What Factors Influence Judges’ Rulings About the Legality of Affirmative Action Plans?

Purpose

When implementing affirmative action programs involving race and gender, human resource practitioners must balance efforts to increase workforce diversity against the need to avoid illegal reverse discrimination. The tension between non-discrimination law and preferential treatment is explored. In reverse discrimination case law, affirmative action plans are evaluated by judges along two dimensions: remedial need and limiting harm. The legal literature specifies certain factors such as statistical imbalance, employee qualification, and duration of plan that are usually examined within these two dimensions.

Methodology

A content analysis of 80 federal court cases was conducted to quantitatively analyze the weight and importance of these factors within judicial rulings as well as contextual factors (e.g., judge’s political affiliation, beneficiary of program) that may influence the outcome of affirmative action lawsuits.

Results

It was found that remedial need can be demonstrated by large statistical disparities in the workforce, and was also more likely to be found by Democratic than Republican judges. Limiting harm is more likely to be supported by plans that are of limited duration and do not use reserved slots, or quotas.

Implications

The study provides empirically based recommendations for the design of legally defensible affirmative action plans that involve preferential treatment.     

Beauty,Personality, and Affect as Antecedents of Counterproductive Work Behavior Receipt

Over the years, much attention has been devoted to understanding counterproductive work behavior (CWB) and its related concepts. Less is known, however, about whether certain employees find themselves more than others to be the targets of CWB. To examine this issue, we tested a model that positioned CWB receipt as a function of employees' personality (neuroticism, agreeableness), their appearance (physical attractiveness), and the negative emotions felt toward those employees by their coworkers. Two studies using multiple sources of data revealed that disagreeable and physically unattractive employees received more CWB from their coworkers, coworker negative emotion felt toward employees was associated with CWB receipt, and the relationship between employee agreeableness and CWB receipt was due, in part, to coworker negative emotion.     

Incentive Salience and Improved Performance

Using data from 441 call center employees at a large North American financial services firm, we studied how the frequency of thinking about an incentive available for performance led to increased output on an important performance metric. We find that people think more frequently about noncash tangible incentives (merchandise and travel) than cash incentives and that as the frequency of thought increases, performance increases. This leads to a larger performance boost for tangible incentives compared to a cash incentive of equal purchasing power. These results show an additional benefit from the use of tangible incentives and help answer the question regarding the psychological processes which make incentives motivating.     

Forecasting Elections from Voters' Perceptions of Candidates' Ability to Handle Issues

When deciding for whom to vote, voters should select the candidate they expect to best handle issues, all other things equal. A simple heuristic predicted that the candidate who is rated more favorably on a larger number of issues would win the popular vote. This was correct for nine out of ten U.S. presidential elections from 1972 to 2008. We then used simple linear regression to relate the incumbent's relative issue ratings to the actual two‐party popular vote shares. The resulting model yielded out‐of‐sample forecasts that were competitive with those from the Iowa Electronic Markets and established quantitative models. The issue‐index model has implications for political decision makers, as it can help to track campaigns and to decide which issues to focus on. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Rawls’s Principle of Justice as Fairness and Its Application to the Issue of Same-Sex Marriage

Abstract

This essay applies the principle of justice as fairness to the issue of same-sex marriage. I will outline Rawls’s theory of justice, including the original position and the veil of ignorance as the means by which choosers craft a just state. In considering whether same-sex marriage should be permissible, I argue that a just society, formulated in the Rawlsian context of justice as fairness, should allow them. I assert that gays and lesbians do count as equal citizens because they possess the minimum requirements of the capacity for a sense of justice, a conception of the good, and the ability to be cooperating members of society. Furthermore, within the original position gays and lesbians will be represented because choosers do not know their sexual orientation because it is one of the individual characteristics that are withheld behind the veil. Since the choosers do not know their sexual orientation, they will be unable to use that information in their construction of what counts as a just state comprised of free and equal citizens. Because the family, and the institution of marriage as a primary manifestation of the family, is one of the major social institutions within the basic structure, limitations must be carefully scrutinized.     

The role of ethnicity,gender, emotional content,and contextual differences in physiological,expressive, and self-reported emotional responses to imagery

Cardiovascular responses, skin conductance, corrugator ("frown"), and zygomaticus ("smile") electromyographic activity, and self-reported emotional responses were examined in response to scenarios that varied in emotional content and whether they involved interacting with a Black or White person. Black (33 women, 25 men) and White (28 women, 26 men) students imagined joy, neutral, fear, and anger situations. Emotional contents replicated patterns of physiological and self-reported emotion found in other studies, although gender differences in emotion found in other studies were evident only in White participants. Blacks exhibited more positive facial expressions, while Whites were more negatively expressive. Blacks, and particularly Black men, exhibited greater blood pressure reactivity to the emotional contexts. For both White and Black participants, imagined interactions with Blacks increased both positive and negative facial expression. Results suggest that, compared to Whites, Blacks are both more autonomically reactive to emotional interactions and may be responded to more emotionally. The results are discussed in terms of the need to study specific contextual factors rather than broad cross-cultural characterisations.     

Negative cognitive response to a sad mood induction: Associations with polymorphisms of the serotonin transporter (5-HTTLPR) gene

Increased negative thinking in response to sad mood states has been identified as a marker of depression risk. The present study examined whether polymorphisms of the serotonin transporter (5-HTTLPR) gene were associated with the tendency to endorse negative cognition after sad or neutral mood inductions in a healthy college student sample. Non-depressed participants were genotyped for the 5-HTTLPR and then viewed films designed to elicit a sad mood (n=30) or a neutral mood (n=23). Analyses indicated that individuals homozygous for the short 5-HTTLPR allele endorsed more negative cognition following a sad mood induction than individuals homozygous for the long 5-HTTLPR allele. Negative cognition did not vary as a function of 5-HTTLPR genetic status in the neutral mood condition. These preliminary results suggest that genetic variation of the serotonin transporter may contribute to depression vulnerability via a tendency to think more negatively in response to events that elicit sad mood.     

Modelling the Direct and Indirect Effects of Positive Emotional and Cognitive Traits and States on Social Judgements

It was hypothesised that positive affective states and situational information-processing demands would differentially influence the favourability of social judgements of a target social group. These hypothesised direct effects on social judgements were subsequently incorporated into a broader statetrait model of the social judgement process, whereby direct and indirect effects of personality and cognitive traits, along with positive affective states and information-processing demands (i.e. cognitive state), were also hypothesised to influence social judgements. Three hundred and eight subjects reported their trait levels of introversion-extraversion and need for cognition, and were subsequently induced into an affective state (content, happy, surprise, or neutral) and a cognitive state (heuristic or substantive information processing). Results indicated that study participants who were manipulated into either a content or a happy affect state made more positive judgements about the target group than study participants who were manipulated into either a surprised or a neutral state. Moreover, when the cognitive demands of the situation were low, a cognitive trait (need for cognition) and the affective state directly influenced the social judgement. H owever, when the cognitive demands of the situation were high, only an indirect effect of affective state through a cognitive state influenced the social judgement. Discussion focused on the components of the state-trait model of the social judgement process as it applies to positive affective states.     

Emotional dimensions as determinants of self-focused attention

Negative emotions, and particularly sadness, have been found to induce self-focused attention among both depressed and normal individuals. However, positive emotion, such as happiness, is sometimes found to have a similar effect. The present study examines the effect of emotion on self-focus induction by looking separately at the emotional dimensions of valence and arousal. It postulates that arousal would be even more potent than valence in increasing self-focus, since it increases the salience of the self. Results of Experiment 1 showed that emotions that are both intense and negative, such as fear, induce the most self-focus, but pleasant relaxation also resulted in increased self-focusing. Experiment 2, using a similar design, replicated the arousal effect, and showed that fear and joy, the two most arousing emotions resulted in the most self-focus.