Preventing Contagion With Avian Influenza: Disease Salience,Attitudes Toward Foreigners,and Avoidance Beliefs1

Building on an evolutionary approach to out‐group avoidance, this study showed relations between perceived disease salience and beliefs in the efficacy of avoiding foreigners as protective measures in the context of a real‐life pandemic risk; i.e., avian influenza. People for whom avian influenza was salient and who held unfavorable attitudes toward foreigners were more likely to believe that avoiding contact with foreigners protects against infection. This finding suggests that individual differences in social attitudes moderate evolved mechanisms relating threat of disease to out‐group avoidance.     

Contextual cueing in preview search

Frequently finding a target in the same location within a familiar context reduces search time, relative to search for objects appearing in novel contexts. This learned association between a context and a target location requires several blocks of training and has long-term effects. Short-term selection history also influences search, where previewing a subset of a search context shortly before the appearance of the target and remaining distractors speeds search. Here we explored the interactions between contextual cueing and preview benefit using a modified version of a paradigm from Hodsoll and Humphreys (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31(6), 1346–1358, 2005). Participants searched for a T target among L distractors. Half of the distractors appeared 800 ms before the addition of the other distractors and the target. We independently manipulated the repetition of the previewed distractors and the newly added distractors. Though the previewed set never contained the target, repetition of either the previewed or the newly added context yielded contextual cueing, and the effect was greater when the previewed context repeated. Another experiment trained participants to associate the previewed context with a target location, then disrupted the association in a testing phase. This disruption eliminated contextual cueing, suggesting that learning of the previewed context was associative. These findings demonstrate an important interaction between distinct kinds of selection history effects.

     

The “Ought-Is” Problem: An Implementation Science Framework for Translating Ethical Norms Into Practice

Abstract

We argue that once a normative claim is developed, there is an imperative to effect changes based on this norm. As such, ethicists should adopt an “implementation mindset” when formulating norms, and collaborate with others who have the expertise needed to implement policies and practices. To guide this translation of norms into practice, we propose a framework that incorporates implementation science into ethics. Implementation science is a discipline dedicated to supporting the sustained enactment of interventions. We further argue that implementation principles should be integrated into the development of specific normative claims as well as the enactment of these norms. Ethicists formulating a specific norm should consider whether that norm can feasibly be enacted because the resultant specific norm will directly affect the types of interventions subsequently developed. To inform this argument, we will describe the fundamental principles of implementation science, using informed consent to research participation as an illustration.