The World of Work as a Subsystem

When beginning a systems analysis of work and its relationship to employment counseling, at least three issues must be considered. First, the historical and cultural definitions of work; second, the meaning and expectations that each individual attaches to work; and third, the potential impact of employment counseling on the lives of people.     

The Conception of a Person as a Series of Mental Events

It is argued that those who accept the psychological criterion of personal identity, such as Parfit and Shoemaker, should accept what I call the 'series' view of a person, according to which a person is a unified aggregate of mental events and states. As well as defending this view against objections, I argue that it allows the psychological theorist to avoid the two lives objection which the 'animalist' theorists have raised against it, an objection which causes great difficulties for the conception of a person that most psychological theorists favour, the constitution view. It is also argued that the series view allows that people can body swap and teleport, which the constitution view–which takes a person to be a physical object (but a distinct physical object from the human being)–has great trouble with.     

Classifying a Person as a Sexual Partner: The Impact of Contextual Factors

This study assessed the influence of five factors on respondents' judgments of whether two hypothetical actors, Tom and Lucy, would consider each other to be "sexual partners." The factors were: respondent's gender, actor's gender, type of act (vaginal, anal, or oral intercourse), frequency of act (once, several times), and actors' dating status (not dating, dated once, dated for three months). 223 undergraduates (mean age 22.2 - 2.2 years; 65% female) read 16 hypothetical heterosexual behavior scenarios featuring Tom and Lucy and judged whether Tom (Lucy) would consider Lucy (Tom) to be a "sexual partner." Respondents thought the actors would be more likely to consider each other sexual partners if they had engaged in vaginal or anal intercourse as opposed to oral sex; if they had more frequent sex; or if they were in a steady dating relationship. Researchers and health care professionals should take contextual/situational factors into account when they ask respondents about their sexual partners.     

Person perception as a function of occupation and sex

The purpose of this study was to assess perception of stimulus persons in sex-appropriate, sex-inappropriate, and neutral occupations, using the sexual dimension of the occupations, the sex of the person-in-occupation, and the sex of the perceiver as independent variables. Male and female Ss rated two stimulus persons (one female and one male) in each of 12 selected occupations (4 masculine, 4 feminine, and 4 neutral occupations) on 20 bipolar rating scales. The scales represented the following factors: Leadership, Interpersonal Adjustment and Likability, Professional and Intellectual Competence, Personal Adjustment, Social Sensitivity, Activity, Happiness in Home Life, Physical Attractiveness, and Liberalism and Individualism. Results indicated that sexual dimension of the occupation and the sex-appropriateness/inappropriateness of the occupation have strong effects on person perception.This study is based on part of a doctoral dissertation in psychology at the Ohio State University, under the direction of Samuel H. Osipow. Partial results were presented at the Western Psychological Association convention, April 1976. Thanks are extended to David Shinar for consultation and statistical analysis of the data.     

Person as scientist, person as moralist

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people's moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people's moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. I argue that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.     

第一人称

本文考察了卡普兰、弗雷格和刘易斯等人的观点,对第一人称代词“我”分别从语义学刻画、自我概念以及它在信念、命题中所起的作用等方面做了深入分析.本文首先讨论了卡普兰等人关于“我”的语义学观点.对“我”的语义学说明的困难在于:“我”确定指称的方式似乎因人而异,每个人在使用“我”时都有其特殊的指称方式;即使如此,人们仍然能够相互交流和理解.作者同意卡普兰的观点:要通过描述“我”的使用方法而非寻找弗雷格式的涵义来刻画“我”的语义.人们使用“我”时都依赖于一个先在的自我概念.作者随后考察了笛卡尔、休谟等人关于“自我”的观点,批评笛卡尔的“主体”理解会导致唯我论和循环,而休谟的“漂浮”的“自我”则根本无法理解.作者赞同笛卡尔关于“我”是思想主体和身体共同构成的统一实体的观点.作者还批评了安斯康姆将“我”等同于笛卡尔式自我而“我”并非指称性表达式的观点,指出她无法解释为何可对包含“我”的句子做存在概括.随后,作者考察了刘易斯对“命题”、“可能世界”以及“自我”等的理解,指出:虽然在刘易斯和他之间有明显分歧,但他们都认为每个可能世界是唯一的,且都把其中一个可能世界视为现实世界,但在哪个可能世界是现实世界上却发生分歧.文章认为,我们每一个人都以一种特殊的方式把握“自我”,这种认识方式比任何纯粹的语言学描述更基本,它是我们使用第一人称的基础.     

Judged Person Dangerousness as Weighted Averaging 1

This article reports two experiments requiring subjective evaluative judgments of the potential dangerousness of hypothetical persons. The research operationally fits the paradigm for the study of personality impression formation, and seeks to illuminate the processes by which two offenses combine to evoke a net judgment of dangerousness. The theoretical framework and philosophy adopted is Anderson's information integration and functional measurement theory. In Study 1, all paired combinations of 10 distinctive crimes were each presented as having been committed by the same person on two separate occasions. Subjects judged overall offender dangerousness. In Study 2, judgments of dangerousness were made when the time purportedly elapsing between two crimes was systematically varied over several ranges of up to 41 years. Three key findings emerged. First, judgments of dangerousness result from an averaging process. This result yields paradoxical implications having considerable pragmatic significance. Second, judgments of dangerousness following two sequential criminal acts (one of high and one of low seriousness) are consistently higher when the high seriousness one is the second crime. Third, with certain qualifications discussed in the text, a serious earlier crime appears to elicit an approximately constant magnitude of judged present dangerousness no matter how long ago it was perpetrated. This result implies that subjects infer considerable permanence of criminal predilection to those who have committed a serious crime in the past.     

State Self-Esteem as a Moderator of Negative Mood Effects on Person Impression

Participants in a negative or a neutral mood performed an impression formation task in Experiment 1, a word fragment completion task in Experiment 2, and both tasks in Experiment 3. A self-referent versus other-referent sentence completion task was used to induce a negative mood. As a result, participants exhibited fewer mood-congruent effects on impression rating in the self-referent than in the other-referent mood induction condition, even though relevant traits had been equally activated across the two conditions. It was also shown that the self-referent induction procedure was accompanied by degrading of self-esteem, whereas the other-referent one was not. Taken together, the results suggest that the state self-esteem might be relevant to moderating of the negative mood effects on person impression.     

Junzi as a Tragic Person: A Self Psychological Interpretation of the Analects

This article explicates self psychological connotations of junzi (君子) in the Analects of Confucius. Junzi is a noble person who attempts to actualize Confucian cardinal virtues in concrete human relationships at any cost. Kohut argues that a tragic person is faithful to the psychologically structured ideals even at the expense of death. Like a tragic person, a junzi follows his or her ideals and values, which are deeply anchored in the nuclear self. In the Analects, a junzi remarkably resembles a tragic person. A junzi in the Analects shows the characteristics of a tragic person: empathy, creativity, humor, and wisdom.