The Impact of Balanced Risk–Benefit Information and Initial Attitudes on Post‐Information Attitudes1

In a realistic social context, people are confronted with both positive and negative information, yet research on this topic is relatively scarce. We present 2 studies examining the role of initial attitudes on the impact of one‐sided vs. balanced positive and negative information on attitudes toward food production methods. The first experiment demonstrated that one‐sided information influenced post‐information attitudes congruent to the direction of the message content. The second experiment showed that the effect of balanced information on post‐information attitudes may depend on initial attitudes. These results demonstrate that negativity effects are dominant for people with initial positive attitudes, but change into positivity effects for people with initial negative attitudes. Implications for communicating both positive and negative information are discussed.     

I.C.E. World Information,Consciousness, Energy

There is underway a worldwide shift in society from an industrial‐based to an information‐based metaindustrial way of living and working. This will require innovative organization and management. Three factors are described as propellers of this industrial transformation: technological innovations, technology transfer, and global marketplace. Trends in post‐industrial organizations are mapped out, and a profile of metaindustrial organization culture is created.?     

Till death do us part: Terror management and forgiveness in close relationships

Two experiments extended terror management theory to investigate forgiveness in close relationships. We hypothesized that mortality salience would elicit less forgiveness in less committed relationships. In Experiment 1, participants were primed with either mortality salience or a physical pain control condition, recalled a recent hurtful interpersonal offense, and reported their degree of forgiveness. Mortality salience evoked less forgiveness in less committed relationships. In Experiment 2, participants were assigned to recall an offense that occurred in a low‐commitment or high‐commitment relationship. Again, mortality salience elicited less forgiveness in less committed relationships; it elicited more forgiveness in more committed relationships. Moreover, this interaction was mediated by empathy. Existential considerations may play an important role in the functioning of close relationships.     

Feminist Resources for Biomedical Research: Lessons from the HPV Vaccines

Several feminist philosophers of science have argued that social and political values are compatible with, and may even enhance, scientific objectivity. A variety of normative recommendations have emerged regarding how to identify, manage, and critically evaluate social values in science. In particular, several feminist theorists have argued that scientific communities ought to: 1) include researchers with diverse experiences, interests, and values, with equal opportunity and authority to scrutinize research; 2) investigate or “study up” scientific phenomena from the perspectives, interests, and conditions of marginalized stakeholders potentially affected by the research; and 3) make gender, ethnicity, class, and geographical location “visible,” or use them as categories of analysis when appropriate. Yet, more work is needed to determine what exactly these recommendations would require, and the benefits they would yield, in specific research contexts. Using the recent development of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines, we examine how these three feminist recommendations would have applied. We argue that these principles would have yielded several epistemic and social benefits in the HPV case, as well as in biomedical research more generally. That is, biomedical research guided by these principles would not only be epistemically superior, but also more socially responsible.