Accepting Testimony

I defend the acceptance principle for testimony (APT), that hearers are justified in accepting testimony unless they have positive evidence against its reliability, against Elizabeth Fricker's local reductionist view. Local reductionism, the doctrine that hearers need evidence that a particular piece of testimony is reliable if they are to be justified in believing it, must on pain of scepticism be complemented by a principle that grants default justification to some testimony; I argue that (APT) is the principle required. I consider two alternative weaker principles as complements to local reductionism; one yields counter–intuitive results unless we accept (APT) as well, while the other is too weak to enable local reductionism to avoid scepticism.     

Making Rorschach interpretation as good as it can be

This article delineates six guidelines for enhancing the quality and utility of interpretations derived from the Rorschach inkblot method. These include (a) using all of the available structural, thematic, and behavioral data in arriving at interpretations; (b) focusing interpretive statements primarily on personality processes and drawing clinical conclusions and recommendations secondarily on the basis of identified personality processes; (c) addressing interpretations to both personality strengths and personality weaknesses to attend equally to adaptive capacities and maladaptive tendencies; (d) formulating and conveying interpretations at appropriate levels of certainty to distinguish clearly between probable fact and possible conjecture; (e) pursuing and expressing both nomothetic and idiographic implications of interpretations to the fullest possible extent, recognizing that personality is best described by considering both how people resemble and how they differ from each other; and (f) grounding the implications of interpretations in each respondent's cultural context to take adequate account of the mediation of cultural relativism between personality characteristics and their adaptive consequences.     

The shifting sands of a professional identity

I decided while an undergraduate that I wanted to be a psychologist. Beyond that, I'm still not sure what I'll do when I grow up. This brief autobiography maps the shifting sands of my professional identity: from psychotherapist to developmental psychopathologist and then to primary concerns with education and training, from psychologist to academic administrator and then back again, to forensic psychologist and on to whatever may come next. Through all of these shifts in focus, however, there has been one recurring theme--the appeal of being an assessment psychologist. The events that kept bringing me back to assessment, whatever else my focus at the time, are recorded in the story that follows.     

Whom would you rather help: an acquaintance not responsible for her plight or a responsible sibling?

When 2 persons--an acquaintance who could not have avoided a problem and a close relative who is responsible for her own plight--ask for help, attribution theory and sociobiology conflict about who will receive help. Attribution theorists assume that the nonresponsible acquaintance will be supported, but sociobiologists argue that the responsible sibling will receive help. The authors tested the hypothesis that characteristics of the situation affect which theory better predicts help giving. The results confirmed that in situations that do not affect life and death, a nonresponsible acquaintance would receive more help than a responsible sibling. But in life-or-death situations, inasmuch as the reproductive fitness of the person in need is in danger, a responsible sibling would be supported more than a nonresponsible acquaintance.     

Developments in research in personality assessment

Progress in personality research requires an adequate data analysis link between concepts of what people are like and observations of how they are likely to behave. Advances in computer technology have strengthened this link but also have made it necessary for investigators to be wary of lack of selectivity and trivialization in their research designs.