This is an invited comment on a forthcoming target article (Rachlin, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in press) which provides a further entry in the long list of proposals for reducing what might be seen as social motivation to some roundabout form of self-interest. But his argument exhibits the...

This draft material gives an account of the "S-diagram", which uses Schelling's social choice diagram in the context of my NSNX ("neither selfish nor exploited") model of individual choice to provide an account of social equilibrium in situations in which social outcomes are contested. Examples...

The paper considers some aspects of rival beliefs in religion as against rival beliefs in science. This can easily account for why tolerance is far more characteristic of science, but leaves some question about the extreme zeal that has often marked religious rivalry. One essential aspect seems...

A leading recent line of work in game theory applied to politics exploits the "pivotal voting" insight introduced by Austen-Smith and Banks [1]. The most prominent follow-on papers have been by Feddersen and Pesendorfer [2, 3, 4, 5], where a particularly striking result is that in a large...

This responds to an invitation to comment on Steve Fuller’s severely critical appraisal of Thomas Kuhn. In a slightly different version it appears, along with other invited comments and a response from Steve Fuller, in Social Epistemology 17:211-213 (November 2003).

The prevailing account of expert vs. lay conflicts of risk intuition on such matters as nuclear waste and pesticides is that experts focus on a very narrow range of consequences, but ordinary people have a much richer sense of what is involved in choices about risk. Experts may feel comfortable...

These are draft chapters for "Cognition and Social Motivation", to be published by Routledge in late 2007. The book should go formally into press about January 1. Comments welcome. The chapters will be posted as they emerge from a final read-through, but with Chapter 9 posted early for use in...

A controversy among economists and others interested in the limits of rational choice analysis, still running after an onset at least two decades ago, concerns whether intelligent people, and especially experts, can be subject to cognitive illusions. This note provides a striking illustration...

A "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" (Guardian, 9 September) is the latest reminder of the persistence of controversy over who wrote Shakespeare. But the skeptics' case depends on a logical slip. The starting point is always some close variant of the claim that while Shakspere (a common spelling...

The paper gives an account of several well-known cognitive illusions in terms of contextual defaults which guide intuition where familiar cues are ambiguous. When the default is inappropriate, as it sometimes must be, the result is a cognitive illusion. In contrast to Kahneman & Tversky...