2009. vol. 6. No. 2

The article examines different approaches to the study of conscientiousness developed by W. James, G.G. Shpet, M.M. Bakhtin, L.S Vygotsky, A.N. Leotiev, M.K. Mamardashvili. Evaluation of neurophysiologic reductionism is made. The article thoroughly studies the properties of conscientiousness: dialogism and the related cultural and historical sources of conscientiousness; beingness, semantic features, the polyphony of conscientiousness. «Polyphonic thinking» (M.M. Bakhtin) is examined as a means of investigation of the conscientiousness. The metaphor of the flow of conscientiousness is supplemented with a metaphor of the tissue of conscientiousness. The requirements for conscientiousness structuring are formulated and a preliminary version of conscientiousness structure is briefly described.

Understanding the proximate and ultimate sources of human cooperation is a fundamental issue in all behavioural sciences. In this article we review the experimental evidence on how people solve cooperation problems. Existing studies show without doubt that direct and indirect reciprocity are important determinants of successful cooperation. We also discuss the insights from a large literature on the role of peer punishment in sustaining cooperation. The experiments demonstrate that many people are «strong reciprocators» who are willing to cooperate and punish others even if there are no gains from future cooperation or any other reputational gains. We document this in new one-shot experiments which we conducted in four cities in Russia and Switzerland. Our cross-cultural approach allows us furthermore to investigate how the cultural background influences strong reciprocity. Our results show that culture has a strong influence on positive and in especially negative strong reciprocity. In particular, we find large cross-cultural differences in «antisocial punishment» of pro-social co-operators. Further cross-cultural research and experiments involving different socio-demographic groups document that antisocial punishment is much more widespread than previously assumed. Understanding antisocial punishment is an important task for future research because antisocial punishment is a strong inhibitor of cooperation.

The article is devoted to a problem of correctness of interpretation of prosocial decisions observed in experimental studies in economics as an undoubted evidence of a prosocial motivation and considerations which take into account other side's interests among people making these decisions. The results of the main research confirmed the hypothesis that decisions about equal distribution of money in the situation of ultimatum transaction cannot be viewed as a disproof of axiom of egoism of classic economic game theory. It was shown that such prosocial cooperative decisions in the vast majority of cases were determined by aspiration to care exclusively for one's own interests maximizing one's own benefits and minimizing one's own losses.

This work presents the results of the first experiment in Russia on voting and voting power. The general formulation of this task goes back to the theoretical works on voting power measurement, which are based on the number of participants' votes and the configurations of the winning coalitions. We compare the explanatory power of the classical indices of that kind with that of a generalized power index introduced by one of the authors in 2006, which takes into account not only the number of votes, but also preferences of the participants towards coalescing with each other. Our results demonstrate that generalized power indices are more adequate then the classical ones from a descriptive perspective, and that this notion should apparently include many of those decision factors that were considered insignificant in the classic literature, but are of great practical importance.

The paper describes the phenomenon of dependence of the functional state (FS) of participants of laboratory markets with complete information from the process of their trading activity. FS is measured by using the system of stabilographic chairs of the laboratory of experimental economics of CCAS RAS and MIPT. The result is compared with a well-known study of English and Dutch auctions which was based on measurement of participants' heart rate frequency. In essence, we have found the solution to a similar problem for a double auction with methods of stabilography. The influence of psychological type of subject on his/her success in the auction of this type is discussed.

The article examines the ways of recruiting the respondents for participation in matrimony research. A comparative analysis of different ways of recruiting is provided and the factors helping to increase the respondents' motivation for participation in an experiment are revealed.

The study is referred to the peculiarities of understanding of emotions as an index of formation of theory of mind in children brought up in the conditions of family deprivation.  The study demonstrated that such children show deficit of theory of mind in comparison with children brought up in families. Compared to their coevals from families, orphans at the age of 5-6 years recognize negative emotions less accurately except for anger. This testifies the importance of recognition of anger for orphans. When drawing their own emotional states and emotions of an «another», orphans use a stereotyped symbol which is typical for drawings of an another's emotions by children from families at the age of 3-4 years. Most vividly the deficit of theory of mind in children in the conditions of family deprivation is revealed in their incomprehension of mismatch of causal and expressive components of emotions, in the use of ineffective strategies when resolving contradictions except for the emotion of anger.