While postsecondary education appears to promote civic mindedness and engagement, relatively little is known about the association between outcomes types of education, as well across different academic programs. Using a convenience sample from two institutions in Mid-Atlantic U.S., this research examines differences engagement 2-year community college 4-year university students, students majors...

A large-scale research study on the impact of overseas experience for undergraduate professional school students showed significant change in several dimensions of intercultural competence, including open-mindedness and emotional resilience, as a result of international study. Attitude change differed by length of study abroad term. Measured dimensions of intercultural competence are valuable f...

In this study of the origins of individual differences in theory of mind (ToM), the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study sample of 1,116 sixty-month-old twin pairs completed a comprehensive battery of ToM tasks. Individual differences in ToM were striking and strongly associated with verbal ability. Behavioral genetic models of the data showed that environmental factors explained...

We decompose distributional preferences into fair-mindedness (weight on oneself vs. others) and equality-efficiency tradeoffs, and measure both at the individual level in a large and diverse sample of Americans. We find considerable heterogeneity in both the extent of fairmindedness and willingness to trade off equality and efficiency, much of which cannot be explained by standard socioeconomic...

The human eye and brain are powerful pattern detection instruments. Coupled with the clear human need to perceive the world as deterministic and understandable, and the often counter-intuitive results of probability theory, it is easy to go astray in making inferences. In particular, many examples exist where attention was called to apparent extreme behavior, whether in time or space series, or...