But during the first hour of the debate, candidates' voices communicated anger less often than mere frustration.
Along with many others, the cognitive psychologists Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon and Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon University have identified several reasons something might feel more or less scary than mere reason might suppose.
This ties in well with studies showing that perceptual mental images elicit more anxiety than verbal thoughts (for a review see Holmes & Mathews, 2010), are considered less acceptable than mere thoughts (Parkinson & Rachman, 1981) and can prompt severe preoccupation (Hales et al., 2011).
In 2008, Republican John McCain won the state's electoral votes by a margin of less than 1% – mere thousands of votes.
Does such a triumph of the will to understand reduce compassion for the welfare of those who are less than human to mere sentimentality?
Think tanks occupy a unique position in the Washington firmament, something less than government but more than mere academia, places where officials may recharge their batteries while their party is out of power; and they are important instigators of policy.
In 2006 taxpayers with incomes over $100,000 received 76% of the total $40.9 billion tax subsidy due to the charitable deduction, although they made only 57% of all donations; those with incomes of less than $50,000 received a mere 5% of the subsidy, despite making one-fifth of all charitable donations.This unfairness costs a lot of money and in some cases, at least, makes little difference.
For example, Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001 to 2005, decries, with arrival of "the age of genetic technology," "the erosion, perhaps the final erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man, no less than of nature, as mere raw material for manipulation and homogenization" (2002, p. 138).
This may be because more and more, the authors of such books or essays are celebrity professors less dependent on readers' good will than mere writers are.
He added the "second degree of the affix for expectation of outcome" to suggest an element of surprise that is more than mere unpreparedness but less than outright shock, and the "third degree of the affix for contextual appropriateness" to suggest an element of impropriety that is less than scandalous but more than simply eyebrow-raising.
