To escape blame, don't be a hero—Be a victim

In situations where people (or their lawyers) seek to escape blame for wrongdoing, they often use one of two strategies: frame themselves as a hero (hero strategy) or as a victim (victim strategy). The hero strategy acknowledges wrongdoing, but highlights previous good deeds to offset blame. The victim strategy also acknowledges wrongdoing, but highlights the harms suffered by the perpetrator to deflect blame. Although commonsense suggests that past good deeds can offset blame from transgressions, moral typecasting (Gray & Wegner, 2009) suggests otherwise. Despite past good deeds, heroes remain blameworthy as moral agents. On the other hand, victims are moral patients and thus incapable of blame. Three studies found that victim strategy consistently reduced blame, while the hero strategy was at best ineffectual and at worst harmful. This effect appeared to stem from how the minds of victims and heroes are perceived.     

Reporting Ethics Committee Approval in Public Administration Research

While public administration research is thriving because of increased attention to social scientific rigor, lingering problems of methods and ethics remain. This article investigates the reporting of ethics approval within public administration publications. Beginning with an overview of ethics requirements regarding research with human participants, I turn to an examination of human participants protections for public administration research. Next, I present the findings of my analysis of articles published in the top five public administration journals over the period from 2000 to 2012, noting the incidences of ethics approval reporting as well as funding reporting. In explicating the importance of ethics reporting for public administration research, as it relates to replication, reputation, and vulnerable populations, I conclude with recommendations for increasing ethics approval reporting in public administration research.     

Thin slices of creativity: Using single-word utterances to assess creative cognition

We investigated the hypothesis that individual differences in creative cognition can be manifest even in brief responses, such as single-word utterances. Participants (n = 193) were instructed to say a verb upon seeing a noun displayed on a computer screen and were cued to respond creatively to half of the nouns. For every noun–verb pair (72 pairs per subject), we assessed the semantic distance between the noun and the verb, using latent semantic analysis (LSA). Semantic distance was higher in the cued ("creative") condition than the uncued condition, within subjects. Critically, between subjects, semantic distance in the cued condition had a strong relationship to a creativity factor derived from a battery of verbal, nonverbal, and achievement-based creativity measures (β= .50), and this relation remained when controlling for intelligence and personality. The data show that creative cognition can be assessed reliably and validly from such thin slices of behavior.     

SANLab-CM: A tool for incorporating stochastic operations into activity network modeling

The Stochastic Activity Network Laboratory for Cognitive Modeling (SANLab-CM) is a new tool that incorporates stochastic operations into activity network modeling (Schweickert, Fisher, & Proctor, 2003). In this article, we discuss the core functionality of SANLab-CM and walk through a case study that expands a previously published single, static path model of telephone operators interacting with customers via a workstation (from Gray, John, & Atwood, 1993) into a stochastic model that generates 55 unique paths with different frequencies and a variety of qualitative properties. Without SANLab-CM, it would have been easy to mistake some of the more frequent critical paths as evidence for alternative strategies for task completion. With SANLab-CM, these critical paths can be shown to be simple emergent properties of variability in elementary cognitive, perceptual, and motor processes.     

Spatial modulation of tactile temporal-order judgments

We report a series of three experiments designed to examine the effect of posture on tactile temporal processing. Observers reported which of two tactile stimuli, presented to the left and right index fingers (experiments 1-3; or thumb, experiment 3), was perceived first while adopting one of two postures--hands-close (adjacent, but not touching) or hands-far (1 m apart)--in the dark. Just-noticeable differences were significantly smaller in the hands-far posture across all three experiments. In the first two experiments we compared hand versus foot responses and found equivalent advantages for the hands-far posture. In the final experiment the stimuli were presented to either the same or different digit on each hand (index finger or thumb) and we found that only when the same digit on each hand was stimulated was there an advantage for the hands-far posture. The finding that temporal precision was better with greater distance contradicts predictions based on attention-switching models of temporal-order judgments, and also contrasts with results from similar experimental manipulations in other modalities (eg vision). These results provide support for a rapid and automatic process that transforms the representation of a tactile stimulus from a skin-centred reference frame to a more external (eg body-centred or allocentric) one.     

Love,That Indispensable Supplement: Irigaray and Kant on Love and Respect

Is love essential to ethical life, or merely a supplement? In Kant's view, respect and love, as duties, are in tension with each other because love involves drawing closer and respect involves drawing away. By contrast, Irigaray says that love and respect do not conflict because love as passion must also involve distancing and we have a responsibility to love. I argue that love, understood as passion and based on respect, is essential to ethics.