Repair Avoidance: When Faithful Informational Exchanges Don't Matter That Much

Common-sense intuition suggests that, when people are engaged in informational exchanges, they communicate so as to be reasonably sure that they perform the exchanges faithfully. Over the years, we have found evidence suggesting that this intuition, which is woven into several influential theories of human communication, may be misleading. We first summarize this evidence and discuss its potential limitations. Then, we present a new study that addresses the potential limitations. A confederate instructed participants to “pick up the skask” from a tray containing six objects and move it to a specific location. Since skask is a non-word invented by us, participants had to ask for clarification to perform the instruction faithfully. In contradiction with the intuition that people pursue faithfulness when engaged in informational exchanges, 29 of the 48 participants we tested performed the instruction without asking for clarification. We identified a possible cause for this behavior, which occurred more frequently when avoiding the clarification was unlikely to result in an overt consequence (an error in the execution of the instruction that could be noticed by the confederate or the experimenter). Other factors such as individual differences and the specific interpersonal dynamics of the experimental settings, if they played a role at all, did it to an extent that is unlikely to be comparable to that of the role played by overt consequences. Considered together, our various assessments of the extent to which people engage in faithful informational exchanges converge on a simple conclusion: Communicating faithfully is a substantially demanding task, and people often fail at it. We discuss the implications of this conclusion and speculate on its relevance for understanding the evolutionary past of human communication.     

Loving People for Who They Are (Even When They Don't Love You Back)

The debate on love's reasons ignores unrequited love, which—I argue—can be as genuine and as valuable as reciprocated love. I start by showing that the relationship view of love cannot account for either the reasons or the value of unrequited love. I then present the simple property view, an alternative to the relationship view that is beset with its own problems. In order to solve these problems, I present a more sophisticated version of the property view that integrates ideas from different property theorists in the love literature. However, even this more sophisticated property view falls short in accounting for unrequited love's reasons. In response, I develop a new version of the property view that I call the experiential view. On this view, we love a person not only in virtue of properties shaped by and experienced in a reciprocal loving relationship, but also in virtue of perspectival properties, whose value can be properly assessed also outside of a reciprocal loving relationship. The experiential view is the only view that can account not only for reciprocated love's reasons, but also for unrequited love's reasons.     

Evolutionary Psychology,Ethology, and Essentialism (Because What They Don't Know Can Hurt Us)

In 2002, Evolution and Human Behavior published a study purporting to show that the differences in toy preferences commonly attributed to girls and boys can also be found in male and female vervet monkeys, tracing the origin of these differing preferences back to a common ancestor. Despite some flaws in its design and the prima facie implausibility of some of its central claims, this research received considerable attention in both scientific circles and the popular media. In what follows, I survey some of the problems with this study that seem to be characteristic of research into sex differences in a particular research program in evolutionary psychology. I suggest that an epistemology of ignorance is at work that suppresses the methods and insights of an earlier research program, which emphasized the complexity and contingency that ultimately grounds the variety of human behaviors, in favor of one that has been widely criticized as empirically flawed and politically pernicious. I conclude with some speculative remarks on the persistence of this problematic research program in evolutionary psychology.     

Animal Morality: What It Means and Why It Matters

It has been argued that some animals are moral subjects, that is, beings who are capable of behaving on the basis of moral motivations (Rowlands 2011, 2012, 2017). In this paper, we do not challenge this claim. Instead, we presuppose its plausibility in order to explore what ethical consequences follow from it. Using the capabilities approach (Nussbaum 2004, 2007), we argue that beings who are moral subjects are entitled to enjoy positive opportunities for the flourishing of their moral capabilities, and that the thwarting of these capabilities entails a harm that cannot be fully explained in terms of hedonistic welfare. We explore the implications of this idea for the assessment of current practices involving animals.     

FEMALE PARTNERS OF BISEXUAL MEN What They Don't Know Might Hurt Them

Individual interviews with 350 behaviorally bisexual men aged 18–30 revealed that 71% of their female sexual partners and 59% of their steady female sexual partners in the past 6 months had not been aware of their homosexual activity. Rates of nondisclosure were higher for African-American than White men. Compared to nondisclosers, men who disclosed to all their female partners were less self-homophobic and perceived their friends, families, and neighbors as more accepting of their homosexual behavior. Compared to men who had disclosed, the nondisclosers had more female partners and used condoms less consistently with women.     

Risk Factors,Warning Signs,and Drivers of Suicide: What Are They,How Do They Differ,and Why Does It Matter?

Research investigating suicide attempts and deaths by suicide has yielded many specific risk factors and warning signs for future suicidal behaviors. Yet, even though these variables are each valuable for suicide prevention efforts, they may be limited in their applicability to clinical practice. The differences among risk factors, warning signs, and “drivers,” which are person‐specific variables that lead individuals to desire death by suicide, are highlighted. The scarce evidence on drivers is described and specific recommendations for conducting future drivers‐focused research and targeting them in clinical practice are suggested.     

How Disadvantaged Group Members Cope With Discrimination When They Perceive That Social Support Is Available1

This experiment examined how disadvantaged group members cope with discrimination when they perceive that social support is available. Women reacted to a failing test grade after ambiguous information about the probability for discrimination. With no social support, women minimized discrimination and attributed their failure to the quality of their answers. Participants were less inclined to minimize discrimination when social support was available. When they perceived that either emotional or informational support was available, women were equally likely to blame their failure on discrimination as on the quality of their answers. The results revealed less minimization of personal discrimination when both emotional and informational support were available, in which case participants blamed their failure more on discrimination and less on themselves.     

What Incompleteness Arguments are and What They are Not

Cappelen and Lepore (2005) maintain that Incompleteness Arguments for context sensitivity are fallacious. In their view, Incompleteness Arguments are non sequitur fallacies whose conclusions are not logically related to premises. They affirm that the conclusions of Incompleteness Arguments are metaphysical claims about the existence of entities that might be constituents of propositions, while their premises concern psychological data about speakers' dispositions to truth evaluate sentences in contexts of utterance. Cappelen and Lepore reject Incompleteness Arguments because psychological data have no bearing on metaphysical issues. I do not dispute Cappelen and Lepore's claim that psychological data have no relevance to metaphysics. Nonetheless, I argue that Cappelen and Lepore's criticism is vitiated by a misunderstanding of the nature of Incompleteness Arguments that makes them overlook the link between semantics and linguistic competence. I try to shed light on the real nature of Incompleteness Arguments by pointing at the failure of Cappelen and Lepore's criticism. My aim is not to defend Semantic Contextualism, but to bring to attention the link between semantics and linguistic competence that should never be overlooked in debates in the field of semantics.     

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.     

Parasocial Relationships with Media Personae: Why They Matter and How They Differ Among Heterosexual,Lesbian, Gay,and Bisexual Adolescents

Parasocial relationships are social bonds audiences develop with media personae. Parasocial relationships may be particularly meaningful for those who experience obstacles developing real-life social bonds. The objective of this study was to examine parasocial relationships among a relationally vulnerable population by surveying lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) adolescents (n = 106). Heterosexual adolescents (n = 321) were surveyed for comparison purposes. Results suggest that LGB adolescents have more other-gender favorite media personae than heterosexual male adolescents. LGB adolescents were more likely to select LGB media personae as their favorites, particularly if they lacked real-life LGB friends. Repeated media exposure, perceived similarity, and attraction were positively correlated with parasocial relationship strength for all adolescents, but loneliness contributed to parasocial relationship strength for LGB adolescents only. LGB adolescents were more likely to report their favorite media personae as important sources of information on a range of issues related to socialization. Though previous research suggests that parasocial relationships supplement real-life social relationships, parasocial relationships may be compensatory for LGB adolescents attempting to fill a relational void left by the absence of real-life LGB peers. Scholars must better dissect parasocial relationships with media characters when considering media’s influence on special populations like LGB adolescents.     

Laws of Nature Don't Have Ceteris Paribus Clauses,They Are Ceteris Paribus Clauses

Laws of nature are properly (if controversially) conceived as abstract entities playing a governing role in the physical universe. Dispositionalists typically hold that laws of nature are not real, or at least are not fundamental, and that regularities in the physical universe are grounded in the causal powers of objects. By contrast, I argue that dispositionalism implies nomic realism: since at least some dispositions have ceteris paribus clauses incorporating uninstantiated universals, and these ceteris paribus clauses help to determine their dispositions' ranges of manifestation, there are indeed abstracta which play a governing role in the physical universe. After addressing several objections (including the objection that such ‘laws’ lack sufficient independence/externality from the dispositions to count as genuinely governing), I go on to consider some broader implications of this conclusion for other debates in metaphysics and the philosophy of science. ¹      

What It Means to Be a Man: Aging and Anxiety in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and That Time

One of the great writers of Twentieth-century doubt, Samuel Beckett is perhaps best known for endowing his protagonists with some of the more classic symptoms of anxiety and depression. The result is an extraordinary corpus that unfolds how the intricacies and excesses of anxiety affect the behavior of men and women involved in intimate relationships, and how that behavior is exhibited in their aging years. While this discussion of Krapp's Last Tape (1960) and That Time (1976) will explore anxiety from a specifically male point of view, the works themselves compel various responses from readers of both sexes. Both pieces also may be of interest to those concerned with the rethinking of sexual roles in intimate relationships in light of an individual's response to the physical and emotional aspects of aging.