Précis of <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Virtue Epistemology</Emphasis> (Oxford University Press, 2007)

This is a summary of A Virtue Epistemology, the book that is the subject of this book symposium.     

Replies to commentators on <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Virtue Epistemology</Emphasis> (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Paul Boghossian discusses critically my account of intuition as a source of epistemic status. Stewart Cohen takes up my views on skepticism, on dreams, and on epistemic competence and competences and their relation to human knowledge. Hilary Kornblith focuses on my animal/reflective distinction, and, along with Cohen, on my comparison between how dreams might mislead us and how other bad epistemic contexts can do so. In this paper I offer replies to my three critics.

Reducing intergroup conflict through the consideration of future consequences

Basic social psychological research has suggested several interventions to reduce intergroup conflict. Most of these interventions, however, have been indirect and impractical to implement outside laboratory settings. Although past research has demonstrated that indirect manipulations of the consideration of future consequences reduce intergroup competition, no study of interindividual–intergroup discontinuity has tested this assumption with a direct manipulation. The present study found that when participants (individuals and members of groups) interacting in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game (PDG) were asked to predict how their opponent's choice on a second trial would be affected by their own choice on an initial trial, intergroup competition was reduced while interindividual competition remained low regardless of the manipulation. On a practical level, implications of this study provide a simple and easily implemented solution to reducing intergroup conflict in non‐laboratory situations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Determining risk in pediatric research with no prospect of direct benefit: time for a national consensus on the interpretation of federal regulations

United States federal regulations for pediatric research with no prospect of direct benefit restrict institutional review board (IRB) approval to procedures presenting: 1) no more than "minimal risk" ( section sign 45CFR46.404); or 2) no more than a "minor increase over minimal risk" if the research is commensurate with the subjects' previous or expected experiences and intended to gain vitally important information about the child's disorder or condition ( section sign 45CFR46.406) (DHHS 2001). During the 25 years since their adoption, these regulations have helped IRBs balance subject protections with the pursuit of scientific knowledge to advance children's welfare. At the same time, inconsistency in IRB application of these regulations to pediatric protocols has been widespread, in part because of the ambiguity of the regulatory language. During the past decade, three federally-charged committees have addressed these ambiguities: 1) the National Human Research Protections Advisory Committee (NHRPAC) (Washington, DC), 2) the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on the Ethical Conduct of Clinical Research Involving Children (Washington, DC); and 3) the United States Department of Health and Human Services Secretary's Advisory Committee for Human Research Protections (SACHRP) (Washington, DC). The committees have reached similar conclusions on interpretation of language within regulations section sign section sign 45CFR46.404 and 406; these conclusions are remarkably consistent with recent international recommendations and those of the original National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1977) report from which current regulations are based. Drawing on the committees' public reports, this article identifies the ethical issues posed by ambiguities in regulatory language, summarizes the committees' deliberations, and calls for a national consensus on recommended criteria.     

The Collective Preference for Shared Information

Decision-making groups prefer to discuss shared information that all members know instead of unshared information that a single member knows. This bias toward discussing shared information can lead groups to make suboptimal decisions when unshared information is critical for good decision making. This preference for discussing shared information may stem from group members' positive evaluations of each other's task capabilities when shared information is communicated. Members who already are perceived as capable (i.e., those high in status, experts, and leaders) need not bolster their image by communicating shared information. Instead, they discuss unshared information more than members perceived as less capable. As members low in status gain respect by communicating shared information, they may risk mentioning unshared information later during discussion. Assigning group leaders, informing members of their expert roles, and allowing ample time for discussion may increase groups' discussion of unshared information.     

Inherent emotional quality of human speech sounds

During much of the past century, it was widely believed that phonemes—the human speech sounds that constitute words—have no inherent semantic meaning, and that the relationship between a combination of phonemes (a word) and its referent is simply arbitrary. Although recent work has challenged this picture by revealing psychological associations between certain phonemes and particular semantic contents, the precise mechanisms underlying these associations have not been fully elucidated. Here we provide novel evidence that certain phonemes have an inherent, non-arbitrary emotional quality. Moreover, we show that the perceived emotional valence of certain phoneme combinations depends on a specific acoustic feature—namely, the dynamic shift within the phonemes' first two frequency components. These data suggest a phoneme-relevant acoustic property influencing the communication of emotion in humans, and provide further evidence against previously held assumptions regarding the structure of human language. This finding has potential applications for a variety of social, educational, clinical, and marketing contexts.