Michael Nielsen
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3874170 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Michael Nielsen |
| NOMBRES | Michael |
| APELLIDO | Nielsen |
| FIRMA | NIELSEN M |
| AFILIACIONES | Georgia Southern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3161-6823 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 41 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 147 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1995 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
The Demography of Exiting, Retention, and Conversion among Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Utah
Utah has a unique religious subculture that emerges from the historical and demographic prominence of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS , or Mormon church). Scholars argue that in recent decades this subculture is eroding as disaffiliation from Mormonism rises. This paper examines the demography, social attitudes and religiosity of current and former Mormons to understand the dynamics of Utah’s shifting religious landscape.…
Leaving the Catholic Church
What predicts whether people are likely to leave the Catholic Church? We examine the role of different identification aspects and their interaction with acceptance of authority, possibility for change, and reputation of the Church in society. In a cross-sectional (N = 583) and longitudinal study with random intercept (N = 271) we find that specifically lower scores on the identification aspects of solidarity, satisfaction, and centrality predict …
The Lord's Supper in the Early Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
The March 15, 1879, issue of The Saints’ Herald describes the performance of the Lord's Supper in Plano, Illinois, the then-flagship congregation of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ). The periodical responded to administrative questions and used Plano's template as an example for others to imitate. The pertinent portion is as follows: On the first Sunday in each month, at three in the afternoon,…
New Possibilities for Fair Algorithms
We introduce a fairness criterion that we call Spanning. Spanning i) is implied by Calibration, ii) retains interesting properties of Calibration that some other ways of relaxing that criterion do not, and iii) unlike Calibration and other prominent ways of weakening it, is consistent with Equalized Odds outside of trivial cases
Spanning in and Spacing out? A Reply to Eva
The implicit decision theory of non-philosophers
This paper empirically investigates whether people’s implicit decision theory is more like causal decision theory or more like a non-causal decision theory (such as evidential decision theory). We also aim to determine whether implicit causalists, without prompting and without prior education, make a distinction that is crucial to causal decision theorists: preferring something as a news item and preferring it as an object of choice . Finally, we…
Distention for Sets of Probabilities
Bayesians often appeal to “merging of opinions” to rebut charges of excessive subjectivity. But what happens in the short run is often of greater interest than what happens in the limit. Seidenfeld and coauthors use this observation as motivation for investigating the counterintuitive short run phenomenon of dilation, since, they allege, dilation is “the opposite” of asymptotic merging of opinions. The measure of uncertainty relevant for dilation…
On the Best Accuracy Arguments for Probabilism
In a recent paper, Pettigrew (2022) reports a generalization of the celebrated accuracy-dominance theorem due to Predd et al. (2009), but Pettigrew’s proof is incorrect. I will explain the mistakes and provide a correct proof
Speed-Optimal Induction and Dynamic Coherence
A standard way to challenge convergence-based accounts of inductive success is to claim that they are too weak to constrain inductive inferences in the short run. We respond to such a challenge by answering some questions raised by Juhl ([1994]): when it comes to predicting limiting relative frequencies in the framework of Reichenbach, we show that speed-optimal convergence—a long-run success condition—induces dynamic coherence in the short run.
Accuracy-dominance and conditionalization
The strength of de Finetti’s coherence theorem
Persistent Disagreement and Polarization in a Bayesian Setting
For two ideally rational agents, does learning a finite amount of shared evidence necessitate agreement? No. But does it at least guard against belief polarization, the case in which their opinions get further apart? No. OK, but are rational agents guaranteed to avoid polarization if they have access to an infinite, increasing stream of shared evidence? No.
Reinventing Discovery
On the Possibility of Testimonial Justice
Recent impossibility theorems for fair risk assessment extend to the domain of epistemic justice. We translate the relevant model, demonstrating that the problems of fair risk assessment and just credibility assessment are structurally the same. We motivate the fairness criteria involved in the theorems as also being appropriate in the setting of testimonial justice. Any account of testimonial justice that implies the fairness/justice criteria mu…
Generalized Learning and Conditional Expectation
Reflection and martingale principles are central to models of rational learning. They can be justified in a variety of ways. In what follows we study martingale and reflection principles in the context of measure theory. We give special attention to two approaches for justifying these principles that have not been studied in that context before: diachronic coherence and the value of information. Together with an extant argument based on expected …
Deterministic Convergence and Strong Regularity
Bayesians since Savage ([1972]) have appealed to asymptotic results to counter charges of excessive subjectivity. Their claim is that objectionable differences in prior probability judgements will vanish as agents learn from evidence, and individual agents will converge to the truth. Glymour ([1980]), Earman ([1992]) and others have voiced the complaint that the theorems used to support these claims tell us, not how probabilities updated on evide…
Another Approach to Consensus and Maximally Informed Opinions with Increasing Evidence
Merging of opinions results underwrite Bayesian rejoinders to complaints about the subjective nature of personal probability. Such results establish that sufficiently similar priors achieve consensus in the long run when fed the same increasing stream of evidence. Here, we establish a merging result for sets of probability measures updated by Jeffrey conditioning. This generalizes a number of different merging results in the literature. We also s…
Religious/secular distance
Predictors of opposition to and support for the ordination of women
Female ordination is an important component of gender equality in Christian religious communities. While prior research has examined societal, institutional, and organisational factors that predict changes in ordination policies in Christian denominations, there is very little research examining individuals’ attitudes regarding the ordination of women. In this research, we use data from two surveys of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latt…
War on Terror’ in our backyard
Framing metaphors for counterterrorism have been analyzed theoretically but their effect has not yet been fully understood empirically. One framing metaphor that has been employed for counterterrorism is a 'War on Terror'. The present study examined the effect of using the phrase 'War on Terror' on support for security policies that unfairly target Muslims. We manipulated the frame to make federal action or community action salient. Additionally,…
Religiousness and Social Support
Previous research has shown that religiousness is related to social support, but most studies on this subject have been conducted in highly religious contexts. In the secular culture of Norway, we investigated the level of perceived social support among religious and non-religious individuals using the scale from the Medical Outcomes Study Social Support Survey. Of the 3,000 randomly selected persons aged 18-75 years, 653 (22 %) participated in t…
Church Attendance and Religious Experience
Previous studies have shown that gender may moderate the relationship between religiousness and mental health in most countries, but few studies have been conducted in Norway and Denmark. This study examined gender differences in religious experiences and church attendance as predictors of existential well-being among 295 women and 233 men from the general Norwegian population. Analyses showed that the structural equation models for women and men…
On the Receiving End
The present study examines perceived discrimination faced by religious ‘nones’. After distinguishing between atheists, agnostics, and ‘nones’ who are deists or theists, we use nationally representative data from the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) to study the contexts in which these various types of religious ‘nones’ have reported experiencing discrimination. The strongest predictor of such discrimination was not theological…
A new justification of induction
The Varieties of Spiritual Experience
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author
On the Receiving End
The present study examines perceived discrimination faced by religious ‘nones’. After distinguishing between atheists, agnostics, and ‘nones’ who are deists or theists, we use nationally representative data from the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) to study the contexts in which these various types of religious ‘nones’ have reported experiencing discrimination. The strongest predictor of such discrimination was not theological…
Honesty
Most demonstrations of the automatic activation of mental representations and resulting behavioral effects have been conducted in the context of specific stereotypes. The main purpose of these studies was to test whether primed religious representations can have automatic influences on relevant (prosocial) behavior (Study 1) regardless of prior religious belief (Study 2). Study 1 found that participants primed with religious representations (reli…
War on Terror’ in our backyard
Framing metaphors for counterterrorism have been analyzed theoretically but their effect has not yet been fully understood empirically. One framing metaphor that has been employed for counterterrorism is a 'War on Terror'. The present study examined the effect of using the phrase 'War on Terror' on support for security policies that unfairly target Muslims. We manipulated the frame to make federal action or community action salient. Additionally,…
Is God Really Watching You? A Response to Shariff and Norenzayan (2007)
On the Best Accuracy Arguments for Probabilism
In a recent paper, Pettigrew (2022) reports a generalization of the celebrated accuracy-dominance theorem due to Predd et al. (2009), but Pettigrew’s proof is incorrect. I will explain the mistakes and provide a correct proof
Persistent Disagreement and Polarization in a Bayesian Setting
For two ideally rational agents, does learning a finite amount of shared evidence necessitate agreement? No. But does it at least guard against belief polarization, the case in which their opinions get further apart? No. OK, but are rational agents guaranteed to avoid polarization if they have access to an infinite, increasing stream of shared evidence? No.
The politics of corporate responsibility and child labour in the Bangladeshi garment industry
In 1995—after more than two-and-a-half years—a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) concerning child labour in the Bangladeshi garment industry was signed by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), UNICEF (Bangladesh) and the International Labour Office (ILO), Bangladesh. The agreement and the process were uniquely important in a number of respects and this article explores a question that remains almost unasked, alth…
Further Examination of the Relationships of Religious Orientation to Religious Conflict
Another Approach to Consensus and Maximally Informed Opinions with Increasing Evidence
Merging of opinions results underwrite Bayesian rejoinders to complaints about the subjective nature of personal probability. Such results establish that sufficiently similar priors achieve consensus in the long run when fed the same increasing stream of evidence. Here, we establish a merging result for sets of probability measures updated by Jeffrey conditioning. This generalizes a number of different merging results in the literature. We also s…
Religiousness and Social Support
Previous research has shown that religiousness is related to social support, but most studies on this subject have been conducted in highly religious contexts. In the secular culture of Norway, we investigated the level of perceived social support among religious and non-religious individuals using the scale from the Medical Outcomes Study Social Support Survey. Of the 3,000 randomly selected persons aged 18-75 years, 653 (22 %) participated in t…
Church Attendance and Religious Experience
Previous studies have shown that gender may moderate the relationship between religiousness and mental health in most countries, but few studies have been conducted in Norway and Denmark. This study examined gender differences in religious experiences and church attendance as predictors of existential well-being among 295 women and 233 men from the general Norwegian population. Analyses showed that the structural equation models for women and men…
Leaving the Catholic Church
What predicts whether people are likely to leave the Catholic Church? We examine the role of different identification aspects and their interaction with acceptance of authority, possibility for change, and reputation of the Church in society. In a cross-sectional (N = 583) and longitudinal study with random intercept (N = 271) we find that specifically lower scores on the identification aspects of solidarity, satisfaction, and centrality predict …
The implicit decision theory of non-philosophers
This paper empirically investigates whether people’s implicit decision theory is more like causal decision theory or more like a non-causal decision theory (such as evidential decision theory). We also aim to determine whether implicit causalists, without prompting and without prior education, make a distinction that is crucial to causal decision theorists: preferring something as a news item and preferring it as an object of choice . Finally, we…
The strength of de Finetti’s coherence theorem
Generalized Learning and Conditional Expectation
Reflection and martingale principles are central to models of rational learning. They can be justified in a variety of ways. In what follows we study martingale and reflection principles in the context of measure theory. We give special attention to two approaches for justifying these principles that have not been studied in that context before: diachronic coherence and the value of information. Together with an extant argument based on expected …
Deterministic Convergence and Strong Regularity
Bayesians since Savage ([1972]) have appealed to asymptotic results to counter charges of excessive subjectivity. Their claim is that objectionable differences in prior probability judgements will vanish as agents learn from evidence, and individual agents will converge to the truth. Glymour ([1980]), Earman ([1992]) and others have voiced the complaint that the theorems used to support these claims tell us, not how probabilities updated on evide…
Religious Orientation, Personality, and Attitudes About Human Stem Cell Research
Human stem cell research has revived long-standing debates regarding the sanctity and beginning of life. The current study addresses the issue by examining the ability of selected religiosity and personality variables to predict attitudes regarding stem cell research. Participants were given questionnaires measuring attitudes regarding stem cell research, along with the Need for Closure scale, the Internal Control Index, the Need for Uniqueness s…
An Assessment of Religious Conflicts and Their Resolutions
Religious conflicts were explored in a sample of 202 adults, 132 of whom provided written descriptions of conflicts they considered to be religious in nature. The majority of conflicts involved other people, but the resolution of the conflict did not. Participants also completed Hunt's Literal, Antiliteral and Mythological scales of religiousness. Mythological scores were significantly greater among people who had experienced conflict than among …
Further Examination of the Relationships of Religious Orientation to Religious Conflict
An Alternative View of Religious Complexity
This research applied the approach and methodology of self-complexity theory (Linville, 1985, 1987) to the study of religious complexity. Two studies examined the complexity and content of self-representation in the intellectual and religious domains. In Study 1, 59 university students described their roles and activities related to their intellectual and religious lives. Results supported the prediction that, among students, the intellectual dom…
Religious Influences on Personal and Societal Well-Being (Book)
An Assessment of Religious Conflicts and Their Resolutions
Religious conflicts were explored in a sample of 202 adults, 132 of whom provided written descriptions of conflicts they considered to be religious in nature. The majority of conflicts involved other people, but the resolution of the conflict did not. Participants also completed Hunt's Literal, Antiliteral and Mythological scales of religiousness. Mythological scores were significantly greater among people who had experienced conflict than among …
Descriptions of Religious Experience Using Trait and Affect Adjectives
66 adults rated the relevance of adjectives representing dimensions of affect and personality for describing how they felt during religious experiences. Adjectives, representing positive affect (enthusiastic, at ease), low neuroticism (calm, relaxed), and high agreeableness (soft-hearted, sympathetic), conscientiousness (conscientious, reliable), and extraversion (sociable, talkative), were rated to be descriptive of religious experiences. The fa…
Appalling acts in god's name
The politics of corporate responsibility and child labour in the Bangladeshi garment industry
In 1995—after more than two-and-a-half years—a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) concerning child labour in the Bangladeshi garment industry was signed by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), UNICEF (Bangladesh) and the International Labour Office (ILO), Bangladesh. The agreement and the process were uniquely important in a number of respects and this article explores a question that remains almost unasked, alth…
Honesty
Most demonstrations of the automatic activation of mental representations and resulting behavioral effects have been conducted in the context of specific stereotypes. The main purpose of these studies was to test whether primed religious representations can have automatic influences on relevant (prosocial) behavior (Study 1) regardless of prior religious belief (Study 2). Study 1 found that participants primed with religious representations (reli…
Men's grooming in the Latter-day Saints Church
The role of personal grooming as an indicator of commitment to church hierarchy is examined in a study of one congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Latter-day Saints Church policy urges men to be clean-shaven. In the present study, we interview all men in one ward who have worn beards or mustaches, in order to investigate questions of authority, identity, and conflict that occurred as a result of violating the grooming …
The relationship between ethnicity, Christian orthodoxy, and mental health
Although researchers have noted differences in the role of religiosity in the lives of people from different ethnic backgrounds, the components of religion's influence (i.e., membership and orthodoxy) on mental health have not been previously examined. In the current study, Christian participants’ Christian Orthodox Scale (COS) scores were used to predict scores on mental health. As hypothesized, African Americans with higher COS scores exhibited…
Is God Really Watching You? A Response to Shariff and Norenzayan (2007)
Opinions regarding Polygamy among LDS Church Members
People's opinions toward polygamy were examined in a study of 1369 adults who were current or former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Questions addressed several areas: polygamy and the law, respondents’ perceptions of polygamous women, the potential link between legalizing gay marriage and legalizing polygamy, polygamists’ reliance on social welfare programs, and the ability of teens raised in polygamy to leave that li…
Opening the Doors of Perception
Two studies are reported in which participants’ reports of altered states of consciousness (ASC) were manipulated using priming methods. Study 1 used both subtle and blunt supraliminal priming methods, while Study 2 used a subliminal priming method. Across the two studies, two different methods for inducing ASC were used. In both studies a direct and an indirect measure of ASC was employed in order to separate the more nonconscious and spontaneou…
Religious Orientation, Personality, and Attitudes About Human Stem Cell Research
Human stem cell research has revived long-standing debates regarding the sanctity and beginning of life. The current study addresses the issue by examining the ability of selected religiosity and personality variables to predict attitudes regarding stem cell research. Participants were given questionnaires measuring attitudes regarding stem cell research, along with the Need for Closure scale, the Internal Control Index, the Need for Uniqueness s…
In the Course of a Lifetime
Journal Article In the Course of a Lifetime: Tracing Religious Belief, Practice, and Change Get access In the Course of a Lifetime: Tracing Religious Belief, Practice, and Change, by MICHELE DILLON and PAUL WINK. Berkeley: University of California, 2007, 295 pp.; $65.00 USD (cloth), $24.95 USD (paper). Michael Nielsen Michael Nielsen Georgia Southern University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of …
Religious orientation, religious affiliation, and boundary maintenance
The role of religious orientation in group boundary maintenance was explored in the context of Fundamentalist Mormon polygamy. A sample of 2330 Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Fundamentalist (polygamous) Mormons, and religious “nones” responded to a series of questions regarding sexuality, polygamy, religious orientation, religious doubt, and whether Mormons are considered Christian. Regression analyses indicate that attitudes regarding polygamy…
Reinventing Discovery
How the internet and powerful online tools are democratizing and accelerating scientific discovery Reinventing Discovery argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than three hundred years. This change is being driven by powerful cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business, the workplace, or…
All the World’s Knowledge
On the Receiving End
The present study examines perceived discrimination faced by religious ‘nones’. After distinguishing between atheists, agnostics, and ‘nones’ who are deists or theists, we use nationally representative data from the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) to study the contexts in which these various types of religious ‘nones’ have reported experiencing discrimination. The strongest predictor of such discrimination was not theological…
Religiousness and Social Support
Previous research has shown that religiousness is related to social support, but most studies on this subject have been conducted in highly religious contexts. In the secular culture of Norway, we investigated the level of perceived social support among religious and non-religious individuals using the scale from the Medical Outcomes Study Social Support Survey. Of the 3,000 randomly selected persons aged 18-75 years, 653 (22 %) participated in t…
Church Attendance and Religious Experience
Previous studies have shown that gender may moderate the relationship between religiousness and mental health in most countries, but few studies have been conducted in Norway and Denmark. This study examined gender differences in religious experiences and church attendance as predictors of existential well-being among 295 women and 233 men from the general Norwegian population. Analyses showed that the structural equation models for women and men…
Predictors of opposition to and support for the ordination of women
Female ordination is an important component of gender equality in Christian religious communities. While prior research has examined societal, institutional, and organisational factors that predict changes in ordination policies in Christian denominations, there is very little research examining individuals’ attitudes regarding the ordination of women. In this research, we use data from two surveys of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latt…
War on Terror’ in our backyard
Framing metaphors for counterterrorism have been analyzed theoretically but their effect has not yet been fully understood empirically. One framing metaphor that has been employed for counterterrorism is a 'War on Terror'. The present study examined the effect of using the phrase 'War on Terror' on support for security policies that unfairly target Muslims. We manipulated the frame to make federal action or community action salient. Additionally,…
Religious/secular distance
Another Approach to Consensus and Maximally Informed Opinions with Increasing Evidence
Merging of opinions results underwrite Bayesian rejoinders to complaints about the subjective nature of personal probability. Such results establish that sufficiently similar priors achieve consensus in the long run when fed the same increasing stream of evidence. Here, we establish a merging result for sets of probability measures updated by Jeffrey conditioning. This generalizes a number of different merging results in the literature. We also s…
Psychology (22 obras) · Philosophy (21 obras) · Social Psychology (19 obras) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (18 obras) · Sociology (16 obras) · Epistemology (15 obras) · Mathematics (15 obras) · Computer Science (14 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Religion and Society Interactions (12 obras)