The moral behavior of ethics professors: A replication-extension in German-speaking countries

What is the relation between ethical reflection and moral behavior? Does professional reflection on ethical issues positively impact moral behaviors? To address these questions, Schwitzgebel and Rust empirically investigated if philosophy professors engaged with ethics on a professional basis behave any morally better or, at least, more consistently with their expressed values than do non-ethicist professors. Findings from their original US-based sample indicated that neither is the case, suggesting that there is no positive influence of ethical reflection on moral action. In the study at hand, we attempted to cross-validate this pattern of results in the German-speaking countries and surveyed 417 professors using a replication-extension research design. Our results indicate a successful replication of the original effect that ethicists do not behave any morally better compared to other academics across the vast majority of normative issues. Yet, unlike the original study, we found mixed results on normative attitudes generally. On some issues, ethicists and philosophers even expressed more lenient attitudes. However, one issue on which ethicists not only held stronger normative attitudes but also reported better corresponding moral behaviors was vegetarianism.     

Context-sensitive elemental theory

My theories of associative learning, like those of N. J. Mackintosh and almost all learning theorists, have employed elemental representations of the stimuli involved. We must take notice when two important contributors to elemental theory, J. M. Pearce and W. K. Estes, find sufficient problems with the theory type to cause them to defect from it. I will describe some of the essential problems, concerning the substantial influence of context on learning and retrieval, characterize the different responses of Pearce and Estes, and, then, propose a variation on a recently developed elemental model that was similarly inspired. The resulting elemental theory has a close quantitative relationship to the “product-rule” of Estes and D. L. Medin, and may help us to rationalize how the same formal experimental design can sometimes produce results that favour the configural interpretation of Pearce and at other times the elemental interpretation of R. A. Rescorla and A. R. Wagner, as these have often been pitted against each other.     

The accessibility of the term “contempt” and the meaning of the unilateral lip curl

Four studies are reported investigating the conditions under which various proposed facial expressions of contempt are labelled “contempt”. Only under forced-choice conditions are any of these expressions labelled “contempt” above chance; free responses are at or below chance. Contrary to predictions from Rosenberg and Ekman's (1995) explanation of poor free-response performance, participants demonstrating the best understanding of “contempt”, and those primed by prior tasks to have the concept readily accessible did not do better than other subjects. Using the forced-choice paradigm, supposedly neutral expressions were labelled “contempt” by 70% of respondents. It is concluded that poor performance in free-response studies is not due to inaccessibility or unfamiliarity of “contempt”, that the unilateral lip curl included in the JACFEE set of expressions of basic emotions (Matsumoto & Ekman, 1988) is not decoded as contempt, and that good performance in forced-choice studies results from artifacts of the method.