Effect on Restaurant Tipping of Male and Female Servers Drawing a Happy, Smiling Face on the Backs of Customers' Checks

Research has shown that a server's smiling can increase restaurant tips and that a server's writing "thank you" on the backs of checks can also increase tips. In the current study, these two approaches were combined. An experiment was conducted in which a male or female server drew a happy, smiling face on the backs of checks before delivering them to customers, or simply delivered checks with nothing drawn on the back. It was predicted that this tactic would increase tips for the female server because of an increased perception of friendliness, but would not increase tips for the male server because such behavior would be perceived as gender-inappropriate. Results were consistent with predictions.     

Gender,the Perception of Aggression,and the Overestimation of Gender Bias

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the gender of aggressor, target, and observer influences the perception and evaluation of aggression. One hundred seventy-one university students (predominantly White) read 1 of 8 vignettes that described an aggressive act. The aggressor–target gender combinations and the aggressive act were varied. Data did not support the hypothesis that, because of the impact of gender stereotypes, participants would perceive more aggressiveness in men's aggression than in women's aggression. Participants rated women's aggression as more acceptable than men's aggression, and male participants considered the aggression more acceptable, apparently because they saw the act as less aggressive. In addition, participants estimated how most men/women would perceive and evaluate the aggression. Results suggest that people overestimate how biased others are toward members of their own gender.     

Reifying Sex Difference Isn't the Answer: Gendering Processes, Risk, and Religiosity

The study of risk and religiosity is fundamentally about gender differences in religiosity. Gender scholars would be highly critical about this debate because it ignores questions about the size and universality of gender effects, there is little or no attempt to conceptualize and measure risk preference, and because it does not take into account gendering processes.     

On the Morality of Nuclear Deterrence

ABSTRACT Nuclear deterrence has struck many people as morally perplexing because it is a case in which it appears to be right to threaten, and in a sense intend, what it would be wrong to do. Section 1 explores the assumptions that are necessary to generate this moral paradox. Some moral theorists, however, have refused to embrace this paradox, contending instead that nuclear deterrence is immoral in principle precisely because it is wrong to threaten that which it would be immoral to do. Section 2 rebuts this contention and seeks to reduce the apparent paradoxicality of nuclear deterrence to manageable proportions. This is not to maintain, though, that nuclear deterrence is morally permissible in the world in which we live; consequently, Section 3 surveys some of the factors relevant to a moral assessment of the legitimacy of the actual practice of nuclear deterrence.     

Person Skilled in the Art in Synthetic Biology from Iraqi and Malaysian Perspectives

This article presents the problem of a person skilled in the field of synthetic biology. The person skilled in the art is one of the notions which have to be revisited due to the multidisciplinary nature of synthetic biology which involves numerous fields. The article studies this problem from the perspectives of Iraqi and Malaysian patent laws. First, it conceptualizes synthetic biology and person skilled in the art. The Iraqi and Malaysian attitudes regarding person skilled in the art are then addressed. Afterwards, the paper points out the multidisciplinary nature of synthetic biology. In its last part, it discusses the person skilled in synthetic biology and how patent offices and courts deal with this point. Finally, the authors submit that the use of a team of skilled persons to substitute for a single technician would render the obviousness test a subjective assessment dependent on the inventor. The level of non-obviousness would differ in similar cases simply because of the number of inventors. Consequently, the suggestion of having a hypothetical team instead of one person is irrelevant because skills that are attributed to the skilled notional person are not real skills. Thus, replacing him is easy, but the replacement would be fruitless because the skills attributed to a person or a team will be similar.     

A living will clause for supporters of animal experimentation

Many people assume that invasive research on animals is justified because of its supposed benefits and because of the supposed mental inferiority of animals. However probably most people would be unwilling to sign a living will which consigns themselves to live biomedical experimentation if they ever, through misfortune, end up with a mental capacity equivalent to a laboratory animal. The benefits would be greater by far for medical science if living will signatories were to be used, and also the mental superiority boast would no longer apply. Ultimately, it is argued that invasive biomedical experiments would be unacceptable in a democratic society whose members are philosophically self-consistent.     

Skepticism: Impractical,therefore implausible

The truth of skepticism would be depressing and impractical. Our beliefs would be groundless, we would know nothing (or almost nothing) about the world around us, and epistemic success would likely be impossible. But do these negative consequences have any bearing on the truth of skepticism? According to many scholars, they do not. The impractical consequences of skepticism are typically regarded as orthogonal to its truth. For this reason, pragmatic resolutions to skepticism are regularly dismissed. I will argue, however, that skepticism is implausible because it is impractical. In particular, skepticism is implausible because it goes against the point of epistemic evaluation.     

They Don't Do It Often,But They Do It Well: Exploring the relationship between applicant mental abilities and faking

Despite its scientific and practical importance, relatively few studies have been conducted to investigate the relationship between job applicant mental abilities and faking. Some studies suggest that more intelligent people fake less because they do not have to. Other studies suggest that more intelligent people fake more because they have increased capacity to fake. Based on a model of faking likelihood, we predicted that job candidates with a high level of mental abilities would be less likely to fake a biodata measure. However, for candidates who did exhibit faking on the biodata measure, we expected there would be a strong positive relationship between mental abilities and faking, because mental abilities increase their capacity to fake. We found considerable support for hypotheses on a large sample of job candidates (N=17,368), using the bogus item technique to detect faking.     

Evil and the many universes response

I formulate and defend a version of the many universes (or multiverse) reply to the atheistic argument from evil. Specifically, I argue that (i) if we know that any argument from evil (be it a logical or evidential argument) is sound, then we know that God would be (or at least probably would be) unjustified in actualizing our universe. I then argue that (ii) there might be a multiverse and (iii) if so, then we do not know that God would be (or at least probably would be) unjustified in actualizing our universe. It follows that we cannot know that the atheistic argument from evil is sound, in which case we cannot be certain that the argument succeeds, and so it is rational to refuse to reject theism because of such arguments.     

Modification of the Reactive Attitudes

In ‘Freedom and Resentment’ P. F. Strawson argues that reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation cannot be eliminated altogether, because doing so would involve exiting interpersonal relationships altogether. I describe an alternative to resentment: a form of moral sadness about wrongdoing that, I argue, preserves our participation in interpersonal relationships. Substituting this moral sadness for resentment and indignation would amount to a deep and far‐reaching change in the way we relate to each other – while keeping in place the interpersonal relationships, which, Strawson rightfully believes, cannot be eliminated.     

On the Value and Scope of Freedom

We have a practical, not merely theoretical interest in freedom. The question that is considered in this paper, is what it is that we value about freedom. It is proposed that what we value is being able to get what we most want (or value), because that is what we most want (or value). This account is compatible with determinism. Certain accounts opposed to determinism are considered and rejected. On these accounts freedom requires either a particular sort of indeterminism, or requires a special form of causation, agent-causation, or requires that the agent be a certain sort of self-constituting entity. It is argued that even if these accounts were less metaphysically problematic than they are, they would not give us a 'freedom' that we would value, nor would they secure conditions under which an action would be praise – or blameworthy. It is also argued, that a certain sort of capacity to control ourselves is not a precondition for freedom, though such a capacity would add to the scope of our freedom     

What do differences between own,admired, and attributed choices have to do with group induced shifts in choice

Two studies examined certain discrepancies which have been considered important evidence in support of interpersonal comparison (value-adherence) explanations of group induced shifts in choice. These are (a) the differences between a person's own choice and the choice he predicts others would make and (b) the difference between the former and the choice he admires. Findings from the first study indicate that own choices are more extreme than those a person predicts others would make because he is more certain and confident about the former than the latter, not because he wishes to appear to outdo others as interpersonal comparison theories of choice-shift effect would have it. The second study strongly suggests that extreme choices are admired not because they display maximal adherence to a social ideal but because they imply that the person's solution to a problem involving choice is well-founded, that he has persuasive reasons for the choice. On the whole the evidence bodes well for explanations of choice-shift effects based on persuasive argumentation and poorly for those relying on interpersonal comparison processes.     

On the causes of crime and violence: A reply to Aber and Rappaport

No sensible person would expect that doubling or tripling welfare payments would substantially reduce crime; therefore poverty is not the core problem. It is argued instead that the root cause of the current wave of crime and violence is the unwillingness or inability of parents to socialize their children. Because their task is so difficult, and because single parents are often poorly socialized themselves, the risk of delinquency and crime for the sons of single mothers is seven times that for sons reared by two biological parents.     

On the Role of Mathematics in Explaining the Material World: Mental Models for Proportional Reasoning

Contemporary psychological research that studies how people apply mathematics has largely viewed mathematics as a computational tool for deriving an answer. The tacit assumption has been that people first understand a situation, and then choose which computations to apply. We examine an alternative assumption that mathematics can also serve as a tool that helps one to construct an understanding of a situation in the first place. Three studies were conducted with 6th-grade children in the context of proportional situations because early proportional reasoning is a premier example of where mathematics may provide new understanding of the world. The children predicted whether two differently-sized glasses of orange juice would taste the same when they were filled from a single carton of juice made from concentrate and water. To examine the relative contributions and interactions of situational and mathematical knowledge, we manipulated the formal features of the problem display (e.g., diagram vs. photograph) and the numerical complexity (e.g., divisibility) of the containers and the ingredient ratios. When the problem was presented as a diagram with complex numbers, or “realistically” with easy numbers, the children predicted the glasses would taste different because one glass had more juice than the other. But, when the problem was presented realistically with complex numbers, the children predicted the glasses would taste the same on the basis of empirical knowledge (e.g., “Juice can't change by itself”). And finally, when the problem was presented as a diagram with easy numbers, the children predicted the glasses would taste the same on the basis of proportional relations. These complex interactions illuminate how mathematical and empirical knowledge can jointly constrain the construction of a new understanding of the world. We propose that mathematics helped in the case of successful proportional reasoning because it made a complex empirical situation cognitively tractable, and thereby helped the children construct mental models of that situation. We sketch one aspect of the mental models that are constructed in the domain of quantity—a preference for specificity—that helps explain the current findings.     

Hemispheric Differences in the Processing of Words Learned Early Versus Later in Childhood

The research investigated whether there are hemispheric differences in processing for words acquired early in childhood (early AoA) and words acquired later in childhood (late AoA). We hypothesized that because of recent evidence suggesting that there is a right hemisphere dominance in early childhood, early AoA words would be represented in the right hemisphere, and late AoA words would be represented in the left hemisphere. This hypothesis differs from an early view that late AoA words would be represented in the left hemisphere, and early AoA words would be represented in both hemispheres (Gazzaniga, 1974). We report two experiments using the divided visual field (DVF) technique. The results showed that there was a right visual field (RVF)/left hemisphere (LH) advantage only for late AoA words. For early AoA words, there was a left visual field (LVF)/right hemisphere advantage (RH). Implications for theories of hemispheric differences in word processing are discussed.     

Finitism,Divisibilty, and the Beginning of the Universe: Replies to Loke and Dumsday

Some philosophers contend that the past must be finite in duration, because otherwise reaching the present would have involved the sequential occurrence of an actual infinity of events, which they regard as impossible. I recently developed a new objection to this finitist argument, to which Andrew Ter Ern Loke and Travis Dumsday have replied. Here I respond to the three main points raised in their replies.     

Assisted Suicide,Suffering and the Meaning of a Life

The ethical problems surrounding voluntary assisted suicide remain formidable, and are unlikely to be resolved in pluralist societies. An examination of historical attitudes to suicide suggests that modernity has inherited a formidable complex of religious and moral attitudes to suicide, whether assisted or not. Advocates usually invoke the ending of intolerable suffering as one justification for euthanasia of this kind. This does not provide an adequate justification by itself, because there are (at least theoretically) methods which would relieve suffering without causing the physical death of the suffering person. Carried to extremes, these methods would finish the life worth living, but leave a being which was technically alive. Such acts, however, would provide no moral escape, since they would create beings without meaning. Arguments seeking to justify ending the lives of others need some grounding in concepts of the meaning of a life. The euthanasia discourse therefore needs to take at least some account of the meaning we construct for our lives and the lives of others.     

On the self-serving function of social anxiety: shyness as a self-handicapping strategy

We tested the hypothesis that socially anxious or shy individuals use their anxiety symptoms as a strategy to control attributions made about their performances in social-evaluative settings (i.e., self-handicapping strategies). Specifically, we predicted that trait-socially anxious or shy persons would report more symptoms of social anxiety in an evaluative setting in which anxiety or shyness could serve as an excuse for poor performance than would individuals in (a) an evaluative setting in which shyness was precluded as an excuse or (b) a nonevaluative setting. Furthermore, we predicted that this self-protective pattern of symptom reporting would not occur for individuals who were not trait-socially anxious because these persons would not commonly use such symptoms as a self-handicapping strategy. Results supported these predictions for male subjects, but not for female subjects. Sex differences in the strategic use of shyness are discussed in relation to other research on sex differences in the etiology and correlates of social anxiety.     

Capital Punishment, Restoration and Moral Rightness

In order to show that opposition to capital punishment cannot be both moral and entirely unconditional, Hugo Bedau proposes a fantasy–world scenario in which the execution of a murderer restores his murder victim to life. Were such a world to exist, argues Bedau, the death penalty would then be morally right. The aim of this article is to show that Bedau's argument is mistaken, largely because capital punishment in his fantasy world would not be an instrument of perfect restitution, as he thinks, but instead would be an instrument of unfair restitution. Two attempts are made to repair Bedau's fantasy–world argument, but neither of them is found to be successful. Consequently his fantasy world does not successfully provide the conditions under which opposition to capital punishment morally would have to cease. However, because capital punishment is morally wrong in his fantasy world it does not follow that it is morally wrong in this world.