Attribute and Responsibility Framing Effects in Television News Coverage of Poverty1

This study looks at how television news may contribute to inaction toward the poor through the attribute and responsibility framing of poverty stories. Participants were shown 1 of 4 news presentations on poverty. The news presentations depicted the poor as either primarily Black or primarily White, and framed poverty stories either episodically or thematically. Individuals shown presentations depicting the poor as White felt stronger that too little was being spent on poverty programs and were more likely to take a flyer about volunteering with a poverty charity than were participants shown presentations depicting the poor as Black. This pattern of results was found for both White and Black participants. No effects were found based on the responsibility framing.     

Conceivability,Explanation, and Defeat

Christopher Hill and Joseph Levine have argued that the conceivabilitiesinvolved in anti-materialist arguments are defeated as evidence ofpossibility. Their strategy assumes the following principle: theconceivability of a state of affairs S constitutes evidence for thepossibility of S only if the possibility of S is the bestexplanation of the conceivability of S. So if there is a betterexplanation of the conceivability of S than its possibility, then theconceivability of S is thereby defeated as evidence of possibility. Hilland Levine proceed to offer alternative explanations of theseconceivabilities, concluding that these conceivabilities are therebydefeated as evidence. However, this strategy fails because theirexplanations generalize to all conceivability judgments concerningphenomenal states. Consequently, one could defend absolutely any theoryof phenomenal states against conceivability arguments in just this way.This result conflicts with too many of our common sense beliefs aboutthe evidential value of conceivability with respect to phenomenalstates. The general moral is that the application of such principles ofexplanatory defeat is neither simple nor straightforward.     

Poetry and Truth: A Response to Wilna Meijer A response to Professor Meijer

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

Lying in the elementary school years: verbal deception and its relation to second-order belief understanding

The development of lying to conceal one's own transgression was examined in school-age children. Children (N=172) between 6 and 11 years of age were asked not to peek at the answer to a trivia question while left alone in a room. Half of the children could not resist temptation and peeked at the answer. When the experimenter asked them whether they had peeked, the majority of children lied. However, children's subsequent verbal statements, made in response to follow-up questioning, were not always consistent with their initial denial and, hence, leaked critical information to reveal their deceit. Children's ability to maintain consistency between their initial lie and subsequent verbal statements increased with age. This ability is also positively correlated with children's 2nd-order belief scores, suggesting that theory of mind understanding plays an important role in children's ability to lie consistently.     

Developmental reversal in classification accuracy due to an increase with age in orientation-free judgments.

A complete developmental reversal in accuracy was obtained in Experiment I in which third graders, sixth graders, and adults judged the class membership of patterns presented in a same-different task. An examination of the task requirements and pattern classes employed led to the hypothesis that the reversal in accuracy resulted from an increase with age in orientation-free judgments. The results of Experiment II, in which adults were told to not rotate the patterns, and Experiment III, which was a replication of Experiment I using symmetric rather than areally skewed pattern classes, provided confirmation for that hypothesis.     

Ethical dimensions of group leadership

In Conclusion This article has attempted to identify some of the basic life values that can provide guidelines for the ethically responsible group leader. The value guidelines have support in both psychological and religious knowledge. Such values put the leadership of groups in a frame of reference that indicates that growth of persons, freedom of will, use of man's mind, meaningful fellowship, and the importance of the individual are the dynamic dimensions of qualitative group functioning in today's organization.     

A reexamination of the faithful subject role

Fillenbaum (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1966, 4, 532–537; Fillenbaum & Frey, Journal of Personality, 1970, 38, 43–51) has proposed that a relatively large number of subjects within certain experiments will adopt a faithful subject role, that is, they will intentionally avoid basing their behavior on any suspicions they may have regarding the experimenter's hypothesis. However, examination of the studies on which this conclusion was based casts doubt on whether Fillenbaum's subjects were truly faithful or whether they may have become aware of the nature of the deception after all opportunity for awareness to influence their responses had passed. To test this hypothesis, awareness measures were administered to subjects either before they took an incidental learning test or (as in Fillenbaum's studies) after the test. As predicted, fewer subjects were classified as faithful in the first condition than in the second. It was concluded that, in fact, very few if any subjects are actively faithful. Discussion also concerned the problems associated with role analyses of subject behavior.