Thinking about Morality and Moral Thinking: Is There a Distinction?

ABSTRACT A recent exchange with Shaffer (this issue) reveals several points of agreement underscoring the utility of our subject-based approach to understanding moral thought. Shaffer's latest reply raises the interesting question of whether thinking about morality, the focus of our study, constitutes moral thinking. Our response underscores how Shaffer's approach to studying moral thought differs from our own. More important, we emphasize how disagreements over what constitutes moral thinking can and should be settled empirically.     

Job involvement and Machiavellianism: obsession-compulsion or detachment?

This study addressed a conflicting finding in the Machiavellianism literature--the direction of the relationship between job involvement and Machiavellianism. Although the results did not verify the positive relationship implicit in the view of job involvement as obsession-compulsion, they did confirm the negative relationship implicit in the characterization of Machiavellians as somewhat detached from their surroundings and uninvolved in their jobs.     

Withdrawal Versus Reversal: A Necessary Distinction?

In the behavior analysis literature, the terms withdrawal and reversal are widely used to refer to various iterations of the basic A‐B‐A or A‐B‐A‐B experimental design structure. Although these terms were initially used to label two distinct but closely related experimental designs, it now appears that many researchers have come to use these terms interchangeably. A review of major behavior analytic journals published between 2009 and 2013 reveals a strong preference among researchers for use of the term reversal in labeling the design described in the publication, whether or not that design is characterized by the specific features initially associated with the reversal design. This paper describes the origin of this definitional distinction and reviews the case for abolishing that distinction. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does “Making a Difference” Still Make a Difference?: A Textbook Author’s Reflections

Drawing on my experiences with teaching Psychology of Women and writing three editions of a textbook across two decades starting in 1990, I reflect on the core feminist call to make the personal political. By tracing the chronology and interplay of my textbook writing with my teaching, research, and editing, I speculate about an apparent disconnection between my experiences and research with students (who embrace the feminist call to make a difference) and the textbook market to veer toward less women-centeredness and activism in the pursuit of gender studies. I make my case that the activist goal of making a difference continues to make a difference in individual women’s lives, in women’s relationships, and in a social justice agenda.     

Moral Development and Hawaiian Youths: Does Gender Make a Difference?

This study was designed to assess the moral reasoning of Hawaiian youths. The findings challenge C. Gilligan's (1982) theoretical proposition that gender differences exist in moral development. Implications for counseling theory, research, and practice are discussed.     

Situational Cues and Crime Reporting: Do Signs Make a Difference?1

Two field studies were conducted to assess the effect of signs describing how to report a shoplifting on bystander intervention to a staged theft. In the first study, signs providing directions and one of three rationales for reporting had a small effect on attitudes toward reporting and no effect on intervention. In the second study, a definition of the situation as a shoplifting by a confederate had a strong influence on subjects reporting, but presence or absence of signs describing how to report had no impact. Differences between interpersonal and nonpersonal influences are described, and implications for informational campaigns to increase crime reporting are discussed.     

How Does the Difference Principle Make a Difference?

The paper examines the relationship between the two parts of Rawls’ second principle of justice. More specifically, it explores the ways in which the Difference Principle (DP) may constrain the range of acceptable social arrangements in light of the stated lexical priority of the requirement of fair equality of opportunity (FEO) over the DP. The paper discusses two possibilities. First, it examines the role the DP may play within an institutional scheme that satisfies the requirement of FEO. Second, it discusses the role the principle may play in selecting among different institutional schemes that satisfy FEO. The paper argues that the DP has an important role only if there is a range of institutional arrangements that are equivalent from the point of view of FEO but non-equivalent from the point of view of the DP. Next, it explores the possible sources of the variation among the different FEO-equivalent institutional schemes, and argues that on the most satisfactory reading of the requirement of FEO, there will not be much variation that is relevant from the point of view of the DP. The paper concludes that the role of the Difference Principle is at best very limited in constraining the range of social arrangements that are acceptable from the point of view of justice.     

Job Satisfaction in High Technology and Traditional Industry: Is There a Difference?

The Psychological Record - It is widely believed that work in the high technology sector is different from traditional industry. Yet based upon a random sample of 1509 members of the Silicon Valley...     

Coping and Defense Mechanisms: What's the Difference?

Defense mechanisms and coping strategies are discussed as two different types of adaptational processes. They may be clearly differentiated on the basis of the psychological processes involved, but not on the basis of their relation to outcome measures. Criteria that critically differentiate between defense and coping processes include the conscious/unconscious status and the intentional/nonintentional nature of the processes. Criteria based on the dispositional or situational status of the process, and on the conceptualization of the processes as hierarchical, are found to be more a matter of emphasis than of critical difference. A criterion that attempts to differentiate between defense and coping processes on the basis of their relation to psychological or physical health is found to be without support once the bias in self-report outcome measures is recognized.     

Team–Member Exchange and Work Engagement: Does Personality Make a Difference?

Purpose

Adopting a person–situation interactionist framework, this study examined the joint effects of employee personality (i.e., extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness) and social exchange relationships with peers (i.e., team–member exchange; TMX) in predicting work engagement.

Methodology

This study is based on survey responses from 235 Chinese employees collected at two time points with 3 months in between. We conducted moderated regression analyses to test the hypotheses that employees higher in extraversion or conscientiousness or lower in neuroticism would demonstrate a stronger TMX–work engagement relation.

Findings

Results from this study showed that the three focal personality traits moderated the TMX–engagement relation simultaneously. Specifically, the positive TMX–engagement relation was stronger for employees with higher extraversion or lower neuroticism than that for their counterparts. Interestingly, the TMX–engagement relation was positive for employees lower in conscientiousness but negative for those higher in conscientiousness.

Implications

These findings support the notion that lateral social exchange relationships in the workplace (i.e., TMX) are an important antecedent of work engagement and, more importantly, their beneficial effects on work engagement are contingent on certain types and/or levels of personality traits.

Originality/Value

This study not only advances our understanding of presumed antecedents of work engagement but also opens a new door for future research on work engagement by highlighting the importance of a person–situation interactionist framework.     

Improving Psychological Measurement: Does It Make a Difference? A Comment on Nesselroade and Molenaar (2016)

Nesselroade and Molenaar advocate the use of an idiographic filter approach. This is a fixed-effects approach, which may limit the number of individuals that can be simultaneously modeled, and it is not clear how to model the presence of subpopulations. Most important, Nesselroade and Molenaar's proposal appears to be best suited for modeling long time series on a few variables for a few individuals. Long time series are not common in psychological applications. Can it be applied to the usual longitudinal data we face? These are characterized by short time series (four to five points in time), hundreds of individuals, and dozens of variables. If so, what do we gain? Applied settings most often involve between-individual decisions. I conjecture that their approach will not outperform common, simpler, methods. However, when intraindividual decisions are involved, their approach may have an edge.     

Mobile Persuasion: Can Screen Size and Presentation Mode Make a Difference to Trust?

Guided by the Modality, Agency, Interactivity, and Navigability (MAIN) model of technology effects and the heuristic–systematic model (HSM) of information processing, this study explicates underlying mechanisms by which variations in screen size (large vs. small) and presentation mode (video vs. text) contribute to user perceptions of media content on their smartphones. Results from a between‐subjects experiment (N = 120) indicate that large screen size and video mode promote heuristic processing while small screen size and text mode encourage systematic processing. Heuristic processing leads to greater affective and behavioral trust while systematic processing is associated with cognitive trust. Phantom model analysis reveals the effects of large screen size and video mode on purchase intentions are sequentially mediated by type of information processing and multidimensional trust.     

Revising Republican Liberty: What is the Difference Between a Disinterested Gentle Giant and a Deterred Criminal?

This paper assesses the most well thought out contemporary conception of republican liberty put forward by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. I demonstrate that it is incoherent: at least insofar as it seeks to pick out a form of unfreedom not captured by the negative conception of liberty. This incoherence arises because Pettit and Skinner cannot both hold that republican unfreedom is defined by one agent’s mere capacity to interfere arbitrarily with another agent and, at the same time, claim that republican freedom can be promoted by deterrence mechanisms. My contribution to contemporary republican theory is to suggest that a coherent republican conception can be achieved, however, through an important revision. This is to replace Pettit and Skinner’s antonym of republican liberty—the power to interfere arbitrarily—with a higher order power—the power to determine arbitrarily rules with respect to interference. This revised conception does pick out a genuinely distinct extension of unfreedom from the negative liberty conception. I believe it also reflects an important intuitive sense in which we may understand ourselves to be unfree, that is, to live under the rule of another.     

Underdetermination and Meaning Indeterminacy: What is the Difference?

The first part of this paper discusses Quine’s views on underdetermination of theory by evidence, and the indeterminacy of translation, or meaning, in relation to certain physical theories. The underdetermination thesis says different theories can be supported by the same evidence, and the indeterminacy thesis says the same component of a theory that is underdetermined by evidence is also meaning indeterminate. A few examples of underdetermination and meaning indeterminacy are given in the text. In the second part of the paper, Quine’s scientific realism is discussed briefly, along with some of the difficulties encountered when considering the ‘truth’ of different empirically equivalent theories. It is concluded that the difference between underdetermination and indeterminacy, while significant, is not as great as Quine claims. It just means that after we have chosen a framework theory, from a number of empirically equivalent ones, we still have further choices along two different dimensions.