Interpersonal issues in the Wanglie case

The case of Helga Wanglie involved a conflict between the medical team, which concluded that a respirator was providing no medical benefit to the 87-year-old woman and should therefore be discontinued, and Ms. Wanglie's family who did not want the respirator removed. Most published commentary on the case has analyzed the medical team's conclusion. In contrast, this article examines the impact of the conflict on the conduct of the clinical case, and on the relationships among the various parties involved.     

Intergroup contact between professional groups: Two evaluation studies

We report two studies which evaluate practically-oriented programmes of interprofessional contact involving doctors and social workers. The evaluation is based on the ‘contact hypothesis’ in intergroup relations, and highlights four sets of dependent measures: background perceptions, ingroup and outgroup ratings, knowledge, and judgements about work with outgroup partners and experienced contact. Consistent with the contact hypothesis, both studies revealed an improvement in outgroup attitudes, evidence of mutual intergroup differentiation (acknowledged superiority of ingroup and outgroup on independent dimensions), and increased outgroup knowledge. Greater change in Study 2 is interpreted in terms of its longer duration, and the opportunity it provided for contact with multiple outgroup members, compared with a single outgroup partner in Study 1. These findings from field studies are consistent with results from published laboratory experiments.     

Catching up with wonderful women: The women‐are‐wonderful effect is smaller in more gender egalitarian societies

Inequalities between men and women are common and well‐documented. Objective indexes show that men are better positioned than women in societal hierarchies—there is no single country in the world without a gender gap. In contrast, researchers have found that the women‐are‐wonderful effect—that women are evaluated more positively than men overall—is also common. Cross‐cultural studies on gender equality reveal that the more gender egalitarian the society is, the less prevalent explicit gender stereotypes are. Yet, because self‐reported gender stereotypes may differ from implicit attitudes towards each gender, we reanalysed data collected across 44 cultures, and (a) confirmed that societal gender egalitarianism reduces the women‐are‐wonderful effect when it is measured more implicitly (i.e. rating the personality of men and women presented in images) and (b) documented that the social perception of men benefits more from gender egalitarianism than that of women.