Why Athletic Doping Should Be Banned

So long as a ban is enforceable, large private athletic institutions—such as Major League Baseball and the National Collegiate Athletic Association—should not allow their athletes to take performance‐enhancing drugs. The argument I present is game‐theoretic: though each athlete prefers unilateral permission to dope over a universal ban, he also prefers a universal ban over universal permission to dope. That is because, while doping improves absolute measures of performance, it does not improve relative performance if many athletes dope. Large private athletic institutions should honour their athletes' preferences and should not enact any policy that gives only some athletes but not others permission to dope. Thus, they should ban doping. My paper examines and defends this game‐theoretic argument. After explaining the argument, I compare it (favourably) to other arguments for the same conclusion. I then discuss whether the game‐theoretic argument counterintuitively fails to justify banning some forms of doping (no), and whether it counterintuitively justifies banning things other than doping (also no). After arguing that a doping ban on game‐theoretic grounds is neither wrongly paternalistic or nor wrongfully coercive, I end by discussing some limitations of the argument.     

USING WEB-BASED FRAME-OF-REFERENCE TRAINING TO DECREASE BIASES IN PERSONALITY-BASED JOB ANALYSIS: AN EXPERIMENTAL FIELD STUDY

We identify sources of biases in personality-based job analysis (PBJA) ratings and offer a Web-based frame-of-reference (FOR) training program to mitigate these biases. Given the use of job analysis data for the development of staffing, performance management, and many other human resource management systems, using biased PBJA ratings is likely to lead to a workforce that is increasingly homogenous in terms of personality but not necessarily a workforce with improved levels of performance. We conducted a field experiment (i.e., full random assignment) using 2 independent samples of employees in a city government and found evidence in support of the presence of biases as well as the effectiveness of the proposed solution. Specifically, FOR training was successful at decreasing the average correlation between job incumbents' self-reported personality and PBJA ratings from .27 to .07 (administrative support assistants) and from .30 to .09 (supervisors). Also, FOR training was successful at decreasing mean PBJA ratings by d = .44 (administrative support assistants) and by d = .68 (supervisors). We offer the entire set of Web-based FOR training materials for use in future research and applications.     

Marijuana: A Review of Medical Research With Implications for Adolescents

Recent medical evidence indicates that marijuana is more harmful than had previously been suspected. A review of recent research in the following areas is presented: tolerance and persistence, reproductive system, respiratory system, immune system, central nervous system, genetic and chromosomal effects, and behavioral effects. Implications for mental health professionals are discussed.     

Family contexts as cognitive networks: A structural approach of family relationships

With the permanence of strong emotional bonds between adults and their siblings and parents, with the rise of divorce, with the extension of remarriage, and with the development of pseudo-kinship ties, complex family groupings have emerged. Orientational family members (Kuhn, 1964) are likely to be perceived as being included in relatively large and unbounded family contexts. To deal with the complexity of those contexts, one needs to develop an approach that makes it possible to analyze many relationships in a single model. Such an approach is presented in this article, which considers family contexts as cognitive networks (Marsden, 1990). To illustrate how statistical and graphical network methods can be applied empirically to those contexts, perceived relationships among orientational family members of 25 female students were analyzed in relation to balance theory (Heider, 1958).     

Social Discrimination in a Personnel Selection Context: The Effects of an Authority's Instruction to Discriminate and Followers' Authoritarianism1

Social discrimination in a personnel‐selection context was studied using an in‐basket exercise. West German participants had to select personnel from an applicant pool that included West German applicants (in‐group members) and East German applicants (out‐group members). As predicted, we found a main effect for an authority's instruction to discriminate against out‐group members. This main effect was, as predicted, qualified by an Instruction Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) interaction effect. Only high scorers on RWA discriminated against out‐group members when instructed to do so.     

Mental Causation: Unnaturalized but not Unnatural

The central problem for a realist about mental causation is to show that mental causation is compatible with the causal completeness of physical systems. This problem has seemed intractable in large part because of a widely held view that any sort of systematic overdetermination of events by their causes is unacceptable. I account for the popularity of this view, but argue that we ought to reject it. In doing so. I show how we thereby undermine the idea that mental causes must be naturalizable in order to be legitimate. Thus I argue that a non-naturalist conception of mental causation is compatible with a plausible kind of physicalism.     

PLACING PEER RATINGS IN CONTEXT: SYSTEMATIC INFLUENCES BEYOND RATEE PERFORMANCE

Performance evaluation research indicates that variance in ratings may be attributable to systematic sources beyond the actual performance of the ratee. However, the majority of prior work compares ratings across sources and uses ratings from a single rating event. Using confirmatory factor analysis and multivariate latent growth modeling (MLGM), we specifically examine peer ratings from 740 participants on 5 performance dimensions across 3 distinct performance situations for systematic sources of variance beyond ratee performance. Results demonstrate that both ratee performance and the performance context have systematic effects, with contextual effects varying by how "strong" or "weak" the situation is for a given performance dimension. Furthermore, MLGM results suggest that the influence of performance dynamism is only meaningfully interpreted when contextual effects are modeled.