This article shows the philosophical kinship between Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft on the subject of love. Though the two major 18th century thinkers are not traditionally brought into conversation with each other, Wollstonecraft and Smith share deep moral concerns about the emerging commercial society. As the new middle class continues to grow along with commerce, vanity becomes an ever more common vice among its members. But a vain person is preoccupied with appearance, status, and flattery—things that get in the way of what Smith and Wollstonecraft regard as the deep human connection they variously describe as love, sympathy, and esteem. Commercial society encourages inequality, Smith argues, and Wollstonecraft points out that this inequality is particularly obvious in the relationships between men and women. Men are vain about their wealth, power and status; women about their appearance. Added to this is the fact that most middle class women are both uneducated and encouraged by the conduct literature of their day to be sentimental and irrational. The combined economic and moral considerations of Wollstonecraft and Smith show that there is very little room for love in commercial society as they conceived it.
Persons who are flattered are more likely to assign credibility to and like the flatterer than observers, presumably because they are motivated by vanity. In existing studies, however, the difference between targets and observers has been confounded with other variables. The present experiments demonstrate that the target-observer difference in judgments of an ingratiator is not affected by these confounding variables, such as cognitive resources, the motive to like one's interaction partner, or to form an accurate impression, or mood. Results further suggest that, whereas cognitive responses to ingratiation are different among participants with high versus low self-esteem, affective responses and judgments of the ingratiator are not qualified by any personality variables. 相似文献
We examined the association between month of birth and completed suicides among major league baseball players (N = 76). More than twice as many players born in August committed suicide (N = 19) than any other birth month. This association was statistically significant when birth month was corrected for differences in days of the month. The differences were even larger when expressed in terms of birth month for those committing suicides divided by number of major league players born in each month. The association between birth month and suicide raises the possibility that prenatal factors may influence the inclination for suicide later in life. 相似文献
We examined the relationship between educational attainment and suicide rate in the United States for 2001. Suicide rates, adjusted for age, were compared with percentage of college graduates, median household income, and poverty in 50 states in 2001. The correlations of suicide rates with educational attainment and median household income were both negative and statistically significant. Poverty was not significantly related to suicide rates. We concluded that higher education and income were associated with a decrease in suicide rates in 2001. Data from other years require examination for this conclusion to be generalizable. 相似文献
Almost all research on aggression in adolescent romantic relationships makes use of 1-time, retrospective assessment methods. In the present research, the authors compared data on the experience of adolescent relationship aggression (physical aggression and threatening behavior) collected from 125 high school students via 2 methods: (a) a 1-time, 2-month retrospective assessment and (b) a cumulative method based on four 2-week retrospective assessments, each spaced 2 weeks apart. For the cumulative method, data from the 4 assessments were aggregated to cover the same time period as the single, 2-month retrospective assessment. A greater proportion of the sample (48.0%) reported experiencing physical aggression using the cumulative method compared with the single, 2-month retrospective method (27.0%). The prevalence of threatening behavior was also higher using the cumulative method (48.8% vs. 24.8%). Adolescent trauma and anxiety symptoms correlated more strongly with physical aggression data derived from the cumulative method than from the 1-time assessment method. 相似文献