A Conversation Worth Having: Hauerwas and Gustafson on Substance in Theological Ethics

When a debate is misplaced, new problems are cast in the distorting language of the settled problems of the past while, at the same time, the participants in the debate are assimilated into communities of thought with which they have little in common. The result is that their work, and our response to it, is distorted. This article contends that the polemical debate between James Gustafson (and his followers) and Stanley Hauerwas (and his followers) is just such a misplaced debate. In fact, both can be shown to be Troeltschianhistoricists, and it is only when this commonality is recognized that their very real and deep differences can be rightly appreciated as emblematic of the true sources of disagreement at the growing edge of the discipline.     

Belief in altruistic human nature and prosocial behavior: a serial mediation analysis

According to the theory of internal working model, belief in altruistic human nature positively influences prosocial behavior. However, the precise influencing mechanism remains unclear. Based on the determinants of human behavior theory and self-efficacy theory, we hypothesized that belief in altruistic human nature indirectly influences prosocial behavior through causally linked multiple mediators of prosocial attitude and prosocial self-efficacy. The results of the current research supported our hypothesis and demonstrated that this serial mediation model could be generalized across individualistic and collectivistic cultures.     

Innovative Mental Health Treatment Alternatives for Women

No abstract available for this article.     

Criticisms of the Ethical Principles for Psychologists and Code of Conduct

ABSTRACT

Beginning in 1953 the American Psychological Association (APA) has advanced twelve iterations of a professional ethical code. In recent years the adequacy of the Ethics Code as well as APA’s ethics enforcement has come under increased scrutiny. In 2015 the APA empaneled an Ethics Commission which made a series of recommendations; however, the Commission itself as well as its recommendations are also controversial. This paper presents criticisms of the Ethics Code that have generally not been discussed in the previous literature.     

Honesty and inquiry: W.K. Clifford’s ethics of belief

ABSTRACT

W.K. Clifford is widely known for his emphatic motto that it is wrong, always everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. In fact, that dictum and Clifford’s condemnation of a scheming self-deceptive shipowner sum up how his ethics of belief is most often remembered and how it has been subsequently interpreted. In contrast to other recent interpretations, we argue that the motto is misleading as a guide to Clifford’s position. It is best understood as essentially a rhetorical flourish. Moreover, in important ways the scheming shipowner is not stereotypical of the kind of believer Clifford thought blameworthy. A careful study of Clifford’s various writings on the ethics of belief finally reveals him not to be an evidentialist in the Humean tradition. Rather, inspired by Charles Darwin’s work in moral psychology, he applied an evolutionary-functional virtue ethics to the doxastic realm. This perspective allows a fruitful examination of his engagement with contemporaries like Matthew Arnold. It also allows us to recognize him as a predecessor to modern attributionist accounts of blameworthy belief.     

A geometric principle of indifference

That one's degrees of belief at any one time obey the axioms of probability theory is widely regarded as a necessary condition for static rationality. Many theorists hold that it is also a sufficient condition, but according to critics this yields too subjective an account of static rationality. However, there are currently no good proposals as to how to obtain a tenable stronger probabilistic theory of static rationality. In particular, the idea that one might achieve the desired strengthening by adding some symmetry principle to the probability axioms has appeared hard to maintain. Starting from an idea of Carnap and drawing on relatively recent work in cognitive science, this paper argues that conceptual spaces provide the tools to devise an objective probabilistic account of static rationality. Specifically, we propose a principle that derives prior degrees of belief from the geometrical structure of concepts.     

A normative perspective on the linguistic intergroup bias: How intragroup approval of ingroup members who use the linguistic intergroup bias perpetuates explicit intergroup bias

The present research examined from a normative perspective how intragroup normative processes regulate the consequences of the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB). Results of three studies supported our hypothesis that intragroup approval of an ingroup member who uses the LIB plays a key role in perpetuating pro-ingroup bias. In Study 1, ingroup members who used pro-ingroup (vs. pro-outgroup) LIB elicited more intragroup approval and this effect was mediated by the perception of the speaker as being biased in favor of the ingroup. In Studies 2 and 3, intragroup approval (vs. disapproval) of an ingroup member who used the LIB enhanced the expression of pro-ingroup bias. By providing the first demonstration of how the LIB relates to intragroup normative processes, our studies highlight a new path by which the LIB helps perpetuate intergroup bias.     

Objective and epistemic gradability: Is the new angle on the Knobe effect empirically grounded?

According to the New Angle, any explanation of the Knobe effect must be gradable and asymmetric. It has been argued that only Hindriks’ approach meets both criteria. First, we argue that Holton’s hypothesis also meets the criteria. Second, we show that the authors are not justified in taking the criteria to be empirically justified. We have failed to replicate the asymmetry result in two experiments. Moreover, gradability can be objective or epistemic. We show that the New Angle presupposes objective gradability. In our experiments, the patterns of responses to questions about epistemic and objective gradability are the same, irrespective of whether the feature is objectively gradable (e.g., blameworthiness) or not (e.g., intentionality). Our results thus question the extent to which the New Angle is empirically grounded. Moreover, they raise doubt whether the answers to questions about epistemic and objective gradability can be taken at face value at all.

Abbreviations: NRH - normative reasons hypothesis; NVH - norm violation hypothesis; DQ - degree question; DAQ - degree of agreement question     

Friendlessness and theory of mind: A prospective longitudinal study

Chronic friendlessness in childhood predicts adverse mental health outcomes throughout life, yet its earliest roots are poorly understood. In theory, developing a theory of mind (ToM) should help children gain mutual friends and one preschool study (Peterson & Siegal, 2002. Br J Dev Psychol, 20, 205) suggested a cross‐sectional connection. We therefore used a 2‐year prospective longitudinal design to explore ToM as a predictor of mutual friendship in 114 children from age 5 to 7 years after controlling potential confounds including language ability and group popularity. Confirming friendship's distinctiveness from group sociometric status, numerous group‐rejected children (53%) had a mutual friend whereas 23% of those highest in group status did not. Five‐year‐olds with a mutual friend significantly outperformed their friendless peers on a comprehensive ToM battery (basic and advanced false belief). Longitudinally, chronically friendless 7‐year‐olds (no friends at either testing time) stood out for their exceptionally poor Time 1 ToM understanding even after controlling for group popularity, age, and language skill. Extending previous evidence of ToM's predictive links with later social and cognitive outcomes, these results for mutual friendship suggest possible interventions to help reduce the lifelong mental health costs of chronic friendlessness.     

A pessimistic view of optimistic belief updating

Received academic wisdom holds that human judgment is characterized by unrealistic optimism, the tendency to underestimate the likelihood of negative events and overestimate the likelihood of positive events. With recent questions being raised over the degree to which the majority of this research genuinely demonstrates optimism, attention to possible mechanisms generating such a bias becomes ever more important. New studies have now claimed that unrealistic optimism emerges as a result of biased belief updating with distinctive neural correlates in the brain. On a behavioral level, these studies suggest that, for negative events, desirable information is incorporated into personal risk estimates to a greater degree than undesirable information (resulting in a more optimistic outlook). However, using task analyses, simulations, and experiments we demonstrate that this pattern of results is a statistical artifact. In contrast with previous work, we examined participants’ use of new information with reference to the normative, Bayesian standard. Simulations reveal the fundamental difficulties that would need to be overcome by any robust test of optimistic updating. No such test presently exists, so that the best one can presently do is perform analyses with a number of techniques, all of which have important weaknesses. Applying these analyses to five experiments shows no evidence of optimistic updating. These results clarify the difficulties involved in studying human ‘bias’ and cast additional doubt over the status of optimism as a fundamental characteristic of healthy cognition.