Why and for whom does the pressure to help hurt others? Affective and cognitive mechanisms linking helping pressure to workplace deviance

Scholars are paying increasing attention to the “dark side” of citizenship behavior. One aspect of this dark side that has received relatively scant attention is “helping pressure”—an employee's perception that s/he is being encouraged to, or otherwise feels that s/he should, enact helping behavior at work. Drawing from theory associated with work stress, we examine affective and cognitive mechanisms that potentially explain why helping pressure, counterintuitively, may lead employees to engage in deviant behavior instead. Beyond examining these possible mechanisms, we also answer calls to identify a potential buffer to these effects. Drawing from self-determination theory, we examine how an employee's intrinsic motivation for citizenship may lessen the deleterious consequences of helping pressure at work. In two studies (a within-individual experience-sampling study and a two-wave between-individual study), we find consistent evidence that helping pressure has a positive indirect relationship with deviant behavior through increased negative affect. Further, we find evidence that intrinsic motivation for citizenship weakens the positive relationship of helping pressure with negative affect, buffering the indirect effect on subsequent deviant behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for the study of helping pressure at work are discussed.     

Luck,Mystery and Supremacy: D. Z. Phillips Reads Nagel and Williams on Morality

This paper critically examines D. Z. Phillips’ critical examination of Nagel's and Williams's famous exchange about moral luck. It argues that Phillips fails properly to identify the fundamental issues at stake in the exchange – particularly with respect to the role of scepticism, of the picture of the will as an extensionless point, and of the putative supremacy of morality – and so fails to recognise a certain commonality of interest between himself and those he criticises.     

A rational approach to rational suicide.

Suicide is a reaction to internal and external sources of stress and the impact of life events. In the elderly these situations are prevalent in many who are not suicidal and instead choose life. They represent what may be called rational nonsuicide. They are far more frequent than rational suicide. Nevertheless, considerably more is written about rational suicide than its alternative. The reasons for this phenomenon are reviewed, and suggestions are made for a rational approach to the affirmation of life rather than its rejection, even to the very end.     

Equality,Bias, and the Right to an Equal Say

Philosophia - Thomas Christiano argues that democracies acquire a right to rule by being the unique embodiment of publicly accessible rules. Justice requires the equal advancement of the interests...     

SELF-ABANDONMENT AND SELF-DENIAL Quietism, Calvinism, and the Prospect of Hell

Self‐abandonment and self‐denial are, respectively, Catholic and hyper‐Calvinist analogues of each other. Roughly, each requires the surrendering of a person to God's will and providence through faith, hope, and love. Should the self‐abandoning/self‐denying individual accept his or her own damnation if that be God's will? This article, which is virtually alone in discussing the Catholic and Reformed Protestant traditions together, answers “No.” The unqualified self‐abandonment present in quietism and the radical self‐denial of Samuel Hopkins are perverse and irrational responses to the prospect of hell because they run counter to the Christian's deepest need to spend eternity with God. However, a qualified self‐abandonment is intellectually defensible and offers a viable Christian piety.     

Gaining knowledge via other minds: Children's flexible trust in others as sources of information

In five experiments, we examined 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds’ understanding that they could gain knowledge indirectly from someone who had seen something they had not. Consistent with previous research, children judged that an informant, who had seen inside a box, knew its contents. Similarly, when an informant marked a picture to indicate her suggestion as to the content of the box, 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds trusted this more frequently when the informant had seen inside the box than when she had not. Going beyond previous research, 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds were also sensitive to informants’ relevant experience when they had to look over a barrier to see the marked picture, or ask for the barrier to be raised. Yet when children had to elicit the informant's suggestion, rather than just consult a suggestion already present, even 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds were no more likely to do so when the informant had seen the box's content than when she had not, and no more likely to trust the well‐informed suggestion than the uninformed one. We conclude that young children who can ask questions may not yet fully understand the process by which they can gain accurate information from someone who has the experience they lack.