This paper investigates the effect of explicitly informing participants about the objective probability of winning a lottery on the illusion of control. In a procedure based on Experiment 3 from Langer’s 1975 seminal paper, participants were faced with lotteries based on familiar vs. unfamiliar stimuli and either explicitly informed about the objective probability of winning or not (the probability could be derived from other data). Results indicated that stating the objective probability of winning the lottery reduced, but not eliminated the illusion of control. Moreover, Langer’s effect of stimulus familiarity was not replicated. Experiment 2, which included a lottery based on the full set of Polish alphabet letters, confirmed the same effects. Results indicate that illusion of control may be explained by the control heuristic (Thompson et al., 1998) – in absence of explicitly stated probability, participants estimate their chances of winning based on perceived control, even though calculating the objective probability is possible.

The late Trappist monk and prolific author, Thomas Merton, was intensely concerned with the self – or to be more precise, with the desire to break free from the tyranny of the self he took to be his identity. His early years in France and England were marked by a sense of loss and dislocation. After leaving Cambridge for Columbia, his subsequent life in America and decision to be baptised a Catholic at the age of 23 eventually led to his taking vows as a Cistercian monk. On taking the name Frater Louis, the ‘world’ with all its temptations and unresolved issues had been left safely behind along with his old identity. Or so he thought. In fact, Merton’s years as a Trappist led to a best-selling autobiography written under obedience to his abbot and many more books to follow. Compared at the time of its publication to St Augustine’s Confessions, the autobiography led to his international renown as Thomas Merton. He voiced his disquiet over what he called ‘this shadow, this double, this writer who […] followed me into the cloister … I cannot lose him.’ In time, Merton came to the realisation – through the lived experience and voracious reading of the Bible, St Augustine, the mystics, the individuation process propounded by Jung, Zen Buddhism and others – that the ‘self’ he was trying to escape was, in fact, largely a ‘false’ self driven by the ego. This paper traces Merton’s journey from that self to the authentic self which is found in God, and in transcendence. Obsession with ‘the self’ as understood in the 21st century makes the study of Merton’s path to selfhood much more vital. The advent of the ‘Selfie’, the self-promotion that social media afford and the examples of narcissistic individuals in positions of power give the lie to the lives in which self-consciousness is confused with self-realisation. Nothing, as Merton discovered, could be further from the truth.

Created in the distant past, attitudes and patterns of thinking have caused the mentality of contemporary Poles. The collective memory about the greatness delusions of old-time nobilities and the traumas suffered in the annexed territories today infl uence their thinking and behaviours as well national self-evaluation.

This article is an attempt to look at how individual freedom is realized in the world of consumption. Consumer freedom understood as a social relationship – and not for example as a gift received from God and the ability to make independent choices between good and evil according to one’s free will – is not a given once and for all. In the case of consumer freedom, some people have this type of freedom, while others are deprived of it, which often results in moral evil. Freedom in a world where ‘a menu replaces the Decalogue’ is first and foremost a freedom to consume, a freedom of those who have the appropriate material means to make use of them. Therefore, it is not a gift given once and for all, but it requires from us – free consumers – constant activity in acquiring funds that allow us to meet the needs of ownership. It only pretends to be accompanied by freedom of choice but in fact is not. Freedom in the world of consumption is implemented mainly in the sphere of everyday life practice and it does not constitute the implementation of any lofty philosophical ideas. It is an impoverished form without proper theoretical foundation. The problem is whether in the world of consumption there is any freedom at all. Unfortunately, most often we only have an illusion of freedom, because choosing to participate in it (more or less consciously), we agree to its prevailing rights. One of the most important rights in the domain of consumption implying is freedom of consumption, or ironically speaking, the free-dom to choose between Coca Cola and Pepsi. But even in its narrow application consumer freedom does not seem to realize any moral good. It is true that various attempts are being made to codify the ethical activity of consumers, traders, producers, etc., but this has nothing to do with the real moral dimension of actions, concerning instead instrumental and performative aspects of those actions by sustaining unreflective choice automatisms.

The Franssen illusion, or Franssen effect (FE), is one of the auditory spatial illusions. Few studies have explored the FE, and the mechanisms underlying it remain unknown. The present study was conducted to clarify the FE occurrence with different tasks and presentation modes in young adults. It also sought to investigate possible neurophysiological similarities between interaural time difference (ITD) cue processing and FE perception. FE perception was evaluated using two different tasks and two presentation modes (i.e., insert phones and loudspeakers). Sound reflections (reverberation) were presented in the diffuse field (loudspeaker mode). ITD performance was investigated using different stimuli delivered via insert phones. No significant difference between the two FE perception tasks was found ( F _1,25 = 0.138, p = 0.713). However, the FE perception showed a significant difference between the two presentation modes (F _1,25 = 434.03, p < 0.001). Spearman’s correlation did not reveal a significant relationship between FE perception and ITD scores ( p > 0.05).
The current findings show the importance of reverberation in the FE occurrence. Also, the non-significant correlation between the results of the behavioral binaural temporal resolution test and FE perception in young people with normal temporal resolution may indicate that room reflections (reverberation) complicate the ability to process ITDs (rather than poor ITD processing for the “steady state” portion of signal).

Simultaneous perception of audio and visual stimuli often causes concealment or misrepresentation of information actually contained in these stimuli. Such effects are called the "image proximity effect" or the "ventriloquism effect" in the literature. Until recently, most research carried out to understand their nature was based on subjective assessments. The authors of this paper propose a methodology based on both subjective and objectively retrieved data. In this methodology, objective data reflect the screen areas that attract most attention. The data were collected and processed by an eye-gaze tracking system. To support the proposed methodology, two series of experiments were conducted - one with a commercial eye-gaze tracking system Tobii T60, and another with the Cyber-Eye system developed at the Multimedia Systems Department of the Gdańsk University of Technology. In most cases, the visual-auditory stimuli were presented using a 3D video. It was found that the eye-gaze tracking system did objectivize the results of experiments. Moreover, the tests revealed a strong correlation between the localization of a visual stimulus on which a participant's gaze focused and the value of the "image proximity effect". It was also proved that gaze tracking may be useful in experiments which aim at evaluation of the proximity effect when presented visual stimuli are stereoscopic.