“We are your Bad Conscience” The Influences of the White Rose and their Peaceful Resistance for Intellectual Freedom

Graduat

The Motivations Behind the Diplomacy of the Marshall Plan: An Analysis on U.S. Foreign Policy in a Post-War Economy

Undergraduate Textual or Investigativ

Modern Misconceptions on the Wall of Separation: An Analysis on the Influence and Misinterpretation of Jefferson’s Separation of Church and State

The symbolic concept of separation between church and state defines the relationship between government and religion. While Jefferson did not author the phrase, the third President of the United States promoted the philosophy of a wall of separation between church and state in his letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802. Jefferson’s support for a wall of separation stemmed from a strong belief in liberty of conscience and relied heavily upon the conviction to protect religious liberty. Through an analysis on the contextual history of the phrase, the original intent and application of separation of church and state becomes evident. By examining Jefferson’s original intent behind the concept of a wall of separation, a proper interpretation of this philosophy will demonstrate appropriate protection for both religion and government. Later paraphrased “separation of church and state,” this political concept has been misconstrued from Jefferson’s original meaning. Recent Supreme Court interpretations have misinterpreted the concept as freedom from religion, instead of freedom of religion.The Supreme Court has mistakenly categorized the wall of separation as a summary of the First Amendment and cited Jefferson’s phrase as judicial precedent in numerous cases, resulting in a misrepresentation of Jefferson’s concepts. This misrepresentation subsequently affected the judicial rulings of succeeding courts

Social Position and Distributive Justice: Experimental Evidence

Using a simple, double-blind dictator experiment, we examine the extent to which subjects\u27 choices of distributive shares are influenced by unearned social position. We measure social position by the initial distributive shares (resources) and the subjects\u27 ability to determine the final distributive shares (power). We find that subjects\u27 decisions are consistent with Rawls\u27 (1971) hypothesis that individuals expect a greater share when in a position with more power and initial resources. Finally, we test if subjects\u27 choices under a laboratory veil of ignorance are consistent with Rawls\u27 concept of distributive justice. Veiled individuals exhibit preferences that are less risk-averse and have greater variance than Rawls hypothesized. [excerpt

A Strategy for Teaching an Effective Undergraduate Mineralogy Course

An effective undergraduate mineralogy course provides students with a familiarity and understanding of minerals that is necessary for studying the Earth. This paper describes a strategy for integrating the disparate topics covered in a mineralogy course and for presenting them in a way that facilitates an understanding of mineralogy that enables students to apply it in subsequent courses and research. The course is organized into a well-integrated sequence of lectures, demonstrations and laboratory exercises that unfolds the material logically and at a pace that is responsive to the students’ needs. The course begins with six weeks on crystal chemistry, then five weeks covering analytical methods for characterizing minerals and ends with five weeks on the silicates. This order facilitates a progression of learning from the basic concepts to the more advanced and allows us to reinforce the concepts of crystal chemistry during the final section on the silicates. Optical mineralogy is almost entirely taught in the lab and is aided by use of a mineral identification chart developed to help students learn to identify minerals in thin section. Student performance is assessed through one technical paper and presentation as well as homework, essay exams and lab practicals. Educational levels: Graduate or professional

Multi-Period Rent-Seeking Contests with Carryover: Theory and Experimental Evidence

The majority of theoretical and experimental research stemming from Tullock’s (1980) model of rent-seeking considers static, single-period contests. This paper contributes to a growing body of research on multi-period rent-seeking contests by developing and experimentally testing a model in which a player’s effort affects the probability of winning a contest in both the current and future periods. Theory predicts that rent-seeking effort will be shifted forward from later to earlier periods, with no change in overall rent-seeking expenditures relative to the static contest. Experimental results indicate a significant shift forward when “carryover” is present and that the amount shifted is directly related to the carryover rate. Finally, although experimental expenditures are greater than the equilibrium predictions, overall rent-seeking effort in the carryover contests is lower than in similar static contests.

Personality Preferences and Pre-Commitment: Behavioral Explanations in Ultimatum Games

This paper uses responder pre-commitment and the Jungian theory of mental activity and psychological type, as measured by the widely-used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), to gain insight into subject behavior in a laboratory ultimatum bargaining experiment. Three experiment design details are noteworthy: (1) one design requires responders to make a nonbinding pre-commitment rejection level prior to seeing the offer, (2) one design requires responders to make a binding pre-commitment rejection level, and (3) one design includes a third person (or “hostage”) who makes no decision, but whose payment depends on the proposal being accepted. In general, we find behavior in our experiment to be consistent with hypotheses based on theoretical underpinnings of the MBTI and its descriptions of psychological type.

An Experimental Dynamic Public Goods Game with Carryover

We examine voluntary contributions in a two-stage public good experiment with ‘carryover.’ In two treatments, each subject’s second stage endowment is determined by the return from the public good in the first stage. We manipulate payoffs across these treatments so that, relative to our no-carryover baseline, earnings from either Nash play or Pareto Optimal play are held constant. The remaining two treatments maintain a constant endowment in each stage, but vary the marginal per capita return (MPCR) to contributions in the second stage. Our results indicate that carryover increases first stage contributions. Our implementation of carryover enables us to examine the effects of changing endowments and MPCR’s with a wider variety of parameter values than in the existing literature. Consistent with these studies, we find that MPCR and endowment effects are important determinants of subject contributions to the group account. While stage 1 contributions tend to increase in the presence of carryover, efficiency levels across both stages fall relative to the baseline due to the high potential payoffs from complete contribution in the second stage (due to higher endowments or MPCR levels).

Sharing, Gift-Giving, and Optimal Resource Use Incentives in Hunter-Gatherer Society

In the typical hunter-gatherer society, decision-making is collective, yet decentralized, access to resources is shared, goods are typically distributed via reciprocal exchange, sharing, and gift-giving, and the distribution of both income and decision-making power is egalitarian. We argue these features are interrelated. We adopt an incentive-based view of sharing and gift-giving, in which the fundamental role of sharing and gift-giving is to implement socially desirable production decisions in the face of a common resource use problem. We show how this system decentralizes decision-making, while at the same time encouraging agents to make production decisions in the best interests of the group. Sharing rules give agents optimal use incentives, while gift-giving obligations give agents incentives to reveal private information about skill. The system has some interesting properties; for example, it may result in a relatively equal distribution of income, even though the productive capabilities of agents differ. Our theory is also able to account for some features of the ethnographic record that do not jibe well with existing theories of sharing; for example, why the rather extensive free-riding on the efforts of the most productive agents is typically tolerated in hunter-gatherer society.

Contracts, Behavior, and the Land-Assembly Problem:An Experimental Study

We use multilateral bargaining experiments to examine how the order of bargaining (simultaneous or sequential) and the nature of contracts (contingent or non-contingent) affect the duration of bargaining, the efficiency of exchange, and the distribution of the surplus in a laboratory land-assembly game with one buyer and two sellers. While theory predicts an earnings advantage for the first seller when contracts are sequential and contingent, and for the second seller when contracts are sequential and non-contingent, we find that when a seller has an earnings advantage in the laboratory, it is the first seller to bargain in the non-contingent contract treatments. This result contradicts conventional wisdom and a common result from the land-assembly literature that it is advantageous to be the last seller to bargain, a so-called “holdout”. We also find evidence that sequential bargaining leads to more aggressive seller bargaining and greater bargaining delay than simultaneous bargaining, ceteris paribus, and that non-contingent contracts increase bargaining delay and the likelihood of failed agreements. The majority of sellers indicated a preference for being the first seller to bargain in all sequential bargaining treatments.