Sex Biases in Subject Selection: A Survey of Articles Published in American Medical Journals

This study discusses the results of a survey of 1,800 articles published in American medical journals from 1985--1996. The study finds 9% of these articles reported research that uses only male subjects to examine medical conditions that affect both sexes; the ratio of research on female to male conditions among these articles was greater than 5:1; but 76.5% of the articles reported research that includes both male and female subjects. The study also discusses evidence that sex biases against women (and men) are decreasing. This study also offers some possible psychological, institutional, medical, and economic explanations of the sex biases in medical research published in American journals, and discusses some policy implications of sex biases in medical research. The study concludes by urging others to conduct more empirical research on sex biases in medical research.     

测评中的共同方法偏差

共同方法变异是指由于测量方法而非所测构想造成的变异。共同方法变异会对测评和测评间的相关产生严重影响,甚至会使研究导致错误结论。本文介绍了学界对共同方法偏差的研究,内容包括：(1)共同方法偏差在多大程度上和以何种方式影响测评研究结果;(2)共同方法偏差的潜在来源及其程序控制。     

Interpretational Biases in Emotional Psychopathology

Many psychological disorders are characterized by interpretational processing biases, and Aaron T. Beck's work provided a crucial theoretical foundation for assessing, treating, and researching them. The present commentary aims to sketch a brief historical overview of how this work evolved and developed, and how it has been translated into concrete assessment techniques for use in treatment and led to innovative research lines in clinical research.     

Worth Repeating...

No abstract available for this article.     

Comparable measurement scales in task-comparison experiments

The primary goal of this comment on the article by Schacter, Cooper, and Delaney (1990) is to illustrate two kinds of advantages of comparable measurement scales for task-comparison experiments. First, a comparable metric allows quantitative comparisons of the degree of accurate performance across tasks, which yields more information than the qualitative conclusions from tests of significance on noncomparable measurement scales. Second, such a scale can highlight situations in which fundamentally different kinds of comparisons are being attempted. A few remarks about the inferences drawn from the research are also offered.     

Effort and Moral Worth

One of the factors that contributes to an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness — his or her moral worth — is effort. On the one hand, agents who act effortlessly seem to have high moral worth. On the other hand, agents who act effortfully seem to have high moral worth as well. I explore and explain this pair of intuitions and the contour of our views about associated cases.     

Biases in children's and adults' moral judgments

Two experiments examined biases in children's (5/6- and 7/8-year-olds) and adults' moral judgments. Participants at all ages judged that it was worse to produce harm when harm occurred (a) through action rather than inaction (omission bias), (b) when physical contact with the victim was involved (physical contact principle), and (c) when the harm was produced as a direct means to an end rather than as an unintended but foreseeable side effect of the action (intention principle). The youngest participants, however, did not incorporate benefit when making judgments about situations in which harm to one individual resulted in benefit to five individuals. Older participants showed some preference for benefit resulting from action (commission) as opposed to inaction (omission). The findings are discussed in the context of the theory that moral judgments result, in part, from the operation of an inherent, intuitive moral faculty compared with the theory that moral judgments require development of necessary cognitive abilities.     

The Origin of Biases in Face Perception

ABSTRACT— Experience with certain types of faces during the first year of development defines which types of faces are more efficiently recognized later in life. In work described here, we found that infants who learned to recognize six monkey faces individually (i.e., each face was individually labeled) over a 3-month period maintained the ability to discriminate monkey faces. However, infants who learned these same six faces categorically (i.e., all faces were labeled "monkey") or were simply exposed to these faces (i.e., faces were not labeled) showed a decline in the ability to discriminate monkey faces. These results suggest that experience individuating faces from 6 to 9 months of age, via labeling, critically shapes the perceptual representation that is responsible for later recognition and discrimination of faces.     

Gender-Based Biases in Occupational Hiring Decisions1

Two studies which investigated gender-based decision making in an occupational setting are reported. Participants judged the suitability of a male or a female applicant with identical résumés for a male-dominated or a female-dominated position. In Study 1. where participants gave their own judgments of the suitability of the applicants for the positions, there was no evidence of gender-based biases. In Study 2. participants were required to take the perspective of the applicant in providing their judgments of suitability. In this experiment, gender-based biases were apparent, with a positive bias toward the male applicant. Results are discussed in terms of occupational stereotyping and subtle sexism.     

Attributional Biases in Sexually Coercive Males1

A social cognitive framework was applied to sexually coercive behavior. Sixty-two male undergraduates completed a self-report measure of sexually coercive behavior, as well as several questionnaires assessing trait aggression, the encoding of sexual behaviors, attributions of hostile intent, and traditional attitudes toward women. Results demonstrate a relationship between the encoding of sexual behaviors and committing sexually coercive behaviors. A tendency to encode ambiguous dating behaviors as admissions of sexual intent related strongly to initiating sexually coercive behavior, while none of the variables examined were strongly related to persisting in sexually coercive behavior. Similar effects were found when controlling for all of the other variables. Implications for intervention designs are discussed.     

Moral Worth and Moral Knowledge

To have moral worth an action not only needs to conform to the correct normative theory (whatever it is); it also needs to be motivated in the right way. I argue that morally worthy actions are motivated by the rightness of the action; they are motivated by an agent's concern for doing what's right and her knowledge that her action is morally right. Call this the Rightness Condition. On the Rightness Condition moral motivation involves both a conative and a cognitive element—in particular, it involves moral knowledge. I argue that the Rightness Condition is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth. I also argue that the Rightness Condition gives us an attractive account of actions performed under imperfect epistemic circumstances: by agents who rely on moral testimony or by those who, like Huckleberry Finn, have false moral convictions.     

孺子可教

姥姥因为疾病做了子宫摘除手术,因此只生育了母亲一个孩子,我从小就和姥姥生活在一起以慰其情。在不知不觉中听着姥姥讲的妖魔鬼怪的故事长大了。姥姥身体还硬朗,70多岁的时候又开始帮我带孩子。于是太姥姥又给孩子重复起了那些红毛绿眼长舌头的故事,什么鬼搭墙、吊死鬼吓人、黄鼠狼迷人等等。这种教育的后果是孩子很胆小,一到晚上就怕黑,而且一旦什么事情成功了就会说“阿弥陀佛”。孩子6岁时,我把他接到身边上小     

Moral Accountancy and Moral Worth

People do good or bad things, and get or do not get good or bad credit for their actions, depending (in part) on knowledge of their actions. I attempt to unfold some of the interconnections between these matters, and between them and the achievement of moral worth. The main conclusion is that the heights of moral worth seem to appear in the oddest places.     

Examining Explanatory Biases in Young Children's Biological Reasoning

Despite the well-established literature on explanation in early childhood, little is known about what constrains children's explanations. State change and negative outcomes were examined as potential explanatory biases in the domain of naïve biology, extending upon previous work in the domain of naïve physics. In two studies, preschool children (N = 70, 3- to 5-year-olds) were informed of the distinct health outcomes of characters in four between-subjects conditions (i.e., becoming ill, recovering from illness, continuous health, and continuous illness) and were asked to provide explanations. Whereas children in both studies provided relevant information for health outcomes, they more often explained outcomes that included a salient health-state change. Presence of a state change also influenced the interpretation of potentially relevant information and improved memory for health outcomes. We discuss how biases in children's explanations constrain children's reasoning and may exacerbate difficulties with reasoning about important health-related topics such as illness prevention.     

Gender Differences in Self-Perception and Negative Recall Biases

This study investigated gender differences inthe accuracy of self-perceptions and whetherself-perception biases are related to negative recallbiases. Participants were 275 female and 213 malecollege students. Approximately 10% of the participantswere minorities (mostly African American and Asian). Ona masculine task, gender differences in self-perceptionswere found for three measures of accuracy: The accuracy of self-evaluations, calibration,and response bias. Females underestimated theirperformance, were less well calibrated, and showed amore conservative response bias than did males. Ashypothesized, no gender differences in the accuracy ofself-evaluations were found for feminine and neutraltasks. Participants' expectancies mediated the genderdifferences in post task self-evaluations ofperformance. In addition, evidence for a negative recallbias was found. Females were more likely than males torecall their mistakes even with performance and accuracyof self-evaluations controlled. The implications of females' greater self-perception biases onmasculine tasks are discussed and suggestions for futureresearch are made.