Is there evidence of robust,unconscious self-deception? A reply to Funkhouser and Barrett

Robust self-deception, in Funkhouser and Barrett’s sense, consists in the strategic pursuit of the goal of misleading oneself with respect to some proposition. Funkhouser and Barrett’s thesis is that an evaluation of the relevant empirical literatures reveals that the unconscious mind engages in robust self-deception. If Funkhouser and Barrett are correct, the psychological evidence vindicates an account of self-deception that challenges the orthodox motivationalist approach and makes clear the distinction between self-deception and other forms of motivated belief formation such as wishful thinking. The aim of this paper is to show that the evidence adduced by Funkhouser and Barrett fails to establish the existence of robust, unconscious self-deception.     

What Contributes to College Students’ Cheating? A Study of Individual Factors

To better understand the multiple individual factors that contribute to college cheating, we undertook a multivariate analysis of a national sample of 2,503 college students. Our findings indicated that demographic characteristics (e.g., gender, socioeconomic status, and year in college), character qualities (e.g., lack of self-control, others-oriented life purpose), college experience (e.g., academic preparation, extracurricular activities involvement, and working), and student perceptions and attitudes (e.g., attitude toward academic cheating, perception of faculty’s actions against cheating and cheating environment) are all significantly associated with academic cheating.     

Synagogues without rabbis or Christians? Ancient institutions beyond normative discourses

Abstract

This article focuses on a problem that tends to afflict, especially but not exclusively, historical narratives involving written sources celebrated as normative texts in contemporary religious communities. The religious authority ascribed to such texts is often entangled in claims about historical phenomena, resulting in ideological support of specific narratives nourished within religious communities as not only religiously significant but also historically true. Such assumptions in turn sustain aspects of religious identities and thus fulfil the social function of maintaining the status quo within and between communities. Because of their contemporary usefulness, these types of normative narratives are liable to bleed into scholarly reconstructions too, complicating the academic search for historical scenarios untouched by the needs of societies unknown to the ancients. This study aims to illustrate the problems involved through an exercise in which sources that speak to a specific historical question – the nature of ancient synagogues – but which later attained normative status within religious communities, are removed from the historical archive. The reconstruction offered, based on sources with no direct relationship to the continuing histories of Judaism and Christianity, yields a very different picture than the one commonly embraced today. The exercise also indicates the value of re-reading the sources previously removed from a new perspective, which may enrich the religious communities in question as they seek to understand their own history and identity, as well as one another.     

Taking a children’s rights perspective on children’s spirituality

Abstract

The right to spiritual development has had little attention in public educational policy. This is more challenging, considering the fact of increasing religious diversity and the focus on spirituality and religion in that context, as well as the way the spiritual is mentioned in documents on children’s rights. This article traces the development from the first documents on the rights of the child and responses to these documents. It is argued that educational policy and practice should pay more attention to the way children’s spirituality is included in the documents. This is an issue of general education as well as of moral philosophy. The article concludes with a claim: spiritual development is a matter of survival and flourishing as human beings, and considering this in the framework of children’s rights could mean exploring spiritual sources in one’s own faith as well as in other faiths.