No Sympathy for the Devil: Narratives about Evil

Christian religious experiences usually take place within the context of a religious group or community. Some of these experiences play a central role in propagating and sustaining group identity and belief. In many Pentecostal and charismatic communities, the most conspicuous experiences of this kind are those orchestrated by the devil, including 'demon possession' and 'supernatural assault'. Often, these encounters are thought to be part of an ongoing 'spiritual war' between the forces of good and evil. Christian victory in this war clarifies and strengthens community identity. Employing an ethnographic approach, this article examines the importance of storytelling in relation to this process. Through an analysis of three oral stories, it is suggested that storytelling is the means through which experiences of evil are interpreted and understood and that it is the essential way in which these experiences are communicated by members of a community to one another.     

Terror Management and Trait Empathy: Evidence that Mortality Salience Promotes Reactions of Forgiveness among People with High (vs. low) Trait Empathy

Terror management research has typically found that people respond harshly toward offending others when reminded of their mortality. In the current research we examined whether mortality salience would increase attitudes of forgiveness toward such individuals, especially among those with high trait empathy. Consistent with prior research, Study 1 showed that mortality salience increased forgiveness of a violent hockey player, but only if this person was a member of the ingroup. Study 2 showed that mortality (vs. dental pain) salience led persons high in trait empathy to forgive the same violent hockey player regardless of his group membership. Implications for increasing forgiveness and prosocial behavior in intergroup contexts are briefly discussed.

Taboo Trade-offs: Reactions to Transactions That Transgress the Spheres of Justice

Taboo trade-offs violate deeply held normative intuitions about the integrity, even sanctity, of certain relationships and the moral-political values underlying those relationships. For instance, if asked to estimate the monetary worth of one's children, of one's loyalty to one's country, or of acts of friendship, people find the questions more than merely confusing or cognitively intractable: they find such questions themselves morally offensive. This article draws on Fiske's relational theory and Tetlock's value pluralism model: (a) to identify the conditions under which people are likely to treat trade-offs as taboo; (b) to describe how people collectively deal with trade-offs that become problematic; (c) to specify the conceptual components of moral outrage and the factors that affect the intensity of reactions to various explicit trade-offs; (d) to explore the various strategies that decision-makers—required by resource scarcity and institutional roles to confront taboo trade-offs—use to deflect the wrath of censorious observers; (e) to offer a method of dispute resolution based on pluralism.     

The Happiness of Giving: Evidence from the German Socioeconomic Panel That Happier People Are More Generous

This study explores the causal direction between happiness and charitable giving. Through the application of Cohen’s path analysis, the main purpose of the study is to find evidence which of the possible causal directions—the one from giving to happiness or from happiness to giving—is the more dominant one. To that aim the authors use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel 2009/10. In a sample of 6906 donors, the relationships between monetary giving and life satisfaction were assed. Furthermore, we controlled for different variables such as age, gender, and marital status. Contradictory to the hypotheses development, the results of the Cohen’s path analysis indicate that the causal direction from happiness to charitable giving is the more dominant one. Through the study and our initial results we contribute to theory by highlighting the ambiguous causal relationship between the focal constructs and provide a statistical method to investigate such unclear causal relationships. We discuss how happiness, particularly the affective aspect, can be utilized by nonprofit managers to raise fundraising effectiveness and suggest areas for further research.     

Terror Management and Meaning: Evidence That the Opportunity to Defend the Worldview in Response to Mortality Salience Increases the Meaningfulness of Life in the Mildly Depressed

Previous terror management research has demonstrated that mildly depressed participants show a greater increase in worldview defense in response to reminders of their mortality than do nondepressed participants. Because the cultural worldview is posited to provide a meaningful conception of life, we hypothesized that mildly depressed participants who defend their worldview in response to mortality salience (MS) would increase their perception that the world is meaningful. A preliminary study first examined the Kunzendorf No Meaning Scale as a measure to assess perceptions of meaning. In the primary study, mildly depressed and nondepressed participants contemplated their own mortality or a neutral topic, evaluated two targets in a manner that either allowed them to defend their worldview or that did not, and then completed the Kunzendorf No Meaning Scale. As predicted, mildly depressed participants who had the opportunity to defend their worldview in response to mortality salience reported greater meaning in life than did mildly depressed participants who did not have the opportunity to defend their worldview, or mildly depressed participants not exposed to mortality salience. Implications for understanding and treating depression are briefly discussed.     

Human Reactions to Uncontrollable Outcomes: Further Evidence for Superstitions Rather Than Helplessness

Recent research has shown superstitious behaviour and illusion of control in human subjects exposed to the negative reinforcement conditions that are traditionally assumed to lead to the opposite outcome (i.e. learned helplessness). The experiments reported in this paper test the generality of these effects in two different tasks and under different conditions of percentage (75% vs. 25%) and distribution (random vs. last-trials) of negative reinforcement (escape from uncontrollable noise). All three experiments obtained superstitious behaviour and illusion of control and question the generality of learned helplessness as a consequence of exposing humans to uncontrollable outcomes.     

Getting Students to Choose to Do More Work: Evidence of the Effectiveness of the Interspersal Procedure

College students were exposed to two sets of mathematics assignments. For each set students were given an experimental and a control assignment. The control assignments contained 15 three-digit by two-digit target problems. The experimental assignments contained 18 similar target problems as well as six one-digit by one-digit multiplication problems interspersed after every third target problem. In the first assignment set, students were asked to work each assignment for 5 minutes. Although the experimental assignments contained more target problems, results showed that significantly more students chose the experimental assignment and rated it as less difficult and as requiring less effort to complete. In the second assignment set, students were asked to complete both assignments. Again significantly more students rated the experimental assignment as being less difficult and as requiring less effort to complete. Although more students chose the experimental assignment for homework, this difference was not significant. Discussion focuses on using the interspersal procedure to enhance students' perceptions of assignments and alter their choice behavior.     

Psychological Reactions to the Drunk Driver: Associations With Intervention and Their Success1

Research on psychological factors in helping behavior has been undertaken primarily in laboratory settings. Although this work has been instrumental in identifying psychological factors that influence helping, their role in naturally occurring helping behavior, such as informal drunk-driving intervention, is largely unknown. College students (N= 192) completed a questionnaire that assessed 11 possible reactions to the drunk driving situation, types of interventions, and their success. Over half of the students (55%, N= 10) reported having intervened to prevent someone from driving drunk. Using structural modeling, we examined the effect of various emotions and affective and cognitive reactions on the frequency and success of different types of informal drunk-driving intervention. Different reactions to the drunk driving situation influenced the number, type, and success of interventions used.     

How to Be Fashionably Queer: Reminding the Church of the Importance of Sexual Stories

Abstract

This article compares experiences of working in the fashion industry with being a member of the Church It asserts that the Church's pastoral practice is often rendered ineffective by its unwillingness to embrace sexual stories and ironically demonstrates that in the unexpected context of a fashion store, where such stories were frequently shared, that there was a deep sense of trust and intimacy that allowed for meaningful pastoral experiences, especially during times of crisis. With reference to the work of queer theologians such as Marcella Althaus-Reid and Robert Goss, it employs the motif of the ‘theological catwalk’ to demonstrate that the biblical texts and the person of Jesus can be approached as sexual stories. By refusing to accept that queer people can only dress in the sexual outfit of church teachings, it opens the closet doors and reveals that in truth there are many stylish outfits that can be worn on the catwalk of life.     

Mothers' Reactions to Children Misbehaving in Ways That Can Lead to Injury: Implications for Gender Differences in Children's Risk Taking and Injuries

A scenario methodology in which mothers imagined themselves and their school-age children in different home situations was used to examine mothers' reactions to sons and daughters when the children were misbehaving in ways that could, and sometimes did, result in injuries. Prior to injury, mothers predominantly expressed anger to sons and disappointment to daughters, focusing primarily on safety issues in response to daughters' misbehavior and discipline issues in response to sons' misbehavior. Once an injury resulted, mothers became concerned about their children, but the degree of concern was greater for injuries to daughters than to sons. Sons' risky misbehavior was attributed predominantly to nonmodifiable characteristics, whereas daughters' risky misbehavior was attributed to factors that a parent could expect to influence. Consistent with these attributions, mothers advocated active injury-prevention approaches to prevent injury recurrence to daughters, but did not believe that much else could be done to prevent injury recurrence to sons. Generally, the pattern of results support the notion that mothers expect more risky behavior of sons than of daughters, are more concerned about injuries to daughters than sons, and believe they can have greater influence on the risk-taking behavior of daughters than sons. Implications of these results for understanding gender differences in children's risk-taking and injuries are discussed.     

White South Africans' Reactions to Black Advancement: A Two-Sample Confirmatory Investigation of the Structure of Attitude Using an Analogy to the Multitrait-Multimethod Design

The tripartite (affective, conative, cognitive) theory of attitude has been investigated in a number of empirical studies, with findings mostly favoring the theory. Little attention has been paid, however, to other important characteristics of attitude. One of these is multiplexity which refers to the number of separate domains into which an attitude object can be partitioned. In this study, a data design was used which made it possible to investigate trait and domain structure simultaneously. A questionnaire measuring affective, conative, and cognitive responses to three aspects of black advancement was administered to two groups of white South Africans: English speakers employed by a large private-sector company and Afrikaans speakers employed by the government. Confirmatory techniques were employed to investigate the structure of the data. Single-group analysis procedures adapted from Widaman (1985) were initially performed to establish a model satisfactory for both samples. Multi-group procedures were then performed on the two samples to investigate group differences in data structure. The structure was very similar in the two samples with the exception that domain variances were smaller in the English-speaking sample.     

More eyes on the prize: variability in White Americans' perceptions of progress toward racial equality

Much recent research suggests that Whites and non-Whites think differently about issues of race in contemporary America. For example, Eibach and Ehrlinger (2006) recently demonstrated that Whites perceive that more progress toward racial equality has been made as compared to non-Whites. The authors of this article sought to extend Eibach and Ehrlinger's analysis. To this end, they found that differences in Whites' and non-Whites' perceptions of racial progress can be explained by the reference points they use for understanding progress toward racial equality (Study 1). Furthermore, they demonstrated that there is variability in White people's perceptions of racial progress that can be explained by self-reported racial prejudice (Studies 1 and 2). Finally, they demonstrated that White people's perceptions of racial progress predict reactions to affirmative action (Study 2). Implications for better understanding intergroup relations and reactions to social policies are discussed.     

Prejudice matters: understanding the reactions of Whites to affirmative action programs targeted to benefit Blacks.

The authors examined, in 2 studies, the effects of equal employment opportunity/affirmative action (EEO/AA) policies on Whites' job-related attitudes. First, in an experiment, White prospective job recruits, as expected, rated a potential employer whose EEO/AA policies were framed as targeted to benefit Blacks as less attractive than a potential employer whose EEO/AA policies were framed more generally. Second. the results of a field study showed that prejudice against Blacks moderated the relationship between Whites' perceptions that their organization's EEO/AA policies were targeted to benefit Blacks and their satisfaction with promotion opportunities. Specifically, among prejudiced Whites, this relationship was negative and considerable in size (r = -.39. p < .01); whereas, among nonprejudiced Whites, it was negligible (r = -.04, ns). The implications of our findings for the study of prejudice in organizations are discussed.     

Reactions to Affirmative Action: Seeking the Bases for Resistance1

It has been argued that affirmative action negatively affects the self‐perceptions of beneficiaries. In contrast, it was hypothesized that this would not occur when individual qualifications were explicitly considered and, indeed, that failure under discrimination would be more self‐detrimental. However, perceptions of reverse discrimination may buffer negative self‐attributions on the part of nonbeneficiaries. Responses in an experimental simulation indicated that, of several affirmative actions for women, passive nondiscrimination was viewed as the fairest response to discrimination. While women's self‐perceptions were not affected by affirmative actions, they did suffer under failure. The presence of affirmative actions did not alleviate the effects of failure on men's self‐perceptions. Possible alternatives for resistance to affirmative action are assessed and discussed.     

Reaction to Mortality: An Interdisciplinary Organizing Principle for the Human Sciences

Ernest Becker's theory about death denial is one example of depth psychological theory. Because very important features of Becker's theory have now successfully and singularly met the rigorous empirical testing of Terror Management Theory (TMT), it must be concluded that the theory of death denial stands apart from and above alternative depth psychological theories in explaining human behavioral and attitudinal motivation. Nevertheless, TMT only touches the surface of Becker's theory in the round. This essay looks at how Becker's wider theories of death denial are applied to (1) personal psychological, (2) social psychological, (3) political, and (4) spiritual aspects of human experience and suggests that what Becker has given us is an organizing principle, a theory of considerable integrative, explanatory, and interpretive power, for a broadly interdisciplinary social science of human behavior.     

Drivers' Ratings of Different Components of Their Own Driving Skill: A Greater Illusion of Superiority for Skills That Relate to Accident Involvement1

Different components of driving skill relate to accident involvement in different ways. For instance, while hazard‐perception skill has been found to predict accident involvement, vehicle‐control skill has not. We found that drivers rated themselves superior to both their peers and the average driver on 18 components of driving skill (N= 181 respondents). These biases were greater for hazard‐perception skills than for either vehicle‐control skills or driving skill in general. Also, ratings of hazard‐perception skill related to self‐perceived safety after overall skill was controlled for. We suggest that although drivers appear to appreciate the role of hazard perception in safe driving, any safety benefit to be derived from this appreciation may be undermined by drivers' inflated opinions of their own hazard‐perception skill. We also tested the relationship between illusory beliefs about driving skill and risk taking and looked at ways of manipulating drivers' illusory beliefs.     

More on the relation between division and multiplication in simple arithmetic: Evidence for mediation of division solutions via multiplication

Adults (N = 32) solved simple multiplication (e.g., 8 x 7) and corresponding division problems (e.g., 56/8). Self-reports of solution processes were given by half of the participants. Latency patterns and error rates were closely related across operations and were similar in self-report and no-report conditions. Solution of division problems, however, facilitated solution of multiplication problems more than the reverse. On large division problems, participants reported that they "recast" problems as multiplication (e.g., 56/8 as 8 x = 56). These results support the hypothesis that multiplication and division are stored in separate mental representations but that solution of difficult division problems sometimes involves access to multiplication.