This text deals with Mormon conspiracism, the belief in conspiracies among members of religion. I examine how conspiracy theories are reflected culture, history, and faith they were influenced by emergence Denver Snuffer's modern neo-fundamentalist movement. Using example new age movement preppers, show growing influence thinking its connection to Donald Trump QAnon theory. story Nathan Wayne E...

A multivariate stylized fact of financial markets is the frequent occurrence of simultaneous extreme returns. A simple agent-based behavioral model is presented that accounts for this phenomenon. Joint extremes are generated by heterogeneous fundamentalist traders whose perceptions of the effect of a common news factor on asset values become aligned during market stress. Simulation results are ...

D and normative modeling of decision making under risk and uncertainty have grown apart over the past decade. Psychological models attempt to accommodate the numerous violations of rationality axioms, including independence and transitivity. Meanwhile, normatively oriented decision analysts continue to insist on the applied usefulness of the subjective expected utility (SEU) model. As this gap ...

The introduction of a small amount of bounded rationality into a model sometimes has little effect, and sometimes has a dramatic impact on predicted behavior. We call a model robust to bounded rationality if small deviations from rationality result only in small changes in the equilibrium set. We also say that a model is structurally stable if the equilibrium set (given fully rational agents) v...

According to one view about the rationality of belief, such rationality is ultimately nothing other than the rationality that one exhibits in taking the means to one’s ends. On this view, epistemic rationality is really a species or special case of instrumental rationality. In particular, epistemic rationality is instrumental rationality in the service of one’s distinctively cognitive or episte...

My aim in this paper is to explore the relationship between epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. By epistemic rationality, I mean, roughly, the kind of rationality which one displays when one believes propositions that are strongly supported by one's evidence and refrains from believing propositions that are improbable given one's evidence. Prominent epistemologists frequently em...

The author conducted a four-year ethnography of American fundamentalists including fieldwork as a participant-observer in more than 250 worship services at some 200 churches in 17 states. While the private speech of laity is readily analyzable through an ethnography of communication (EOC), the approach could interpret only half the story. For a community of practice bound not by geography but b...

Recent research in group cognition points towards the existence of collective cognitive competencies that transcend individual group members' cognitive competencies. Since rationality is a key cognitive competence for group decision making, and group cognition emerges from the coordination of individual cognition during social interactions, this study tests the extent to which collaborative and...

Rationality is a fundamental concept in economics. Most researchers will accept that human beings are not fully rational. Herbert Simon suggested that we are “bounded rational”. However, it is very difficult to quantify “bounded rationality”, and therefore it is difficult to pinpoint its impact to all those economic theories that depend on the assumption of full rationality. Ariel Rubinstein pr...

I am honored to present this lecture in tribute to Nancy L. Schwartz. I did not know Professor Schwartz well, yet I am aware of her important professional contributions. First and foremost are the direct advances to the profession made through her writings. But also her indirect contributions, as a teacher and an intellectual leader, are very important. Some of the ideas and applications discus...