Ethics Consultation and Autonomy

Services of ethics consultants are nowadays commonly used in such various spheres of life as engineering, public administration, business, law, health care, journalism, and scientific research. It has however been maintained that use of ethics consultants is incompatible with personal autonomy; in moral matters individuals should be allowed to make their own decisions. The problem this criticism refers to can be conceived of as a conflict between the professional autonomy of ethics experts and the autonomy of the persons they serve. This paper addresses this conflict and maintains that when the nature of both ethics consultation and individual autonomy is properly understood, the professional autonomy of ethics experts is compatible with the autonomy of the persons they assist.     

质性比较专家与新手的物理学知识结构

通过质性比较方法,本实验刻画了专家与新手在物理学欧姆定律上的知识差异,并发现,与新手相比,专家的知识结构有如下特点:(1)精致化,即拥有更多公式且生成了新公式,表示他们在知识之间形成了更多联系;(2)限制化,即添加更多恒定条件于知识中,从而产生更为明确的行动。此外,本实验在方法学上为细致描述和解释专长的实质提供了可能。     

Expertise, Evaluative Motivation, and the Structure of Citizens' Ideological Commitments

Political psychologists have typically argued that ideological commitments are structured in a bipolar fashion, where a positive evaluation of conservative objects implies a negative evaluation of liberal objects (and vice versa). Individual differences in conformity to this pattern are usually attributed to an ability-related variable, i.e., political expertise . Departing from this strict focus on ability, this study examines the hypotheses that an important motivational variable—the need to evaluate , or the desire to form opinions of objects as "good" or "bad"—would (1) predict deviations from ideological bipolarity, even controlling for expertise; and (2) moderate the relationship between expertise and deviations from bipolarity. Data from two national surveys provided evidence for these hypotheses and indicated that the results extended to deviations from bipolarity in evaluations of presidential candidates and political parties.     

Moral Expertise and the Credentials Problem

Philosophers have harbored doubts about the possibility of moral expertise since Plato. I argue that irrespective of whether moral experts exist, identifying who those experts are is insurmountable because of the credentials problem: Moral experts have no need to seek out others’ moral expertise, but moral non-experts lack sufficient knowledge to determine whether the advice provided by a putative moral expert in response to complex moral situations is correct and hence whether an individual is a bone fide expert. Traditional accounts of moral expertise require that moral experts give reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification, an account which, I argue, is too lean in allowing for the possibility of a moral expert who is motivationally indifferent to her own moral judgments and advice. Yet even if the proposition that a moral expert is an individual who provides reliably correct moral advice supported by adequate justification and is necessarily motivated by that advice exhausts the necessary and sufficient conditions for moral expertise, this proposition cannot function as an applicable criterion for non-experts to use in appraising would-be experts’ claims to expertise. The credentials problem thus remains unanswered.

行为遗传学：解决面孔特异性问题争论的新思

面孔刺激的加工存在特异性,但“特异性”的具体内涵仍存在争议。面孔特异性假说认为面孔刺激具有特异性;而专家假说则认为存在特异性的是整体加工的模式。通过对相关领域近年来主要的研究结果的总结,发现争论中混淆了两个概念——加工类型和刺激类型,二者正交分解可将争论归纳为三个假设：1）面孔整体加工特异性的假设;2）面孔刺激特异性的假设;3）专家加工特异性的假设。在未来的研究中,行为遗传学可为解决该争论提供合适的方法     

斯腾伯格智力测验观评述

长久以来,人们习惯于凭智力测验对一个人的能力做出判断,并用之预测个体未来成就的高低。本文介绍了斯腾伯格(R．J．Stemberg)最近提出的“发展中的专门知识技能说”,认为智力测验和任何学业或职业成就测验一样,测的也是个体正在发展中的某种专门知识技能的暂时水平,其测验结果并不能说明一个人的能力,也不能用作预测。最后讨论了该学说对教育的启示。     

A developmental perspective on psychotherapy process, psychotherapists' expertise, and “Meaning-Making Conflict” within therapeutic relationships: A two-part series

Part I (in this issue)—A Dialectical-Constructivist View of Human Development, Psychotherapy, and the Dynamics of Meaning-Making Conflict Within Therapeutic Relationships— reviews a dialectical-constructivist model of human development and articulates, in the language of that model, how psychotherapy, in general, works. It describes and illustrates three generic processes, which contribute to the frequent successes of an extremely diverse range of psychotherapy theories and practices. This view of psychotherapy focuses on both the client's meaning-making processes and the therapist's meaning-making processes and how they contribute together to effective psychotherapy. Part I also offers a way of understanding what is going on when therapeutic progress is blocked by conflict between the client's and the therapist's meaning-making processes. Part II—Dialectical Thinking and Psychotherapeutic Expertise: Implications for Training Psychotherapists and Protecting Clients from Theoretical Abuse—explores those experiences in which the therapist's own exercise of his or her meaning-making structures, and maintenance of the integrity of his or her theories, has a limiting or destructive impact on the value of therapy to the client. It considers the concept of “theoretical abuse” by psychotherapists as a way of characterizing the most destructive of these experiences. This serves as a rhetorical device for introducing comparisons between these phenomena and the phenomena of sexual abuse by psychotherapists, in terms of dynamics, prevalence, and appropriate strategies for prevention. Part II uses work on the development of dialectical thinking in adulthood to conceptualize how different understandings of the nature of psychotherapists' expertise increase or decrease the likelihood and severity of “theoretical abuse”. Finally, it derives implications for training psychologists and other psychotherapy professionals.     

Linking Trust to Trustworthiness

Abstract

Trust is valuable when placed in trustworthy agents and activities, but damaging or costly when (mis)placed in untrustworthy agents and activities. So it is puzzling that much contemporary work on trust – such as that based on polling evidence – studies generic attitudes of trust in types of agent, institution or activity in complete abstraction from any account of trustworthiness. Information about others’ generic attitudes of trust or mistrust that take no account of evidence whether those attitudes are well or ill placed can offer little or no help for those who aim to place or refuse trust well. Information about attitudes is evidently useful to those who aim to influence those who hold them, which explains why polls about attitudes are popular with political parties, advertisers and other campaigning organisations. But where we aim not to influence others, but to place and refuse trust intelligently we must link trust to trustworthiness, and must focus on evidence of honesty, competence and reliability.