The Embodiment Thesis

In this essay I articulate and defend a thesis about the nature of morality called “the embodiment thesis”. The embodiment thesis states that moral values underdetermine the obligations and entitlements of individual persons, and that actual social institutions must embody morality by specifying these moral relations. I begin by presenting two thought experiments that elucidate and motivate the embodiment thesis. I then proceed by distinguishing the embodiment thesis from a Rawlsian doctrine about the nature of justice, from the doctrine of moral relativism, and from solutions to the coordination problem of rational choice theory.     

When Me versus You Becomes Us versus Them: How Intergroup Competition Shapes Ingroup Psychology

Throughout evolutionary history, intergroup competition has been an influential part of social life. Although the topic has received substantial empirical attention among social psychologists, the majority of that work has focused on how ingroup and outgroup members regard one another. Only recently have researchers begun examining how intergroup rivalry changes that way that ingroup members perceive and relate to one another. New findings suggest that a variety of within‐group processes are influenced by the presence of a rival outgroup. In general, altruistic cooperation and prosocial motives increase among ingroup members when their group competes against another. The relationship between leaders and followers also shifts in response to intergroup rivalry: rather than wielding their power for selfish purposes, leaders prioritize the needs of their group. On the flip side, followers’ choice of leader changes, preferring males during times of intergroup competition but females in the absence of competition. Given the substantial impact of intergroup competition on ingroup processes, future research should continue to deepen the field’s knowledge of this topic. Additionally, the scope of research should be broadened to capture the effect of intergroup competition on ingroup dynamics, such as performance and group outcomes.     

Virginia Satir’s Family Camp Experiment: An Intentional Growth Community Still in Process

In 1976, Virginia Satir began Satir Family Camp (SFC) with therapists and their personal families. Initially, it was a context for the family to experience Satir’s concepts and techniques so that the family system would change along with the therapist. The training of therapists is no longer a significant part of camp; relationships with self, family, friends, and the community is now the main focal point. The process and governance of the camp is presented along with a lengthy anecdote of an experiential family session. These two features—community function and personal/familial growth—inextricably work together to provide a validating environment that supports desired changes.     

Counseling for the transition to adulthood as joint, goal-directed action

Transition is important in the career literature as it identifies times at which people are often likely to consult counselors about issues for which they need help. However, the counseling literature has not provided a conceptualization of, or research on, the joint, goal-directed actions and projects of the counselor and the client, which explicitly reflect the goal-directed nature of the transition itself. To address this issue, 12 counseling dyads, representing 37 counseling sessions, were studied. In these dyads, counseling was observed as the joint, goal-directed action between professional counselors and youth who sought assistance with their transition to adulthood. The data were collected using the action-project method. The counseling sessions were video-recorded, then immediately played back for the counselor and client separately to gather their recalled thoughts and feeling during counseling. Detailed qualitative analysis of the data set addressed the research question, “What are the goal-directed projects that counselors and their clients jointly construct, articulate, and enact relevant to the transition to adulthood?” The findings indicated the relationship and identity are intertwined goal-directed projects within counseling as well as outside of it. These projects contributed to the reframing and reorganization of clients' transition projects outside of counseling in occupational, educational, and familial domains. The findings suggest important implications for counseling youth in transition, that is, counselors and clients explicitly address their joint relationship and identity goals in an effort to realize a mutually satisfactory and important transition to adulthood.     

Relations among conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and procedural flexibility in two samples differing in prior knowledge

Competence in many domains rests on children developing conceptual and procedural knowledge, as well as procedural flexibility. However, research on the developmental relations between these different types of knowledge has yielded unclear results, in part because little attention has been paid to the validity of the measures or to the effects of prior knowledge on the relations. To overcome these problems, we modeled the three constructs in the domain of equation solving as latent factors and tested (a) whether the predictive relations between conceptual and procedural knowledge were bidirectional, (b) whether these interrelations were moderated by prior knowledge, and (c) how both constructs contributed to procedural flexibility. We analyzed data from 2 measurement points each from two samples (Ns = 228 and 304) of middle school students who differed in prior knowledge. Conceptual and procedural knowledge had stable bidirectional relations that were not moderated by prior knowledge. Both kinds of knowledge contributed independently to procedural flexibility. The results demonstrate how changes in complex knowledge structures contribute to competence development.     

Learning new faces in typically developing children and children on the autistic spectrum

As faces become familiar, recognition becomes easier but the style of processing also changes. Here, twenty-one typically developing (TD) children and twenty-one children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were familiarised with 6 identities over 3 days. Next, they completed a 4-alternative forced-choice matching test in which targets were the 6 familiarised faces and 6 unfamiliar faces. The TD group showed a significant advantage for familiarised faces when matching whole faces and both internal and external facial regions. The ASD group showed similar familiarisation effects for whole and external faces, but not for internal regions. The ASD group was also impaired at matching eyes and mouths of familiarised faces. Results suggest the process of acquiring familiarity with faces differs from ASD and TD children.     

What causes alternations in dominance during binocular rivalry?

Several mechanisms have been proposed to account for perceptual alterations during binocular rivalry, including neural adaptation and neural noise. However, the importance of neural adaptation for producing perceptual alterations has been challenged in several articles (Y.-J. Kim, Grabowecky, & Suzuki, 2006; Moreno-Bote, Rinzel, & Rubin, 2007). We devised an “online” adaptation procedure to reexamine the role of adaptation in binocular rivalry. Periods of adaptation inserted into rivalry observation periods parametrically alter the dynamics of rivalry such that increased adaptation duration decreases dominance duration, which cannot be accounted for by neural noise. Analysis of the average dominance durations and their variance (coefficient of variation) provides evidence for an increasingly important role of noise in rivalry alternations as a given dominance period continues in time, consistent with recent computational models.     

Selective attention to signs of success: social dominance and early stage interpersonal perception

Results from two experiments suggest that observers selectively attend to male, but not female, targets displaying signs of social dominance. Participants overestimated the frequency of dominant men in rapidly presented stimulus arrays (Study 1) and visually fixated on dominant men in an eyetracking experiment (Study 2). When viewing female targets, participants attended to signs of physical attractiveness rather than social dominance. Findings fit with evolutionary models of mating, which imply that dominance and physical attractiveness sometimes tend to be prioritized preferentially in judgments of men versus women, respectively. Findings suggest that sex differences in human mating are observed not only at the level of overt mating preferences and choices but also at early stages of interpersonal perception. This research demonstrates the utility of examining early-in-the-stream social cognition through the functionalist lens of adaptive thinking.