Not So Enticing Reasons

A common view of the relation between oughts and reasons is that you ought to do something if and only if that is what you have most reason to do. One challenge to this comes from what Jonathan Dancy calls ‘enticing reasons.’ Dancy argues that enticing reasons never contribute to oughts and that it is false that if the only reasons in play are enticing reasons then you ought to do what you have most reason to do. After explaining how enticing reasons supposedly work and why accepting them may appear attractive, I firstly show why we are not committed to accepting them into our conceptual framework and then argue that no reasons work in the way enticing reasons are claimed to. Thus we should reject the category of enticing reasons entirely.

The Slavery of the Not So Talented

The article sets forth Ronald Dworkin’s efforts to avert the slavery of the talented within his theory of equality, so that they are not forced to work full-time at one type of job, but then criticises Dworkin for failing to apply similar concerns to not so talented workers. It argues that he overlooks the problem of the slavery of the not so talented that results from the tough rules he proposes for dealing with insurance payouts. Finally, it tries to show how this unfairness can be avoided with a better interpretation of the likely outcome of his hypothetical insurance experiment given a better understanding of the motivations of parties operating within that experiment.     

Not So Fast: Reassessing Gender Essentialism in Young Adults

We examined young adults’ essentialist reasoning about gender categories. Previous developmental results suggest that until age 9 or 10, children show marked essentialist reasoning about gender, but this disappears by early adulthood. In contrast, results from social cognition suggest that essentialist thinking about social categories persists into adulthood. To address this discrepancy, 69 undergraduates engaged in a switched-at-birth task under speeded or delayed conditions. Delayed participants made essentialist decisions about physical but not behavioral properties and replicated past findings. Speeded participants showed markedly higher essentialist responding for behavioral properties compared with delayed participants. These findings suggest that gender essentialism does not necessarily diminish in adulthood but instead may be suppressed by more explicit reasoning processes.     

Parental Leave of Absence: Some Not So Family-Friendly Implications1

This experiment examined the effects of ratee gender, type of leave of absence, and level of performance on perceptions of organizational commitment, work commitment, family commitment, and recommendations for organizational rewards. The proposed 3-way interactions between gender, type of leave of absence, and performance level were not supported; however, main effects and 2-way interactions were revealed. Moreover, perceived organizational commitment and work commitment were found to moderate the relationship between performance level and reward recommendations. The findings also indicated that men who were depicted as taking a leave of absence from work for parental reasons were less likely to be recommended for rewards than were males who had not taken a leave of absence.     

Remembering Friends as Not So Friendly in Competitive and Bargaining Social Interactions

From children's schoolyard play to executives' boardroom negotiations, competitive and bargaining interactions are common to everyday life. Sometimes, the interacting parties are socially close and sometimes not. In this research, we examine how friendship influences memory for actions in such interactions. Dyads consisting of either friends or strangers played a competitive card game (Study 1) or the ultimatum game (Studies 2 and 4) and then recalled the interaction. We find that participants remembered friends' play as more competitive (Study 1) and less generous (Studies 2 and 4) than strangers' play, even when friends' actual play was more generous than that of strangers (Studies 2 and 4). Friendship did not affect recall for one's own play. In a workplace setting, Study 3 reveals people expect more of work colleagues who are friends than of work colleagues who are acquaintances. Study 4 tests our complete model and shows that people expect more of friends than of strangers and that this difference in expectations explains the less favorable memory for friend's actions. Our findings are consistent with a negative disconfirmation account whereby people expect their friends to be less competitive and more generous, and when these expectations are violated, people remember friends' actions more negatively than they actually were. Much research shows positive effects of friendship norms on actual behavior. We demonstrate a negative effect on people's memory of friends' behavior in competitive and bargaining social interactions. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Some Serious and Some Not So Serious Reactions to AACD and Its Journals

Critical self-evaluation is central to our professional survival and to the survival of our professional association, the American Association for Counseling and Development (AACD). Although the association and its journals certainly have their critics, unfortunately very little criticism is published for the benefit of the general membership. The purpose of this article is to elaborate on some serious and not so serious criticisms of AACD, its journals, its leaders, and its members.     

‘Ought Implies Can’: Not So Pragmatic After All

Those who want to deny the ‘ought implies can’ principle often turn to weakened views to explain ‘ought implies can’ phenomena. The two most common versions of such views are (a) that ‘ought’ presupposes ‘can’, and (b) that ‘ought’ conversationally implicates ‘can’. This paper will reject both views, and in doing so, present a case against any pragmatic view of ‘ought implies can’. Unlike much of the literature, I won't rely on counterexamples, but instead will argue that each of these views fails on its own terms. ‘Ought’ and ‘can’ do not obey the negation test for presupposition, and they do not obey the calculability or the cancelability tests for conversational implicature. I diagnose these failures as partly a result of the importance of the contrapositive of ‘ought implies can’. I end with a final argument emphasizing the role the principle plays in moral thinking, and the fact that no pragmatic account can do it justice.     

Across the (Not So) Great Divide: Cultural Similarities in Self-Evaluative Processes

Although it is widely assumed that East Asians and Westerners evaluate themselves differently, there is much support for cultural convergences. In this article, I review evidence showing that in both cultures (and to a largely comparable degree), people (a) experience high feelings of self-regard; (b) view themselves and loved ones in highly positive terms; and (c) exhibit self-serving biases that promote feelings of self-worth. Moreover, in both cultures (and to a largely comparable degree), individual differences in self-esteem predict (d) psychological well-being and (e) emotional regulation in response to negative outcomes. These commonalities suggest that self-love is a universal human motivation.     

Psychological Profiles Distinguishing Litigating and Nonlitigating Pain Patients: Subtle,and Not So Subtle

Chronic pain patients in the midst of litigation over settlement for their injuries were examined as a naturally occurring group where one might expect various distortions or differences in test findings on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality inventory-Revised (MMPI-2). Similar groups of 43 chronic pain patients in litigation and 45 not in litigation were examined on 10 key MMPI-2 variable selected a priori Multivariate analysis of variance revealed a significant difference between groups (p = .036). Litigators were most distinct in endorsing more obvious and fewer subtle symptoms. A conversion profile was also more salient for litigators once the obvious versus subtle differences were taken into account, Implications for use of the MMPI-2 and for clinical work with litigious patients are examined.     

Recoupling in Mid‐Life and Beyond: From Love at Last to Not So Fast

Divorce rates have dropped in the United States, except for couples over 50 where they are rising steeply, along with rates of late‐life recoupling. Both stepcouples and their young adult and adult children in new older stepfamilies are often surprised to find themselves facing many of the same challenges that younger stepfamilies do. Some challenges are even intensified by the decades‐long relationships and additional layers of extended family that come with recoupling after mid‐life. Stepfamilies formed in later life must also negotiate decisions about estate planning and elder care among stakeholders who often have sharply divergent agendas before there is time to establish trusting relationships. This article describes the “normal” challenges facing stepcouples who come together over age 50. It provides evidence‐informed guidance for therapists in meeting these challenges on three levels of clinical work: Psychoeducational, Interpersonal, and Intrapsychic/Intergenerational. As in younger stepfamilies, “family therapy” must usually begin in subsystems—often the adult stepcouple and parent–adult child. The article then describes a particularly fraught subgroup of recouplers: over‐50 fathers and their new partners, where the dad's young adult or adult daughter is very unhappy with his new relationship. In these latter stepfamilies, father–daughter repair must precede stepfamily bonding. Stepfamilies that are preceded by a partner's death and those that begin with affairs are also discussed. Finally, some “easy wrong turns” for therapists are described.     

Measuring and Understanding Diversity Is Not So Simple: How Characteristics of Personal Identity Can Improve Museum Audience Studies

ABSTRACT

For decades, museums have been seeking diversity in their audiences, for reasons including equity, vitality, community relations, and audience development. The initial emphasis on diversity was about race, and although museum initiatives and programming forged ahead with evolving definitions of diversity, the visitor studies field has a mixed record of participating in that evolution. The usefulness of visitor demographics in representing diversity has been debated and, although the field has exploded simple conceptions such as “the typical visitor,” visitor research professionals have not thoroughly applied our skills to help museums understand how to define, encourage, and monitor diversity, or to document its benefits. This article suggests that more thoughtful measures of audience diversity can be created by expanding demographics with characteristics of personal identity. Pragmatic examples of such measures in visitor research are presented.     

Genetics,Developmental Psychopathology,and Psychoanalytic Theory: The Case for Ending Our (Not So) Splendid Isolation

This paper considers the historical isolation of psychoanalysis from other scientific academic disciplines. The example of behavior genetics is used to illustrate the potential mutual benefit of cross-fertilization. Exploring links between the two disciplines makes it possible to debate antipsycho-analytic constructions in behavior genetics with greater vigor. At the same time, psychoanalysis, which studies subjectivity, is relevant to a discipline that naively explores the objective environment without considering the crucial mediation through the subjective world. Microbiology and genetics offer models of the mechanisms by which meaning generation and interpretive capacity might interface with the unfolding of genetic expression. Simultaneously, emerging psychoanalytic developmental models have provided an ontogenetic psychological framework that links development of this capacity to the infant-mother relationship. The paper concludes by stressing the need for a cadre of specialist psychoanalytic professionals dedicated to research as the precondition of any meaningful dialogue between psychoanalysis and any other discipline.     

Seemingly Harmless Racial Communications Are Not So Harmless: Racial Microaggressions Lead to Suicidal Ideation by Way of Depression Symptoms

Racial microaggressions, a contemporary form of subtle discrimination that occurs in everyday interactions, are associated with a variety of negative mental health outcomes. Research has not extended the connection between racial microaggressions and negative mental health to include suicide risk. Given the well‐known association between negative mental health outcomes and suicide risk, the current study examined whether racial microaggressions predicted suicidal ideation through depression symptoms among 405 young adults of color. Depression symptoms mediated the relationship between racial microaggressions and suicidal ideation. This is the first study to associate racial microaggressions to suicide risk. Societal and clinical implications are discussed.     

So Close and Yet So Far: Construal Level Moderates Cultivation Effects

The cultivation effect is well established: The more media we consume, the more our worldviews come to reflect the mediated world. Several advancements have been made in the past decade exploring the processes underlying the effect. Importantly, the judgments are often heuristically based (Shrum, 2001 Shrum, L. J. (2001). Processing strategy moderates the cultivation effect. Human Communication Research, 27, 94–120.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2009 Shrum, L. J. (2009). Media consumption and perceptions of social reality: Effects and underlying processes. In J. Bryant &; M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (pp. 50–73). New York, NY: Routledge. [Google Scholar]), with relevance of the media information an important moderator of this process. Mental construal level, in which people are considered to be thinking on a relatively concrete (psychologically close, specific) level or a relatively abstract (psychologically distant, general) level, may influence these cognitive processes. The present studies find that mental construal level (concrete or abstract) moderates the classic cultivation effect for first-order judgments. Specifically, concrete construal encourages the cultivation effect with a stronger relationship between media consumption and violence prevalence estimates, but abstract construal reduces the effect. Comparison to a control condition in Experiment 2 indicates that concrete construal may be the default state for cultivation effects. One possible explanation for the effect of construal on cultivation effects is that construal influences relevance of and reliance on media cues in judgment formation.