Spinoza's environmental ethics

The paper explores an apparent tension in Spinoza's thought between his treatment of man as part of nature, with no specially privileged position within it; and his treatment of morality as circumscribed by what is good for human beings. These two themes, it is argued, are in fact interconnected in Spinoza's thought. The paper goes on to consider some possible responses, from a contemporary standpoint, to Spinoza's rejection of animal rights. Finally, it is argued that the apparent tension in Spinoza's thought becomes more understandable in the light of his treatment of the importance of truth to human beings; and that this throws into relief some puzzling features of some contemporary formulations of the theme of man as part of nature.     

Verifying environmental relationships

In two experiments, subjects first learned the locations of objects in a 21 x 21 ft room and then were timed as they verified, from memory, statements about the spatial relationships of the objects to certain features (e.g., the outside walls, the center of the room, subdividing partitions). The statements were of the form “X is (not) close to (far from) F” in Experiment 1 and “X is farther from (closer to) F than Y is” in Experiment 2, where X and Y are specific objects and F is a feature. While some of the latencies varied directly with the magnitudes of the distances between objects and features named in the sentences, there were several instances in which sentences associated with equivalent distances led to different latencies or sentences associated with different distances led to equivalent latencies. The possible cognitive operations underlying the latency pattern are discussed.     

Incidental environmental anchors

Three studies examined whether potential anchor values that are incidentally present in the environment can affect a person's numerical estimates. In Study 1, estimates of an athlete's performance were influenced by the number on his jersey. In Study 2, estimates of the proportion of sales in the domestic market were influenced by a product's model number. In Study 3, participants' estimates of how much they would spend at a restaurant were influenced by whether the restaurant was named “Studio 17” or “Studio 97.” These effects were not qualified by participants' expertise in the relevant domain (Study 1) or by their ability to subsequently recall the anchor value (Study 3). These findings document the existence of a new form of “basic anchoring” and suggest that not all basic anchoring effects are as fragile as the existing anchoring literature suggests. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Categories of environmental scenes

Environmental scenes are the settings in which human action occurs; since they constrain behavior, they are of interest to social, personality, and environmental psychologists. Scenes can also be viewed as a spatial generalization of objects, as well as the spatial contexts in which objects appear. As such, they are studied in perception and memory. Previous approaches to characterizing environments have relied on scaling techniques to yield a manageable number of dimensions or attributes by which environments can be compared. In contrast, the present research demonstrates development of a taxonomy of kinds of environmental scenes, where perceived attributes are obtained as a byproduct. A basic or preferred level of categorization in the taxonomy is also identified, based on measures of cognition, behavior, and communication. The basic level, for example, school, home, beach, mountains, corresponds to the level commonly used in the study of scene schemas in perception, memory, and environmental psychology, as well as to the level apparently most useful in other domains of knowledge concerned with environments, for example, architecture and geography.     

Multimedia environmental decision-making simulation

A Hypercard-based computer simulation is described here that allows testing and projections about decision making in commons dilemmas. Although the program applies to many different types of value tradeoffs, it focuses on issues related to the harvesting (and overharvesting) of natural resources. In particular, it uses the Atlantic fisheries to look at conflicts between satisfying immediate needs and protecting long-term sustainability. The program’s calculations and projections are based on variables including fish stocks, replenishment rate, average household expenses, value per ton of fish, amount of fishing per year, number of competitors, harvesting strategy of competing decision makers, actual fish caught per year, yearly income, and the levels of harvesting that would maintain a sustainable level of the resource. The multimedia interface includes on-screen movies, moving graphs of results, still photos, cartoon animation, and audio instructions. This simulation program provides an engaging way of collecting data on decision making in social dilemmas and is also well suited to public/educational presentations.     

Counselors as environmental engineers

Counselors should engineer extending and corrective experiences for their counselees. If appropriately selected, such experiences can prove a powerful adjunct to the more traditional one-to-one counseling relationship. Ways are pointed out in which counselors can use school and community experiences to accomplish guidance goals     

Nanotechnology and environmental ethics

It seems that the relation between human and nature is not direct, but mediated by the technology. Therefore, it seems that characteristics of the technology defines the relation. If this is true, the problem is whether new technology always makes new relation or not. In this paper I take a brief look at the relation between technology in general and the environmental crisis from the ethical perspective. And then, I investigate the concept of responsible development and the principle of stewardship that is adopted in two reports concerning nanotechnologies. Through these explorations, an ethical stance on the application of nanotechnology is proposed.     

Quantitative approaches in environmental studies

Psychological scaling methods can be applied and can bring substantial knowledge to bear upon problems within the realm of environmental hygiene. Methodological issues related to the possibility of obtaining calibrated scales of perceptual variables such as discomfort, annoyance, and unpleasant odors are critical when the scale values are to be entered into a physical pollution index or a perceived environmental quality index, both being applied in the form of norms or recommendations. The level of measurement (ordinal, interval, or ratio scale) is related to the question of calibration of scales. From a practical point of view, the effects of observer-environment dependence are important to disguise in the scale values. Problems having to do with calibration of scales and with application of knowledge about perceptual processes to the scales are being explored in ongoing research projects. These include the measurement of temperature discomfort in different climates and the measurement of annoyance in areas with different noise exposures. Attempts have been made to solve an odorous air pollution problem with psychological measurements.     

环境污染对人的心理效应

本文从环境心理学的角度论述了环境污染可以通过作业环境、室内环境、生态环境对人的心理行为产生影响;也可以通过遗传变异导致出生缺陷,或直接损伤身体等原因对心理和行为产生影响,并且提出了心理干预的应对措施。     

论北宋道士施肩吾的环境美学思想

道教的修炼思想中,对于环境的选择,一直是一个十分慎重而关键的问题。北宋时期,钟吕一系的道士施肩吾,继承和发挥了道教这一传统,在修炼思想中,尤其是在对环境、传人的选择原则中,体现了道教特有的以“道法自然”为核心,以神秘主义为特质的环境美学思想。     

Facial display of environmental policy uncertainty

Although much attention has been given to research reflecting the issue of human perception, a limited number of studies have utilized the human face as a mechanism for displaying perceptual data. This article illustrates the use of computer-generated cartoon faces as a method of portraying that data. It also demonstrates the use of this method in detecting perceptions among market drivers toward environmental protection policies. Guided by the Chernoff Faces, data from market drivers are mapped into cartoon faces which reflect perceptual expressions of the policies.The author is grateful to Dr. Morris Wilhelm, Dr. James Bowden, and Dr. James Clevenger for their constructive criticism and support and to the anonymous reviewers of theJournal of Business and Psychology for their very incisive comments.     

Similarity and categorization of environmental sounds

Four experiments investigated the acoustical correlates of similarity and categorization judgments of environmental sounds. In Experiment 1, similarity ratings were obtained from pairwise comparisons of recordings of 50 environmental sounds. A three-dimensional multidimensional scaling (MDS) solution showed three distinct clusterings of the sounds, which included harmonic sounds, discrete impact sounds, and continuous sounds. Furthermore, sounds from similar sources tended to be in close proximity to each other in the MDS space. The orderings of the sounds on the individual dimensions of the solution were well predicted by linear combinations of acoustic variables, such as harmonicity, amount of silence, and modulation depth. The orderings of sounds also correlated significantly with MDS solutions for similarity ratings of imagined sounds and for imagined sources of sounds, obtained in Experiments 2 and 3--as was the case for free categorization of the 50 sounds (Experiment 4)--although the categorization data were less well predicted by acoustic features than were the similarity data.     

The environmental malleability of base-rate neglect

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Across two experiments (N=799) we demonstrate that people’s use of quantitative information (e.g., base-rates) when making a judgment varies as the causal...