Ken I. Manktelow

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at University of Wolverhampton

There is a large body of research exploring the role of altruism in mate choice, showing altruism is a mating signal. However, it is still unclear whether these traits signal good genetic quality, due to their costly nature, or good partner/parenting qualities. We report the findings of three experiments that aimed to address this, by comparing the...

Previous literature suggests that altruism may have evolved as a sexually selectable trait. Recent research suggests that women seek altruistic traits for long-term, not short-term relationships, as altruism can serve as an honest signal of one’s character. We tested this hypothesis by asking 102 participants to complete a modified version of Buss’...

This case study is based on a portion of my PhD research exploring the relationship between physical attractiveness and altruistic behavior. Much of the previous literature exploring these variables has been conducted via computer simulations, using facial images and vignettes. I conducted three studies exploring the relationship between physical a...

Explaining cooperative tendencies through an evolutionary lens has been problematic for theorists. Traditional explanations derive from theories of reciprocity, biological markets, and more recently via partner choice and sexual selection. The sexual selection hypothesis has been tested within game-theoretic frameworks gaining empirical support in...

In sub-Saharan Africa, traditional and faith healers provide competing services alongside biomedical professionals. This may be associated with delays in reaching specialised mental health services, and hence with longer duration of untreated illness. As first line care constitutes a crucial stage in accessing of psychiatric care, investigating pat...

Several studies find that male individuals are more altruistic toward attractive women, suggesting altruism may serve as a courtship display. Many studies exploring this phenomenon have used vignettes and facial images. We tested the sexual selection hypothesis as an explanation for altruistic behavior, where players played the dictator game with “...

The effect of mental illness stigma can be greater in the developing world where sufferers are additionally affected by destitution. This study investigated the attitudes of the Igbo people of Southeastern Nigeria toward mental illness to establish the extent and determinants of negative attitudes. Multistage sampling was used to select participant...

Explaining altruism through an evolutionary lens has been a challenge for evolutionary theorists. Where altruism towards kin is well understood through kin selection, altruism towards non-kin is an evolutionary puzzle. Contemporary research has found that, through a game-theoretic framework, sexual selection could be an explanation for the evolutio...

The striking gaps in formal mental health care in the developing world are largely traceable to Instrumental and Ideological Barriers. Focusing on south-eastern Nigeria, the study aimed to establish the relative weight, significance and determinants of these barriers for prioritised policy interventions. Multistage sampling method was used to selec...

The judgment of blame was studied in a group of 28 teenagers, 14 with Asperger syndrome (AS) and 14 typically developed. Teenagers in each group were matched by age, cognitive development and academic level. They were presented with 12 short vignettes in which they had to judge an action according to the intent of the actor (deliberate and accident...

This study aimed to investigate teachers' perspectives on the practical implementation of the standards agenda and its impact on their professional identities. Q-methodology was used alongside semi-structured interviews with UK primary school teachers. The study explored the views of 25 teachers in six schools, selected through purposive sampling t...

Peng and Nisbett found that Chinese people are more apt to engage in dialectical thinking (DT) than Americans. We gave the Dialectical Self Scale questionnaire and 10 pairs of opposing opinions to high school and university students of Japanese, Chinese, and British nationality. We asked them to fill in the questionnaire, to rate how strongly they...

The threat anticipation model of paranoia (Freeman, 2007) highlights the important roles of schemas and affect in delusional belief; however, we aimed to address unanswered questions about the way in which affect mediates the relationship between schemas and persecutory ideas. In Study 1, we hypothesized that anxiety would mediate the relationship...

Although adolescence is a particularly sensitive period for the development of schizotypy (Walker and Bollini [Schizophr Res 54:17-23, 2002]), there has been relatively limited research on the psychological factors that specifically predict delusional beliefs during adolescence. We studied 392 school students aged 11 to 16 years with a battery of b...

Children between the ages of 6 and 16 years were presented with set-inclusion and linear-ordering relationships embedded in text. On the set-inclusion task, children of all age groups performed similarly to adult subjects; that is, there was an interaction between truth and distance. Hence, children, like adults, treated the relationship as if it w...

In the context of anticipated climate change, particularly the frequency and intensity of rainfall events likely to affect the UK in future, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the ways in which people perceive, and therefore respond to, natural hazards such as flood risk. Behavioural models, incorporating key predictive factors, ar...

The area of psychological research reviewed in this book is one that is not only increasing in popularity in college curricula, but is also making an ever larger impact on the world outside the classroom. Drawing upon research originally cited in Ken Manktelow’s highly successful publication Reasoning and Thinking, this completely rewritten textboo...

A series of five experiments was performed comparing abstract and thematic materials in Wason's (1966) selection task. The first was designed to test the effect of negated rule components on the facilitated performance usually found with thematic rules. No such facilitation transpired, however, and the succeeding four experiments investigated possi...

Hindsight bias is a mistaken belief that one could have predicted a given outcome once the outcome is known. Choi and Nisbett (20005. Choi , I. and Nisbett , R. E. 2000 . Cultural psychology of surprise: Holistic theories and recognition of contradiction . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 79 : 890 – 905 . [CrossRef], [PubMed], [Web of...

There is an acknowledged need to improve the resilience of those at risk of flooding in areas of the UK. Studies of disaster preparedness worldwide indicate raising awareness of a hazard does not necessarily engender action. In the UK the majority of the at-risk population do not display adaptation behaviours until they have experienced one or more...

Findings that illusory contours can facilitate visual detection of a subthreshold real line (Dresp & Bonnet, 1995) were not replicated, when line-induced instead of edge-induced illusory contour stimuli were used (Salvano-Pardieu et al., 2006). Rather, the results of the latter study supported the importance of spatial cues. The present study was d...

Previous studies demonstrate that people high in delusional ideation exhibit a data-gathering bias on inductive reasoning tasks. The current study set out to investigate the factors that may underpin such a bias by examining healthy individuals, classified as either high or low scorers on the Peters et al. Delusions Inventory (PDI). More specifical...

In the context of anticipated climate change outcomes, there is a need to improve the resilience of the householder population in areas of the UK known to be at risk of flooding. Community resilience requires both physical and societal changes, but the adoption of practical coping strategies (such as flood resilient construction) is not a simple pu...

Previous studies (e.g. Moller & Husby, 2000; Blackwood et al., 2004) have revealed that delusional thinking is accompanied by an exaggerated focus upon the self and upon stimuli that are perceived to be related to the self. The objective was to examine whether those high in subclinical delusional ideation exhibit a heightened tendency for self-refe...

Power has been studied in various guises in both the social cognition and the reasoning literatures. In this paper, three experiments are reported in which this factor was investigated in the domain of deontic thinking. Power of source of deontic statements was varied within several scenarios, and participants judged the degree to which they though...

Two experiments are reported which compare conditional reasoning with three types of rule. These consist of two types of rule that have been widely studied previously, if p then q and p only if q, together with a third type, q if p. In both experiments, the p only if q type of rule yields a different pattern of performance from the two other types...

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Subthreshold summation between physical target lines and illusory contours induced by edges such as those produced in the Kanizsa illusion has been reported in previous studies. Here, we investigated the ability of line-induced illusory contours, using Ehrenstein figures, to produce similar subthreshold summation. In the first experiment, three sti...

Content EffectsFrom Contents to ContextsKnowledge and Reasoning: Extending the Perspective EffectKnowledge and Reasoning: Studies of Superordinate Principles (SuperPs)Extending SuperP: Contexts and ConsequencesConcluding RemarksReferences

Recent psychological research has investigated how people assess the probability of an indicative conditional. Most people give the conditional probability of q given p as the probability of if p then q. Asking about the probability of an indicative conditional, one is in effect asking about its acceptability. But on what basis are deontic conditio...

Color selection within built environment visualization involves the decisive arrangement and application of color for the principle interpretation and organization of structural and spatial information. Therefore, appropriate and accurate forms for selecting colors are necessary to ensure that a full communicative visualization can be generated for...

The Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) offers a ‘one-stop-shop’ for checking the suitability of potential employees to work with adults in health and social care settings. This paper argues that an exploration of the rationale for recruitment decision making following the creation of the CRB is timely and necessary.

We report two new phenomena of deontic reasoning: (1) For conditionals with deontic content such as, "If the nurse cleaned up the blood then she must have worn rubber gloves", reasoners make more modus tollens inferences (from "she did not wear rubber gloves" to "she did not clean up the blood") compared to conditionals with epistemic content. (2)...

The interplay between social and cultural context and perceptions of cardiovascular disease This paper seeks to explore the impact of social and cultural factors upon perceptions of the patients’ cardiovascular risk and intended lifestyle changes. Qualitative and quantitative research approaches were used. The sample was purposeful; matched groups...

This commentary focuses on the implications of practical reasoning research for the view of rationality in Stanovich & West's target article. Practical reasoning does not correlate with intelligence or other reasoning tasks. Explanation in decision making terms raises the issue of dilemmas, making it hard to specify the correct norm, when an action...

A growing body of research indicates that in causal conditional reasoning, the conclusion that P is necessary for Q is suppressed where alternative conditions for Q are available. Similarly, the conclusion that P is sufficient for Q is suppressed where disabling conditions for P or additional requirements for Q are available. This paper describes e...

Cummins (1995) offers an analysis of causal and truth-functional sufficiency and necessity to predict and explain the effects on conditional inferences of two pragmatic factors: alternative causes and disabling conditions. However, the justification of these predictions is inconsistent. This note offers a modified analysis which puts her prediction...

This paper reports the outcome of a project sponsored by the UK Government Training Enterprise and Education Directorate (TEED) to produce CAL material to teach employment-related language to hearing-impaired school leavers. The tutorial content was decided after conducting a survey of teachers of the deaf. A survey of the literature relating to la...

Recent research on reasoning has resulted in a number of authors urging a convergence between ideas in the hitherto disparate fields of deduction and decision making. The deontic reasoning literature in particular refers increasingly to the decision-making constructs of subjective utility and subjective probability. Although the former construct ha...

It is argued that reasoning in the real world supports decision making and is aimed at the achievement of goals. A distinction is developed between two notions of rationality: rationality which is reasoning in such a way as to achieve one's goals--within cognitive constraints--and rationality which is reasoning by a process of logic. This dichotomy...

This paper reports the outcomes of a project sponsored by the Training Agency (now TEED) to produce CAL material to teach employment-related language to hearing-impaired school leavers. The tutorial content was decided after conducting a survey of teachers of the deaf, in order to determine which areas they felt were significant and where there was...

A set of experiments is reported in which a new formulation of deontic thinking is tested. This is that people represent subjective utilities inherent in conforming to or violating deontic statements, along with the social dynamics of these statements. The experiments used Wason's selection task and tested people's understanding of conditional perm...

Two experiments were carried out to investigate whether visual imagery was used in representing transitive linear ordering relationships. Subjects were presented with passages describing either a linear ordering or a set inclusion relationship, while being subjected to either visual or verbal interference. Performance was tested by asking subjects...

A review is given of the directions taken by research into Wason’s selection task in recent years. Two major developments are detailed: theoretical formulations based on non-logical constructs and their implications for previous models of task performance; and investigations of the effects of problem content on the solutions offered by subjects. In...

Jean-Baptiste Van der Henst (vanderhenst@isc.cnrs.fr) Institut des Sciences Cognitives, 67, boulevard Pinel Bron, 69675 France Yayoi Kawasaki (yayoi@iris.dti.ne.jp) Abstract The purpose of this study is to see whether hindsight bias is stronger among Japanese people than among French people using conditional reasoning and probability judgment task....

The study of rationality is [an] important [area] of contemporary cognitive science: recent research has involved collaborations across disciplinary boundaries, and theoretical progress has been rapid and profound. [This book] gathers together leading researchers in Europe and the US to survey these developments and present them in an accessible an...

[discuss] one extremely important type of deontic reasoning, which takes place when people try to find out which actions they ought to perform or may perform / this type of reasoning has traditionally . . . been called 'practical reasoning' / present experimental evidence that, in some contexts at least, people tend to be reasonably good at it / wh...

Two experiments, with 98 undergraduates, examined human reasoning performance in the context of the logic programming language PROLOG. Content (familiar vs unfamiliar) and representation (diagrammatic vs PROLOG-like list) were investigated. When Ss answered questions about hierarchical relationships, they made more errors in the familiar-list and u...