Among medical researchers and clinicians the dominant view is that it is unethical to deceive patients by prescribing a placebo. This opinion is formalized in a recent policy issued by the American Medical Association (AMA [Chicago, IL]). Although placebos can be shown to be always safe, often effective, and sometimes necessary, doctors are now effectively prohibited from using them in clinical...

The protocentrism paradigm of social prediction (R. Karniol, 2003) challenges the egocentrism paradigm tacitly accepted by many researchers. The author reviews the 2 paradigms comparatively by focusing on 3 conceptual and 3 empirical issues. On conceptual grounds, the author suggests that the egocentrism paradigm has been proven useful because of (a) its greater breadth and parsimony, (b) the d...

Challenging the contention that statistical methods applied to large numbers of cases invariably provide better grounds for causal inference, this article explores the value of a method of systematic process analysis that can be applied in a small number of cases. It distinguishes among three modes of explanation – historically specific, multivariate and theoryoriented – and argues that systema...