Acquiring Assistance from Others The Effect of Indirect Requests and Relational Intimacy on Verbal Compliance

This research examines the effectiveness of indirect requests in attaining assistance from intimate and nonintimate others. Prior research indicates that people are inclined to make requests using indirect forms. However, help-seeking research has neglected to consider request forms, and research on indirect requests has focused mainly on issues of interpretation. The results of this study indicate that the directness of a request increases request force and also interacts with relational intimacy to influence verbal compliance. Directness is more effective at eliciting verbal compliance at higher levels of intimacy. The experimental findings highlight issues concerning the definition of indirectness and also the utility of merging interpretation and compliance in language research.     

Speaking about the Unspeakable: genocide and philosophy

ABSTRACT  Genocide is a political catastrophe. Yet it has not received much academic attention. A few social scientists have studied it. Philosophers have largely ignored it. There is a large literature on the Holocaust, but there is little agreement as to how this should be related to other genocides. Some have argued that the Holocaust represented a crisis of Western culture, but that Western culture has not responded adequately for the lack of the appropriate self-understanding. This crisis has been attributed to the predominance of scientistic models of rationality in our culture. Social-scientific approaches to genocide have been criticised because of their commitment to logical empiricism, which is held to be epistemologically and ethically inadequate. Ethical approaches based on liberal humanism have been criticised by post-Nietzschean philosophers for their attachment to allegedly outworn metaphysical assumptions. However, the deconstruction of social science and liberal ethics leads in the direction of relativism and nihilism, which are either useless or dangerous in the face of evils such as genocide. The arguments against conventional social science and ethics are examined, and a counter-critique made of post-modern philosophy in order to clear the ground for constructive thinking about genocide.     

INCREMENTAL VALIDITY OF EMPIRICALLY KEYED BIODATA SCALES OVER GMA AND THE FIVE FACTOR PERSONALITY CONSTRUCTS

The major purpose of this study was to determine whether empirically keyed, cross-validated biodata scales accounted for incremental variance over that accounted for by the five factor model (FFM) of personality and GMA predictors. A concurrent validation study was employed using 376 employees in a clerical job (222 in the developmental sample and 154 in the cross-validation sample). Results for the cross-validation sample provided support for the hypothesis that biodata predictors accounted for substantial incremental variance beyond that accounted for by the FFM predictors and GMA for 3 of the 4 criteria. Support was also found for the hypothesized zero-order correlations between GMA, FFM, and biodata predictors and the 4 criteria. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.