Agenda 2000 — Social judgment and attitudes: warmer,more social,and less conscious

Developments in social judgment research during the last two decades have broadened the explanatory power of the information processing perspective by paying attention to the social context of human judgment, the importance of ‘warm' cognition, and the role of nonconscious processes. The application of social cognition theorizing to the formation of attitude judgments provided new insights into classic issues of attitude research, suggesting that attitudes may be fruitfully conceptualized as temporary constructions. Implications of these developments, open issues, and potentially fruitful avenues for future research are discussed. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Kleptomanie und Ladendiebstahl: Ein historischer Überblick

The phenomenon of illness-indicating theft acts committed by apparently psychologically normal offenders engages psychiatry since the beginning of the 19^th century. With the specialist term kleptomania therefore an independent syndrome was created, which was seen as an isolated disturbance of the will (monomania). Structural abnormalities of the brain, women-specific life conditions, problems in early childhood development and the seductions of offensive advertisement strategies of modern big stores were esteemed as causally responsible. In spite of often voiced criticism, the conception of a mental disorder, which is expressed only by theft acts had outlasted more than 150 years. In the currently valid classification systems of mental diseases, kleptomania as well as the leading symptoms are classified as an impulse control disorder. This fact by all appearances has awarded them the grade of detectability. However, in fact these criteria prove as unspecific. The problem with it is that the question of an illness background of theft acts is posed mostly in the context of assessing the criminal responsibility. In fact illness-conditioned stealing is found only as a symptom among other quite different mental diseases and extraordinary situational charges. The concentration to the only theft act carries the risk of disregarding the careful exploration and preparation of the real psychological problem.     

How extending your middle finger affects your perception of others: Learned movements influence concept accessibility

Body movements both express and influence how people feel and think. Conceptualizations of this bidirectional influence assume that movement-concept associations can be innate or learned, although evidence for learned associations remained ambiguous. Providing a conservative test of learned movement-concept associations, two studies investigate the influence of culture-specific body movements, which involve an arbitrary relationship between movements and associated concepts. Paralleling the influence of hostility primes, extending the middle finger influenced the interpretation of ambiguously aggressive behaviors as hostile, but did not influence unrelated trait judgments (Study 1). Paralleling the effects of global evaluative primes, upward extension of the thumb resulted in more positive evaluations of the same target along all trait dimensions and higher liking of the target (Study 2).     

Financial aspirations,financial success,and overall life satisfaction: who? and how?

Nickerson et al. (2003, Psychological Science 14, pp. 531–536) demonstrated in a longitudinal study that the negative relation between aspirations for financial success and subjective well-being found by other researchers was mitigated by high household income. The present study first refined the analysis in Nickerson et al. (2003) and then explored two additional issues: (a) who aspires to financial success? and (b) how is financial success achieved? Analysis indicated that individuals with strong financial aspirations are socially inclined, confident, ambitious, politically conservative, traditional, conventional, and relatively less able academically, but not psychologically distressed. Financial success is achieved via the job and, for women only, via marriage. Financial aspirations influence job income both by influencing choice of occupation and by influencing job income within occupation; however, achieving financial success depends on having the personal resources to do so. Women with strong financial aspirations tend to marry for money (or money-making potential) regardless of their work status; men with strong financial aspirations do not.     

Innerdeutsche Migration und psychisches Befinden

In a representative study German migrants within Germany were assigned to two different groups depending on their answers to the following two questions (?Where did you mainly grow up – Eastern Germany or Western Germany?“ and ?Where do you live now?“). The migrants (54 West-East and 68 East-West migrants) were compared with non-migrants (1,136 Western and 294 Eastern Germans) concerning different variables of their psychic condition. Migrants suffered from higher stress, less bodily well-being and more somatic symptoms than non-migrants. Probands migrating from Western to Eastern Germany reported the lowest levels of quality of life.     

Context effects in political judgement: assimilation and contrast as a function of categorization processes

Two experiments demonstrate that thinking about a given politician may result in assimilation as well as contrast effects in evolutions of the politician's party. In two experiments, assimilation effects were observed when an experimental categorization task elicited the inclusion of a highly respected politician in the representation formed of his party, whereas contrast effects were observed when the categorization task elicited his exclusion from the representation, with the control group falling in between. Hence, the same information may elicit assimilation as well as contrast effects, depending on its use in mental construal. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CULTURE AND HISTORY: ESSENTIAL PARTNERS IN THE CONVERSATION BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE

Abstract. In this essay I respond to John Caiazza's claim for the primacy of what he calls techno‐secularism for understanding twentieth‐century history. Using the examples of the Taiping Rebellion in nineteenth‐century China and Zionism in twentieth‐century Europe, I argue that the range of Caiazza's schema is confined solely to the Protestant West with little applicability to other national histories. I argue further for the lack of clarity and therefore the uselessness of the dichotomy of the secular and the religious for understanding human history. I claim instead that, while the category of technology and the institutions of religion are important determiners in human history, they need to be subsumed, without special status, within a broader set of interrelated factors called “culture.” I appeal for the academic study of science and religion to give primacy for the near future to the history of science and religion over both theology and science.     

Ideal is typical.

A well-established finding in research on concepts and categories is that some members are rated as better or more typical examples than others. It is generally thought that typicality reflects centrality, that is, that typical examples are those that are similar to many other members of the category. This interpretation of typicality is based on studies in which participants had little knowledge about the relevant categories. In the present study, experienced fishermen were asked to give goodness-of-example ratings to familiar freshwater fish. These fishermen were of two cultural groups with somewhat different goals and ideals. Typicality was well predicted by fishes' desirability and poorly predicted by their centrality. Further, the two cultural groups differed in their typicality ratings in ways that corresponded to their different goals and ideals. For knowledgeable reasoners typicality in natural taxonomic categories appears based on ideals rather than on centrality.     

Ethics of Globalization and the AIDS Crisis from a Jewish Perspective

This essay explores what Jewish ethics has to say about globalization in relation to the AIDS crisis. Special attention is paid to the consequences in affirming current intellectual trends to transcend traditional limits in both society and thought for rethinking traditional Jewish values. The discussion proceeds from two presuppositions. The first is that there is an intimate connection between ethics, science, and politics. The second is that the history of Jewish ethics involves three distinct forms that are generally correlated but rarely identical in content and moral judgment. These three forms are law, wisdom or virtue, and covenant. The discussion considers related issues of accidental connections in time between the bubonic plague and Zionism and between AIDS and homosexuality in relation to moral–theological issues related to divine providence and distributive justice.