universities of medical science and health services (umshss) are among the main organizations in iran's health-care section. improving their efficiency in financial resource management through creating an appropri-ate coordination between consumption and resources is strategically vital. investigating the financial performance as well as ranking the iranian umshss is the research objective.the ...

BACKGROUND Individual health beliefs are likely to play a key role in how people respond to knowledge and information about the potential harm from smoking and alcohol abuse. The objectives of the study were to 1) explore whether functional beliefs and risk minimizing beliefs were associated with intention to quit smoking and confidence to quit smoking and 2) explore whether functional beliefs ...

Prior work shows that children view group membership and psychological traits in essentialist terms, perceiving them to be both biologically determined and stable across time. To what extent might individuals view mental states such as beliefs similarly? Given that beliefs are often based on experience and can change across time, one hypothesis is that beliefs on the whole do not elicit essenti...

A decision maker is asked to express her beliefs by assigning probabilities to certain possible states. We focus on the relationship between her database and her beliefs. We show that, if beliefs given a union of two databases are a convex combination of beliefs given each of the databases, the belief formation process follows a simple formula: beliefs are a similarity-weighted average of the b...

Scientific entities like X-rays and black holes defy firsthand observation and everyday intuition, yet most people outside the scientific community still believe in their existence. Upon what kind of epistemic foundations do such beliefs rest? The present study explored this question by comparing students’ scientific beliefs to their supernatural beliefs along four dimensions of epistemic impor...

Following Anthony Downs’s classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that most voters lack the incentive to be well-informed. Recent empirical work, however, suggests further political partisans can display selectively lazy or biased reasoning. Unfortunately, knowledge seems exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these tendencies. In this paper, I build on observations construc...

The relationships among beliefs about volunteerism, volunteering intention, volunteering behavior, and purpose in life were examined in this study. A total of 5,946 participants completed a series of scales, including the Revised Personal Functions of Volunteerism Scale, Volunteering Intention Scale, and Purpose in Life Scale. The results showed that participants whose purpose in life had diffe...