What Is Social Construction?

In this paper I discuss the question of what it means to say that a property is socially constructed. I focus on an influential project that many social constructivists are engaged in, namely, arguing against the inevitability of a trait, and I examine several recent characterizations of social construction, with the aim of assessing which one is more suited to the task.     

What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic in Christian Theological Schools

This article argues for reconceptualizing islām as ‘wholeness making, peacemaking, well-being making, and safety making’ in the institutional setting of theological schools. A small number of Protestant seminaries have hired Muslim faculty and introduced Islamic studies programmes, thereby allowing for approaches to the study of Islam that focus on theology, professional practice and the lived experience of religion. Using the lens of translation studies, this article analyses the semantic and functional equivalence of this fourfold meaning in the Arabic source language and context, as well as the English target language and context, focusing on Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto as an example. The article demonstrates how this translation is linguistically more accurate than ‘submission’ and other conceptualizations and contextually better suited to meeting the theological and professional needs of students who venture into the workplace. Furthermore, the article shows how this fourfold translation serves as an overarching ethos in ethical reasoning, rendering the central theory of the objectives of the law (maqā?id al-sharī?a) functional and pragmatic. At the same time, it provides a foundation for dealing with diversity and difference in interreligious and intercultural settings.     

What Is the Role of Transparency in Cancellation?

A series of experiments is reported in which the cancellation axiom is investigated by manipulating the transparency of gamble option formulations. The findings suggest that previous demonstrations of violations of the cancellation axiom might not be conclusive. While violations in nontransparent conditions have led to substantial changes in expected utility (EU) theory, the present data suggest that violations in transparent conditions require a fundamental change in the models that have been suggested as alternatives to EU theory.     

On the Subjectivity of the Experience of Victory: Who Are the Election Winners?

Elections represent key moments in democratic countries, and an established finding from the existing literature is that winners of elections display higher levels of satisfaction with democracy. Yet we know almost nothing about the times when voters feel like winners of an election. Using panel data in four countries, this article finds that while the objective performance of the supported party—measured using vote share and changes in vote share from the previous election—has a very important effect on feeling like an election winner, prior expectations regarding the election’s outcome as well as preferences for the supported party significantly moderate the effect of party performance on voter feelings. It seems also that the identification of the winners and losers of elections are clearer in majoritarian‐style democracies than in proportional systems with coalition governments. Ultimately, the findings indicate that measuring who are the winners of an election using exclusively objective measures of party performance may provide a distorted view of public opinion following the elections.     

What Is Social about Justice? Inclusive Identity and Group Values as the Basis of the Justice Motive

Three studies tested the claim that the justice motive is based on commitment to the perceived values of the “primary category” of potential recipients of an allocation. In Study 1, participants who identified more strongly with their group regarded a member who represented the group's strengths as more entitled to a common profit. In Study 2, participants judged their own entitlement versus that of a member who represented the group's strengths. Members who identified more strongly with their group were less likely to display self-interest in their judgments. In Study 3, participants judged the entitlement of an in-group member representing out-group strengths versus an out-group member representing in-group strengths. When identification with the primary category (including in-group and out-group) was strong, members who identified more strongly with their in-group viewed the out-group member representing in-group values as more deserving.     

Who Reaps the Benefits of Social Change? Exploration and Its Socioecological Boundaries

We investigated the interplay between the personality trait exploration and objective socioecological conditions in shaping individual differences in the experience of two individual‐level benefits of current social change: new lifestyle options, which arise from the societal trend toward individualization, and new learning opportunities, which accrue from the societal trend toward lifelong learning. We hypothesized that people with higher trait exploration experience a greater increase in lifestyle options and learning opportunities––but more so in social ecologies in which individualization and lifelong learning are stronger, thus offering greater latitude for exploring the benefits of these trends. We employed structural equation modeling in two parallel adult samples from Germany (N = 2,448) and Poland (N = 2,571), using regional divorce rates as a proxy for individualization and Internet domain registration rates as a proxy for lifelong learning. Higher exploration was related to a greater perceived increase in lifestyle options and in learning opportunities over the past 5 years. These associations were stronger in regions in which the trends toward individualization and lifelong learning, respectively, were more prominent. Individuals higher in exploration are better equipped to reap the benefits of current social change––but the effects of exploration are bounded by the conditions in the social ecology.     

Who Is a Good Organizational Citizen? Social Perception of Male and Female Employees Who Use Family Leave

In this study, we examined perceptions of the citizenship behaviors of male and female employees who took leave to care for a newborn, a sick child, a sick parent, or who did not take leave. In a 2 (employee gender) × 4 (reason for leave) × 2 (participant gender) experimental design, 242 undergraduate students read a mock personnel file and rated the employee on altruism and generalized compliance. Female employees were not rated differently whether they took leave or not. Male employees who took leave for birth or eldercare were rated less likely to be altruistic at work than their male counterparts who did not take leave and their female counterparts who took leave. There was also a bias against male leave takers for generalized compliance ratings, especially by male evaluators. Future research ideas and implications for organizational practice are discussed.     

What Is the Role of Tone in the Phonological Similarity Effect?

The Psychological Record - To recall a list of phonologically similar words is more difficult than to recall a list of phonologically dissimilar words; this is the well-known phonological...     

Ageing and Isolation: Is the Issue Social Isolation or Is It Lack of Meaning in Lige?

SUMMARY

Social and spiritual isolation are growing issues for an ageing society that promotes the ideals of autonomy and high levels of individuation amongst its citizens. This chapter explores the issues of social and spiritual isolation for older adults and ways of addressing these issues both now and in the future. The need for intimacy with God and with others is illustrated using material from in-depth interviews with older adults who live independently and others who are residents of aged care facilities.     

What Kind of Society Does the School Need? Redefining the Democratic Work of Education in Impatient Times

Studies in Philosophy and Education - In many places around the world the modern school is under a relentless pressure to perform and the standards for such performance are increasingly being set...     

What Is the Model in Model-Based Planning?

Flexibility is one of the hallmarks of human problem-solving. In everyday life, people adapt to changes in common tasks with little to no additional training. Much of the existing work on flexibility in human problem-solving has focused on how people adapt to tasks in new domains by drawing on solutions from previously learned domains. In real-world tasks, however, humans must generalize across a wide range of within-domain variation. In this work we argue that representational abstraction plays an important role in such within-domain generalization. We then explore the nature of this representational abstraction in realistically complex tasks like video games by demonstrating how the same model-based planning framework produces distinct generalization behaviors under different classes of task representation. Finally, we compare the behavior of agents with these task representations to humans in a series of novel grid-based video game tasks. Our results provide evidence for the claim that within-domain flexibility in humans derives from task representations composed of propositional rules written in terms of objects and relational categories.     

What is the Social Impact of ADHD in Girls? A Multi-Method Assessment

This study explores the social impact of ADHD, with and without opposition-defiant behaviour (ADHD+ODD (n= 22) and ADHD-only (n= 18)), in 9- to 12- year old girls compared to girls without ADHD (n= 40). Girls played a computer game involving simulated players, and mothers and teachers completed rating scales. In general, mothers and teachers saw girls with ADHD+ODD as more overtly and relationally aggressive and less prosocial than girls with ADHD-only, who were seen as more overtly and relationally aggressive and less prosocial than control girls. On the computer game, girls with ADHD+ODD were more overtly aggressive, more directly relationally aggressive, and showed less skilled behaviour than the other groups. Girls with ADHD-only showed less covert, indirect relational aggression and more socially awkward interactions than girls in the control group on the computer game. In all, the results indicate that girls with ADHD, with and without ODD behaviour, engage in socially detrimental behaviours.     

What Is the Role of Quaker Education in a Time of Terror?

Abstract

This article presents not only the distinctive pedagogical philosophy of Quaker education, but discusses the special relevance of Friends values and educational methods in a time when America is at war. The article also includes a listing of print resources on Quaker values and education.     

What is Epistemological Violence in the Empirical Social Sciences?

This article discusses the meaning of epistemological violence in the empirical social sciences. It is argued that the concept is closer to personal than to structural violence in that it has a subject, an object, and an action, even if the violence is indirect and nonphysical: the subject of violence is the researcher, the object is the Other, and the action is the interpretation of data that is presented as knowledge. Using a hypothetical example, the problem of interpretation in empirical research on the Other is discussed. Epistemological violence refers to the interpretation of social-scientific data on the Other and is produced when empirical data are interpreted as showing the inferiority of or problematizes the Other, even when data allow for equally viable alternative interpretations. Interpretations of inferiority or problematizations are understood as actions that have a negative impact on the Other. Because the interpretations of data emerge from an academic context and thus are presented as knowledge, they are defined as epistemologically violent actions. Problems, consequences, and practices surrounding this concept are discussed.