Ethics,Identity and the Boundaries of the Person

Abstract

Ethical theories and theories of the person constrain each other, in that a proposition about the person may be a reason for or against an ethical proposition, and conversely. An important class of such propositions about the person concern the boundaries of the person. These boundaries enclose a person's defining properties, which constitute his identity. A person's identity may partly determine and partly be determined by his ethical judgments. An equilibrium between one's identity and one's ethical judgments is the counterpart, at the personal level, of the philosophical ideal of reflective equilibrium between a theory of the person and an ethical theory.     

Abstract: Within-Person Processes Leading to Quarrelsome Behavior in Interactions Between Romantic Partners

This study used multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM; Preacher, Zyphur, &; Zhang, 2010) to examine within-person processes that give rise to quarrelsome behavior in interactions between romantic partners. Based on Interpersonal Theory and Adult Attachment Theory, we hypothesized that a person's quarrelsome behavior would be predicted by (a) the direct effect of the partner's quarrelsome behavior, (b) an indirect effect mediated by the person's perceptions of the partner's quarrelsome behavior, and (c) an indirect effect mediated by the person's felt security. Using an event-contingent recording methodology, both partners in 93 cohabiting community couples reported independently on their quarrelsome behavior, felt security, and perceptions of the partner's quarrelsome behavior in interactions with each other during a 20-day period. Findings (see Figure 1) supported a direct effect of partner's increases in quarrelsome behavior on person's increases in quarrelsome behavior. This association was partly accounted for by perceptions of partner's behavior and felt security following these perceptions. The more a person perceived the partner as engaging in quarrelsome behavior, the more the person engaged in quarrelsome behavior [indirect effect = .016, 95% CI (.009 ? .022)]. Furthermore, the person's perception of greater quarrelsomeness in the partner's behavior was associated with decreases in the person's felt security, which in turn were related to increases in a person's quarrelsome behavior [indirect effect = .009, 95% CI (.005 ? .013)]. No gender differences were found. Findings indicate that a partner's increase in quarrelsome behavior is partly related to a person's increase in quarrelsome behavior in part to the extent that the person perceives the behavior as quarrelsome and consequently feels insecure during the interaction. Findings illustrate an application of MSEM for assessing multilevel mediation in the dyadic context. Moreover, the results suggest that theory and therapeutic interventions should consider interpersonal perceptions as the first link in the chain of affective and behavioral reactions to the interpersonal behaviors of others.     

Not afraid to trust you: Trustworthiness moderates gaze cueing but not in highly anxious participants

Gaze cueing (i.e., the shifting of person B's attention by following person A's gaze) is closely linked with human interaction and learning. To make the most of this connection, researchers need to investigate possible moderators enhancing or reducing the extent of this attentional shifting. In this study we used a gaze cueing paradigm to demonstrate that the perceived trustworthiness of a cueing person constitutes such a moderator for female participants. Our results show a significant interaction between perceived trustworthiness and the response time trade-off between valid and invalid gaze cues [gaze cueing effect (GCE)], as manifested in greater following of a person's gaze if this person was trustworthy as opposed to the following of an untrustworthy person's gaze. An additional exploratory analysis showed potentially moderating influences of trait-anxiety on this interaction (p = .057). The affective background of the experiment (i.e., using positive or negative target stimuli) had no influence.     

Deceptive Strategic Identity Support: Misrepresentation of Information to Protect Another Individual's Public Self‐Image1

Two laboratory studies identified conditions under which individuals are willing to misrepresent information regarding another person's performance to protect that other person's public self‐image (i.e., to provide deceptive strategic identity support). The extent to which deceptive strategic identity support arises is determined by the salience of another person's need for impression‐management assistance. Factors increasing the salience of a person in need (including performance discrepancy, relationship closeness, location of the target, and trait empathy) motivated individuals' willingness to engage in deceptive strategic identity support. State empathy was found to mediate the effects.     

He is smarter when he looks smart in front of many versus a few others: Impact of audience size on target appraisals in a cross-cultural context

Will a person be seen as more superior if he or she receives an award in front of a large audience in comparison with a small audience? We predicted that this would hold true for East Asians, whose cultural logic of face asserts that a person's worth can only be conferred by collective others, but would not hold true for European Americans, whose cultural logic of dignity promotes the judgement of a person's worth based on their own perspective. This study found an audience-size effect for East Asians, in which participants gave higher appraisals to a target when they imagined the target's high performance to have been seen by 10 other people (vs. one other person) even when the target's performance level remained constant. In contrast, Westerners were not affected by the size of the audience witnessing the target's performance. In addition, perceived social reputation was found to mediate the audience-size effect; the participants imagining the target performing well in front of 10 others (vs. one other) perceived others as thinking more highly of the target; this in turn led participants to give higher appraisals to the target. As expected, this mediation effect was only found for East Asians.     

Reactions to Others' Selfish Actions in the Absence of Tangible Consequences

This research assessed the role of perceived selfishness in people's reactions to events without tangible consequences. In Experiment 1, participants were assigned to complete a boring task by another person who gave a selfish, legitimizing, or exculpatory explanation for the decision. However, half of the participants knew that the other's decision was irrelevant and that they would complete the task regardless of the person's decision. In a second experiment, participants were told that the decision was irrelevant either before or after learning that the other person assigned them to do the boring task. Both studies showed that participants who received a selfish explanation responded strongly to the other person whether or not the person's decision had tangible consequences for them.     

Moral Taint: On the Transfer of the Implications of Moral Culpability

Suppose two people are about to drown. We are in a position to save only one, so the other will have to die. One of the two has just culpably killed an innocent person, but has no intention of killing anybody else and there is no reason to expect that he will. Everything else being equal, should we give them an equal chance of being saved by flipping a coin? In this paper I argue that we should not. I argue that the implications of a person's moral culpability for (recent or prospective) harm to a particular victim should transfer to other conflict situations in which the wrongdoer might find him or herself. This requires establishing the extent to which a person's contributing to harming another person — and his moral culpability for that harm — impinges on our decision making in situations where it is possible only to assist either the wrongdoer or some other person that is not his victim.     

The unconscious and consciousness of the memory: A contribution from neuroscience

Abstract

By integrating data from general psychology and perinatal clinical psychology with neuroscience and psychoanalysis, the author discusses the relations between memory and consciousness, the aim being a unitary definition of the concept of unconscious. Nobody has a brain that can be the same as any other person's: the biology of memory lies in neural networks that have been constructed in the brain of that specific person by their experience. From the fetal stage, each brain progressively learns its own individual functions during its relational neuropsychic development. The author underlines how the continuous emotional biological work of the brain, together with a person's entire relational life, produces the construction of the whole functional and individual mindbrain. The whole construction is memory and this is unconscious; indeed it may be the true unconscious. From the continuous silent work of the mindbrain of a person, some forms of conscious level may emerge in his individual's subjectivity: some functioning of mindbrain makes what an individual person can consciously remember. The unconscious is only what appears in some form in an analyst's consciousness, at some specific moment in his relationship with a patient, and which the analyst translates into some form of his verbal interpretation.     

Effects of Perceived Consensus on Selective Reinforcement of Other People's Stated Opinions

Three studies tested whether perceived consensus affects selective reinforcement of other people's stated opinions on important social issues. Participants who perceived relatively high consensus for their opinions were more likely than participants who perceived low consensus to reward another person's agreeing statements more than the person's disagreeing statements about gun control (Study 1) and to prolong interrogating another student about abortion (Study 2). In Study 3, participants who were told they were in a two-thirds majority regarding gay scout troop leaders were more likely than participants who were told they were in a one-third minority to practice selective reinforcement. The results have implications for settings in which interrogators believe they can exercise power over the person who is being questioned.     

Secondhand information and social judgment

This research investigates how secondhand impressions of other people differ from those based on firsthand information. It was hypothesized that secondhand impressions are often more extreme because secondhand accounts of another person's actions frequently fail to convey adequately the role of mitigating circumstances and situational constraints in producing that person's behavior. Experiments 1 and 2 tested this hypothesis by exposing “first generation” subjects to information about a target person, having them rate the target on several trait and attribution scales, and having them describe the target person's actions to a group of “second generation” subjects. As predicted, second generation subjects made more extreme ratings of the target than their first generation counterparts. Content analyses of the accounts transmitted by first generation subjects indicated that they did indeed underemphasize various situational qualifications of the target persons' behavior. Experiment 3 extended these findings by demonstrating that people's impressions of someone they have often heard about from a friend (but never met) are more extreme than their friends' more informed impressions.     

Inferring task performance and confidence from displays of eye movements

Eye movements reveal what is at the center of people's attention, which is assumed to coincide with what they are thinking about. Eye-movement displays (visualizations of a person's fixations superimposed onto the stimulus, for example, as dots or circles) might provide useful information for diagnosing that person's performance. However, making inferences about a person's task performance based on eye-movement displays requires substantial interpretation. Using graph-comprehension tasks, we investigated to what extent observers (N = 46) could make accurate inferences about a performer's multiple-choice task performance (i.e., chosen answer), confidence, and competence from displays of that person's eye movements. Observers' accuracy when judging which answer the performer chose was above chance level and was higher for displays reflecting confident performance. Observers were also able to infer performers' confidence from the eye-movement displays; moreover, their own task performance and perceived similarity with the performer affected their judgments of the other's competence.     

Olfactory Comfort and Attachment Within Relationships

We replicated a previous study that found that men and women often smell their sexual partners' clothing when they are apart ( McBurney, Shoup, & Streeter, 2006 ). We found that women tend to perform this behavior across a broader range of relationships than do men. We asked 128 participants if they had ever intentionally smelled another person's clothing, slept with another person's clothing because of its smell, or given another person an article of their own clothing. The most common response was a romantic partner's clothing. However, women more often than men reported smelling the clothing of family members.     

Retracted: BEING LUCKY AND BEING DESERVING,AND DISTRIBUTION

This paper examines the concepts of desert and luck, familiar in political theory but neglected by sociologists. I argue that the idea of desert is composed of both personal performance and the degree of responsibility a person has over that performance. Distribution ought to be in accordance with the indebtedness created by the person's performance. This can be compromised by luck; that is, personal desert is undermined where lack of performance scuttles the applicability of the contributory model. This paper examines recent work, focusing on establishing desert criteria for each person's ends and life‐plans, and a formula for distribution according to personal welfare.     

An Ecological Approach to Reducing the Social Isolation of People With an Intellectual Disability

An ecological approach to understanding insecure attachments and social isolation among people with an intellectual disability is constructed using Gibson's (1979/1986) affordance-based theory. Although environmental affordances and individual limitations interact to limit the development of social competence, we believe that by focusing on the immediate environment, community-based approaches to helping people with an intellectual disability are often ignored, which increases the burden on individual caregivers. A more comprehensive strategy, which extends Gibson's theory of affordances, allows us to consider how higher level social systems influence the immediate environment and provides the context for understanding why successful change occurs when a multifaceted, holistic approach that works on several levels is adopted. Examining these systems within an ecological framework fundamentally redefines our thinking by shifting the focus from a person's disability to a more nuanced understanding of a person's abilities within the context of appropriate environmental supports in which the person's disability becomes less salient.     

Sexuality and the ‘Non-Intentional’ Implications for Psychotherapy Practice

This article examines how sexuality and desire provide an opportunity to experience the separation between the self and the other, and were developed in association with the experience of working with a particular patient in weekly therapy. The main theme explored in this article is the degree with which a person imposes his or her understanding and experience onto other people around them, and thereby potentially missing the opportunity to enjoy real personal contact with another person. The work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas is examined to highlight the separation between intentionality and nonintentionality. The distinction between the intentional and the nonintentional is also important in illustrating how a person can impose himself or herself on to others. A person's sexuality and desire for intimacy with another person is discussed in terms of how it provides the opportunity to experience the boundary between being for oneself and being in contact with the other; illustrating the separation of the nonintentional from the intentional. Finally, the implications for psychotherapy practice will be examined, particularly acknowledging the importance of a person's sexuality in determining how they relate to other people.     

Children tell white lies to make others feel better

We investigated whether children tell white lies simply out of politeness or as a means to improve another person's mood. A first experimental phase probed children's individual insight to use white lies when prosocial behaviour was called for. We compared a situation in which a person had expressed sadness about her artwork and the goal was to make her feel better (Sad condition) with a situation in which a person was indifferent about her work (Neutral condition). Children at 7 years and older were more likely to tell a white lie than the blunt truth in the Sad over the Neutral condition. Five‐year‐olds showed only a trend. A second phase tested whether children selectively use white lie telling after it was modelled by an adult. Results showed that after modelling, children from all age groups were significantly more likely to use white lies in the Sad condition than in the Neutral condition. Taken together, these results show that children are attentive to another person's affective states when choosing whether to tell a white lie or tell the truth. We discuss the emergence of this behaviour in relation to children's developing social cognition and the increasing sophistication of children's prosocial behaviour.