The new IOC and IAAF policies on female eligibility: old Emperor,new clothes?

The Caster Semenya debacle touched off by the 2009 Berlin World Athletics Championships resulted finally in IOC and IAAF abandonment of sex testing, which gave way to procedures that make female competition eligibility dependent upon the level of serum testosterone, which must be below the male range or instrumentally countered by androgen resistance. We argue that the new policy is unsustainable because (i) the testosterone-performance connection it posits is uncompelling; (ii) testosterone-induced female advantage is not ipso facto unfair advantage; (iii) the new policy reflects the gender policing impulses endemic to sport as well as the broader cultural impulses to monstrify women and to doctor women who have nothing wrong with them; (iv) female–male performance disparities are not the only reason for sex-segregated sport, but co-exist with respectable cultural and practical reasons, which (v) provide a powerful case for allowing athletes to compete in the sex category congruent with their gender identity.     

脑神经回路预警系统:研究社会公正的新视角

广义的预警系统不仅包含预警情境下脑神经回路的活动,还包括由其引发的一系列心理和行为反应。在面临威胁或不确定情境时,人们的公正判断经常无法用传统的公平理论来解释。预警系统的观点则认为,在预警情境下人们会检测到现实威胁与理想状态的差距,激活预警系统,并促使人们通过调整态度和行为来管理消极情绪或不确定性,从而影响到人们的公正判断和公正关心。一系列fMRI和ERP的研究表明,预警情境下的心理和行为主要与大脑前扣带回皮层的活动有关。预警系统通过冲突监测、情绪表征和整体调控过程,引发了人们对公正的关心,并导致在后续的公正判断过程中产生置换过程、首因效应和极端判断。     

研究员工和组织关系的新视角:个别协议

个别协议(Idiosyncratic deals,简写为I-deals)指意在使单个员工和雇主双方均受益的,经两者协商而定的,个性化的工作安置(Rousseau,2005)。个别协议可以作为组织和员工良好心理联系的现实依据,它是组织吸引、保留核心员工的重要策略。本文从个别协议的概念、渊源、测量方式、以及与相关组织现象的研究现状等方面,进行了回顾,并提出相应建议。文章最后探讨了个别协议未来的研究手段、结构和对象等新方向。     

Facing an incompetent leader: The effects of a nonexpert leader on subordinates' perception and behaviour

We investigated the effects of a leader's task-incompetence on how subordinates perceive and interact with their leader. In Study 1, 80 participants in a subordinate role interacted via e-mail and in Study 2, 80 participants interacted face-to-face with either a competent or an incompetent leader on a problem-solving task. Participants' dominance behaviour, how much they resisted the leader's influence, their perception of the leader, and their task involvement were assessed. As predicted, subordinates perceived the leader's incompetence as a lack of power and compensated for it by taking on a more powerful position themselves (i.e., more dominance behaviour, more resistance to the leader's influencing attempts). In sum, having a task-incompetent leader affects not only the subordinates' perception of the leader but also how the subordinate interacts with the leader.     

Elevation at work: The effects of leaders’ moral excellence

Leaders influence followers in many ways; one way is by eliciting positive emotions. In three studies we demonstrate that the nearly unstudied moral emotion of ‘elevation’ (a reaction to moral excellence) mediates the relations between leaders’ and their followers’ ethical behavior. Study 1 used scenarios manipulated experimentally; study 2 examined employees’ emotional responses to their leaders in a natural work setting; study 3 compared the effects of elevation to those of happiness, serenity, and positive affect. We found that leaders’ interpersonal fairness and self-sacrifice are powerful elicitors of elevation, and that this emotion fully mediates leaders’ influence on followers’ organizational citizenship behavior and affective organizational commitment. In the first study, we also observed a moderation effect of interpersonal fairness on self-sacrifice. Results underline the importance of positive moral emotions in organizations and shed light on the emotional process by which ethical leaders can foster positive organizational outcomes.     

Doping: Just Do It?

This paper provides a new philosophical argument against the lifting of the ban on doping in sports. It makes several assumptions for the sake of argument, one of which is, ironically, the moral justification of the lifting of the ban on sports doping. It is, then, a reductio ad absurdum against the claim that said ban should be lifted. Following this is a preliminary discussion concerning how doping athletes ought to be punished given that there ought to be a ban on doping due to the implausibility of the position to lift said ban. Considerations from responsibility and punishment theories are brought to bear in order to discern which punishments are most fitting for those athletes caught doping in designated clean sports competitions.     

In the Halfway House of Ill Repute: Gender Verification under a Different Name,Still No Contribution to Fair Play

The aftermath of Caster Semenya’s resounding victory in the women’s 800?m at the 2009 Athletics World Championships in Berlin highlighted the ethical and scientific flaws of gender verification in women’s athletics. It has led the governing international body of professional athletics, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), to adopt new rules regarding athletes with differences of sexual developments (DSDs) in women’s competitions in 2011 (Regulations on Hyperandrogenism). The International Olympic Committee followed suit and adopted a similar set of rules in 2012. Locating the practice of gender verification in a history of sexist stereotyping of women athletes (in Section 1), I argue (in Section 2), following other critics, that the IAAF’s new rules suffer from the same ethical flaws as their predecessors; and specifically that they still invite and rely on qualitative measuring of an athlete’s femininity and masculinity. In the central section of this paper (Section 3), I relate the practice of gender verification to the vexing question of what constitutes an unfair advantage in sports. I suggest, first, that athletes with a DSD should be at liberty to exploit competitive advantages their conditions might confer on them, just as most athletes in most sports are at liberty to exploit their congenital traits (the only irrelevant difference being that DSDs are construed as gendered advantages). In a second step, I argue that gender segregation in sports and gender verification practices cannot both be defended by an appeal to fairness. If we want to preserve gender segregation, then we ought to give up gender verification; and if we are not prepared to give up regulation of gendered congenital advantages, then we ought to give up gender segregation in favor of a classification system that tracks genetic predisposition rather than gender.     

基于泰尔指数的辽宁卫生资源配置公平性分析

利用泰尔指数对辽宁省卫生资源配置公平性进行分析评价,其中包括医院(卫生院)床位、卫生总人员、卫生技术人员、医师和护士(师)等五项.研究结果显示,辽宁卫生资源配置的总体公平性较好,但不同经济发展水平区域卫生资源配置的公平性存在较大差异,区域间差异是导致辽宁卫生资源配置不公平的主要成因.     

Voice and Culture: A Prospect Theory Approach

The present study examines the congruence of individuals' minimum preferred amounts of voice with the prospect theory value function across nine countries. Accounting for previously ignored minimum preferred amounts of voice and actual voice amounts integral to testing the steepness of gain and loss functions explicated in prospect theory, we use curve fitting to show that ratings of procedural justice fit prospect theory's value function specifically. Further, we investigate the form of this function across nine countries that range in power distance. Results suggest that the form of the value function is congruent with prospect theory, showing an S‐shaped curve that is steeper in the loss than in the gain domain. Further, this pattern is similar across countries. Theoretical and practical implications of these results for both decision making and organizational justice are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.