Remedial Responsibility for Severe Poverty: Justice or Humanity?

Remedial responsibility is the prospective responsibility to assist those in great need. With tens of millions of people worldwide suffering from severe poverty, questions about the attribution of remedial responsibility and the nature of the relevant duties of assistance are among the most pressing of our time. This article concerns the question of whether remedial responsibility for severe poverty is a matter of justice or of humanity. I discuss three kinds of situation in which an agent owes remedial responsibility to another suffering from severe poverty. In the first, the remedially responsible agent foreseeably and avoidably caused the poverty. In the second, the poverty was caused by forces outside the control of any agent, such as natural disaster. And in the third situation, the agent who was originally attributed remedial responsibility fails to fulfil it, and so remedial responsibility for the poverty in question is acquired by a secondary bearer. According to David Miller, remedial responsibility is a matter of justice in the first two situations, but not in the third. I argue that his grounds for thinking that remedial responsibility in the second situation are in tension with his view that remedial responsibility is not a matter of justice in the third situation. This has important implications in our world in which remedial responsibilities too often go unfulfilled.     

Age‐related differences in work motivation

This paper examines age‐related differences in work motivation in two samples of 9,388 and 2,512 individuals who completed a comprehensive motivation questionnaire for selection or development purposes. In the first sample, age differences were examined by controlling for gender and investigating whether relationships between age and motivation were non‐linear. Statistically significant relationships between motivation and age were found for most motivation scales, explaining up to 12% of the variance in specific scales. The second sample was used to confirm these results and to determine whether differences on these motivation scales could be explained by additional demographic variables, which were not available in the first sample. When controlling for demographic variables, such as gender, managerial experience, and university education, the pattern of results was similar in the second data set although effects were smaller. Results generally support propositions from the literature, which suggest a shift in people's motives rather than a general decline in motivation with age: older employees were less motivated by extrinsically but more by intrinsically rewarding job features.     

The nature of rhyme processing in preliterate children

Background. Rhyme awareness is one of the earliest forms of phonological awareness to develop and is assessed in many developmental studies by means of a simple rhyme task. The influence of more demanding experimental paradigms on rhyme judgment performance is often neglected. Addressing this issue may also shed light on whether rhyme processing is more global or analytical in nature. Aims. The aim of the present study was to examine whether lexical status and global similarity relations influenced rhyme judgments in kindergarten children and if so, if there is an interaction between these two factors. Sample. Participants were 41 monolingual Dutch-speaking preliterate kindergartners (average age 6.0 years) who had not yet received any formal reading education. Method. To examine the effects of lexical status and phonological similarity processing, the kindergartners were asked to make rhyme judgements on (pseudo) word targets that rhymed, phonologically overlapped or were unrelated to (pseudo) word primes. Results. Both a lexicality effect (pseudo-words were more difficult than words) and a global similarity effect (globally similar non-rhyming items were more difficult to reject than unrelated items) were observed. In addition, whereas in words the global similarity effect was only present in accuracy outcomes, in pseudo-words it was also observed in the response latencies. Furthermore, a large global similarity effect in pseudo-words correlated with a low score on short-term memory skills and grapheme knowledge. Conclusions. Increasing task demands led to a more detailed assessment of rhyme processing skills. Current assessment paradigms should therefore be extended with more demanding conditions. In light of the views on rhyme processing, we propose that a combination of global and analytical strategies is used to make a correct rhyme judgment.     

Working through: in-session processes that promote between-session thoughts and activities

This study examined whether clients' ratings of the working alliance as well as their perception of cognitive-behavioral (CB) and psychodynamic-interpersonal (PI) techniques (delivered by therapists who used both) were associated with clients' intersession processes (i.e., their thoughts about therapy and therapeutic activity between sessions). Seventy-five clients who were currently in therapy at a large university counseling center participated in the current study. Multilevel regression analyses demonstrated that alliance and clients' perceptions of their therapists' use of PI techniques were positively associated with clients' general thoughts about therapy between sessions. Also, stronger alliances were associated with more therapeutic activities between sessions and more positive (and less negative) thoughts about therapy between sessions. In addition, clients at later sessions who described their therapists as using more PI techniques also reported engaging in more therapeutic activities between sessions (after controlling for the variance in the other variables, such as use of CB techniques). Clients' perceptions of their therapists' use of CB techniques in the most recent session were not related to thinking about therapy or therapeutic activities after controlling for the variance in the other variables.     

Cleanliness and godliness: Mutual association between two kinds of personal purity

Purity rituals (such as baptism, mikvah, and ablution) are an important component of many religious practices. These practices not only help protect the faithful from physical contaminants, but also bestow symbolic purity and maintain the sanctity of sacred objects. The present work examines the association between religion and cleanliness, as two representations of personal purity. Religious primes were found to activate cleanliness concepts in a word-stem completion task (Study 1), and increased the subjective value of cleaning products (Study 2). In a final study, cleaning primes increased ratings of religious value. These studies suggest a mutual association between religiousness and cleanliness, and that each may activate the other as goals for personal purity.     

Stirring images: Fear, not happiness or arousal, makes art more sublime

Which emotions underlie our positive experiences of art? Although recent evidence from neuroscience suggests that emotions play a critical role in art perception, no research to date has explored the extent to which specific emotional states affect aesthetic experiences or whether general physiological arousal is sufficient. Participants were assigned to one of five conditions-sitting normally, engaging in 15 or 30 jumping jacks, or viewing a happy or scary video-prior to rating abstract works of art. Only the fear condition resulted in significantly more positive judgments about the art. These striking findings provide the first evidence that fear uniquely inspires positively valenced aesthetic judgments. The results are discussed in the context of embodied cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Chalmers on the objects of credence

Chalmers (Mind 120(479): 587–636, 2011a) presents an argument against “referentialism” (and for his own view) that employs Bayesianism. He aims to make progress in a debate over the objects of belief, which seems to be at a standstill between referentialists and non-referentialists. Chalmers’ argument, in sketch, is that Bayesianism is incompatible with referentialism, and natural attempts to salvage the theory, Chalmers contends, requires giving up referentialism. Given the power and success of Bayesianism, the incompatibility is prima facie evidence against referentialism. In this paper, I review Chalmers’ arguments and give some responses on behalf of the referentialist.     

Behavioral ethics for Homo economicus,Homo heuristicus,and Homo duplex

In this article we explore how assumptions about human nature may influence the ways one might try to promote ethical behavior in organizations. We summarize two common views of human nature in organizational research—Homo economicus and Homo heuristicus. We then extend these views by putting forward a third view of human nature initially proposed by Emile Durkheim—Homo duplex—which describes human beings as moving back and forth between a lower (individual) and higher (collective) level. We suggest that the Homo duplex view is uniquely equipped to account for variables of interest to organizational scholars because of its attention to a fundamental tension: People in organizations can be both selfish and groupish, and the balance between those tendencies influences the ethical profile of the organization in complex ways. We end with a discussion of the theoretical implications of the Homo duplex view for behavioral ethics researchers.     

The Simplest Axiom System for Hyperbolic Geometry Revisited,Again

Dependencies are identified in two recently proposed first-order axiom systems for plane hyperbolic geometry. Since the dependencies do not specifically concern hyperbolic geometry, our results yield two simpler axiom systems for absolute geometry.