Conflicting Intuitions about Causality1

In this article I examine five kinds of conflicting intuitions about the nature of causality. The viewpoint is that of a probabilistic theory of causality, which I think is the right general framework for examining causal questions. It is not the purpose of this article to defend the general thesis in any depth but many of the particular points I make are meant to offer new lines of defense of such a probabilistic theory. To provide a conceptual framework for the analysis, I review briefly the more systematic aspects of the sort of probabilistic theory of causality I advocate. I first define the three notions of prima facie cause, spurious cause, and genuine cause. The technical details are worked out in an earlier monograph (Suppes 1970) and are not repeated.     

A Dilemma of Late Life Memory

ABSTRACT Unexpected but vivid and compelling memories are a wide-spread experience in late life. The experience has often been described in literature, and in recent years has been the object of extensive gerontological research under the label ‘life review’. Such memories often include a reversal of judgment about a past act, relationship, event, etc. What earlier was judged to be so is, in the retrospect of late life, judged not to have been so after all. This presents a question: which judgment—the earlier or the later—has better epistemological credentials in such cases? Some obvious possible answers are considered and rejected. It would seem that the issue is not resolvable on epistemological grounds. A parallel dilemma seems to appear in other dimensions of experience. An example from aesthetic experience is briefly considered.     

THE MORAL REQUIREMENT IN THEISTIC AND SECULAR ETHICS

One of the central tasks of meta‐ethical inquiry is to accommodate the common‐sense assumptions deeply embedded in our moral discourse. A comparison of the potential of secular and theistic ethics shows that, in the end, theists have a greater facility in achieving this accommodation task; it is easier to appreciate the action‐guiding authority and binding nature of morality in a theistic rather than in a secular context. Theistic ethics has a further advantage in being able to accommodate not only this essential conceptual feature of morality, but also the existence of moral requirements and their source of normativity.     

MEASUREMENT ERROR IN RESEARCH ON HUMAN RESOURCES and FIRM PERFORMANCE: HOW MUCH ERROR IS THERE AND HOW DOES IT INFLUENCE EFFECT SIZE ESTIMATES?

Studies of the relationship between human resource (HR) practices and firm performance typically use a single respondent to assess firm level HR practices or HR effectiveness. However, previous research in other substantive areas suggests that rater differences are a potentially important source of measurement error. We demonstrate analytically the potential consequences of both random and systematic measurement error in research on HR and firm performance. However, our main focus is on random error and we show how generalizability theory can be applied to obtain better estimates of reliability by simultaneously recognizing multiple sources (e.g., items, raters) of random measurement error. These more inclusive reliability estimates, in turn, offer the possibility of more precisely quantifying substantive relationships in the HR and firm performance literature. In our sample, reliabilities (as estimated by generalizability coefficients) for single-rater assessments of HR variables were generally below .50. This degree of measurement error, if present in substantive studies on HR and firm performance, could lead to considerable bias, given that an unstandardized regression coefficient is corrected for measurement error in the independent variable by dividing by its reliability coefficient (not its square root). We also found only limited convergent validity between HR and line managers ratings of a second type of HR measure, HR effectiveness. In general, our findings suggest that future researchers need to devote greater attention to measurement error and construct validity issues. Our study provides an example of how generalizability theory can be useful in this pursuit.     

Mutual and unrequited love in adolescence and young adulthood

The purpose of the study was to examine the frequency of experiencing passionate love during adolescence and young adulthood as recalled by young adults, and to examine gender differences in this frequency. Female and male US. introductory psychology students, several of whom were of nontraditional age, responded to a questionnaire that asked about the frequency of their mutual and unrequited love experiences. Respondents provided information for four age periods ranging from childhood to age 25 years. Although the frequency of recalled mutual love experiences increased for both genders from childhood through the 16-to-20-year-age period, men reported more episodes or unrequited love during the 16-to-20-year-age period compared to (a) other age periods, (b) their reports of mutual love during that age period, and (c) the reports of unrequited love for 16-to-20-year-old women.     

Computerized Career Information Systems on the College Campus: A Low-Cost,Do-It-Yourself Approach

For a variety of reasons, computerized career information systems have not made any significant impact on college or university campuses. This article attempts to describe an economically feasible approach to designing computerized systems. The actual design and development of such a system on the campus of Virginia Tech University is outlined. We include a discussion of development rationale, cost, program offerings, and potential applications.     

The Emperor's clothes: Some serious problems in psychoanalytic training

The author discusses some of the key problems in psychoanalytic training, in particular those problems that stem from the power differential between training analysts and students in training. One effect of this differential can be that some students feel a pressure to comply with their teachers and supervisors, even their training analyst, in ways that can be seriously detrimental to their development. Further, when something goes wrong in a student's training, how is this to be viewed by those in charge of the training? Also, how are complaints dealt with? Is suffi cient weight given to external reality? Too often training analysts, and training committees, get into pathologising a student in a process that should be recognised as ‘wild analysis in committee’, rather than considering more carefully the external realities that may be affecting a student's progress in the training. This ‘analysis’ in committee should never be allowed. There is an urgency for immediate changes to be made in psychoanalytic training so that the problems discussed, with more care being taken, should be prevented from happening. Too often, however, an institutional resistance to change dominates discussions in committee, and in society meetings, with the result that little or no change takes place even after years of debate.     

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HR PRACTICES AND FIRM PERFORMANCE: EXAMINING CAUSAL ORDER

Significant research attention has been devoted to examining the relationship between HR practices and firm performance, and research support has assumed HR as the causal variable. Using data from 45 business units (with 62 data points), this study examines how measures of HR practices correlate with past, concurrent, and future operational performance measures. The results indicate that correlations with performance measures at all 3 times are both high and invariant, and that controlling for past or concurrent performance virtually eliminates the correlation of HR practices with future performance. Implications are discussed.