Historically, the psychology of ignorance has been under-explored, despite being a topic of great importance to anyone wishing to understand human behaviour. In this volume, Smithson develops foundations for a psychology of ignorance by providing an extensive and critical account of what psychology has to say about ignorance. The book's scope includes the nature and causes of ignorance, when and why we attribute ignorance to ourselves or to others, how we feel, think, and behave when we ar...

�This is a major, and deeply thoughtful, contribution to understanding uncertainty and risk. Our world and its unprecedented challenges need such ways of thinking! Much more than a set of contributions from different disciplines, this book leads you to explore your own way of perceiving your own area of work. An outstanding contribution that will stay on my shelves for many years.�Dr Neil T. M. Hamilton, Director, WWF International Arctic Programme�This collection of essays ...

This book introduces researchers and students to the concepts and generalized linear models for analyzing quantitative random variables that have one or more bounds. Examples of bounded variables include the percentage of a population eligible to vote (bounded from 0 to 100), or reaction time in milliseconds (bounded below by 0). The human sciences deal in many variables that are bounded. Ignoring bounds can result in misestimation and improper statistical inference. Michael Smithson and Y...

Generalized Linear Models for Categorical and Continuous Limited Dependent Variables is designed for graduate students and researchers in the behavioral, social, health, and medical sciences. It incorporates examples of truncated counts, censored continuous variables, and doubly bounded continuous variables, such as percentages.The book provides br

This book presents an accessible and state-of-the-art survey of current research on social dilemmas. A social dilemma arises when actions that are justifiable in terms of individual rationality (e.g. over-harvesting resources, or using private instead of public transportation) threaten the common good and in the long run the individual's own self-interest as well. The study of social dilemmas has important links with many areas in psychology, as well as with cognate disciplines such as ris...

Smithson first introduces the basis of the confidence interval framework and then provides the criteria for "best" confidence intervals, along with the trade-offs between confidence and precision. Next, using a reader-friendly style with lots of worked out examples from various disciplines, he covers such pertinent topics as: the transformation principle whereby a confidence interval for a parameter may be used to construct an interval for any monotonic transformation of that parameter; co...

Critics of intelligence tests—writers such as Robert Sternberg, Howard Gardner, and Daniel Goleman—have argued in recent years that these tests neglect important qualities such as emotion, empathy, and interpersonal skills. However, such critiques imply that though intelligence tests may miss certain key noncognitive areas, they encompass most of what is important in the cognitive domain. In this book, Keith E. Stanovich challenges this widely held assumption.Stanovich shows that IQ tes...

Need to learn statistics for your job? Want help passing a statistics course? Statistics in a Nutshell is a clear and concise introduction and reference for anyone new to the subject. Thoroughly revised and expanded, this edition helps you gain a solid understanding of statistics without the numbing complexity of many college texts.Each chapter presents easy-to-follow descriptions, along with graphics, formulas, solved examples, and hands-on exercises. If you want to perfo...

Existentialisms arise when the foundations of being, such as meaning, morals, and purpose come under assault. In the first-wave of existentialism, writings typified by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche concerned the increasingly apparent inability of religion, and religious tradition, to support a foundation of being. Second-wave existentialism, personified philosophically by Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, developed in response to similar realizations about the overly optimistic Enli...

This volume is devoted to the fascinating topic of social communication - fascinating because communication is ubiquitous, in that one cannot not communicate. And yet, the art of effective communication can be extremely demanding and elusive, because a tricky trade-off problem has to be solved. For communication to be successful, it must be at once informative - somehow indicating an intended direction of thought or action - as well as subtle - somehow concealing intentions and in...

While Applying Social Statistics is "about" social statistics and includes all of the topics generally covered in similar texts, it is first and foremost a book about how sociologists use statistics. Its emphasis is on statistical reasoning in sociology and on showing how these principles can be applied to numerous problems in a wide variety of contexts; to answer effectively the question "what's it for."A main learning objective is to help students understand how and why ...

This book captures the diversity and richness of writing as it relates to different forms of abilities, skills, competencies, and expertise. Psychologists, educators, researchers, and practitioners in neighboring areas are interested in exploring how writing develops and in what manner this development can be fostered, but they lack a handy, unified, and comprehensive source of information to satisfy their interest. The goal of this book is to fill this void by reflecting on the phenomenon...