It Could Have Been Better or It Might Have Been Worse: Implications for Blame Assignment in Rape Cases

Victim and assailant blame, as well as the perceived injustice and severity of a rape event, were examined as a function of the type of counterfactual alternative to which the identically described event was compared. It was hypothesized that when perceivers imagine an alternative outcome that is even worse than the original rape event, the perceived injustice and severity of the rape will be reduced, rendering the assailant less blameworthy. That is, when an alternative outcome is generated by focusing on the assailant, the hypothetically worse outcome that he could have inflicted on the victim makes the rape appear less tragic by comparison. Conversely, when perceivers imagine an alternative outcome that is better than the original rape event, perceptions of injustice should increase. In two experiments, participants considered how an identical rape event could have been worse for the victim or worse for the assailant by imagining how either the victim or the assailant could have behaved differently. Support for the proposed judgment model was obtained and implications are drawn for trial attorneys who may present alternative outcomes in order to reframe juror interpretations.     

A Dialectic on Validity: Where We Have Been and Where We Are Going

It has been suggested that the primary issue in considerations of validity today is the discrepancy between currently accepted theory and the practice of validation. The reason for this discrepancy may be that although considerable discussion has taken place in educational measurement and psychometrics regarding changes in our conceptions of validity, that has not been the case more generally in the social and behavioral sciences. A dialectic on the current status of validity theory for social and behavioral scientists is presented to help bridge this gap.     

Missed Opportunities: Speculation on What Japanese Psychology Could Have Been

Takasuna (Integr. Physiol. Behav. Sci. 41, 2007) mentioned the ease with which evolutionary theory was accepted by Japanese psychologists, and certainly this is admirable. He also mentioned the stubborn force which had to be used to gain an understanding of the (thoroughly Western) subjective–objective distinction. Alas, during the formative years of Japanese psychology, there was much philosophical work afoot attempting to destroy that distinction. It is speculated that only a small change of which books were translated, or with which Americans early Japanese psychologists trained under, would have made Japan into a haven for these still underdog theories.     

On What We See

This paper investigates the idea that perception can be, at once, a mode of direct awareness of the world and an encounter, in the first instance, with mere appearances. In developing this point, I introduce a sensorimotor account of perception according to which the senses are ways of exploring the environment mediated by different patterns of sensorimotor contingency (i.e. by the distinctive ways in which what the perceiver does affects how things appear).     

On What We are and How We Persist

This article defends novel approaches to what we are and how we persist. First it is claimed that we have disjunctive persistence conditions: we can persist by way of either biological continuity or psychological continuity. Then it is claimed that we are neither human beings nor persons essentially. Rather, we are essentially bio‐psycho‐continuers, a concept to be explained along the way. A variety of objections are considered and found wanting.     

On Becoming Redundant or What Computers Shouldn't Do

I argue here that the development of machines that provide for us what we could previously provide for ourselves may sometimes be a dubious blessing. For the value of many goods is not independent of the way in which they are produced and in particular of the human contribution to their production. With a large range of goods it may matter to us both that people rather than machines contribute to their production and that we ourselves make some such contribution. We have a need to be constructively engaged in the service of our own and one another's ends. We also have an interest both in the extent to which the society in which we live includes all its members in such engagement and the extent to which the goods we enjoy are the fruits of such inclusive human endeavour. A significant and shared human contribution to the meeting of our needs is itself one of our deepest needs. These thoughts are developed primarily with reference to the values found in art, conversation and work.     

Living Danger: On Not Knowing What We Know

This paper contextualizes the struggle around the American Psychological Association's ethical standards regarding psychologists' participation in abusive interrogations of detainees by examining the psychological and political meanings of living in a society in which the state assumes the right to torture. To highlight the implications of authoritarian trends in America's post-9/11 political culture, I offer an interdisciplinary psychoanalytic analysis of the extreme social situation of the Argentine Dirty War, in which torture was used by the military government not as a tactic to make detainees talk but as a strategy to silence an entire population. I explore the defense mechanism of disavowal and its use by both perpetrators and victims in ways that contributed to sustaining authoritarian rule in Argentina. I suggest that it is within the legitimate arena of psychoanalysis to consider the psychological meanings of patients' experience in the larger social order. I argue for a psychoanalytic project that does not disavow the centrality of social reality in the formation of subjectivity and for a clinical model that provides a potential space in which the subject can develop a critical psyche able to co-construct a more democratic political as well as personal life.     

Assessing the Behavior of Girls: What We See and What We Miss

Three standardized measures of child and adolescent behavior are reviewed for their attention to issues salient in the experiences of girls in late childhood and adolescence (ages 12 to 18; American; American and Brown & Gilligan 1992). The Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist and Teacher Report Form (Achenbach and Achenbach), the Behavior Assessment System for Children (Reynolds & Kamphaus, 1992), and the Social Skills Rating System (Gresham & Elliott, 1990) are analyzed. Challenges to psychologists in schools for including the experiences of girls in the knowledge base grounding their practice and research are articulated.     

Long Working Hours and Well-being: What We Know,What We Do Not Know,and What We Need to Know

Despite a widespread belief in both the academic and public policy literatures that working long hours is deleterious to health and well-being, our critical review of this large and complex literature fails to support a robust direct causal effect of work hours on either physical or mental well-being outcomes. Large-scale epidemiological studies, many of which are prospective and include objective health outcome measures, support a statistically significant association between long work hours and coronary heart disease and depression, but the effect sizes are very small. Moreover, there is an absence of true longitudinal studies that assess the consistency of working long hours over time and its relationship to well-being. Our review suggests that the effects of working long hours are nuanced in that they may vary considerably for different working populations based on gender, age, working conditions, and other factors. Primary and meta-analytic studies suggest that such moderator effects are plausible, yet rigorous testing of these remains to be done. We conclude with suggestions for specific moderator effects that seem worth investigating in future research.     

Opening What Has Been Closed,Relaxing What Has Been Clenched: Dissociation and Enactment Over Time in Committed Relationships

I use dissociation and the concept of the multiple self to link Mitchell's profound insight with Goldner's critique. In the process, I use the idea of dissociation to think about the nature of different kinds of long-term relationships.     

What Philosophy Might be About: Some Socio-philosophical Speculations

The most important sources of contemporary American literary theory are neither the linguistics-based movement of French structuralism, as the term 'poststructuralism' implies, nor a 'modernity' that has been superseded, as the term 'postmodernism' implies, but rather a modernist tradition of aesthetics shaped by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German romanticism and idealism, movements that culminated in the work of Heidegger during the Weimar period between the World Wars and afterward, exercising an increasingly dominant influence on French theorists after World War II, from Sartre through Derrida, and subsequently on the development of poststructuralism and postmodernism during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. This essay strives to put well-accepted facts and issues within what Wittgenstein called a 'perspicuous' perspective. Although it is common to observe that deconstruction shares with Romanticism certain very general features, the same judgment is not often applied to deconstruction's semiotic account of language as a system of arbitrary signs without positive values. The essay's claim, by contrast, is that romanticist, especially German influences, operating in complementary relation with influences from the English and French Enlightenments, provided the cultural and conceptual milieu in which literary theory's distinctively modern, characteristically ontological, and anti-metaphysical view of language developed.