Back to Social Behavior: Mining the Mundane

The factors influencing a defendant's decision to accept a plea bargain were investigated in a field study. Convicted defendants who had plea bargained their cases (N = 67) were interviewed. Data were collected that included: reasons for plea-bargain acceptance, firmness of decision, satisfaction with the plea bargain, and other plea-related information. A factor analysis showed seven significant factors contributing to plea-bargain acceptance. A subsequent discriminant analysis showed that defendants who had accepted a plea bargain primarily to minimize suffering tended to feel that their best deal was mediocre and that the defense attorney had little input into the decision. Defendants accepting for reasons other than minimization of suffering tended to feel pressure from the prosecutor and felt that conviction was likely. Additionally, firmness and satisfaction with the decision to accept were negatively related to external sources of pressure.     

Unmitigated Agency and Unmitigated Communion: Distinctions from Agency and Communion

The purpose of this paper is to establish the importance of distinguishing unmitigated agency and unmitigated communion from agency and communion. First, we examine the empirical overlap and distinctions among the four constructs. Then, we demonstrate the differential association of unmitigated agency, unmitigated communion, agency, and communion to relationship and health outcomes. We conclude that only unmitigated agency and unmitigated communion are associated with relationship difficulties and poor health. Finally, we distinguish between the difficulties of the unmitigated agency and the unmitigated communion individual by focusing on interpersonal problems.     

Men's Adjustment to Prostate Cancer: The Role of Agency and Unmitigated Agency

We examined how two male gender-related traits, agency (focus on self) and unmitigated agency (focus on self to the exclusion of others), were related to physical and emotional functioning in 162 men (92% Caucasian) treated for prostate cancer. As predicted, unmitigated agency was associated with worse functioning and more cancer-related difficulties. By contrast, agency was associated with better functioning and fewer cancer-related difficulties. We tested whether difficulties expressing emotions explained these relations. Unmitigated agency was associated with difficulty expressing emotions, and agency was associated with the ability to express emotions. Structural equation modeling was used to show that emotional expressiveness mediated the relations of unmitigated agency and agency to adjustment to prostate cancer. The implications of these results for interventions to enhance men's adjustment to prostate cancer are discussed.     

Husserl and the Penetrability of the Transcendental and Mundane Spheres

There is a two-fold problem the phenomenologist must face: the first has to do with thinking like a phenomenologist given that one is always already steeped in the mundane sphere; the second has to do with the phenomenologist entering into dialogue with those scientists, psychologists, sociologists and other laypersons who still remain in the mundane sphere. I address the first problem by giving an Husserlian-inspired account of the movement from the mundane to the transcendental, and show that there are decent prospects for getting life-world folks to start thinking like phenomenologists. I address the second problem by showing that Husserl has himself caught in a dilemma: either the reduction takes place and no communication is possible between phenomenologist and non-phenomenologist, or the reduction does not take place and the phenomenological method remains a psychological makeshift, supposedly accessible to Husserl and his esoteric followers.     

Sociorelational Psychoanalysis and Agency: Reply to Commentary

The author notes that, overall, he and White seem to agree on many important issues that she writes about in her commentary, such as the necessity of recognizing both our shared humanity and the agency of separate, subjective selves. He argues, however, that White mischaracterizes what it means to think of the self as socially constructed, and he clarifies his views of how the concept of a socially constructed self may be related to individual differences in the same culture, and to personal agency. He responds to White's imputation that his paper implicitly prescribes a type of intervention or mandates some particular view of the Truth as a new theology, substituting a concrete environmental or social determinism for the abstract (intrapsychic) determinism that he criticizes. Finally, he responds to some interesting and insightful questions White raises about the case vignette of Mr. J that was presented in his essay.     

Agential Conversations: Interviewing Postdoctoral Life Scientists and the Politics of Mundane Research Practices

Science and Technology Studies (STS) projects often aim at understanding social problems and epistemic challenges in science and, more generally, in the technoscientific worlds we inhabit. However, it is often unclear if and how these projects can help address the problems they identify. Scholars such as Donna Haraway, John Law, and Karen Barad have argued that STS methods always interfere with the contexts they study. Combining this insight with recent feminist scholarship on the politics of care in technoscience suggests that a better understanding of how our research practices already interfere can help us attune our methods in order to promote care as part our research practices. One avenue to investigate this hypothesis is to return to a completed study and reconstruct how its research methods have created interference effects that promoted or could promote care for the problems the study identified. In the case at hand, the methods investigated are interviews with life scientists in Austria and the USA. The problem they defined is that current career rationales in the life sciences, which foreground individualism, mobility, and competition hinder collaboration, teamwork, and mentoring, strain group cohesion, and tend to exclude certain groups. Reframing the research interviews as ‘agential conversations’ that interfered with the contexts they sought to understand shows how the interviews also created situated moments of reflection, connection, and disruption that could serve as a basis for responding to these problematic conditions affecting researchers in the life sciences and beyond.     

Never Mind the Trolley: The Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles in Mundane Situations

Trolley cases are widely considered central to the ethics of autonomous vehicles. We caution against this by identifying four problems. (1) Trolley cases, given technical limitations, rest on assumptions that are in tension with one another. Furthermore, (2) trolley cases illuminate only a limited range of ethical issues insofar as they cohere with a certain design framework. Furthermore, (3) trolley cases seem to demand a moral answer when a political answer is called for. Finally, (4) trolley cases might be epistemically problematic in several ways. To put forward a positive proposal, we illustrate how ethical challenges arise from mundane driving situations. We argue that mundane situations are relevant because of the specificity they require and the scale they exhibit. We then illustrate some of the ethical challenges arising from optimizing for safety, balancing safety with other values such as mobility, and adjusting to incentives of legal frameworks.     

Animality and Agency: A Kantian Approach to Abortion

This paper situates abortion in the context of women's duties to themselves. I argue that the fundamental Kantian requirement to respect oneself as a rational being, combined with Kant's view of our animal nature, form the basis for a view of pregnancy and abortion that focuses on women's agency and characters without diminishing the importance of their bodies and emotions. The Kantian view of abortion that emerges takes abortion to be morally problematic, but sometimes permissible, and sometimes even required.
After sketching Kant's account of duties to oneself, I discuss the challenges pregnancy poses to women's agency. I then argue that abortion is morally problematic because it is antagonistic to an important subset of morally useful emotions that we have self-regarding duties to protect and cultivate; thus, there is a rebuttable deliberative presumption against maxims of abortion for inclination-based ends. I close by considering objections.     

From Treasure to Trash: The Lingering Value of Technological Artifacts

Science and Engineering Ethics - Electronic waste (e-waste) is the fastest growing form of waste worldwide, associated with a range of environmental, health, and justice problems. Unfortunately,...     

回归"现场":多重权力互动下的宗教实践--读《相国寺:在唐宋帝国的神圣与凡俗之间》

宗教研究大致可以从两个不同的取径展开.一种是对义理层面的思辨,它注重教理、教义和教派,精致地分析、比较精英人物的理论体系,关注教理教义的纯正性与正确性这样的问题.这种研究预设了一个"全真"的认知彼岸世界,所有研究都是为了证明某一教理教义及其理解是符合还是违离这一认知的彼岸世界,这可以称为神学取径的宗教学研究.另一种是对具体宗教实践的探究,它注重现实社会中展开的宗教实践的具体过程,分析这一过程中诸种权力的博弈与诉求,神学意义上教理教义的真确性这类问题在被"悬置起来"(bracket it out),而代之以追问宗教实践的现场各种权力与各类资本是如何发挥作用的,这可以称之为现象学取径(approach of phenomenology)的宗教研究.段玉明教授的新著<相国寺:在唐宋帝国的神圣与凡俗之间>①(以下简称<相国寺>)无疑采用了后一种研究取径.     

Agency on the Move: Revisioning the Route to Social Change

Throughout the course of everyday life individuals enter into interactions in which an intricate relationship between agency and subordination can be observed: they sometimes act agentively and at other times—via discursive and/or interpersonal processes—their agency is reduced to objectness. Thus, theoretically we can think of constant dynamics of transfer of agency. It is argued that the transfer of agency between persons (or groups) is a fundamental quality of the societal discourses in which all persons are constituted. This transfer of agency occurs constantly throughout social interaction and at different levels of social functioning as individuals live and make meaning of their experiences. In light of this perspective, it is suggested that social change movements that aim to interrupt the transfer of agency and instead fix agency with one person (or one group of people) are inadequate. Rather, these movements can actually subvert their own agenda by producing problematic tensions in discourse and subjectivity. The self-defense movement, a component of the movement to end violence against women, is presented as a case study. The problematic and tension-filled positions and meanings the movement (re)produces for women are explored as an effect of denying any transfer of agency between women and men around issues of violence and gender oppression.     

Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt

Book Information Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt. Edited by Sarah Buss and Lee Overton. MIT Press. Cambridge MA. 2002. Pp. 381. US$45.     

Exploring the relationship between perceived Action-Outcome distance and Agency: Evidence from temporal binding

Intentional actions are usually accompanied by a sense of agency (SoA), along with a perceived shortening of action-outcome intervals known as the intentional binding (IB) effect. This is at least partly associated with the perceived strength of action-outcome relationships, which have been described in terms of distance (e.g., a ‘distancing effect’). Given that actions in the modern world are increasingly distant from their outcomes, the current study aimed to explore the effect of perceived spatial distance on the strength of IB. Participants voluntarily triggered, or passively observed, a circle on a background that was either flat or appeared three-dimensional, and estimated action-outcome delays. Depth cues modified the circle’s perceived distance while the circle itself did not change. When viewed on a forced-perspective background, interval estimates increased with apparent distance, but only when outcomes were caused by intentional actions. This suggests that agency is reduced for outcomes that appear further away.