Two studies examined misperceptions of disagreement in partisan social conflicts, namely, in the debates over abortion (Study 1) and politics (Study 2). We observed that partisans tend to exaggerate differences of opinion with their adversaries. Further, we found that perceptions of disagreement were more pronounced for values that were central to the perceiver’s own ideology than for values th...

When is it Pareto optimal for risk averse agents to take bets? Under what conditions do they choose to introduce uncertainty into an otherwise certain economic environment? One obvious case is where they do not share beliefs. As in the classical (theoretical) example of horse lotteries, people who do not agree on probability assessments do nd it mutually bene cial to engage in uncertainty-gener...

Is there a distinction between questions of fact and questions of language? Many philosophers have said no. But a version of the distinction is ubiquitous, in philosophy and elsewhere, in the notion of a verbal dispute. Intuitively, a dispute between two parties is verbal when the two parties agree on the relevant facts about a domain of concern, and just disagree about the language used to des...

Is there a distinction between questions of fact and questions of language? Many philosophers have said no. But a version of the distinction is ubiquitous, in philosophy and elsewhere, in the notion of a verbal dispute. Intuitively, a dispute between two parties is verbal when the two parties agree on the relevant facts about a domain of concern, and just disagree about language used to describ...