Performance normativity and here-and-now doxastic agency

Synthese - Sosa famously argues that epistemic normativity is a species of “performance normativity,” comparing beliefs to archery shots. However, philosophers have traditionally...     

Distancing or drawing together: Sexism and organisational tolerance of sexism impact women's social relationships at work

This article examines the role of organisational climate in women's social responses to sexism at work. We argue that after experiences of sexism, women “draw together” with other women when they perceive that the organisational climate is intolerant of sexism. We assess the role of organisational climate at three levels: peer-, manager-, and policy-level. We conducted a correlational study (N_study1 = 405) and two experimental studies (N_study2 = 377, N_study3 = 391), in which we examined women's experiences of sexism at work (measured in Study 1; manipulated in Studies 2 and 3). We also measured perceived tolerance of sexism at the peer-, manager- and policy-level in all studies. The main DVs were women's workplace friendships with other women in Studies 1 and 2, and closeness to female co-workers in Study 3. Results showed that perceived tolerance of sexism from peers was especially important in shaping women's social relationships following experiences of sexism; tolerance from managers or at the policy level had less consistent effects. Specifically, experiences with sexism were positively associated with female participants' reported friendship (Studies 1 and 2) and closeness (Study 3) with their female colleagues, but only when peers were perceived not to tolerate sexism. When peers were perceived to tolerate sexism, female participants did not respond to sexism by drawing together.     

Counter-argument self-efficacy predicts choice of belief-defense strategies

Research has identified many strategies people use to defend against belief-inconsistent information. However, little research has identified factors that predict which defense strategy people will use when more than one is available. Two experiments tested whether people choose to counter-argue belief-inconsistent information because they believe arguing will be successful, but resort to weaker defense strategies because they believe arguing will be unsuccessful. Exposure to strong versus weak belief-inconsistent information caused a decrease in counter-arguing and an increase in ignoring (Experiment 1) or claiming a belief to be a matter of opinion (untestable) rather than a matter of fact (testable; Experiment 2). Consistent with self-efficacy theory, expectations of successful counter-arguing was the mechanism responsible for both effects. When people feel less capable of successfully counter-arguing because the information is too difficult to refute, they resort to epistemically weaker defense strategies in order to preserve their belief.     

Functional Properties are Epiphenomenal

Philosophia - I argue for the epiphenomenality of functional properties by means of thought experiments and general principles. General principles suggest that an object’s causal powers...     

Moral Values Reveal the Causality Implicit in Verb Meaning

Prior work has found that moral values that build and bind groups—that is, the binding values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and preservation of purity—are linked to blaming people who have been harmed. The present research investigated whether people's endorsement of binding values predicts their assignment of the causal locus of harmful events to the victims of the events. We used an implicit causality task from psycholinguistics in which participants read a sentence in the form “SUBJECT verbed OBJECT because…” where male and female proper names occupy the SUBJECT and OBJECT position. The participants were asked to predict the pronoun that follows “because”—the referent to the subject or object—which indicates their intuition about the likely cause of the event. We also collected explicit judgments of causal contributions and measured participants' moral values to investigate the relationship between moral values and the causal interpretation of events. Using two verb sets and two independent replications (N = 459, 249, 788), we found that greater endorsement of binding values was associated with a higher likelihood of selecting the object as the cause for harmful events in the implicit causality task, a result consistent with, and supportive of, previous moral psychological work on victim blaming. Endorsement of binding values also predicted explicit causal attributions to victims. Overall, these findings indicate that moral values that support the group rather than the individual reliably predict that people shift the causal locus of harmful events to those affected by the harms.     

Assessing the Intersectionality of Religious and Sexual Identities During the Coming-Out Process

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals often experience internalized and/or externalized religious rejection due to their sexual orientation. Initial steps in the coming-out process can be especially difficult and can result in existential crises, including questioning one's place within the religious/spiritual realm. The authors propose a developmental framework for conceptualizing the role of religion and spirituality in the coming-out process. Cass's (1979, 1984) stage model of coming out and Genia's (1995) model of religious development, along with additional literature addressing LGB spirituality, serve as foundations for this framework. Counseling and research implications of the framework are also discussed.     

Diachronic agency and practical entitlement

As diachronic agents, we deliberate and decide in the present to perform future courses of action. Such future‐directed decisions normally enjoy a distinctive species of rational authority over subsequent thought and action. But what is the nature of this authority, and what underwrites its normative force? In this paper, I argue that our answer to this question must begin by situating future‐directed deciding within an intrapersonal model of cross‐temporal influence. The role of future‐directed deciding (and intending), then, is not to generate a novel decision‐based reason for action, but instead to preserve a certain positive normative status over time. I develop an entitlement approach to decisional authority, according to which an agent who rationally decides to ? enjoys a practical entitlement, rather than a reason‐based practical justification, to ? at the appointed time. This entitlement is underwritten, I argue, by the warrant‐preserving nature of the sequence taking an agent from deliberation to subsequent action.     

Pairing People with Products: Anthropomorphizing the Object,Dehumanizing the Person

We present the first empirical integration of anthropomorphism and dehumanization, two intrinsically linked processes representing the extent to which the concept of humanness is activated for a given target. Across several experiments, we demonstrate that pairing a person and object in an ad, while focusing respondent attention on the object, leads to its being anthropomorphized and evaluated better compared to presenting it alone. However, compared to presenting a person alone, the same pairing leads to inferior evaluations of the person through a process of dehumanization. We rule out two alternative explanations for these effects, namely the transfer of an object's qualities to the person and consumption associations, and conduct a post‐test that provides additional support for our proposed activation/inhibition of humanness account. Finally, we inspect several moderators, finding that anthropomorphism only occurs with moderately and highly functional objects and dehumanization occurs irrespective of the person's gender or fame. By incorporating the literature on dehumanization, we propose new research questions to motivate future inquiry.     

Irrelevant‐action imitation is short‐term and contextual: Evidence from two under‐studied populations

Across the lifespan and across populations, humans ‘overimitate’ causally unnecessary behaviors. Such irrelevant‐action imitation facilitates faithful cultural transmission, but its immediate benefits to the imitator are controversial. Over short time scales, irrelevant‐action imitation may bootstrap artifact exploration or interpersonal affiliation, and over longer time scales it may facilitate acquisition of either causal models or social conventions. To investigate these putative functions, we recruited community samples from two under‐studied populations: Yasawa, Fiji, and Huatasani, Peru. We use a two‐action puzzle box: first after a video demonstration, and again one month later. Treating age as a continuous variable, we reveal divergent developmental trajectories across sites. Yasawans (44 adults, M = 39.9 years, 23 women; 42 children, M = 9.8 years, 26 girls) resemble documented patterns, with irrelevant‐action imitation increasing across childhood and plateauing in adulthood. In contrast, Huatasaneños (48 adults, M = 37.6 years, 33 women; 47 children, M = 9.3 years, 13 girls) evince a parabolic trajectory: adults at the site show the lowest irrelevant‐action imitation of any demographic set in our sample. In addition, all age sets in both populations reduce their irrelevant actions at Time 2, but do not reduce their relevant‐action imitation or goal attainment. Taken together, and considering the local cultural contexts, our results suggest that irrelevant‐action imitation serves a short‐term function and is sensitive to the social context of the demonstration.     

Why not to be a ‘Thomist’: A Critique of the Bañezian Reconciliation of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom

Thomas Osborne has asserted that ‘No one has developed an argument against premotion that works if the distinctions made by the Thomists are granted.' This article attempts to form just such an argument. Specifically, it argues that the Thomistic system – even with the distinctions it relies on having been granted – cannot account for human freedom, at least not in a sense sufficiently strong to sustain human guilt for sin. Further, it argues that the Thomists, by their own clear though tacit admission, acknowledge this insufficiency.