ADOLESCENTS' PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL CONFLICTS IN TELEVISION NEWS AND SOCIAL REALITY

This study examined Israeli adolescents' differential perception of social conflicts in society and of their presentation by TV news, given the assumption that TV presents a distorted picture of real social conflicts along three dimensions: complexity, intensity, and solvability. It was hypothesized that age and degree of remoteness of social conflicts from one's life experiences will account for the main differences in an adolescent's differential perception of social conflicts. The sample consisted of 492 9th-grade and 425 12lh-grade Israeli adolescents. The data indicate that the older adolescents typically differentiate between the two realms of reality to a greater degree than do the younger adolescents. This is the case for three conflicts (school integration, labor disputes, and political terrorism) across the three dimensions. Moreover, the highest degree of differentiation between the two realms of reality was found for both age groups in the school integration conflict, with which the respondents were presumed to be most familiar, and the least differentiation for the conflict concerning political terrorism, with which they were presumed to have had the least experience.     

AN EMPIRICAL TEST OF A MODEL OF RESISTANCE TO PERSUASION

This investigation synthesized research from several related areas to produce a model of resistance to persuasion based upon variables not considered by earlier congruity and inoculation models. Support was found for the prediction that the kind of critical response set induced and the target of the criticism are mediators of resistance to persuasion. The more critical acts are focused on arguments presented in a persuasive message, the more likely that the critical act will not be distracting and therefore promote counterarguing which will lead people to be resistant to subsequent persuasive messages arguing on the same side of given attitudinal issue. When criticism is less central to message variables and focuses on speaker and/or delivery characteristics, distraction occurs which decreases the probability of counterarguing and induces people to be vulnerable to forthcoming persuasive messages. This is especially true when negative criticism of speaker characteristics reduces threat to present attitudes and reduces motivation to counterargue to protect privately held beliefs. A completely counterbalanced design employing several manipulation checks was created to rule out competing explanations for differential resistance to persuasion.     

Luck and Equality: A Reply to Hurley1

In Chapter 6 (“Why the Aim to Neutralize Luck Cannot Provide a Basis for Egalitarianism”) of her Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, Susan Hurley defends two claims: that “the aim to neutralize luck [does not] contribute to identifying and specifying what egalitarianism is”, and that it also provides no “independent non‐question‐begging reason or justification for egalitarianism” (p. 147). In the present response, I reject the first of Hurley's claims, and I show that the second, while true, lacks polemical force. I said, in “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice” (Ethics, 1989), that