Missed opportunity for creating value in negotiations: reluctance to making Integrative Gambit Offers

In the present study we address a multi‐issue negotiation agenda, where several issues are under consideration and parties have different priorities among these issues. We suggest that in such agendas loss aversion and within issue anchoring may constrain the configuration of offers that parties propose to each other during the course of negotiation. We specifically focus on offers in which negotiators self‐propose to give the other party more than was demanded on one of the issues, while still maintaining or improving their overall value. We term such offers Integrative Gambit Offers (“IGO”s) and show that although making such offers improves integrative negotiation outcome, the frequency of making them is relatively low, and does not increase as negotiators gain experience with the task. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The mystery of the well-attended group. A model of Personal Construct Therapy for adolescent self-harm and depression in a community CAMHS service

This paper describes a style of weekly group therapy offered in a city CAMHS department for adolescent girls who are depressed and self-harming. Research has found that such girls typically have other psychological problems, such as anger, anxiety, low self-esteem, poor school performance, grief reactions and poor school attendance. This paper describes a group based upon Personal Construct Theory (Kelly, 1955 Kelly, G. (1955). The psychology of personal constructs, Vol. 1. New York: Routledge  [Google Scholar]) which addresses the management of symptoms and the problems underlying them. It takes into account each girl's unique history and her personal priorities, and group sessions aim to encourage each individual to understand and address their own difficulties. The group is open, has no set number of sessions to attend, and has no set week-by-week curriculum. Instead, it takes the individual's personal construction of their difficulties and works with it through the principles and techniques of Personal Construct Therapy. The group has been well-attended and has a positive atmosphere in sessions with the emphasis upon each individual taking responsibility for her own progress inside and outside the group. This paper will describe the principles and practice that are used in the group and the need for further research into the efficacy of this therapeutic treatment is highlighted.     

RELIGIOUS REASONS AND POLITICAL ARGUMENTATION

In Evangelium Vitae Pope John Paul II calls for a renewal of culture to combat the culture of death. He criticizes various aspects of a pluralistic, liberal society—a type of society that he claims is based on moral relativism and a view of democracy that becomes a substitute for moral law. He maintains that such a view trivializes moral choice. In this essay I argue that John Rawls's notion of a liberal society as an overlapping consensus of comprehensive doctrines can avoid relativism while allowing for reasonable debate among opposed positions. While Rawls maintains that comprehensive doctrines, including religions, should employ a form of public reason that is not a unique feature of any one comprehensive doctrine, I argue that this requirement is too strong. One is often justified in appealing to features of comprehensive doctrines other than one's own, features that are unique to the doctrines themselves. Such an appeal does not pretend to be neutral as public reason would seem to be. In the final section of the paper I discuss some suggestions made by the Pope regarding actions in civil society that are independent of debates about legal change and suggest some ways in which they might contribute to desired cultural transformation.     

A Test of Voir Dire as a Remedy for the Prejudicial Effects of Pretrial Publicity1

The present experiment asked two questions: Does prejudicial pretrial publicity produce bias that may impair juror objectivity and, if it does, can extended, defense attorney-conducted voir dire (jury examination procedure) remedy its untoward effects? Subjects were 68 college undergraduates who had or had not read pretrial publicity one week before viewing a mock murder trial. Just prior to viewing the trial, subjects experienced either minimal or extended voir dire. Both pretrial publicity and voir dire produced significant main effects on subjects' perceptions of defendant culpability. Subjects exposed to pretrial publicity perceived the defendant as more culpable than subjects not exposed to pretrial publicity. Subjects who experienced extended voir dire perceived the defendant as less culpable than subjects who experienced minimal voir dire. The interaction between pretrial publicity and voir dire was nonsignificant, indicating that, contrary to our hypothesis, voir dire did not reduce the impact of pretrial publicity.     

Leninism and the Enlightenment

Conclusion The outcome of this comparison of the impact of the Englishtenment on two rival philosophical traditions suggests that there are points of contact even on the issues that appear to push Leninism in an opposite direction from liberalism. The lack of communication between these two traditions results in a lack of vigor in developing their philosophies in a way that addresses the accomplishments of rival philosophies. For example, Leninism, which seeks to justify limits on the freedom of speech for those viewed as anti-socialist, would do well to reinforce its position by mastering the reasoning of the liberals who differentiate the rights of the Ku Klux Klan from those of the N.A.A.C.P. And liberalism, which has been concerned with overcoming formal equality to implement real, practical equality of opportunity, is in effect echoing one of Lenin's main concerns about democracy under capitalism.Insofar as Lenin put forward the idea of Marxism as the continuation and sublation of the best accomplishments of human culture, it appears to be a weakness of contemporary Leninism that it fails sufficiently to embrace or confront the body of philosophical thought characterizing the liberal democratic conceptions of the Enlightenment and of contemporary liberalism. Even though this body of thought was known to Lenin and partially appropriated as well as confronted by him, there is a lack of emphasis by Leninists upon the mastering of the arguments advanced by liberalism. The fact that rival, anti-Leninist thought also began from certain ideas of the Enlightenment underscores the importance for Leninism's own self-understanding of studying the evolution of Enlightenment philosophy, its links with twentieth-century liberalism, and the reasons for the rejection of liberal conceptions by Lenin.     

Training class inclusion responding in typically developing children and individuals with autism

In a class inclusion task, a child must respond to stimuli as being involved in two different though hierarchically related categories. This study used a Relational Frame Theory (RFT) paradigm to assess and train this ability in three typically developing preschoolers and three individuals with autism spectrum disorder, all of whom had failed class inclusion tests. For all subjects, relational training successfully established the target repertoire and subsequent testing demonstrated both maintenance and generalization. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.     

Do People Really Have Insights in the Shower? The When,Where and Who of the Aha! Moment

While there are well‐known anecdotes and documented insight cases by renowned scientists and inventors, little is known about the experiences of insight in the general population. The present study aimed to determine peoples' self‐reported experience of insight in their daily lives. Using an online questionnaire, responses were obtained from 1,114 respondents. Eighty‐percent reported having insights. These respondents reported demographic information and answered three open‐ended questions on where their insights occur, what insights are and other thoughts on insight. A greater percentage of those who have insights are, female, younger, highly educated, and involved in occupations including, management, sciences, arts and service professions. The qualitative results uncovered eight major themes, reflecting on the places people have insights: At night, work, shower, home, when it is quiet, transport, while exercising, and in nature. Two major themes emerged on what insights are: Something from the subconscious, and a result of (not) thinking. Finally, three major themes emerged from the third question on thoughts they would like to share on insight: The improvement of insight with age, the importance of analyzing the details of the problem, and the unexpectedness of the solution. Results are discussed in the context of the current experimental research on insight.     

The effect of pre-cueing on spatial attention across perception and action

It is well established that processes of perception and action interact. A key question concerns the role of attention in the interaction between perception-action processes. We tested the hypothesis that spatial attention is shared by perception and action. We created a dual-task paradigm: In one task, spatial information is relevant for perception (spatial-input task) but not for action, and in a second task, spatial information is relevant for action (spatial-output task) but not for perception. We used endogenous pre-cueing, with two between-subjects conditions: In one condition the cue was predictive only for the target location in the spatial-input task; in a second condition the cue was predictive only for the location of the response in the spatial-output task. In both conditions, the cueing equally affected both tasks, regardless of the information conveyed by the cue. This finding directly supports the shared input-output attention hypothesis.     

The Prejudicial Impact of Pretrial Publicity1

The current studies examine the influence of pretrial publicity on potential jurors' attitudes toward a defendant. In Study 1, following one year of newspaper coverage of the investigation, arrest, and indictment of defendants for distributing large quantities of marijuana in southern Illinois, 604 potential jurors in that district were surveyed regarding their knowledge of the case, general attitudes toward crime, and attitudes toward the specific case. Analyses of the survey data revealed that knowledge of the case specifics was positively and significantly correlated with perceived culpability of the defendant but nonsignificantly correlated with willingness to admit partiality. Study 2 dealt with a highly publicized Dade County, Florida murder of a police officer in a drug sting operation. Again knowledge of pretrial publicity correlated significantly with perceived culpability of the defendant. As in Study 1, such knowledge did not correlate with stated ability to be impartial. We conclude that even modest pretrial publicity can prejudice potential jurors against a defendant and that self-reports of impartiality should not be taken at face value.     

Social facilitation as a function of the mere presence of others

According to R. B. Zajonc's (1965) drive theory of social facilitation, the mere presence of others increases arousal and, thereby, the frequency of dominant responses (i.e., responses with the greatest habit strength). In the present experiment, U.S. undergraduates performed a stimulus discrimination task under 1 of 2 conditions: in the presence of another individual (audience) or alone. The mere presence condition was designed to make it difficult for the participants to attend directly to the audience. The task was designed to minimize the likelihood that the specific response (numerical preference) would be attributable to a desire to respond appropriately to the audience. There was a significant difference in the mean number of dominant responses between the participants in the audience condition and those in the alone condition. The results provide support for Zajonc's mere presence drive theory of social facilitation.