Political Animals: Luck, Love and Dignity

Human beings are both needy and dignified. How should we think about the relationship between our neediness and our worth? Card argues well that our vulnerability to luck is intertwined in the very conditions of moral agency. We can see the merit of her approach even more clearly by turning to some difficulties the Stoics have in preserving dignity while removing vulnerability. Stoicism does, however, help us to sort through the difficulties involved as we try to combine love of particular people with respect for all human life. Richardson is correct to suggest that love itself can animate the concern for all humanity; I also agree with him that institutions must play a major role in any solution to problems of inequality between nations. Although the “capabilities approach” offers an attractive account of one part of the goal of just political institutions, combining, as Moody-Adams suggests, respect for difference with a commitment to universal norms, I now believe that the capabilities account should be combined with a form of Rawlsian political liberalism that protects spaces within which citizens may pursue the good as they understand it.     

TRAINING PREDELINQUENT YOUTHS AND THEIR PARENTS TO NEGOTIATE CONFLICT SITUATIONS1

In response to parental requests for assistance in dealing with adolescent problem children, three parent-child pairs were taught negotiation responses to hypothetical conflict situations using behavior rehearsal and social reinforcement. The negotiation process was separated into component behaviors that were practised during simulations by each youth and his parent under the direction of trainers. Results indicated that (a) the procedures were successful in training youths and their parents in negotiation behaviors that produced agreements to conflict situations, and (b) these behaviors generalized to actual conflict situations in subjects' homes.     

Language and the ability to evaluate contradictions and tautologies

Children were found to experience difficulty evaluating contradictions of the form p & -p, and tautologies of the form p v -p. It was hypothesized that (a) the difficulty of these statements was not due solely to the logical words occuring in them, (b) part of the difficulty is due to the fact that their truth value derives from their linguistic form rather than from empirical considerations, and (c) the ability to examine language in an objective manner, apart from events and objects to which it refers, is necessary but not sufficient for correct evaluation of contradictions and tautologies. The results of two experiments support the hypothesis.     

Effects of prefeeding on the DRL preformance of rats with septal lesions.

Two experiments reported the effects of prefeeding normal and septal rats prior to their daily sessions on a differential reinforcement of low rates (DRL-20) schedule. Prefeeding reduced responses and increased reinforcements in the case of septal animals, regardless of the level of body weight. In the case of normal animals, prefeeding led to a decrease in responding and an increase in the number of reinforcements obtained only when the animals were at 85% of ad-lib levels, prefeeding, although it decreased responding, also decreased the frequency of obtained reinforcements. These results implied an impairment in normal animals in the discrimination of response feedback by stimulation arising from stomach distention.     

Child judgments of sentences varying in grammatical complexity

This study is another contribution to the development of a satisfactory child version of the linguistic task of judging grammaticality. With a nondifferentially reinforced forced-choice procedure, it was found that responses of 24 5- and 24 7-yr-old children did vary as a function of the grammatical complexity of stimulus sentences. The children judged sentence stimuli of two types (negatives and wh-word questions) each having three levels of grammatical complexity (two primitive and one well-formed). After each stimulus presentation, the subject pointed to the adult or the child in a photograph, depending on who was judged to have produced that utterance. Performance of the two age groups did not differ for the question stimuli, for which subjects pointed to the adult more frequently as the grammatical complexity of wh-word questions increased. In response to the negative sentences, the older group attributed more well-formed stimuli to the adult than primitive ones. While the younger group pointed to the adult more frequently for well-formed negatives than for the middle level negatives, they made more adult responses than expected to the least complex negatives. It was concluded that, with this procedure, 5- and 7-yr-olds demonstrate ability to distinguish grammatically well-formed from primitive sentences. Procedural improvements for future research may allow children this age and younger to demonstrate more adult-like discrimination between a variety of primitive and well-formed sentences.     

Productivity and uniqueness in continued word association as a function of subject creativity and stimulus properties

Ninety-six male and 44 female college students gave written continued associations for 2 minutes to each of 24 stimulus words and then completed the Remote Associates Test and the Revised Art Scale No significant relationship was found between the creativity measures for either sex Few relationships, differing for males and females, were found between the creativity measures and associative productivity or uniqueness Productivity and uniqueness were found to be substantially related, and common responses occurred earlier in time than unique responses The properties of the stimulus words (frequency, form class, and slope of associative hierarchy) had marked effects on response productivity and uniqueness The study confirms the strong impact of stimulus properties on associative productivity and demonstrates similar effects on uniqueness The creativity data, yielding weaker and less consistent relationships, are in keeping with a specificity theory but lend only limited support to Mednick's associative hypotheses.     

Acquisition of matching to sample via mediated transfer

Two severely retarded Down's-syndrome boys learned a matching-to-sample performance through mediated transfer. The transfer paradigm involved three sets of stimuli, one auditory set (A) and two visual sets (B and C). The subjects were taught directly to do B-A and C-B matching, but experienced no direct association between C and A. They acquired the ability to do C-A matching without having been taught that performance directly. They also learned indirectly to name some of the visual stimuli, but naming was apparently not the mediator in the emergent C-A matching. The use of words and letters as stimuli highlighted the possible relevance of mediated associations in the indirect acquisition of elementary reading comprehension and oral reading. The acquisition of matching via mediated transfer also raised some new considerations concerning the role of coding responses in arbitrary matching to sample.