Taking Blame for Other People's Misconduct

Taking blame for another person's misconduct may occur at relatively high rates for less serious crimes. The authors examined individual differences and situational factors related to this phenomenon by surveying college students (n = 213) and men enrolled in substance abuse treatment programs (n = 42). Among college students, conscientiousness and delinquency predicted their likelihood of being in a situation in which it was possible to take the blame for another person's misconduct. Situational factors, including the relationship with the perpetrator, the seriousness of the offense, feelings of responsibility for the offense, and differential consequences between the offender and the blame taker, were associated with college students’ decisions to take the blame. Among substance abuse treatment participants, individuals who took the blame for another person's misconduct were more extraverted, reported feeling more loyalty toward the true perpetrator, and indicated more incentives to take the blame than individuals who did not take the blame. Links between theories of helping behavior and situational factors that predict blame taking are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Markets,Choice and Agency

John Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness (2012) introduces several powerful arguments in favour of a novel and surprising thesis: the best way to realize Rawls’s principles of justice is a free market society, rather than the arrangements that Rawls himself believed would best promote justice. In this paper, I adduce three arguments against Tomasi. First, I suggest that his view rests on a faulty understanding of what constitutes conventional property rights. Second, I argue that many market solutions generate choices which are not valuable ones for the agent to have to make. Third, I show that many choices created by the market systems Tomasi favours create the illusion that citizens are making their own choices when in fact they are not. I suggest that taken together these three arguments are sufficient to defend Rawlsian institutional arrangements against Tomasi’s challenge.     

Task difficulty reduces the left visual hemispace bias for judgments of emotion in chimeric faces

A prior study (Carbary, Almerigi, & Harris, 2001) of adults' judgments of emotional chimeric faces showed that the left visual hemispace (LVH) bias normally found on a free-viewing chimeric faces test is reduced when the task is judged to be difficult. Taking into account theory and research on hemispheric differences in styles, or strategies, of information processing, we proposed that the reduction was related to a change in these strategies. Two new experiments are presented that independently manipulate task difficulty and show the same task difficulty-related effect as in our prior study. Data are also presented suggesting that the strategy most commonly adopted for difficult judgments is part-based or feature-oriented, whereas the strategy most commonly adopted for easy judgments is reliance on "first impression."     

"If …": Satisficing algorithms for mapping conditional statements onto social domains

People regularly use conditional statements to communicate promises and threats, advices and warnings, permissions and obligations to other people. Given that all conditionals are formally equivalent--"if P, then Q"--the question is: When confronted with a conditional statement, how do people know whether they are facing a promise, a threat, or something else? In other words, what is the cognitive algorithm for mapping a particular conditional statement onto its corresponding social domain? This paper introduces the pragmatic cues algorithm and the syntactic cue algorithm as partial answers to this question. Two experiments were carried out to test how well these simple satisficing algorithms approximate the performance of the actual cognitive algorithm people use to classify conditional statements into social domains. Conditional statements for promises, threats, advices, warnings, permissions, and obligations were collected from people, and given to both other people and the algorithms for their classification. Their corresponding performances were then compared. Results revealed that even though these algorithms utilised a minimum number of cues and drew only a restricted range of inferences from these cues, they performed well above chance in the task of classifying conditional statements as promises, threats, advices, warnings, permissions, and obligations. Moreover, these simple satisficing algorithms performed comparable to actual people given the same task.     

The Present State of Workplace Spirituality: A Literature Review Considering Context,Theory, and Measurement/Assessment

This article seeks to review the growing body of research in the field of workplace spirituality, extending the earlier and broader literature review work of Danna and Griffin; Miller and Gorsuch; Hill and Hood; the Fetzer Institute; Moberg, Mohamed, Hassan, and Wisnieski; Day; and Lund Dean and Fornaciari. This article also seeks to advance future psychometric scale development in the burgeoning field of workplace spirituality; by suggesting a rubric for understanding the literature (manifestation, development, and adherence), and analyzing the scale validity and reliability, the authors hope to expand conceptual imagination for new scale research.

This article argues that the previous research which has begun to address important aspects of research scale development, though it has been limited in its applicability to workplace contexts, does not address diverse religious traditions and fails to understand how and the degree to which individual or collective spirituality integrates and manifests itself in the workplace. To this end, this article will codify and extend the aforementioned work by identifying the drivers for the field, exploring the connections between spirituality/religion and organizations, reviewing existing scales and instruments, discussing the literature review findings, and identifying gaps within the research, and it will resolve by suggesting specific areas for further research.     

Reference Ethics: Theological Librarianship in Conversation with ALA Reference Ethics Guidelines

This particular article will look at one ethical concern that is likely to be very familiar to most theological reference librarians. This question is what the theological reference librarian's ethical responsibilities are when the American Library Association's Code of Ethics seems to conflict with an institution's expectations for an employee of that institution. In order to adequately solve this question, the article will first summarize the basic elements of the American Library Association's Code of Ethics that relate to the reference interview. Next, the special nature of theological reference librarianship will be discussed. Third, the Association of Theological Schools accreditation guidelines will be examined to determine the relationships that theological librarians have to their religious institutions. Fourth, in light of the theological librarian reference ethics that emerge from the proposed investigation, possible ethical solutions will be suggested. The article will conclude that the article's research question is actually a false question, not because theological librarians have not raised it or because it is not worth considering, but because the American Library Association's Code of Ethics and the Association of Theological Schools accreditation standards expect the same thing from their librarians.     

Emotional Bonds with Parents, Emotion Regulation, and School-Related Behavior Problems Among Elementary School Truants

Among juvenile status offenses, truancy represents the largest share of juvenile court caseloads. As a marker of risk, truancy is important because of its associations with school disengagement, drop-out, and developmental trajectories that include various forms of delinquency and anti-social behavior. Better understanding of the developmental circumstances and needs of truant children may point the way to more effective intervention strategies. Much accumulated research has shown strong associations between the emergence of juvenile delinquency and qualities of caregiving in parent–child relationships. Child-parent attachment in particular has been identified as an important developmental foundation of the child-parent relationship. We used a multi-informant approach to examine associations between children’s self-reported perceptions of attachment security (using the Security Scales), their emotion regulation (reported by parents on the Emotion Regulation Checklist), and school-related behavior problems (as reported by teachers with the Child Behavior Checklist), among 74 elementary school-aged truant children (mean age 9 years). Children and families were recruited through a truancy intervention program in a state in the deep South in the U.S. Data were analyzed via hierarchical multiple regression. Parents’ reports of their children’s emotion regulation predicted behavior problems as reported by teachers. Children’s own reports of their emotional bonds with parents were somewhat less predictive of emotion regulation and behavior problems. Implications for truancy intervention programs for high-risk elementary school children include more focused attention to the importance of children’s developing capacities for emotion regulation and the child-parent bond.     

A structural dynamic of form: Displacements in memory for the size of an angle

Memory for the angular size of a chevron (V) shaped target was examined in four experiments. When the target was stationary, memory was displaced inwards (i.e., towards a smaller angle), and the magnitude of displacement increased with increases in absolute angle size. When the target moved vertically or horizontally, memory was displaced inwards, but the effect of absolute angle size was weakened, and displacement was not influenced by whether the direction of motion and the direction in which the angle pointed were the same or different. When the target expanded or contracted (i.e., increased or decreased in angular size), memory for expanding targets was displaced inwards more than was memory for contracting targets, and displacement was not influenced by whether motion was coherent or incoherent. Implications of the data for the possibility of dynamic aspects of mental representation based on the shape of a stimulus are discussed.