Primo Levi’s bearing witness and the reinterpreted past: post‐truth and the authoritarian other

The stark realism of Primo Levi’s experiences of the Shoah is considered in light of the current political climate in which the authoritarian other induces a divergence between reality, a state of things as they actually exist or existed, and truth, that which to some extent accords to reality. In this paper I will consider how truth becomes divorced from reality by considering Giegerich’s interpretation of Plato’s Parable of the Cave, arguing that truth is affected by perception and belief. After addressing ‘truth’ in justice, analytic work and the family, the post‐truth phenomenon is discussed and defined as a force erosive to reason and sensibility; its general purpose is to avoid doubt and anxiety. The past is interpreted and re‐interpreted to advance multiple geopolitical interests. Levi warned, in 1976, that the authoritarian state considers it quite permissible to alter the perception of what is true.     

Centering Prayer as a Healing Response to Everyday Stress: A Psychological and Spiritual Process

Eastern forms of meditation have been widely studied for their effectiveness in stress management (Walsh and Shapiro American Psychologist 61:227–239, 2006). Yet few empirical studies have been conducted on the health effects of Judeo-Christian contemplative prayer practices. This study contributes to research in this underdeveloped area by exploring the outcome of a contemporary form of Christian meditation called Centering Prayer (Keating 1986) on everyday stress and on Christians’ approach to communicating with God. The impact of 10 weekly 2-hour group sessions and individual practice of Centering Prayer 2-times daily by 15 Roman Catholic congregants was hypothesized to decrease participants’ stress and increase their collaborative relationship with God (Pargament et al. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 27:90–104, 1988). Pre-post quantitative and qualitative data on Centering Prayer versus comparison groups supported the hypothesis.     

A new look at the attribution of moral responsibility: The underestimated relevance of social roles

What are the main features that influence our attribution of moral responsibility? It is widely accepted that there are various factors which strongly influence our moral judgments, such as the agent’s intentions, the consequences of the action, the causal involvement of the agent, and the agent’s freedom and ability to do otherwise. In this paper, we argue that this picture is incomplete: We argue that social roles are an additional key factor that is radically underestimated in the extant literature. We will present an experiment to support this claim.     

Is there really an omission effect?

The omission effect, first described by Spranca and colleagues (Spranca, Minsk, & Baron, 1991), has since been extensively studied and repeatedly confirmed (Cushman, Murray, Gordon-McKeon, Wharton, & Greene, 2012). All else being equal, most people judge it to be morally worse to actively bring about a negative event than to passively allow that event to happen. In this paper, we provide new experimental data that challenges previous studies of the omission effect both methodologically and philosophically. We argue that previous studies have failed to control for the equivalence of rules that are violated by actions and omissions. Once equivalent norms are introduced, our results show that the omission effect is eliminated, even if the negative outcome of the behavior is foreseen and intended by the agent. We show that the omission effect does not constitute a basic, moral disposition but occurs exclusively in complex moral situations. Building on these empirical results, we cast doubt onto two influential explanations of the omission effect, the Causal Relevance Hypothesis and the Overgeneralization Hypothesis, and provide a novel explanation of the phenomenon. Furthermore, we discuss various ramifications of the interplay between our understanding of omissions and legal systems.     

The Employment Interview: The Role of Sex Stereotypes in the Evaluation of Male and Female Job Applicants in the Netherlands1

This field study focused on the influence of sex stereotypes in the evaluation of male (N=38) and female (N=21) job applicants in the Netherlands. The employee selection process for higher-level technical and academic jobs in real life situations was studied, with special attention to the assessment of applicants by members of selection committees. It was demonstrated that, according to the job interviewers, the ideal applicant had more masculine than feminine traits. Males and females were regarded as having the same qualifications for the job, but because male applicants were assessed as having more masculine characteristics and female applicants more feminine characteristics, the male applicants were accepted more often. The job interviewers acted according to a fit model: The applicant most similar in traits to the ideal applicant was hired for each job.     

Proactive interference in immediate serial recall

Two experiments yielded significant inter-list proactive interference (PI) in immediate serial recall of nine-consonants lists. This argues against the assumption that intra-trial rehearsal is sufficiently powerful to prevent PI from occurring. In the first experiment PI proved to be more pronounced in the case of visually than of auditorily presented lists to the extent that the modality effect on the prerecent items could be completely attributed to PI. PI also enlarged the effect of output interference through reversed order recall. These findings were confirmed in the second experiment which also showed that the effect of PI persisted at a slower presentation rate, suggesting that the role of rehearsal in counteracting PI should not be overestimated. Implications of these results for current notions on short-term retention are discussed.     

The evaluation of effectiveness and likability of gender-role congruent and gender-role incongruent leaders

The aim of the present study was to test the gender-role congruency hypothesis in the context of assumed leadership. Three hundred and forty-two female and 154 male Dutch students participated in a laboratory experiment. We expected that gender-role incongruent leaders would be evaluated less favorably than gender-role congruent leaders and that male subjects would devalue the gender-role incongruent leaders to a greater extent than would female subjects. In addition, we were interested in the relative contribution of the effectiveness and likability measures to the devaluation of gender-role incongruent leaders. The gender-role congruency hypothesis was supported by the data from male subjects only, and then only for the effectiveness measures. The results are discussed in the context of two meta-analyses concerning the impact of gender stereotypes on judgments of competence and evaluation of leaders.     

Just Like Other People: Narcissism Among Pastors

In contemporary culture, narcissism is an important and common personality trait. It colours people's attitudes towards themselves and others, and plays an important role in their performance and success in relational occupations, including the pastorate. A survey among Dutch pastors was used as the basis for developing a typology of four narcissistic styles: balanced, vulnerable, undisguised, and masking. The implications of these four styles for the pastoral profession are discussed.     

Empirically Investigating the Concept of Lying

Lying is an everyday moral phenomenon about which philosophers have written a lot. Not only the moral status of lying has been intensively discussed but also what it means to lie in the first place. Perhaps the most important criterion for an adequate definition of lying is that it fits with people’s understanding and use of this concept. In this light, it comes as a surprise that researchers only recently started to empirically investigate the folk concept of lying. In this paper, we describe three experimental studies which address the following questions: Does a statement need to be objectively false in order to constitute lying? Does lying necessarily include the intention to deceive? Can one lie by omitting relevant facts?