Savings and fertility: ethical issues

... Population ethics is rightly regarded a difficult field of inquiry. Here I have tried to argue that the kinds of difficulty that have intrigued philosophers in recent years are insubstantial. Real difficulties lie elsewhere. They lie in deep conceptual problems actual people are faced with when they contemplate the desirable size of their family and the savings that should accompany it.     

When do counterstereotypic ingroup members inspire versus deflate? The effect of successful professional women on young women's leadership self-concept

Three experiments tested whether and when exposure to counterstereotypic ingroup members enhances women's implicit leadership self-concept. Participants read about professional women leaders framed as similar to versus different from most women (Experiment 1) or having the same versus different collegiate background as participants (Experiment 3). Experiment 2 manipulated similarity by giving false feedback about participants' similarity to women leaders. In all cases, seeing women leaders reduced implicit self-stereotyping relative to controls but only when they were portrayed as similar to one's ingroup (Experiment 1) and oneself (Experiments 2-3). Leaders portrayed as dissimilar either had no effect on self-beliefs (Experiment 1 and 3) or increased implicit self-stereotyping (Experiment 2). Dissimilar leaders also deflated participants' career goals and explicit leadership beliefs (Experiment 3). Finally, implicit self-beliefs became less stereotypic regardless of whether women believed the similarity feedback, but explicit self-beliefs changed only when they believed the feedback to be true (Experiment 2).     

What underlies the deficit in reported recollective experience in old age?

In recognition memory, older adults report fewer occasions on which recognition is accompanied by recollection of the original encoding context. This study asks why this occurs. Two main hypotheses were tested: (1) Older adults fail to encode the items sufficiently when first they experience them. (2) Older adults have a retrieval deficit that prevents efficient reintegration of target and context. In addition, the hypothesis that frontal lobe integrity is essential for recollective experience was examined. Twenty older (mean age 70.7 years) and 20 younger (mean age 22.9 years) adults were asked to study a list of items and to verbalize the strategies they were using to remember. A further 20 older adults (mean age 70.0 years) were tested without the think-aloud protocol. Subsequently, subjects completed a battery of psychometric tests before completing a recognition test. As expected, older adults showed less recollective experience. They differed from the young in how they encoded the material, and once this difference was accounted for, no age differences in recollective experience remained. There was little evidence to support the hypothesis that frontal lobe integrity plays a role in the reduction of recollective experience with age.     

Attribution of responsibility and crime seriousness

In this study we observed the effects of type of damage, magnitude of damage, and apprehension or escape of the offender upon the perceived seriousness of the offense, perceived freedom and intent exercised by the offender, and perceived duration of the crime. Contrary to previous results, personal crimes were judged to be more serious than property crimes only when the offender escaped arrest. Results confirmed previous findings that an increase in the negative consequences of the crime led to higher ratings of criminal intent. Perceived duration and assessments of crime seriousness were positively related to attribution of responsibility.     

Group entitativity and group perception: associations between physical features and psychological judgment

Two experiments tested whether the perceived entitativity of groups (i.e., cohesiveness) influences judgments about those groups, in terms of both their observable physical properties and underlying psychological traits. Entitativity was manipulated with groups whose members were similar or dissimilar in skin color. Experiment 1 demonstrated that beliefs about entitativity elicited more accurate judgments of skin color for entitative than nonentitative social groups, although memory for individual members of entitative groups was relatively impoverished. Experiment 2 revealed that entitative groups were viewed as not only physically similar but also psychologically homogeneous and elicited strong negative trait and behavioral judgments. Together, these findings suggest that physical properties (e.g., similarity) can create perceptions of psychological "groupness" that have important consequences for group perception.     

From automatic antigay prejudice to behavior: the moderating role of conscious beliefs about gender and behavioral control

Two experiments tested whether the relation between automatic prejudice and discriminatory behavior is moderated by 2 conscious processes: conscious egalitarian beliefs and behavioral control. The authors predicted that, when both conscious processes are deactivated, automatic prejudice would elicit discriminatory behavior. When either of the 2 processes is activated, behavioral bias would be eliminated. The authors assessed participants' automatic attitudes toward gay men, conscious beliefs about gender, behavioral control, and interactions with gay confederates. In Experiment 1, men's beliefs about gender were heterogeneous, whereas women's beliefs were mostly egalitarian; men's responses supported the predictions, but women's responses did not. In Experiment 2, the authors recruited a sample with greater diversity in gender-related beliefs. Results showed that, for both sexes, automatic prejudice produced biased behavior in the absence of conscious egalitarian beliefs and behavioral control. The presence of either conscious process eliminated behavioral bias.