Ethical Challenges of Personal Disclosure in Gaining Entry with Religious Congregations

This is a story about learning how to navigate my social identities as a non‐religious gay man attempting to conduct data‐based consultation with a religious congregation. Beyond my own growth in knowing myself better, this story speaks to the larger ethical challenge of how we build trust in community relationships, and in particular how much of our personal selves we need to disclose in the process of an individual or group deciding to work with us. Individuals and groups make decisions to work with us based on who they perceive us to be; thus, what is our ethical obligation to disclose aspects of who we are to promote full informed consent? To illustrate this ethical challenge of personal disclosure, I tell the story of discussions I had with three different religious leaders and a congregational committee about potentially working together. Throughout these stories, I reflect on my own messy process of growth as a window into the more general question of how we navigate our identities and values as community psychologists in the work we do with communities.     

A role for the anterior insular cortex in the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness

According to the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, consciousness results from the global broadcast of information throughout the brain. The global neuronal workspace is mainly constituted by a fronto-parietal network. The anterior insular cortex is part of this global neuronal workspace, but the function of this region has not yet been defined within the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness. In this review, I hypothesize that the anterior insular cortex implements a cross-modal priority map, the function of which is to determine priorities for the processing of information and subsequent entrance in the global neuronal workspace.     

经济全球化的若干伦理思考

经济全球化已经成为当代社会的客观事实和发展趋势。经济全球化的实质是人类利益实现形式的转换与更新。经济全球化中,不同利益主体需要遵循一定的道德要求,即全球伦理,以实现稳定的经济秩序和自身的利益。但全球伦理的实现是一个漫长而艰苦的过程,需要克服一系列价值观和价值取向的障碍,乃至冲破政治上霸权主义的干扰。     

中国古代“孝”文化的两重性

孝的本义是“善事父母”。因为人为父母所生养而成长 ,应该给以回报 ,所以孔孟主张对父母尽孝。先秦儒家还提出父慈子孝的对等关系 ,在道德人格上是平等的。秦汉大一统以后 ,移孝作忠 ,伦理向政治伸延 ,君父对臣子形成统治与被统治的关系。汉朝称以孝治天下 ,建立察孝廉、奖孝悌的制度。对孝道的提倡 ,用以造就一批父慈子孝、兄友弟恭的孝悌家庭 ,对以家族为本位、家国同构的中国古代 ,儿女尽孝能和睦家庭 ,进而安定社会 ,增强中华民族凝聚力 ,有一定的正面作用。同时把孝亲与忠君联系起来 ,所谓忠臣出于孝子之门 ,对于维护汉皇朝的统治亦有安定的作用。但是历朝的孝治政策亦有负面效应。由于朝廷奖励孝子 ,有的人就弄虚作假 ,败坏社会风气 ,把孝道作为沽名钓誉的工具。有的虽然真心尽孝 ,但措施不当 ,形成愚昧行为。正面与负面就形成中国古代孝文化的两重性。     

“生”对儒家伦理的意义

“生”是儒家学说中一个很重要的概念 ,儒家的许多范畴和命题基本上都能从“生”中得到说明。只有正确理解“生”的内涵和意义上 ,才能准确理解“中庸”、“仁”、“忠恕之道”和“天人合一”的含义 ,也才能把握儒家重精神情操的思想特征和推己及人的行为方式。     

Lack of sleep and unethical conduct

We draw from the Ego Depletion model and research on sleep physiology to predict a relationship between lack of sleep and individuals’ unethical behavior. Laboratory studies showed that sleep quantity is positively related to self-control resources and negative associated with unethical behavior. In a cross-sectional field study examining unethical behavior in a variety of work settings, low levels of sleep, and low perceived quality of sleep, were both positively related to unethical behavior as rated by the supervisor, and cognitive fatigue mediated the influence of sleep quantity. In an experience sampling field study, we found similar effects within-individuals. We discuss the role of lost sleep in better understanding unethical behavior in organizations.     

The mismeasure of morals: antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas

Researchers have recently argued that utilitarianism is the appropriate framework by which to evaluate moral judgment, and that individuals who endorse non-utilitarian solutions to moral dilemmas (involving active vs. passive harm) are committing an error. We report a study in which participants responded to a battery of personality assessments and a set of dilemmas that pit utilitarian and non-utilitarian options against each other. Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness. These results question the widely-used methods by which lay moral judgments are evaluated, as these approaches lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those individuals who are least prone to moral errors also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral.     

High regularities in eye-movement patterns reveal the dynamics of the visual working memory allocation mechanism

With only two to five slots of visual working memory (VWM), humans are able to quickly solve complex visual problems to near optimal solutions. To explain the paradox between tightly constrained VWM and impressively complex human visual problem-solving ability, we propose several principles for dynamic VWM allocation. In particular, we propose that complex visual information is represented in a temporal manner using only a few slots of VWM that include global and local visual chunks. We built a model of human traveling salesman problem solving based on these principles of VWM allocation and tested the model with eye-movement data. Exactly as the model predicted, human eye movements during traveling salesman problem solving have precise quantitative regularities with regard to both the general statistical pattern of attentional fixations and how they vary across individuals with different VWM capacities. Even though VWM capacity is very limited, eye movements dynamically allocate VWM resources to both local and global information, enabling attention to fine details without loss of the big picture.     

Obstetric Ultrasound and the Technological Mediation of Morality: A Postphenomenological Analysis

This article analyzes the moral relevance of technological artifacts and its possible role in ethical theory, by taking the postphenomenological approach that has developed around the work of Don Ihde into the domain of ethics. By elaborating a postphenomenological analysis of the mediating role of ultrasound in moral decisions about abortion, the article argues that technologies embody morality and help to constitute moral subjectivity. This technological mediation of the moral subject is subsequently addressed in terms of Michel Foucault’s ethical position, in which ethics is about actively co-shaping one’s moral subjectivity. Integrating Foucauldian ethics and postphenomenology, the article argues that the technological mediation of moral subjectivity should be at the heart of an ethical approach that takes the moral dimensions of technology seriously.

The direction of hemispheric asymmetries for object categorization at different levels of abstraction depends on the task

In this study hemispheric asymmetries for categorizing objects at the basic versus subordinate level of abstraction were investigated. As predictions derived from different theoretical approaches are contradictory and experimental evidence is inconclusive in this regard, we conducted two categorization experiments, where we contrasted two experimental paradigms. In the first experiment, subjects had to verify whether a word and a laterally presented picture matched or not. In the second experiment, subjects had to identify laterally presented pictures of animals either at the basic or subordinate level by pressing a corresponding response key. Whereas the first experiment revealed an advantage of the left hemisphere (LH) for categorizing objects at the basic level and of the right hemisphere (RH) for categorizing at the subordinate level, just the opposite brain asymmetry was found in the second experiment. As the stimuli were identical in both experiments, hemispheric asymmetries seem to be strongly task dependent.