Returning to the Fire: Surviving the Holocaust and “Going Back”

This paper examines the multiply determined factors in Holocaust survivors who return to their native countries and sites of persecution. Citing material from archived interviews and consultations with a gravely ill survivor, as well as published accounts from others, the author explores historical, cultural, and psychodynamic dimensions. Intrapsychic, developmental, and traumatic aspects are considered, such as the fantasy of reunion with the lost maternal object, unresolved grief, the repetition compulsion, attempts at mastery, and the use of counterphobic or hypomanic defenses. This constellation of factors is seen in the context of the Jewish premium on remembering and the political realities of post war Europe. The role of the Second Generation in assisting the survivor parents in the working through process is also emphasized.     

Self-Construal and Cooperation: Is the Interdependent Self More Cooperative Than the Independent Self?

The present study examined whether a temporary activation of independent or interdependent self-construals by priming has an influence on cooperation in social dilemmas. It was expected that individuals primed with independence would be primarily concerned with their own outcomes, whereas individuals primed with interdependence would also be concerned with the outcomes of their interaction partner. The former should therefore exhibit lower levels of cooperation. Additionally, the influence of social value orientation on cooperation was measured. Participants played 32 rounds of a give-some dilemma with an alleged interaction partner. As predicted, participants primed with independence exhibited lower levels of cooperation than participants primed with interdependence. Results are discussed in terms of their significance for research on self-construals and social dilemmas.     

Are Volunteers More Committed Than Nonvolunteers?

Volunteers and nonvolunteers have generally been compared on demographic and personality data. Little research is available on attitudinal differences between these groups. As part of a large study on commitment to the police department, 215 officers were asked to participate in a two-stage study. The first stage asked subjects to complete a large questionnaire that included a moral commitment scale and a calculative commitment scale. In order to analyze future behavior, participants were asked to supply their ID number. Results showed that volunteers were more committed than nonvolunteers, particularly on an identification with the organization factor. Some implications of the findings, as well as supportive data, are discussed.     

Is Racial Profiling More Benign in Medicine Than Law Enforcement?

It might seem that racial profiling by doctors raised few of the same concerns as racial profiling by police, immigration, or airport security. This paper argues that the similarities are greater than first appear. The inappropriate use of racial generalizations by doctors may be as harmful and insulting as their use by law enforcement officials. Indeed, the former may be more problematic in compromising an ideal of individualized treatment that is more applicable to doctors than to police. Yet doctors, unlike police, should not attempt to ignore race altogether. Race and ethnicity are associated with the geography of disease, with social and cultural factors relevant to disease, and, to some extent, with genetic predispositions to disease. Moreover, greater attention to the distinctive health conditions of certain racial and ethnic groups is necessary to make up for past neglect. But it will be a tricky business to steer a middle course between a naïve, reckless, or dogmatic color blindness and a stereotype-driven overreliance on race and ethnicity. In trying to steer such a course, the doctor can only hope for the day when a combination of more individualized genomic medicine and greater social equality will make it possible for her to pay less attention to race and ethnicity without detriment to her patients?? health.     

Do Girls Change More Than Boys? Gender Differences and Similarities in the Impact of New Relationships on Identities and Behaviors

Prompted by research suggesting females' self-concepts are more interpersonally rooted than males', I compare girls' identity changes in reaction to relationships in new social contexts with boys', testing whether identity change processes are the same for each sex. I use survey responses from 320 summer program students about five activity areas: (1) science & technology; (2) computers; (3) athletics & recreation; (4) beliefs & interests; and (5) arts & literature. While girls become more attached to and involved with others, their identity processes are equivalent to those of boys. Girls change more, but their change is rooted in greater sociability, not higher reactivity to new relationships. Findings vary by relationship and activity types, indicating sex differences may reflect gender role expectations.     

Is Consequential Luck Morally Inconsequential? Empirical Psychology and the Reassessment of Moral Luck

Philosophical discussions of the phenomenon that has come to be known as ‘moral luck’ have either dismissed it as illusory or touted it as the evidence for doubting the probative value of our commitment to certain widely avowed views concerning interpersonal assessments of responsibility. In this discussion, we present a third, distinctive interpretation of the moral luck phenomenon. Drawing upon empirically robust results from psychological studies of judgment bias, we argue that the phenomenon of moral luck is demonstrably not illusory. What we suggest, however, is that the phenomenon ought not to be taken to countenance doubts about the standards generally taken to be regulative of assessments of interpersonal responsibility. Rather, its significance lies in foregrounding certain generally unacknowledged obstacles we face in the process of conclusively applying general valid moral standards in making specific judgments of responsibility and desert.¹     

Can the “Stripping of the Boss” be More Than a Joke?

In January 2011, uprisings and demonstrations broke out in Egypt, and the reverberations of the revolution are felt up to this day. The events that lead President Hosni Mubarak to resign were violent, disturbing, and definitely serious, but at the same time they were fuelled by and caused a plethora of jokes and funny slogans which circulated among the protesters. Previous studies on the functions of humour have suggested that among other things, humour can be used to enhance group cohesion by lifting up the spirits or to attack the (political) enemy by sharp sarcasm, the duality of which is captured in the metaphors of a shield and a sword. The present article builds upon “Stripping the Boss: The Powerful Role of Humor in the Egyptian Revolution 2011” by Helmy and Frerichs (2013), offering another perspective on the functionality Egyptian political jokes grounded in the current sociological approaches to humour. It aims to argue that humour as an ambiguous phenomenon is unreliable in reaching serious aims and thus cannot be conceptualised as a predictably functioning tool in conflicts, although it can sometimes give insights into the functioning of a society as a mirror of the social reality.     

Are the Questions of Metaphysics More Fundamental Than Those of Science?

When pursued naturalistically, metaphysics may seem forced to navigate a narrow path. So that it may be a worthwhile enterprise, it must have claim to discovery of a distinctive set of objective truths. Yet it must also avoid potential competition or conflict with the results of scientific theories. In response to this problem, some naturalistic metaphysicians have argued that properly understood, metaphysics is aimed at a set of truths distinct from those of science. Metaphysicians investigate a realm of truths more fundamental than those of even fundamental science. This paper examines what is required both in science and metaphysics for a theory to count as a fundamental theory. Several criteria are presented which suggest that metaphysics does not investigate a realm more fundamental than that of science.     

More Royalist Than the King? Immigration Policy Attitudes Among Naturalized Citizens

Social psychological research has analyzed immigration attitudes mostly from the perspective of natives without an immigrant background. Nevertheless, an increasing number of migrants obtain national citizenship and take a stance towards immigration policies. By studying immigration policy attitudes reported by naturalized citizens, this article develops a dual-pathway model of immigrant political incorporation featuring pathways of either absorption or transformation. Based on a unique sample of immigrants who just accomplished the naturalization procedure (N = 566), we investigate participants' preferences for permissive or restrictive immigration policies as a function of their naturalization motives and expectations about how immigrants should acculturate in the receiving society (i.e., acculturation orientations). Our findings provide evidence for both processes of political absorption and transformation. On the one hand, belongingness motives underlying naturalization were connected to orientations towards host culture adoption, which in turn predicted support for restrictive immigration policies. On the other hand, instrumental motives were connected to orientations towards heritage culture maintenance, which in turn predicted support for permissive immigration policies. To conclude, we discuss the social psychological dynamics involved in the transition from national outsiders to national insiders and highlight the effects of naturalization on power relations between national majority and immigrant minority groups.     

Social Networking Websites,Personality Ratings,and the Organizational Context: More Than Meets the Eye?1

We examined the psychometric properties of the Big Five personality traits assessed through social networking profiles in 2 studies consisting of 274 and 244 social networking website (SNW) users. First, SNW ratings demonstrated sufficient interrater reliability and internal consistency. Second, ratings via SNWs demonstrated convergent validity with self‐ratings of the Big Five traits. Third, SNW ratings correlated with job performance, hirability, and academic performance criteria; and the magnitude of these correlations was generally larger than for self‐ratings. Finally, SNW ratings accounted for significant variance in the criterion measures beyond self‐ratings of personality and cognitive ability. We suggest that SNWs may provide useful information for potential use in organizational research and practice, taking into consideration various legal and ethical issues.     

Is the Interdependent Self More Sensitive to Question Context Than the Independent Self? Self-Construal and the Observation of Conversational Norms

Question answering requires close attention to the common ground to determine what the questioner wants to know. Because attentiveness to others is more likely to be a self-defining goal when the self is thought of as interdependent with others rather than independent of others, we predicted that self-construal influences attentiveness to the common ground. In Experiment 1, participants' temporary self-construal was manipulated through a priming technique. As predicted, interdependence-primed participants were more likely than independence-primed participants to take the recipient's knowledge into account and avoided providing redundant information in a self-administered questionnaire. Drawing on chronic differences in self-construal, Experiment 2 replicated these findings with participants from independent (Germany) and interdependent (China) cultures. Throughout, participants' differential attentiveness to the common ground resulted in differential question order effects, raising important methodological issues for cross-cultural research.     

Wallas’ Four-Stage Model of the Creative Process: More Than Meets the Eye?

Based on a detailed reading of Graham Wallas’ Art of Thought (1926 Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. London, UK: Jonathan Cape. [Google Scholar]) it is argued that his four-stage model of the creative process (Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification), in spite of holding sway as a conceptual anchor for many creativity researchers, does not reflect accurately Wallas’ full account of the creative process. Instead, it is suggested that a four-stage model that gives due recognition to the detailed treatment Wallas gave to the Intimation stage is a more authentic representation of his explanation of creativity. A version of this model with three levels of proximity to consciousness (nonconsciousness; fringe consciousness; consciousness) and five stages (Preparation; Incubation; Intimation; Illumination; Verification) is presented as a general conceptual architecture within which relevant concepts and theories from more recent creativity research, including neuroscience and intuition, are positioned and from which a number of implications are drawn.     

When Are Tutorial Dialogues More Effective Than Reading?

It is often assumed that engaging in a one-on-one dialogue with a tutor is more effective than listening to a lecture or reading a text. Although earlier experiments have not always supported this hypothesis, this may be due in part to allowing the tutors to cover different content than the noninteractive instruction. In 7 experiments, we tested the interaction hypothesis under the constraint that (a) all students covered the same content during instruction, (b) the task domain was qualitative physics, (c) the instruction was in natural language as opposed to mathematical or other formal languages, and (d) the instruction conformed with a widely observed pattern in human tutoring: Graesser, Person, and Magliano's 5-step frame. In the experiments, we compared 2 kinds of human tutoring (spoken and computer mediated) with 2 kinds of natural-language-based computer tutoring (Why2-Atlas and Why2-AutoTutor) and 3 control conditions that involved studying texts. The results depended on whether the students' preparation matched the content of the instruction. When novices (students who had not taken college physics) studied content that was written for intermediates (students who had taken college physics), then tutorial dialogue was reliably more beneficial than less interactive instruction, with large effect sizes. When novices studied material written for novices or intermediates studied material written for intermediates, then tutorial dialogue was not reliably more effective than the text-based control conditions.     

Are Some Psychotherapies Much More Effective Than Others?

In a previous paper we had reported on the examination of comparisons of 18 metaanalyses of active treatments with each other (Luborsky, Rosenthal, Diguer, et al., 2001). These metaanalyses gave a small and nonsignificant mean level of difference between types of treatments. The smallness of this correlation confirms Rosenzweig's (1936) expectation that because of the large overlap in effective ingredients of different psychotherapies, comparative studies of psychotherapies would show little difference. Such a comparison that includes psychoanalyses seems a long way off, but if outcomes of psychoanalyses are defined similarly to those in the other psychotherapies, the expected differences in outcomes may also be small.