the implications Dennett finds are erroneous, regardless of whether such a robot is possible, and therefore that the real existence of metaphysically original intentionality has not been undermined by the possibility of the robot Dennett describes.     

Relationship of ego disjunction and manifest anxiety to conflict resolution.

The purpose of this study was to discover the influence of 2 determinants, ego disjunction (ED) and manifest anxiety (MA), on conflict resolution. ED, defined as antagonistic response tendencies within an individual, was measured by the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule, and MA by the Taylor MA scale. From a sample of 56 college Ss, it was found that Ss high in both ED and MA required significantly more time to resolve approach-approach and avoidance-avoidance conflicts than Ss high in only one determinant but low in the other and Ss low in both determinants. No significant differences in conflict scores were found when Ss low in both determinants were compared with Ss high in only one determinant but low in the other. The results were interpreted as indicating that ED and MA interact, producing interfering responses which hinder efficient resolution of conflicts when ED and MA are both high within an individual High MA and high ED scores, when taken alone, did not yield any conclusive results. It is only when both determinants are taken into consideration that greater confidence can be invested in those measures to predict conflict performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Naturalistic ethics and the social sciences.

This article discusses naturalistic ethics and the social sciences. It is noted that some of those who believe science is (or should be) ethically neutral have fallen into a naturalistic fallacy. The author believes that we all have equal cause to reject the naturalistic fallacy and what he calls the "counternaturalistic fallacy," that is, the belief that ethics cannot have a naturalistic basis but must have supernatural origins or sanctions. The fallacy of these points of view are discussed in this article, as well as evolutionary ethics and human nature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

VNS methods for home care routing and scheduling problem with temporal dependencies,and multiple structures and specialties

The need for optimization in the Home Care Service is becoming more and more legitimate in the face of the increase of demand and cost all over the world. Recently, many researchers in the Operation Research community have been attracted by this issue, which presents interesting aspects related to the vehicle routing problems. In this paper, we consider a new variant called the vehicle routing problem with time windows, temporal dependencies (synchronization, precedence, and disjunction), multi‐structures, and multispecialties problem (VRPTW‐TD‐2MS). This new variant is an extension of the vehicle routing problems with time windows and synchronization constraints (VRPTW‐S) that is well‐studied in literature. We present a Mixed Integer Programming method, and propose three Variable Neighborhood Search approaches. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of the General Variable Neighborhood Search with Ejection Chains‐based local search for solving VRPTW‐TD‐2MS and VRPTW‐S.     

The fallacious strategy of virtual water trade

Since the concept of virtual water was put forward, there has been an increasing number of papers on the topic, as a result of which virtual water is now being mainstreamed in the water policy world. Unfortunately, virtual water trade strategy as a solution to water shortages is wrong and fallacious. Although the virtual water trade theory is considered a descendant of the comparative advantage theory of economics, it is in fact an over-simplification, going from the truth to fallacy. To make decisions of virtual water trade based on only one production factor, water, though there are many other production factors that influence the allocation of resources at the same time, is misleading theoretically and practically.