Giving and Getting: Altruism and Exchange in Transplantation

In the study of organ and tissue transplantation, the focus tends to be on donation. But where there is "giving," there is also "getting:" receiving help. Altruism, helping behavior, and the exchange of benefits have received extensive attention from social psychological researchers. The gift exchange described by anthropologist Marcel Mauss provides a framework for reviewing this social psychological research on altruism and exchange and applying it to transplantation. An overall conclusion is that altruistic donation is not so ethically or clinically problematic, while receiving help has a complex psychosocial context that needs to be acknowledged and given more attention.     

Getting Out of the Way: A Strategy for Engaging Students in Collaborative Learning

The author describes what has been entailed in a shift from a teacher-centered approach — one which relied on her expertise in Chinese studies — to a more student-centered approach in which the teacher creates a learning environment and seeks to “get out of the way” of student learning. She describes concrete strategies for de-centering herself and empowering students, and discusses the roles and responsibilities of the teacher in this alternative model.     

Spatial Strategy Selection: Interesting Incremental Information

The aim of this article is to show that individuals differ in the way they solve spatial tasks of all kinds, and both research on and measurement of spatial ability could profit from an integration of strategy aspects. We first review evidence for both intra- and interindividual strategy differences (including gender differences) in 3 domains of spatial cognition: spatial ability tests, mental rotation, and environmental orientation and navigation. Then, we present additional evidence from 2 of our own studies. Finally, we discuss what a focus on strategy aspects could add to basic research and to spatial ability testing, and we give some concrete suggestions for integrating strategy assessment into standard spatial tests.     

Not Giving the Skeptic a Hearing: Pragmatism and Radical Doubt

Pragmatist responses to radical skepticism do not receive much attention in contemporary analytic epistemology. This observation is my motivation for undertaking a search for a coherent pragmatist reply to radical doubt, one that can compete, in terms of clarity and sophistication, with the currently most popular approaches, such as contextualism and relevant alternatives theory. As my point of departure I take the texts of C. S. Peirce and William James. The Jamesian response is seen to consist in the application of a wager argument to the skeptical issue in analogy with Pascal's wager. The Peircean strategy, on the other hand, is to attempt a direct rejection of one of the skeptic's main premises: that we do not know we are not deceived. I argue that while the Jamesian attempt is ultimately incoherent, Peirce's argument contains the core of a detailed and characteristically "pragmatic" rebuttal of skepticism, one that deserves to be taken seriously in the contemporary debate.     

Getting it right: a reply to baum

In this reply to Baum, I emphasize that the failure to understand the processes associated with scientific verbal behavior may result in scientific statements like the generalized matching law that do not accurately reflect cause-and-effect relations.     

Giving Directions: Gender and Perceived Quality

Two related studies examined gender differences in directions given between 2 campus buildings (Experiment 1) and the rated quality of these directions and their authorship in terms of gender (Experiment 2). In the first experiment, 95 participants gave written directions for newcomers to their college campus. No significant gender differences were found in 6 assessment categories adapted from Ward, Newcombe, and Overton (1986). In the second experiment, 14 sets of directions from Experiment 1 were evaluated by 111 participants in a between-subjects design, half evaluating them in terms of the gender of the author and half in terms of the quality of the directions. Results indicated that length (in terms of gender) and errors (in terms of quality) most clearly differentiated the directions. The findings are discussed in terms of the schism between performance and perception.     

Giving the sceptic a good name

The word ‘sceptic’ usually refers to a theoretical figure whose philosophical importance lies exclusively in his challenge to any attempt to justify the belief in the possibility of knowledge. But the label was once applied to living persons ‐ the so‐called Pyrrhonists ‐ whose scepticism encompassed a way of life. Following Sextus Empiricus's portrayal of the Pyrrhonists, Arne Naess has provided comprehensive arguments both in rebuttal of the frequent claims either that scepticism is logically inconsistent or that at least it is impossible to put into practice, and in support of scepticism as a fruitful philosophical attitude. The present essay attempts a critical consolidation of Naess's case for scepticism by drawing more explicitly than he does on his work in empirical semantics. The notion of degrees of preciseness is used to outline a philosophically interesting rationale for the Pyrrhonist's persistent abstention from any act or action that commits him to the truth of a proposition, and also to indicate why possible, or even inevitable lapses on the Pyrrhonist's part need not seriously prejudice either his status as a sceptic or the philosophical value of his sceptical ideal.     

Getting a Life: Gender Differences in Postwar Recovery

This study examined gender differences in stress symptoms and recovery one year after the end of war, among two Israeli samples (adults n?=?870 and adolescents n?=?810). MANOVA analysis indicated that females reported higher levels of stress symptoms and lower levels of postwar recovery compared to males. Adolescents reported lower levels of stress and higher levels of recovery compared to adults. Path analysis supported the following: Gender associated negatively with family support and sense of danger. Sense of danger associated positively with symptoms and negatively with recovery, while family support associated with these variables in the opposite direction. Mediation test indicated that family support and sense of danger served as mediators between gender and recovery and between gender and stress symptoms.     

Giving and Receiving Awards

ABSTRACT— Awards in the form of orders, medals, decorations, prizes, and titles are ubiquitous in monarchies and republics, private organizations, and not-for-profit and profit-oriented firms. Nevertheless, this kind of nonmaterial extrinsic incentive has been given little attention in the social sciences, including psychology. The demand for awards relies on an individual's desire for distinction, and the supply of awards is governed by the desire to motivate. The technique of analytic narratives is used to show that a number of empirically testable propositions about awards are consistent with observable data.     

群体讨论过程中信息策略的变化

启发式是人类决策的重要特征,然而对于群体分布式加工条件下的启发式研究却是一个困难的任务。本研究利用多特征多选择决策任务与过程跟踪技术,对群体讨论条件下的启发式决策特点进行研究。结果发现,在群体讨论情景下,决策者的信息呈现策略要更加完全,但决策者的信息搜索负荷并没有因此而增加,群体的各成员之间形成了信息策略上的分布式加工,所以在群体工作情景中的表现出相互依赖性与内隐加工机制。     

Giving Science a Bad Name: Politically and Commercially Motivated Fallacies in BSE Inquiry

It is a feature of scientific inquiry that it proceeds alongside a multitude of non-scientific interests. This statement is as true of the scientific inquiries of previous centuries, many of which brought scientists into conflict with institutionalised religious thinking, as it is true of the scientific inquiries of today, which are conducted increasingly within commercial and political contexts. However, while the fact of the coexistence of scientific and non-scientific interests has changed little over time, what has changed with time is the effect of this coexistence on scientific inquiry itself. While scientists may no longer construct their theories with various religious dictates in mind, growing commercial and political interests in science have served to distort the interpretation of science. Using the U.K.’s recent crisis with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) as my context, I examine two ways in which this distortion has occurred – the interpretation of the science of BSE by politicians and by commercial parties for the purposes of justifying policy decisions and informing the public of risk, respectively. Fallacious reasoning, I contend, is the manifestation of this distortion in these contexts. In demonstration of this claim, I examine how politicians and commercial parties alike have employed two fallacies in their assessments of the science of BSE. These fallacies extend in novel ways the set of so-called traditional informal fallacies. The interpretation of science, I conclude, is a rich context in which to conduct a study of fallacious reasoning; moreover, such a study can contribute in significant ways, I argue, to the public understanding of science.     

Getting a New Lease on Life

Abstract

A significant number of marriages today arc interchurch, that is, marriages in which each spouse belongs to a different Christian church or denomination. The limited research on interchurch couples suggests that they are more at risk for divorce than same-church couples. A qualitative study and a national telephone survey were conducted by the Center for Marriage and Family at Creighton University to better understand interchurch marriages. Based on findings from these studies, clinical implications for premarital counseling with interchurch couples are presented. The findings suggest not only how to work with interchurch couples, but how religion can potentially impact all couples regardless of their denominational affiliation.     

Getting a little closure for closure

Synthese - In this paper, I’ll survey a number of closure principles of epistemic justification and find them all wanting. However, it’ll be my contention that there’s a novel...     

Getting the story right: a Reductionist narrative account of personal identity

A popular “Reductionist” account of personal identity unifies person stages into persons in virtue of their psychological continuity with one another. One objection to psychological continuity accounts is that there is more to our personal identity than just mere psychological continuity: there is also an active process of self-interpretation and self-creation. This criticism can be used to motivate a rival account of personal identity that appeals to the notion of a narrative. To the extent that they comment upon the issue, proponents of narrative accounts typically reject Reductionist metaphysics that (ontologically) reduce persons to aggregates of person stages. In contrast to this trend, we seek to develop a narrative account of personal identity from within Reductionist metaphysics: we think person stages are unified into persons in virtue of their narrative continuity with one another. We argue that this Reductionist version of the narrative account avoids some serious problems facing non-Reductionist versions of the narrative account.     

Getting Started: Helping a New Profession Develop an Ethics Program

Both of us have been involved with helping professions, especially new scientific or technological professions, develop ethics programs—for undergraduates, graduates, and practitioners. By “ethics program”, we mean any strategy for teaching ethics, including developing materials. Our purpose here is to generalize from that experience to identify the chief elements needed to get an ethics program started in a new profession. We are focusing on new professions for two reasons. First, all the older professions, both in the US and in most other countries, now have ethics programs of some sort. They do not need our advice to get started. Second, new professions face special problems just because they are new—everything from deciding who belongs to the profession to formalizing ethical standards so that they can be taught. Our purpose in this paper is to generalize from our experience and to identify some of the fundamentals for getting an ethics program started in a new profession. We present our recommendations in the form of response to 6 questions anyone designing an ethics program for a new profession should ask. We realize that our brief discussion does not provide a complete treatment of the subject. Our purpose has been to point in the right direction those considering an ethics program for new profession.