Human Nature: What We Need to Know about Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century

The Western worldview that now dominates the planet embodies beliefs about human nature that are inconsistent with our evolutionarily evolved natures. Its "logic" at best ignores and at worst creates the symptoms of the modern world, which if uncorrected predict severe crises in coming centuries: population growth, environmental destruction, economic collapse, and increasing social violence. In contrast, there are numerous communities today creating alternative solutions based on different understandings of human nature and human needs: cooperation rather than competition; meaningful social identity; and respect for and trust in the autonomous behavior of all persons. There exist optimistic future models.     

Symbioses Can Transcend Particularisms: A Memoir of Friendship with Ralph Wendell Burhoe

Ralph Burho's paradigmatic scientific innovation is the extension of the concept of symbiosis to coadapted human genotypes and "culturetypes," centered on religion. Civilization also requires a coexistent secular arena, where religion's nearness may help prevent our natural synergistic instrumentalizations of each other from degrading to losses of respect for one another as responsible free agents. The mixed messages in the Bible's diverse stories help to preserve a richness of choices in memory as we navigate history. We science-and-religion theorists should expand our cademic base to include economics, politics, literature, and other areas, while emulating Ralph's wise and good-humored ways of drawing us together and affecting our lives.     

Laterality effects in the spinning dancer illusion: The viewing‐from‐above bias is only part of the story

The ‘silhouette illusion’, representing the silhouette of a female dancer pirouetting about her vertical axis, is a bistable stimulus created by Japanese web designer Nobuyuki Kayahara. Although the dancer can be perceived as spinning either clockwise or counterclockwise, the clockwise rotation is usually preferred. Troje and McAdam (i‐Perception, 2010, 1, 143) showed that this clockwise bias can be attributed to the tendency to assume a viewpoint from above rather than from below, given that the dancer is portrayed from a vantage point that is not perpendicular to the axis of rotation. Here, we tested whether another possible factor contributing to the observers’ interpretation of this bistable stimulus might be the tendency to perceive movements of the right rather than the left foot. We confirmed both the viewing‐from‐above bias and our hypothesis. The bias to perceive movements of the right leg might be a generalization to lower limbs of a perceptual frequency effect already observed for upper limbs. Such a perceptual and attentional bias towards the right hand/foot could account for the greater ability to predict the outcome of sport actions when observing right‐ rather than left‐limbed movements, and thus the left‐handers' and left‐footers' advantage observed in a variety of interactive sports.     

A crowdsourced nickel‐and‐dime approach to analog OBM research: A behavioral economic framework for understanding workforce attrition

Incentives are a popular method to achieve desired employee performance; however, research on optimal incentive magnitude is lacking. Behavioral economic demand curves model persistence of responding in the face of increasing cost and may be suitable to examine the reinforcing value of incentives on work performance. The present use‐inspired basic study integrated an experiential human operant task within a crowdsourcing platform to evaluate the applicability of behavioral economics for quantifying changes in workforce attrition. Participants included 88 Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers who earned either a $0.05 or $0.10 incentive for completing a progressively increasing response requirement. Analyses revealed statistically significant differences in breakpoint between the two groups. Additionally, a novel translation of the Kaplan‐Meier survival‐curve analyses for use within a demand curve framework allowed for examination of elasticity of workforce attrition. Results indicate greater inelastic attrition in the $0.05 group. We discuss the benefits of a behavioral economic approach to modeling employee behavior, how the metrics obtained from the elasticity of workforce attrition analyses (e.g., P _max) may be used to set goals for employee behavior while balancing organizational costs, and how economy type may have influenced observed outcomes.     

The Use of Social Psychology in Rural Development? Two Readings of Rural Business Owners' Values

Rural development refers to diverse attempts being made to address the problems of rural communities. In Finland, rural development leans heavily on entrepreneurship and small business development. Rural development processes have a strong social psychological component that entails that psychological knowledge is crucial for rural development agents. Nevertheless, psychological knowledge has also been criticised for simplifying highly complex development processes and overstating the role of internal psychological factors. In this paper, we argue that, regarding the relevance and utility of psychological knowledge, the question is not only how extensively different factors are taken into account but also how knowledge about psychological factors is read and interpreted. In this paper, we focus on Finnish rural business owners' values and demonstrate that value survey data can be read from two different social psychological perspectives: those of substantialism and relationalism. Although data and the conducted analyses are kept constant, the two readings produce differing types of knowledge of rural business owners' values; one reveals what business owners ‘truly’ are like and the other informs how to best communicate with business owners. Both readings are potentially useful for rural development work. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Associations between job burnout and self-efficacy: a meta-analysis

Background and Objectives: This study aimed at systematically reviewing and meta-analyzing the strength of associations between self-efficacy and job burnout (the global index and its components). We investigated whether these associations would be moderated by: (a) the type of measurement of burnout and self-efficacy, (b) the type of occupation, (c) the number of years of work experience and age, and (d) culture. Design and Methods: We systematically reviewed and analyzed 57 original studies (N?=?22,773) conducted among teachers (k?=?29), health-care providers (k?=?17), and other professionals (k?=?11). Results: The average effect size estimate for the association between self-efficacy and burnout was of medium size (?.33). Regarding the three burnout components, the largest estimate of the average effect (?.49) was found for the lack of accomplishment. The estimates of the average effect were similar, regardless of the type of measures of burnout and self-efficacy measurement (general vs. context-specific). Significantly larger estimates of the average effects were found among teachers (compared to health-care providers), older workers, and those with longer work experience. Conclusions: Significant self-efficacy–burnout relationships were observed across countries, although the strength of associations varied across burnout components, participants' profession, and their age.     

Employability capacities and organisational commitment foci of human resource professionals: An exploratory study

This study explored the relationship between employees’ employability capacities and their organisational commitment foci. A convenience sample of 196 South African human resource professionals participated in the study, consisting of 73% females and 88% black African people, predominantly within their early career stages (aged > 45 years). Data on individuals’ employability capacities and organisational commitment were collected via questionnaires. Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) was performed to assess the association between the variables of employability capacities and organisational commitment foci. Participants’ lifelong learning capacities (goal-directed behaviour and continuous learning orientation) were positively associated with their career commitment. This finding suggests that a strong lifelong orientation is likely to increase involvement in one’s occupation within the organisation, which contributes to organisational commitment. Lifelong learning capacities appear important to human resource professionals’ career development within their employer organisation.     

Healing Faith: A Qualitative Exploration of Latina Breast Cancer Survivors

Latina cancer survivors report higher levels of distress and depression and lower levels of social quality of life and overall health‐related quality of life when compared with all other cancer survivors. Cultural values influence cancer survivorship; however, little research to date has examined how aspects of the Latina culture may be healing during the cancer journey. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to present findings from a qualitative study exploring the influence of culture on quality of life for Latina breast cancer survivors. The authors use consensual qualitative research to understand the lived experiences of Latina breast cancer survivors.     

WALKER PERCY,LANGUAGE, AND HOMO SINGULARIS

The novelist Walker Percy argued that modern science has a tremendous blind spot in its view of human nature. Unlike purely physical phenomena, which can be explained by the interaction of dyadic relationships, human beings must also be understood in terms of triadic relationships brought into being by symbolic language. The self brought into being by symbolic language is nonmaterial but real, and operates by different “laws” than those that govern dyadic relations. In making this case, Percy drew a sharp line between human and nonhuman language, a line that more recent developments in science has challenged. However, Percy's central point, that the agent of symbolic language cannot be understood within a materialist framework, remains valid.     

Living in a Non‐Communist Versus in a Post‐Communist European Country Moderates the Relation Between Conservative Values and Political Orientation: A Multilevel Study

We performed a multilevel, multinational analysis using the 2012 European Social Survey dataset (N = 41 080, nested in 20 countries) to study how living in a non‐communist versus in a post‐communist country moderates the link between individual conservative values (drawn on Schwartz's theory of basic human values) and political orientation (assessed as self‐placement on the left–right axis and attitude towards economic redistribution). The results supported the moderating role of living in a non‐communist versus in a post‐communist country in the case both of political self‐placement and of attitude towards economic redistribution, even controlling for the countries' degree of individualism, power distance and democracy. Specifically, conservative values were positively related to a rightist political self‐placement among participants living in countries without a communist past, and to a favourable attitude towards economic redistribution in countries with a communist past. The limitations, implications and future directions of this study are discussed. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology