Saying no to negativity: The effects of context and motivation to control prejudice on automatic evaluative responses

The current research explored the interaction of context and motivation to control prejudice reactions (MCPR) on automatic evaluative responses toward individuals of different races. Three studies incorporated contextual backgrounds into an evaluative priming procedure. Across all three studies, White participants low in MCPR demonstrated automatic ingroup biases when threatening contexts were presented. However, in contexts where targets could be construed as threatening, Whites high in MCPR showed automatic outgroup biases in favor of Blacks over Whites. Importantly, this outgroup bias was driven by an automatic inhibition of negative responses toward Blacks. The results indicate that even at the automatic level, people high in motivation to control prejudice can inhibit negative responses toward Blacks in contexts that have cues associated with prejudice.     

Getting the story right: a Reductionist narrative account of personal identity

A popular “Reductionist” account of personal identity unifies person stages into persons in virtue of their psychological continuity with one another. One objection to psychological continuity accounts is that there is more to our personal identity than just mere psychological continuity: there is also an active process of self-interpretation and self-creation. This criticism can be used to motivate a rival account of personal identity that appeals to the notion of a narrative. To the extent that they comment upon the issue, proponents of narrative accounts typically reject Reductionist metaphysics that (ontologically) reduce persons to aggregates of person stages. In contrast to this trend, we seek to develop a narrative account of personal identity from within Reductionist metaphysics: we think person stages are unified into persons in virtue of their narrative continuity with one another. We argue that this Reductionist version of the narrative account avoids some serious problems facing non-Reductionist versions of the narrative account.     

Phenomenological approaches to personal identity

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on...     

Taylor and Parfit on personal identity: a response to Lötter

In this paper the author attempts to show that Lötter is not justified in ignoring orthodox views of personal identity on the basis of arguments offered by Taylor. It is argued that Taylor's arguments against the orthodoxy do not establish what he, and Lötter, hope they establish, namely, that the orthodox position, represented by the work of Parfit, fails to account for personal identity. The author also attempts to show the importance of this area of debate between orthodox theories of personal identity and the concept of personal identity offered by Taylor, Lötter, and others.     

Self-identity and personal identity

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - The key to understanding self-identity is identifying the transcendental structures that make a temporally extended, continuous, and unified experiential...     

Compatibilism and personal identity

Compatibilists disagree over whether there are historical conditions on moral responsibility. Historicists claim there are, whilst structuralists deny this. Historicists motivate their position by claiming to avoid the counter-intuitive implications of structuralism. I do two things in this paper. First, I argue that historicism has just as counter-intuitive implications as structuralism when faced with thought experiments inspired by those found in the personal identity literature. Hence, historicism is not automatically preferable to structuralism. Second, I argue that structuralism is much more plausible once we accept that personal identity is irrelevant to moral responsibility. This paves the way for a new structuralist account that makes clear what it takes to be the diachronic ownership condition (which is normally taken to be personal identity) and the locus of moral responsibility (which is normally taken to be ‘whole’ person), and helps to alleviate the intuitive unease many have with respect to structuralism.     

Saying no to being uprooted: The impact of family and gender on willingness to relocate

Although career research contends that women managers and professionals are less willing than men to relocate, much of the previous research has been either limited by comparative sampling issues, or has not fully accounted for the role of family. To address these issues we gathered survey data from managers and professionals in 102 large companies by identifying pairs of individuals from each firm who worked in the same division, location, and functional area, who were similar in age (± 5 years), yet differed in gender ‐ resulting in a comparatively matched sample of 333 male and 333 female respondents. To account for the role of family, we tested a model that first controlled for the impact of previous determinants of willingness to relocate, and then examined the impact of four family attributes including spouse's contribution to family income, presence of preschool‐aged children at home, and the perceived strength of spouse's and children's community ties. We also examined the moderating role of gender in explaining the impact of these attributes. Results indicate that the inclusion of family attributes increased the amount of variance explained in our regression model. Moreover, beyond substantiating a significant main effect for gender ‐ that is, women managers are less willing to relocate ‐ we also found that gender interacts with family attributes to further dampen a woman's willingness to relocate.     

Precedent autonomy and personal identity

Debates on precedent autonomy and some forms of paternalistic interventions, which are related to questions of personal identity, are analyzed. The discussion is based on the distinction between personal identity as persistence and as biographical identity. It first is shown that categorical objections to advance directives and "Ulysses contracts" are based on false assumptions about personal identity that conflate persistence and biographical identity. Therefore, advance directives and "Ulysses contracts" are ethically acceptable tools for prolonging one's autonomy. The notions of personality and biographical identity are used to analyze the ethically relevant features. Thereby, it is shown that these concepts are operative in and useful for thinking in biomedical ethics. The overall conclusion is that categorical arguments against precedent autonomy or "Ulysses contracts" are based on misleading theories of personal identity and that advance directives are an ethically respectable tool for prolonging individuals' autonomy in cases of dementia and mental illness.     

Substance concepts and personal identity

According to one argument for Animalism about personal identity, animal, but not person, is a Wigginsian substance concept—a concept that tells us what we are essentially. Person supposedly fails to be a substance concept because it is a functional concept that answers the question “what do we do?” without telling us what we are. Since person is not a substance concept, it cannot provide the criteria for our coming into or going out of existence; animal, on the other hand, can provide such criteria. This argument has been defended by Eric Olson, among others. I argue that this line of reasoning fails to show Animalism to be superior to the Psychological Approach, for the following two reasons: (1) human animal, animal, and organism are all functional concepts, and (2) the distinction between what something is and what it does is illegitimate on the reading that the argument needs.     

Artificial intelligence and personal identity

Considerations of personal identity bear on John Searle's Chinese Room argument, and on the opposed position that a computer itself could really understand a natural language. In this paper I develop the notion of a virtual person, modelled on the concept of virtual machines familiar in computer science. I show how Searle's argument, and J. Maloney's attempt to defend it, fail. I conclude that Searle is correct in holding that no digital machine could understand language, but wrong in holding that artificial minds are impossible: minds and persons are not the same as the machines, biological or electronic, that realize them.     

When time becomes personal. Aging and personal identity

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Aging is an integral part of human existence. The problem of aging addresses the most fundamental coordinates of our lives but also the ones of the...