Moral Principles or Consumer Preferences? Alternative Framings of the Trolley Problem

We created paired moral dilemmas with minimal contrasts in wording, a research strategy that has been advocated as a way to empirically establish principles operative in a domain-specific moral psychology. However, the candidate "principles" we tested were not derived from work in moral philosophy, but rather from work in the areas of consumer choice and risk perception. Participants were paradoxically less likely to choose an action that sacrifices one life to save others when they were asked to provide more reasons for doing so (Experiment 1), and their willingness to sacrifice lives depended not only on how many lives would be saved, but on the number of lives at risk (Experiment 2). The latter effect was also found in a within-subjects design (Experiment 3). These findings suggest caution in the use of artificial dilemmas as a key testbed for revealing principled bases for moral judgment.     

KIERKEGAARD'S "NEW ARGUMENT" FOR IMMORTALITY

This essay examines texts from Kierkegaard's signed and pseudonymous authorship on immortality and the resurrection, challenging the received opinion that Kierkegaard's account of eternal life merely connotes a temporal, existential modality of experience as a present eternity. Kierkegaard's thoughts on immortality are more complicated than this reading allows. I demonstrate that Kierkegaard's ideas on the afterlife emerge out of a context in which the topic had been vigorously debated in both Germany and Denmark for more than a decade. In responding to these debates, Kierkegaard establishes a "new argument" for immortality that stands as a robust account of the Christian resurrection and highlights the power of a personal God at the center of life, death, and post-mortem existence.     

When is peer rejection justifiable? Children's understanding across two cultures

This study investigated how Korean (N = 397) and U.S. (N = 333) children and adolescents (10 and 13 years of age) evaluated personality (aggression, shyness) and group (gender, nationality) characteristics as a basis for peer rejection in three contexts (friendship rejection, group exclusion, victimization). Overall, peer rejection based on group membership was viewed as more unfair than peer rejection based on personality traits. Children viewed friendship rejection as more legitimate than group exclusion or victimization and used more personal choice reasoning for friendship rejection than for rejection in any other context. Although there were a few cultural differences, overall, the findings provided support for the cultural generalizability of social reasoning about peer rejection.     

A clean self can render harsh moral judgment

Physical cleanliness has many medical benefits, such as protection from the dangers of contagion. We explore a potential unintended consequence of cleanliness. Given the metaphorical association between physical cleanliness and moral purity (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006), we contend that a clean self may also be linked to a virtuous self. This enhanced moral self-perception can in turn license harsher moral judgment. Three experiments found that cleanliness, whether induced via physical cleansing or through a visualization task, licensed severe judgment on morally contested issues such as abortion and pornography. Further, we found that an inflated moral self mediated the relationship between cleanliness and moral judgment. These results provide unique insight to the social significance of cleanliness and may have important implications for discrimination and prejudice.     

Role of attention, memory, and covariation-detection processes in clinically significant eating-disorder symptoms

Cognitive theorists implicate a role for cognitive processing of shape- and weight-related information in the maintenance and potential etiology of eating disorders. The present study examines the role of women’s processing of information regarding other women’s body size and affect in eating disorder symptoms among young women. 253 female undergraduates completed attention, memory, and covariation-detection tasks that presented full-body photographs of young women, as well as an eating-disorder measure. High-Symptom women, relative to Medium- and Low-Symptom women, showed greater relative attention to body size than affect, better memory for body size and worse memory for affect, and enhanced sensitivity to the manipulated covariation between body size and affect. All participants perceived an illusory correlation between body size and affect. These findings suggest that cognitive theories may be extended usefully by considering processing of other-relevant and affective information, as well as the role of covariation-detection processes in eating disorders.     

Incorporating Demographic Embeddings Into Language Understanding

Meaning depends on context. This applies in obvious cases like deictics or sarcasm as well as more subtle situations like framing or persuasion. One key aspect of this is the identity of the participants in an interaction. Our interpretation of an utterance shifts based on a variety of factors, including personal history, background knowledge, and our relationship to the source. While obviously an incomplete model of individual differences, demographic factors provide a useful starting point and allow us to capture some of this variance. However, the relevance of specific demographic factors varies between situations—where age might be the key factor in one context, ideology might dominate in another. To address this challenge, we introduce a method for combining demographics and context into situated demographic embeddings—mapping representations into a continuous geometric space appropriate for the given domain, showing the resulting representations to be functional and interpretable. We further demonstrate how to make use of related external data so as to apply this approach in low‐resource situations. Finally, we show how these representations can be incorporated into improve modeling of real‐world natural language understanding tasks, improving model performance and helping with issues of data sparsity.     

质性研究中的资料饱和及其判定

在质性研究中,资料饱和通常被用以评估研究资料的充足性。但在研究实践中,资料饱和却存在概念模糊及操作性问题。作为某项质性研究所抽取的样本量已满足研究需要的标志,按照在研究过程中判定时点的先后顺序,资料饱和可划分为数据饱和、编码或主题饱和、意义饱和及理论饱和4种主要形式。4种形式的资料饱和各有其特定的内涵、评估方式和判定标准。研究认为,达到资料饱和的样本量标准不应统一设定,其检验需嵌入具体的研究过程;资料饱和存在逻辑上的不确定性,适度追加抽样有助于进一步确认;资料饱和作为考察研究质量的一项重要指标,并不适用于所有质性研究。     

Choice,Rating, and Ranking: Framing Effects with Different Response Modes

In a typical risky choice framing task, people have to choose among two options, which are either positively or negatively framed. Choices in the two framing conditions are then compared. However, different preferences between the conditions can be due to changes in the evaluation of the single constituent options or due to specific processes triggered by the choice task. In order to clarify the source of the framing effect, we investigate the effect with different response modes: choice, rating, and ranking. The rating and ranking findings indicate that what is commonly called a risky choice framing effect is actually a framing effect that changes the evaluation of only the riskless option, although there is little or no effect on the risky option. According to these findings, risky choice framing might be construed as a process of attribute framing, which is independent of risk preference in choice contexts. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

道德判断的分级现象

Blair(1996)发现即使没有心理理论的孤独症儿童,也具备道德判断能力。而Kahn(2004)认为没有心理理论就不可能完成道德判断。已有研究表明,道德判断可能需要一定程度的心理理论。孤独症儿童心理理论存在困难,影响他们理解道德情景并进行正确的道德判断,但这是否与任务的要求道德判断能力的程度不同有关呢?研究增加道德情景的复杂程度,进一步考察儿童道德判断规律。结果发现,道德判断有分级现象,第一级是直接对道德行为进行判断,孤独症和正常儿童都能完成该任务,可能是以原始情绪为基础的;第二级道德判断是对简单道德情景进行判断,需要以心理理论为基础,只有正常儿童才能完成;而对行为与意图不一致的复杂道德判断则需要以更加丰富的经历或者经验为基础,但其属于三级道德判断还是二级道德判断的高级形式还需要进一步的研究。     

Hypocrites or maligned cooperative participants? Experimenter induced normative conflict in zero-sum situations

The failure to recognize the influence of two distinct forms of moral norms can lead to the misattribution of moral behavior to egoistic motives. This is illustrated in the research of Batson and his colleagues (e.g., Batson, Kobrynowicz, Dinnerstein, Kampf, & Wilson, 1997). They reported the appearance of moral failure and hypocrisy motivation in several experiments employing essentially the same “zero-sum” experimental situation. They cited as evidence the discrepancy between participants’ apparently self-serving private acts and their subsequent public ratings of the morality of what they had done as well as their recognition of the “most” moral way to behave. The research reported here supported an alternative explanation that located the experimenter’s implicit and explicit instructions as the source of the discrepancy between the participants’ private acts and their public ratings. The findings confirmed the hypothesis that Batson and his colleagues had not merely made moral norms “salient”. They had actually presented their participants with contradictory “demands”: explicitly inviting them to meet the norm of justified self-interest in private but then give public lip-service to the experimenter’s instructions as to a supererogatory way to behave. When either of the demands was removed, the “hypocrisy” no longer occurred.