Active prompting to decrease cell phone use and increase seat belt use while driving

Automobile crashes are the leading cause of death for those aged 3 to 33, with 43,005 (118 per day) Americans killed in 2002 alone. Seat belt use reduces the risk of serious injury in an accident, and refraining from using a cell phone while driving reduces the risk of an accident. Cell phone use while driving increases accident rates, and leads to 2,600 U.S. fatalities each year. An active prompting procedure was employed to increase seat belt use and decrease cell phone use among drivers exiting a university parking lot. A multiple baseline with reversal design was used to evaluate the presentation of two signs: "Please Hang Up, I Care" and "Please Buckle Up, I Care." The proportion of drivers who complied with the seat belt prompt was high and in line with previous research. The proportion of drivers who hung up their cell phones in response to the prompt was about equal to that of the seat belt prompt. A procedure that reduces cell phone use among automobile drivers is a significant contribution to the behavioral safety literature.     

Prompting safety belt use: comparative impact on the target behavior and relevant body language

ResearcherS used two behavioral prompts to compare increases in safety belt use: a Click It or Ticket prompt or a Flash-for-Life prompt. Participants were 1,822 unbuckled drivers exiting two student parking lots of a large university. Research assistants identified unbuckled drivers, flashed one of the two prompts, and recorded whether drivers buckled after the prompt and the drivers' facial expressions and hand gestures. Findings and implications are discussed.     

THE CASTRATION OF SIGNS: CONVERSING WITH AUGUSTINE ON CREATION, LANGUAGE AND TRUTH

This article takes as its starting point Nicholas Lash's use of the Buberian distinction between the basic words “I‐It” and “I‐You” to address the question of how the difference between God and creation is “displayed” within the world. Drawing on a rather different discourse—the semiotics developed by Augustine in the distinctions he makes between sign and thing, use and enjoyment—it seeks to explore the concrete shape that might be taken by practices that foster the speaking of the basic word “I‐You”, and which thereby manifest God's redemptive activity within the world, focusing specifically on practices of debate and argument. “What might a redeemed practice of debate look like?” is the question that this article seeks to answer.     

“Caring‐about” and the Problem of Overwhelming Obligations

Care theorists often think of care as involving (at least) “caring‐about”—concern or attentiveness—and “caring‐for”—acting to nurture, look after, or meet needs. One problem for any theory of care is the scope of our obligations to care in both of those senses; in particular, our capacities for “caring‐about” often outrun our capacities for “caring‐for.” Accounts of care as potentially global in scope may ascribe overwhelming obligations to moral agents; however, we are often tempted to avoid or ignore situations that may call for a caring response. I suggest that some Kantian ideas may help to strike a reasonable balance.     

Beyond the Tools of the Trade: Heidegger and the Intelligibility of Everyday Things

In everyday life, we constantly encounter and deal with useful things without pausing to inquire about the sources of their intelligibility. In Div. I of Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes just such an inquiry. According to a common reading of Heidegger's analysis, the intelligibility of our everyday encounters and dealings with useful things is ultimately constituted by practical self‐understandings (such as being a gardener, shoemaker, teacher, mother, musician, or philosopher). In this paper, I argue that while such practical self‐understandings may be sufficient to constitute the intelligibility of the tools and equipment specific to many practices, these “tools of the trade” are only a small portion of the things we encounter, use, and deal with on a daily basis. Practical self‐understandings cannot similarly account for the intelligibility of the more mundane things—like toothbrushes and sidewalks—used in everyday life. I consider whether an anonymous self‐understanding as “one,” “anyone,” or “no one in particular” —das Man—might play this intelligibility‐constituting role. In examining this possibility, another type of self‐understanding comes to light: cultural identities. I show that the cultural identities into which we are “thrown,” rather than practical identities or das Man, constitute the intelligibility of the abundance of mundane things that fill our everyday lives. Finally, I spell out how this finding bears on our understanding of Heidegger's notion of authenticity.     

The behavioral impact of an advertising campaign to promote safety belt use.

Safety belt use was observed at one restaurant during McDonald''s "Make It Click" promotional campaign. Following baseline, the program was monitored without intervention. During the final 2 weeks of the campaign an incentive strategy was added providing a large soft drink contingent on safety belt use. Safety belt use did not change from baseline levels before the incentive phase. The rate of belt use increased under contingent reward and declined during follow-up. The effects of a verbal prompt could not be assessed because of the almost nonexistent use of the "Make It Click" stickers throughout the study.     

Good Moral Judgment and Decision‐Making Without Deliberation

It is widely accepted in psychology and cognitive science that there are two “systems” in the mind: one system (System 1) is characterized as quick, intuitive, perceptive, and perhaps more primitive, while the other (System 2) is described as slower, more deliberative, and responsible for our higher‐order cognition. I use the term “reflectivism” to capture the view that conscious reflection—in the “System 2” sense—is a necessary feature of good moral judgment and decision‐making. This is not to suggest that System 2 must operate alone in forming our moral decisions, but that it plays a normatively ineliminable role. In this paper, I discuss arguments that have been offered in defense of reflectivism. These arguments fit into two broad categories; let us think of them as two sides of a coin. On the first side are arguments about the efficaciousness of conscious reasoning—for example, without conscious deliberation we will make bad moral judgments and decisions. On the other side of the coin are arguments about the centrality of conscious deliberation to normative actions—for example, without conscious deliberation we are no more agential than animals or automatons. Despite their attractiveness, I argue that these arguments do not successfully establish that reflection is a necessary component of good moral judgment and decision‐making. If I am right, the idea that good moral judgment and decision‐making can result from entirely automatic and subconscious processes gains traction. My goal in this paper is to show that reflectivism fails to include the full range of cases of moral decision‐making and that a theory of automaticity may do a better job. I briefly discuss at the end of the paper how an account of successful automatic moral judgment and decision‐making might begin to take shape.     

Author's response

The year 1996 was regarded by a considerable part of contemporary literature on global political economy as a definite turning point in modern history. The majority of experts tended to see the starting point of take‐off that year, but others—not a negligible minority—saw omens of disastrous recession and lasting depression. It appears the time has not yet come. The question is now that of the incalculable resultant of runaway (deregulated) forces of the international financial “whirlpool”, of a random process of global, regional and local accumulation of capital. The year 1997 will set in with a foreseeable and calculable agrarian and related cycle and it may find an outlet for accumulated tensions of capital accumulation at the high tide of unemployment (demographic or migratory) wave with unforeseeable and incalculable effects and side‐effects. This will be just the beginning of the end and a Black Weekday still lies ahead of us. There can be no doubt that we live in a transition period but we do not know where this transition leads to. Loose talk about “post‐industrial society”, “post‐modern age” and “postsomething anything” has limited interpretative power. Very few students of social sciences venture to see and verify secular trends in world history.     

Against “Transracialism”: Revisiting the Debate

This article critically reflects on some of the themes and assumptions at stake in the “transracialism” controversy, and connects them to important works in critical race theory: namely Rey Chow's notion of “coercive mimeticism” and Sara Ahmed's critique of white liberal multiculturalism. It argues that the analytic account of “race” that Tuvel draws upon in her article—Sally Haslanger's—is politically problematic, both on its own terms and in light of broader reflections on racialized and gendered power relations. In particular, I critique Haslanger's assumption that all racial identities exist on the same conceptual plane: that a single variable definition of “race” can be applied to any particular racialized group—including white and nonwhite racial identities. This erases racialized power relations, especially where, in liberal “multicultural” nations, whiteness constitutes the implied standard against which an appearance of “racial difference” is conjured. Finally, I extend my argument to the issue of treating “race” and gender analogously. Rejecting this move, I propose an alternative way of conceptualizing these as analytically distinct, yet constitutively interdependent, phenomena. In order to situate the debate historically, I consider an example of “racial transgression” from twentieth‐century China.     

The Rhetoric of Homosexual Practice

Many Protestant denominations have or recently had policies that prohibit “self‐avowed practicing homosexuals” from being ordained. By only prohibiting “practicing” homosexuals, proponents of these policies claim that they do not discriminate against homosexuals as a group since, technically, a homosexual can still be ordained as long as she is “non‐practicing.” In other words, a condemnation of homosexual practice is not the same as a condemnation of homosexual persons. I argue that this is not the case; the rhetoric of homosexual practice does, in fact, amount to a condemnation of gays and lesbians. It does so by conflating the two things it claims to keep separate—homosexual conduct and homosexual identity. I demonstrate this conflation by analyzing the history of this rhetoric and how it has been adjudicated in church court decisions from the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA).     

God,Purpose in Life,and Mental Well‐Being Among Older Adults

This research note uses mixed methods on data from a nationwide sample of 1,525 Americans age 40 and older to make two theoretical contributions to the literatures on purpose and religion. First, by categorizing open‐ended responses to an item asking “Please describe a few of the things, feelings, ideas, etc. that give you a sense of purpose in your life,” we present a categorization framework to group sources of purpose (SPs) in life. Next, we run multivariate models, using mental well‐being as a dependent measure, which simultaneously enter dummy variables reflecting each of the SPs categories within our framework. We hypothesize no relative differences in the effect that any specific source of purpose category would have on mental well‐being. This prediction is undercut by finding a positive link between mental well‐being and a single SP—citing one's “relationship with God”—although this relationship is noted only among respondents age 60 and older. Beyond this research's theoretical contributions, we offer some practical guidance in arguing that research on SPs, particularly when claiming comprehensiveness or examining mental well‐being, should not preclude religious measures and should consider that SPs may have differing effects between age groups.     

Basements and Intersections

In this paper, I revisit Kimberlé Crenshaw's argument in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) to recover a companion metaphor that has been largely forgotten in the “mainstreaming” of intersectionality in (white‐dominated) feminist theory. In addition to the now‐famous intersection metaphor, Crenshaw offers the basement metaphor to show how—by privileging monistic, mutually exclusive, and analogically constituted categories of “race” and “sex” tethered, respectively, to masculinity and whiteness—antidiscrimination law functions to reproduce social hierarchy, rather than to remedy it, denying Black women plaintiffs legal redress. I argue that in leaving the basement behind, deployments of “intersectionality” that deracinate the concept from its origins in Black feminist thought also occlude Crenshaw's account of the socio‐legal reproduction of hierarchical power.     

WITNESS AGREEMENT AND THE TRUTH‐CONDUCIVENESS OF COHERENTIST JUSTIFICATION

Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “witness agreement” by itself implies neither an increase in the probability of truth nor a high probability of truth—the witnesses need to have some “individual credibility.” It can seem that, from this formal epistemological result, it follows that coherentist justification (i.e., doxastic coherence) is not truth‐conducive. I argue that this does not follow. Central to my argument is the thesis that, though coherentists deny that there can be noninferential justification, coherentists do not deny that there can be individual credibility.     

Reforming intuition pumps: when are the old ways the best?

One mainstream approach to philosophy involves trying to learn about philosophically interesting, non-mental phenomena—ethical properties, for example, or causation—by gathering data from human beings. I call this approach “wide tent traditionalism.” It is associated with the use of philosophers’ intuitions as data, the making of deductive arguments from this data, and the gathering of intuitions by eliciting reactions to often quite bizarre thought experiments. These methods have been criticized—I consider experimental philosophy’s call for a move away from the use of philosophers’ intuitions as evidence, and recent suggestions about the use of inductive arguments in philosophy—and these criticisms point out important areas for improvement. However, embracing these reforms in turn gives wide-tent traditionalists strong reasons to maintain other traditional approaches to philosophy. Specifically, traditionalists’ commitment to using intuitions and to gathering them with bizarre thought experiments is well founded, both philosophically and empirically. I end by considering some problems with gathering trustworthy intuitions, and give suggestions about how best to solve them.     

PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY,ETHICS, AND LOVE: TOWARD A NEW RELIGION AND SCIENCE DIALOGUE

Religion and science dialogues that orbit around rational method, knowledge, and truth are often, though not always, contentious. In this article, I suggest a different cluster of gravitational points around which religion and science dialogues might usefully travel: philosophical anthropology, ethics, and love. I propose seeing morality as a natural outgrowth of the human desire to establish and maintain social bonds so as not to experience the condition of being alone. Humans, of all animals, need to feel loved—defined as a compassionate present‐with in dynamic dyadic relation such that one experiences the sense of mattering—but that need has an equally natural tendency to be met by creating biased us‐and‐them distinctions. A “critical” natural ethics, then, is one in which we become aware of and work to undermine our tendency to reify in‐group distinctions between “us” and “them.” Religious communities that work intentionally on this can be seen, to some extent, as laboratories of love—or as sites for co‐creating knowledge in perilous times.     

Beyond the image paradigm: Systemic evolution through participative planning

This paper is an attempt at introducing a formal framework for societal, participative, anticipatory, inner‐change oriented and open‐ended ‘’ learning for evolution.” The key point of our approach is that it considers the evolution of a social system not exclusively as an appropriate result of the given system structure, operating and behaving under external constraints; but mainly as an outer (or observable) consequence of some inner changes brought about from within the system of heterogenous actors‐designers in their effort to cope with complexities generated equally by external constraints and by the network of mutual relationships between them. The actors‐designers are thus trying to assess critically the courses the system could possibly take in the future and also to isolate —through a dialogue between them—the so‐called “evolutionary” ones. Consequently, a policy‐oriented approach to “social homcorhesis” is obtained. It opens the way to a participative planning outlook on societal learning.     

JUMPING TOGETHER: A WAY FROM SOCIOBIOLOGY TO BIO‐SOCIO‐HUMANITIES

Sociobiology is a grand narrative of evolutionary biology on which to build unified knowledge. Consilience is a metaphorical representation of that narrative. I take up the same metaphor but apply it differently. I evoke the image of jumping together, not on solid ground but on the strong, flexible canvas sheet of a trampoline, on which natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities jump together. This image overlaps with the traditional East Asian way of understanding—that is, the “Heaven‐Earth‐Person Triad.” Using recent insights from cognitive science—metaphor, embodiment, and conceptual blending—I propose the alternative way of “bio‐socio‐humanities” to understand and experience the world.     

“THE PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF EXPERTS”: IN DEFENSE OF THE “ELITES” OF THE SCIENCE‐AND‐RELIGION DEBATE

This article takes a critical stance on John H. Evans's 2018 book, Morals Not Knowledge: Recasting the Contemporary U.S. Conflict between Religion and Science. Highlighting the significance of the book for the science‐and‐religion debate, particularly the book's emphasis on moral questions over knowledge claims revealed in social‐scientific studies of the American public, I also suggest that the distinction between the “elites” of the academic science‐and‐religion field and the religious “public” is insufficiently drawn. I argue that various nuances should be taken into account concerning the portrayal of “elites,” nuances which potentially change the way that “conflict” between science and religion is envisaged, as well as the function of the field. Similarly, I examine the ways in which the book construes science and religion as distinct knowledge systems, and I suggest that, from a theological perspective—relevant for much academic activity in science and religion—there is value in seeing science and religion in terms of a single knowledge system. This perspective may not address the public's interest in moral questions directly—important as they are—but nevertheless it fulfils the academic function of advancing the frontiers of human knowledge and self‐understanding.