Editorial: Animal Metaphors

Social dominance theory (SDT) suggests that prejudice legitimizes and maintains the existing social hierarchy. Consistent with an SDT explanation, it was predicted that (a) perceptions of threat to the existing social hierarchy and (b) social dominance orientation (SDO) would be related to stronger beliefs in stereotypes and "legitimizing myths." In addition, this analysis tests SDT's predicted interaction between perceptions of threat and SDO. It was predicted that for high SDO individuals the relation between perceptions of intergroup threat and the endorsement of legitimizing myths would be stronger than for low SDO individuals. These predictions were examined using a national probability General Social Survey archival data set. The results were consistent with our predictions and suggest that social dominance theory compliments and augments other threat theories of prejudice.     

One Desire Too Many1

I defend the widely-held view that acting with moral worth does not require a desire for rightness as such. Some have recently come to reject this view, arguing that desires for rightness as such are necessary for avoiding a certain kind of luck thought incompatible with morally worthy action. I show that those who defend desires for rightness as such on the basis of this argument misunderstand the relationship between moral worth and the kind of luck that their argument employs. Consequently, the argument provides no reason to doubt the popular view that a desire for rightness as such is no part of virtue. I conclude by suggesting that a family of worries about merely accidentally right action presuppose one side of the recent debate about objectivism and perspectivism concerning moral rightness.     

The Influences of Category Learning on Perceptual Reconstructions

We explore different ways in which the human visual system can adapt for perceiving and categorizing the environment. There are various accounts of supervised (categorical) and unsupervised perceptual learning, and different perspectives on the functional relationship between perception and categorization. We suggest that common experimental designs are insufficient to differentiate between hypothesized perceptual learning mechanisms and reveal their possible interplay. We propose a relatively underutilized way of studying potential categorical effects on perception, and we test the predictions of different perceptual learning models using a two-dimensional, interleaved categorization-plus-reconstruction task. We find evidence that the human visual system adapts its encodings to the feature structure of the environment, uses categorical expectations for robust reconstruction, allocates encoding resources with respect to categorization utility, and adapts to prevent miscategorizations.