The Humdrum of Rhetorics: A Reply to Durrheim's "Theoretical Conundrum"

Durrheim's core argument appears upon close inspection not to be very convincing, nor his use of rhetoric. His argument is now shown from the—presumably exemplary—four theories, he cites. He unwarrantly strengthens his argument by preselection, overgeneralization, oversimplification, and by confusing and misconceiving key concepts, and using an arbitrary selection of theories. His suggestion that he knows the vast literature of authoritarianism is not substantiated, considering the unbalanced use of citations, some along the line of Jaensch, Ray and Eysenck. Rhetoric is portrayed as an alternative scientific method, but seems in this way rather to regress into a neodogmatic approach devoid of empirical testing and emancipatory content.     

The Political Manipulation of Group Composition: Engineering the Decision Context

Group decisions are not made solely by evaluating the merits of the contending positions. Instead, actors may engage in manipulation to increase the fortunes of their policy preference. Actors may manipulate information, group procedures, or group composition. Using a model of group socialization, this paper argues that a manipulator may seek to alter the group composition as to access and/or status. In doing so, the manipulator seeks to create a more favorable decision environment. This political perspective maintains that the dynamic nature of group composition provides an opportunity for a manipulator to engineer the decision context, potentially affecting the group's decisional output. Strategies and tactics of composition manipulation are presented and then utilized to analyze the American decision process during the Iranian revolution.     

Culture, Society, and the Individual: Cross-Cultural Political Psychology in Japan

Studies of political behavior and attitudes in Japan have often looked to similarities and differences between the West, most notably the U.S., and Japan. This paper details two approaches concerned with examining Japanese social and political behavior within a cross-cultural context. The first—nihonjinron—works with cultural nationalism, which argues that Japanese values are unique and thus no social theory developed in the West can be applied to Japanese society. The second approach is characterized by field studies and tries to assess Japanese social behavior by comparing it to that of Americans and Europeans. There is a great deal of knowledge on political behavior in Western countries which scholars in Japan often refer to in order to evaluate the significance of their survey results. But there is still limited information on the Japanese situation, and any attempt to construct a general theory in either cultural or cross-cultural political psychology will have to refer also to human attitudes in this non-Western industrial society.     

The Challenger Disaster And The Revival Of Rhetoric In Organizational Life

Explanations of the cause of the Challenger disaster by the Presidential Commission and by communication scholars are flawed. These explanations are characterized by a common tendency to emphasize the technical and procedural aspects of organizational life at the expense of the cognitive and ethical. Rightly construed, the Challenger disaster illustrates both the need for a revived art of rhetoric and the importance of putting in place the political and social conditions that make this art efficacious in furthering cognitive understanding and ethical conduct.     

On the Origins of Children's Compliance and Opposition: Family Context, Reinforcement, and Rules

Interactional synchrony and context dependent reinforcement are presented as similar phenomena in this discussion of children's dispositions to comply with or to oppose parental instructions. I argue that consistent and appropriate parental reactions to the full range of a child's response repertoire will establish a family context conducive to positive reinforcement of child compliance. In contrast, inconsistent parental reactions appear to create a chaotic family context conducive to the negative reinforcement of child opposition. Depending on these two forms of context, the parents and children seem to generate distinctive personal rules which outline the functional arrangements of context, behavior and reinforcement. The importance of these personal rules in helping parents and children to improve the lawfulness of family context is highlighted.     

Effects of thematic and lexical priming on readers' eye movements

The study was inspired by Ehrlich & Rayner (1981). In the study semantic context effects were investigated during on-line discourse processing. Readers' eye movements were registered to see whether words that were semantically closely related to the global theme of the text were read faster than words that did not have any apparent semantic link to the discourse theme. In addition, lexical priming was examined by presenting an identity prime earlier in the text. The results showed that non-thematic words were regressed to more often than thematic words. Regressions were typically initiated after reaching a clause or sentence boundary. Regressions were thus assumed to be made in order to integrate non-thematic words into the previous context. Modest negative correlations were found between word's fixation time and its relative predictability. No effects of lexical priming were observed. It was concluded that moderately constraining discourse contexts produce negligible effects on word recognition.     

Enacted and nonenacted encoding of social actions

Previous research has demonstrated that recall of enacted verbal commands is superior to recall of the same commands without enactment. The experiment reported explored whether the same effect would hold true in a social context as opposed to the non-social context used in previous research. The results demonstrated that this is indeed the case. Enacted verbal commands are better recalled than commands that are encoded verbally and better than commands that are encoded by means of observing them being performed. It was also demonstrated that items rated as having positive emotional value were better recalled than items rated as negative or neutral. This was true for enacted as well as for nonenacted commands. It is concluded that there is no basic difference between memory of commands enacted in the social context and memory of commands enacted in a non-social context. We discuss the data in relation to current theory of memory of actions.     

Context specificity of operant discrimination performance in pigeons

In an experiment designed to investigate odors as potential retrieval cues in pigeons' memory (i.e., as conditional stimuli), 8 pigeons first learned to peck a red keylight (S+, reinforced) and not a blue one (S−, extinguished) in the presence of either a eucalyptus oil or isoamyl acetate odor. They were repeatedly switched between two chambers with the same odor to habituate any reaction to the switching that would be required for eventual testing for conditional control by the odors. Next, the birds learned the reversal (blue S+, red S−) in the presence of the alternative odor in one of these chambers. When the birds were then switched to the alternative chamber for additional training, although the odor was still appropriate to the reversal problem, behavior appropriate to the original training condition recurred. Testing indicated that reversal performance was specific to the one chamber in which it had been trained.     

BEHAVIORISM: PART OF THE PROBLEM OR PART OF THE SOLUTION?1

The form frequently taken by behavior-modification programs is analyzed in terms of the parent science, Behaviorism. Whereas Behaviorism assumes that behavior is the result of contingencies, and that lasting behavior change involves changing the contingencies that give rise to and support the behavior, most behavior-modification programs merely arrange special contingencies in a special environment to eliminate the “problem” behavior. Even when the problem behavior is as widespread as alcoholism and crime, behavior modifiers focus on “fixing” the alcoholic and the criminal, not on changing the societal contingencies that prevail outside the therapeutic environment and continue to produce alcoholics and criminals. The contingencies that shape this method of dealing with behavioral problems are also analyzed, and this analysis leads to a criticism of the current social structure as a behavior control system. Although applied behaviorists have frequently focused on fixing individuals, the science of Behaviorism provides the means to analyze the structures, the system, and the forms of societal control that produce the “problems”.     

The New Darwinian Naturalism in Political Theory

There has been a resurgence of Darwinian naturalism in political theory, as manifested in the recent work of political scientists such as Roger D. Masters, Robert J. McShea, and James Q. Wilson. They belong to an intellectual tradition that includes not only Charles Darwin but also Aristotle and David Hume. Although most political scientists believe Darwinian social theory has been refuted, their objections rest on three false dichotomies: facts versus values, nature versus freedom, and nature versus nurture. Rejecting these dichotomies would allow the social sciences to be linked to the natural sciences through Darwinian biology.