Intrinsic conflicts of interest in clinical research: a need for disclosure

Protection of human subjects from investigators' conflicts of interest is critical to the integrity of clinical investigation. Personal financial conflicts of interest are addressed by university policies, professional society guidelines, public standards, and government regulation, but "intrinsic conflict of interest"--conflicts of interest inherent in all clinical research--have received relatively less attention. Such conflicts arise in all clinical research endeavors as a result of the tension among professionals' responsibilities to their research and to their patients and both academic and financial incentives. These conflicts should be disclosed to research subjects and managed as assiduously as are financial conflicts of interest.     

Morality: An Evolutionary Account

ABSTRACT— Refinements in Darwin's theory of the origin of a moral sense create a framework equipped to organize and integrate contemporary theory and research on morality. Morality originated in deferential, cooperative, and altruistic "social instincts," or decision-making strategies, that enabled early humans to maximize their gains from social living and resolve their conflicts of interest in adaptive ways. Moral judgments, moral norms, and conscience originated from strategic interactions among members of groups who experienced confluences and conflicts of interest. Moral argumentation buttressed by moral reasoning is equipped to generate universal and impartial moral standards. Moral beliefs and standards are products of automatic and controlled information-processing and decision-making mechanisms. To understand how people make moral decisions, we must understand how early evolved mechanisms in the old brain and recently evolved mechanisms in the new brain are activated and how they interact. Understanding what a sense of morality is for helps us understand what it is.     

Harmony and Justice

The reason why justice and harmony are the most-prized values and the highest aims of human beings is that these qualities are the foundation which makes possible the realization of all other positive goals. Interpersonal conflicts and conflicts between individuals and the society lead to social, cultural, and moral crises. Confucian culture argues that moral reason is only possessed by human beings, and that this is what can make human existence harmonious and rational. Harmony creates power, and power can defeat impediments. As a result, physical qualities are humanized, and moral qualities increase. Goodness promotes the establishment of mutually beneficial systems and procedural justice in a society. Therefore, Chinese traditional culture provides a method for resolving contemporary social conflicts and crises, including accumulating goodness to increase virtue, constructing social integrity and harmonious righteousness, and the building up of a just society.     

Innovation,research integrity,and change: A conflict of interest management framework for program developers

Psychology and the social sciences have an important role to play in developing innovative solutions to pressing global mental health and social problems. Programs developed by psychologists and other social scientists have immense potential to alleviate suffering and to promote healthy human development across the lifespan. In order to realise this potential program developers must manage the research and development challenges involved in testing an intervention, evaluating, and then preparing it for wider dissemination and scaling. Particular challenges and conflicts can occur in managing the joint roles of being a program developer and a researcher evaluating an intervention or innovation. This article examines the management of various forms of conflicts of interest that have the potential to produce bias and decrease the confidence of policy makers, funders, practitioners, fellow researchers, and the public in the value of psychological interventions. We argue that best practice guidelines are needed to assist developers negotiate the predictable, sometime unavoidable but challenging conflicts of interest that arise in the research process.     

Animal models in the research of human aggression

At present, one of the major fields of interest in psychobiological research is the study of human aggression. Besides its contribution to our basic scientific knowledge and its potential value in the development of different applied sciences, research on human aggression will also, hopefully, aid in control of violence and social conflicts, and thereby improve the living condition of man, an ideal that we all should embrace. In addition, further knowledge in this area will permit a more adequate treatment of some mental diseases. The purpose of the present review is to offer a schematic approach designed to illustrate how animal models have a heuristic, hypothesis-generating function, providing important parallels with human aggression and suggesting new directions for future research.     

Florian Znaniecki: Creative evolution of a sociologist

Znaniecki devoted his creative life to aconstant reexamination of the basic problems of sociology: its subject matter and the methodology through which it can be studied. The developments in his thought can be traced with the help of the prefaces to his books, in which he explains the location of that work in his over-all effort to develop a systematic sociology, the major influences on his thought, and his arguments with other theories. Starting as a philosopher with a special interest in the evolution of values, he spent years as a result of Thomas's influence attempting to find a psychological base for human behavior, finally abandoning the attempt in favor of systems of social interaction. He focused on four such systems: social relation, social role, social groups, and societies.     

Fairness,Self‐Interest,and Cooperation in a Real‐Life Conflict1

Effects of procedural fairness and self‐interest on cooperation vs. hardness in an urban planning conflict were examined in a questionnaire study. The self‐interest perspective posits that people seek to maximize their outcomes and, therefore, cooperate only when they can gain advantages or avoid disadvantages by doing so, while fairness models of cooperation view cooperative actions as based mainly on justice motives. The data give strong support for the fairness hypothesis, showing that self‐interest accounts only for hard strategies, whereas justice motives explain a considerable part of cooperation. The impact of the results on further research on social conflicts and their settlement, as well as the elaboration of models of fairness in the social psychology of conflicts are discussed.     

Markets as a structural solution to knowledge-sharing dilemmas

The authors propose a new structural solution to the knowledge-sharing dilemma. They show that simple auction mechanisms, which impose a rigid set of rules designed to standardize interactions and communication among participants, can prevent some of the detrimental effects associated with conflict of interest in freely interacting groups. The authors report results of two experiments that show that transparent conflicts of interest lead to a breakdown of information sharing, learning, and knowledge transfer in freely interacting groups, but not in simple markets and auctions. In these settings, participants were able to identify the best candidate in a voting game and to learn the solution to an intellective reasoning task, allowing participants to successfully transfer their insights to a series of new intellective tasks (tackled up to four weeks later), despite the conflicts of interests among traders. The authors explain their findings within the theoretical framework of collective induction.     

Cultural Psychology of Differences and EMS; a New Theoretical Framework for Understanding and Reconstructing Culture

In this paper I introduce the outlines of our new type of theoretical framework named ‘Cultural psychology of Differences’ for understanding cultural others and dialogically reconstructing interactions among cultural others. In order to understand cultural others, it is necessary for us to reconstruct a new concept which enables us to analyze dynamic generation processes of culture. We propose the concept of Expanded Mediational Structure, EMS, as an elementary unit for understanding human social interactions. EMS is composed of subjects who interacts each other using objects of some kind as mediators, and a normative mediator, NM, which mediates their interactions. It is necessary to generate, share and adjust a NM to keep social interactions stable, and culture will appear when interaction malfunction is attributed to a gaps of NMs. The concept of EMS helps us to understand how culture is functionally substantialized in the plane of collective (or communal) intersubjectivity and how cultural conflicts develop and intensify. Focusing on the generation process of culture through interactions provides us with another option to understand cultural others through dialogical interactions with them.     

Social Categorization and the Perception of Groups and Group Differences

The classification of human beings into distinct groups is a fundamental feature of social perception. Problematic phenomena, such as prejudice, discrimination, and intergroup conflict, are commonly traced back to categorization. We explore the minimal conditions under which categorization occurs and the basic mechanisms by which it affects cognition and behavior. We show that comparisons between groups are not necessary for categorization, reveal the conditions under which people overestimate or underestimate differences between groups, and sketch a model showing how social categorization gives rise to differences in the evaluation of ingroups and outgroups and to differences in the accuracy of judgments of ingroups and outgroups. We conclude with reflections on intergroup conflict and the role of moral judgment in such conflicts.     

Clarifying conflict of interest

As the debate over how to manage or discourage physicians' financial conflicts of interest with the drug and medical device industries has become more heated, critics have questioned or dismissed the concept of "conflict of interest" itself. A satisfactory definition relates conflict of interest to concerns about maintaining social trust and distinguishes between breaches of ethical duty and temptations to breach duty. Numerous objections to such a definition have been offered, none of which prevails on further analysis. Those concerned about conflicts of interest have contributed to misunderstandings, however, by failing to demonstrate when social arrangements leading to temptations to breach duties are in themselves morally blameworthy. Clarifying "conflict of interest" is important if we are eventually going to develop productive modes of engagement between medicine and for-profit industry that avoid the serious ethical pitfalls now in evidence.     

人际互动中社会学习的计算神经机制

人类在社会互动中通过他人的行为对他人特质、意图及特定情境下的社会规范进行学习, 是优化决策、维护积极社会互动的重要条件。近年来, 越来越多的研究通过结合计算模型与神经影像技术对社会学习的认知计算机制及其神经基础进行了深入考察。已有研究发现, 人类的社会学习过程能够较好地被强化学习模型与贝叶斯模型刻画, 主要涉及的认知计算过程包括主观期望、预期误差和不确定性的表征以及信息整合的过程。大脑对这些计算过程的执行主要涉及奖惩加工相关脑区(如腹侧纹状体与腹内侧前额叶)、社会认知加工相关脑区(如背内侧前额叶和颞顶联合区)及认知控制相关脑区(如背外侧前额叶)。需要指出的是, 计算过程与大脑区域之间并不是一一映射的关系, 提示未来研究可借助多变量分析与脑网络分析等技术从系统神经科学的角度来考察大尺度脑网络如何执行不同计算过程。此外, 将来研究应注重生态效度, 利用超扫描技术考察真实互动下的社会学习过程, 并更多地关注内隐社会学习的计算与神经机制。     

Conflict Minerals in Electronic Systems: An Overview and Critique of Legal Initiatives

The Democratic Republic of Congo has vast natural resources, many of which are regularly exploited by the electronics industry. Unfortunately, in addition to these resources, there are widespread human rights abuses committed by armed groups entrenched in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These armed groups are using profits from these minerals as a source of funding. Their human rights abuses have led to a growing humanitarian interest in the region and prompted the international community to action. This paper explores the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, provides an understanding of the link between human rights abuses and conflict minerals, and interprets and critiques the legal actions of the international community.     

Le développement contemporain des régimes juridiques des conflits d’intérêts : l’exemple du secteur de la santé

The conceptualization of conflicts of interests and deployment of their regulatory systems are primarily modes of economic and managerial health control. When did the legal regime of conflicts of interests, which formalizes the process, clash with the conditions of professional practice? Not all assumptions of friction or opposition of interests necessarily constitute a conflict of interests. All public sector professionals have interests but not all their interests generate conflicts. The aim of public declaration of interests is to reveal the relations of interest in order to allay suspicion. Most frequently in the form of soft law system, the declaration of interests is a way of warning about the existence of a “grey zone” or time of deontological risk. It was changed by the law of 29 December 2011     

Researcher Perspectives on Conflicts of Interest: A Qualitative Analysis of Views from Academia

The increasing interconnectedness of academic research and external industry has left research vulnerable to conflicts of interest. These conflicts have the potential to undermine the integrity of scientific research as well as to threaten public trust in scientific findings. The present effort sought to identify themes in the perspectives of faculty researchers regarding conflicts of interest. Think-aloud interview responses were qualitatively analyzed in an effort to provide insights with regard to appropriate ways to address the threat of conflicts of interest in research. Themes in participant responses included disclosure of conflicts of interest, self-removal from situations where conflict exists, accommodation of conflict, denial of the existence of conflict, and recognition of complexity of situations involving conflicts of interest. Moral disengagement operations are suggested to explain the appearance of each identified theme. In addition, suggestions for best practices regarding addressing conflicts of interest given these themes in faculty perspectives are provided.     

Interfaith Relations in the United States: Toward a Multilevel Community Psychology Approach

Interest in religion within the field of community psychology has steadily emerged within the last three decades. This interest has focused almost exclusively on the social benefits of religion, glossing over the often‐contentious nature of religious life and the ways in which religious individuals and institutions can disrupt healthy human and community development. Considering the recent surge of interfaith conflicts and discriminatory practices targeting religious minorities in communities across the United States, it is imperative that community psychologists begin to examine relevant trends in interfaith relations and potential directions for action research and intervention. This paper serves as the beginning point of just such an examination, proposing a multilevel model for addressing the microsystemic, mesosystemic, and macrosystemic levels of interfaith phenomena. More specifically, I present interfaith contact, congregation‐based community partnerships, and theological belief systems as particularly relevant to interfaith community research and intervention. Finally, I detail an interfaith organization that embodies these dimensions of interfaith relations and provides a concrete example of how a multilevel action research model may be effectively employed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.