Reshaping the social order: The case of gender segregation

An experimental study of gender segregation in 38 fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms was conducted. Teachers in the experimental condition were encouraged to utilize small, mixed-sex instructional groups to promote gender integration and the reduction of gender stereotypes. Students in experimental classrooms engaged in more cross-sex interactions than students in control classrooms, and boys in experimental classrooms had greater preference for working in cross-sex groups; there were no experimental effects, however, for girls' preferences for working in cross-sex groups, and all students rated same-sex classmates more positively than cross-sex classmates, with no treatment effect on the ratings. Implications for gender segregation in the labor force are discussed.     

Up against the wall: ecotourism,development, and social justice in Costa Rica

Nearly one-quarter of Costa Rica's export earnings derive from an expanding tourist sector, one that is increasingly diversified in a mix of tourist niches. Ecotourism is the fastest growing niche and its promises are featured in a range of sites and practices, including the largest multinational hospitality and hotel corporations. These companies promote a vision of sustainability that relies on expanding consumption of ‘environmental' amenities through profit-driven global corporations – a vision that is, to some, antithetical to the very meaning of ecotourism. Our study explores the historical evolution of tourist development in Costa Rica, specifically large-scale coastal development, as a means for national development. Amid pressures to attract foreign direct investment in a neoliberal era, Costa Rica has struggled to maintain its developmentalism, which includes social welfare, environmental protection, and public goods, including coastal preservation and public access. We argue Costa Rica's simultaneous protection of coastlines and public access and the promotion of large-scale private investment by global real estate and hospitality industries exposes contradictory ethical paradigms of developmentalism, one rooted in the principle of inclusion and the other in exclusion. We highlight these contradictions in two events in order to raise questions about development, ethics, and inclusion.     

Bayesian inference using WBDev: A tutorial for social scientists

Over the last decade, the popularity of Bayesian data analysis in the empirical sciences has greatly increased. This is partly due to the availability of WinBUGS, a free and flexible statistical software package that comes with an array of predefined functions and distributions, allowing users to build complex models with ease. For many applications in the psychological sciences, however, it is highly desirable to be able to define one’s own distributions and functions. This functionality is available through the WinBUGS Development Interface (WBDev). This tutorial illustrates the use of WBDev by means of concrete examples, featuring the expectancyvalence model for risky behavior in decision making, and the shifted Wald distribution of response times in speeded choice.     

The Johns Hopkins University: Training center for social scientists

In 1878, Professor Benjamin Peirce of Harvard, president of the American Social Science Association, viewed the Johns Hopkins University as the headquarters for social science in the United States. With the guidance provided by Franklin B. Sanborn, secretary of the ASSA, the Hopkins initiated formal instruction in social science in 1888, with Amos G. Warner and Daniel C. Gilman as instructors. This article is concerned with the contributions the ASSA and the Hopkins made in developing a theory/practice model for education for the social sciences.     

AIDS: ethics, justice and social policy

ABSTRACT Principles of justice and equality demand that HIV seropositive individuals and those with AIDS should not be discriminated against in any area of social provision. If social policy on AIDS is constructed in terms of reciprocal obligations, that is if obligations to the HIV seropositive individual and obligations of the HIV seropositive individual are given equal weight, the civil rights of HIV seropositive individuals may be secured and this may create a climate in which HIV seropositive individuals will more readily notify partners, and others at risk of infection, of their HIV status. It is conceivable that such a climate could facilitate greater control of the spread of HIV/AIDS.     

Crow Indian justice: Strategies of informal social control

This study presents ethnographic findings based on fieldwork conducted on the Crow Indian Reservation in Southeast Montana. Special focus is placed on patterns of informal social control which help preserve a condition of communal harmony among reservation Indians. Aspects of kinship obligation, religion, ceremony, and personality are introduced as strategies influencing early socialization and adherence to rules. Off‐reservation problems of assimilation regarding alcohol abuse and adjustment to non‐Indian judicial systems are discussed.     

Distributive justice and rural healthcare: a case for e-health

People living in rural areas make up 20 percent of the U.S. population, but only 9 percent of physicians practice there. This uneven distribution is significant because rural areas have higher percentages of people in poverty, elderly people, people lacking health insurance coverage, and people with chronic diseases. As a way of ameliorating these disparities, e-health initiatives are being implemented. But the rural e-health movement raises its own set of distributive justice concerns about the digital divide. Moreover, even if the digital divide is overcome, e-health services may be of an inferior quality compared to face-to-face medical encounters. In this paper, I argue that before we can fully understand the distributive justice implications of e-health, we must first understand what distributive justice means. I argue that five elements--fairness, quality, accessibility, availability, and efficiency--constitute a general conception of justice and that all of these elements must be considered when evaluating e-health for rural health profession shortage areas. In doing so, it may be necessary to make important tradeoffs among these elements. I then examine the development of e-health programs in light of Rawls's principle of equal opportunity and Daniel's notion of species-typical functioning. I conclude that in the context of e-health, Rawls's principle should be expanded to include geography as a prima facie morally relevant criterion for allocating healthcare benefits. I also conclude that Daniel's notion of species-typical functioning provides grounds for thinking of health and some healthcare services as special goods.     

Event justice perceptions and employees' reactions: perceptions of social entity justice as a moderator

Building on 2 paradigms in organizational justice research and on fairness heuristic theory, the author argues that employees' perceptions about the fairness of social entities (their supervisor and their organization) moderate the relationship between their perceptions about the fairness of specific events and their reactions. A survey of 265 supervisor-employee pairs in 4 companies was conducted to test this argument. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses showed that when employees perceived their organization to be generally fair, this perception moderated the relationship between the perceived justice of a particular event and their reactions to the organization (organizational commitment and organization-directed citizenship behavior). In addition, employees' perceptions of the fairness of their supervisor were found to moderate the relationship between the perceived justice of a particular event and their supervisor-directed responses (trust in managers and supervisor-directed citizenship behavior) and their organization-directed responses. The results suggest that employee attitudes and behavior can be better understood when both event justice perceptions and social entity justice perceptions are considered together.     

On the subjective quality of social justice: the role of affect as information in the psychology of justice judgments

This article argues that it is not uncommon for people forming justice judgments to lack information that is most relevant in the particular situation. In information-uncertain conditions, people may therefore construct justice judgments by relying on how they feel about the events they have encountered, and justice judgments may hence be strongly influenced by affect information. Findings show that in information-uncertain conditions, the affective states that people had been in prior and unrelated to the justice event indeed strongly influenced their justice judgments. These findings thus reveal that in situations of information uncertainty, people's judgments of justice can be very subjective, susceptible to affective states that have no logical relationship with the justice judgments they are constructing. Implications for the social psychology of justice and the literature on social cognition and affect are discussed.     

Paying for kidneys: the case against prohibition

We argue that healthy people should be allowed to sell one of their kidneys while they are alive--that the current prohibition on payment for kidneys ought to be overturned. Our argument has three parts. First, we argue that the moral basis for the current policy on live kidney donations and on the sale of other kinds of tissue implies that we ought to legalize the sale of kidneys. Second, we address the objection that the sale of kidneys is intrinsically wrong because it violates the Kantian duty of respect for humanity. Third, we address a range of consequentialist objections based on the idea that kidney sales will be exploitative. Throughout the paper, we argue only that it ought to be legal for an individual to receive payment for a kidney. We do not argue that it ought to be legal for an individual to buy a kidney.     

Living the vision: health care, social justice and institutional identity.

This paper will examine the topic of identity in Roman Catholicism from the perspective of topics contained in or absent from mission statements of 25 Catholic health care institutions. In particular, I will look at these from the perspective of social justice as well as how this and other topics such as human dignity, sanctity of life, stewardship, pastoral care and the likelihood of mergers with other institutions will affect the healing ministry of Catholic health care providers. The article will conclude that there are three key dimensions to Catholic health care: leadership in advocating reform of the current health care system, care for the marginalized and under-insured, and the provision of pastoral care in all institutions.     

Sexual harassment and social justice: reflections on the distance yet to go

Despite progress, protections remain inadequate for victims who bring legal claims of sexual harassment. The process for damages determination frequently increases harm and undercuts the policy initiatives enshrined in Title VII. The author critiques this process, focusing on misuse of psychological examinations and failure of the federal "rape shield" law to adequately protect plaintiffs. The author suggests possible reforms, including removing caps on Title VII damages, minimum awards (i.e., liquidated damages) upon proof of liability, and strategies for educating juries on the harms of harassment that do not exacerbate them, and concludes with a call for professional guidelines for conducting forensic evaluations in sexual harassment cases, thus advancing the policy goal of combating discrimination by encouraging victims to come forward.     

Psychology and social justice: why we do what we do

Much of psychological science and knowledge is significantly relevant to social justice, defined here as the goal to decrease human suffering and to promote human values of equality and justice. A commitment to social justice has evolved as a more important value in the last few decades for psychology, including for the American Psychological Association (APA). The mission, vision, goals, Ethics Code, and strategic plan of APA all provide a rationale for psychologists' involvement in systematic and visible ways of applying our knowledge to social issues. Although psychology has not been immune to the application of psychological knowledge in destructive ways, overall, psychology, many psychologists, and APA have demonstrated a commitment to social justice. This article provides a brief review of the key proponents, debates, and controversies involved in applying psychological science and knowledge to complex societal problems. Psychologists often find themselves in conflict and honest disagreement when the association addresses complex and controversial issues. An important goal is that we continue to find ways to agree or disagree in a respectful manner regardless of where each of us stands on the various positions that APA takes.     

Making a Difference: The Social Ecology of Social Transformation

A multidisciplinary and multilevel framework for social transformation is proposed, encompassing four foundational goals: capacity-building, group empowerment, relational community-building, and culture-challenge. Intervention approaches related to each goal are presented at the setting, geographic community, and societal levels. Four exemplars of social transformation work are then discussed: the Accelerated Schools Project, Meyerhoff Program, ManKind Project, and women's movement. These examples illustrate the synergistic relationship among the four transformational goals, within and across levels of analysis, which is at the heart of the social transformation process. The paper concludes with three challenges to guide our efforts as we enter the new century: (1) to move social transformation to the center of our consciousness as a field; (2) to articulate jointly with allied disciplines, organizations, and citizen groups an encompassing, multidisciplinary, and multilevel framework for social transformation; and (3) to do the above with heart, soul, and humility.     

Social disadvantage and the self-regulatory function of justice beliefs

Five studies support the hypothesis that beliefs in societal fairness offer a self-regulatory benefit for members of socially disadvantaged groups. Specifically, members of disadvantaged groups are more likely than members of advantaged groups to calibrate their pursuit of long-term goals to their beliefs about societal fairness. In Study 1, low socioeconomic status (SES) undergraduate students who believed more strongly in societal fairness showed greater intentions to persist in the face of poor performance on a midterm examination. In Study 2, low SES participants who believed more strongly in fairness reported more willingness to invest time and effort to achieve desirable career outcomes. In Study 3, ethnic minority participants exposed to a manipulation suggesting that fairness conditions in their country were improving reported more willingness to invest resources in pursuit of long-term goals, relative to ethnic minority participants in a control condition. Study 4 replicated Study 3 using an implicit priming procedure, demonstrating that perceptions of the personal relevance of societal fairness mediate these effects. Across these 4 studies, no link between fairness beliefs and self-regulation emerged for members of advantaged (high SES, ethnic majority) groups. Study 5 contributed evidence from the World Values Survey and a representative sample (Inglehart, Basa?ez, Diez-Medrano, Halman, & Luijkx, 2004). Respondents reported more motivation to work hard to the extent that they believed that rewards were distributed fairly; this effect emerged more strongly for members of lower SES groups than for members of higher SES groups, as indicated by both self-identified social class and ethnicity.     

Decision Making: Research and Theory Challenges for Applied Social Psychology

The potential for contributions by applied social psychology to decision research and theory is explored. Most decisions by groups and individuals are social in origin or impact, suggesting that social psychologists should consider decision making as a relevant topic. Early applied work is considered. Mathematical model approaches are explored. Both are found wanting, especially where we wish to apply our science to complex and multiple uncertain decision problems. Examples of recent relevant research that fit well into an applied social psychological framework are provided, indicating the variety of potential topics for investigations. Finally, the need for encompassing theory is considered. The characteristics of needed theory are discussed.     

Social psychology and social networks: Individuals and social systems

Social psychology and social network research are both centrally concerned with human sociality. Despite some historically significant interactions between the two, these areas of investigation have not been usefully deployed together in recent research endeavours. The present paper attempts to bring out some points of both theoretical and methodological contentions, to characterize the gap between them, to traverse briefly the trajectories of their historical development, and to provide some concrete instances of these differences. Intellectual resources available to Asian social psychology are reviewed, which may help bridge the gap between the two areas of research. We conclude by calling for a greater integration of social psychology and social network perspectives in future research.