Purity matters more than harm in moral judgments of suicide: Response to Gray (2014)

Many people judge suicide to be immoral. We have found evidence that these moral judgments are primarily predicted by people’s belief that suicide taints the soul and by independent concerns about purity. This finding is inconsistent with accounts that define morality as fundamentally based upon harm considerations. In this commentary, we respond to a critique of our finding, and we provide further support for our original conclusions. Even when applying new exclusion criteria to our data, an examination of effect sizes demonstrates that concerns about purity robustly and meaningfully explain variance in moral judgments of suicide. While harm concerns sometimes predict moral judgments of suicide alongside purity concerns, they reliably explain a much smaller proportion of the variance than do purity concerns. Therefore, data from six studies continue to suggest that the relevance of harm concerns for moral judgments of suicide is substantially overshadowed by the contribution of purity concerns.     

A sense of Irishness

This paper explores how issues of Irish identity and difference expressed themselves in a range of group analytic settings. This Irish dimension has been largely absent in therapy literature. Work on the impact of cultural difference and racism, while very relevant, has not addressed itself to the specific dynamics of the Irish experience in Britain and how this manifests itself in therapy settings.

Irishness was understood in a number of different ways in the groups described. For the Irish members, their cultural identity was used both to generate a genuine exploration of difference and the interweaving of personal and cultural events, and, in other circumstances, it was used to create division and to deny early painful family experiences.

For the non-Irish members, the Irish experience was simultaneously acknowledged and denied. Acts of apparent inclusion led instead to an experience of exclusion. These experiences reflect the reality of social, political and historical power relations between cultures and how these manifest themselves in groups. A countertransference reaction on the part of the group therapist when identified as Irish, and the impact of this on the group, is also considered.     

Impact de la discrimination envers les personnes LGBTQ+ en milieu de travail : recension systématique

In the United States, between 3% and 12% of employees are part of the LGBTQ+ community. Despite numerous anti-discrimination laws, they continue to be the target of discrimination in their workplaces. The purpose of this systematic review is to examine the impact of direct and indirect discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals in the workplace and on the organization. Sixty-one articles published between January 2000 and June 2021 and indexed in PsycINFO, Web of Science, Business Source Premier and Gender Studies Data Base and Erudit were analyzed. The results first show that there is no consensus on the definition of discrimination and that few studies distinguish between direct and indirect discrimination. The effects of direct discrimination on individuals can be summarized into five broad categories: 1) hiding one's sexual orientation or gender identity, 2) experiencing financial consequences, 3) experiencing mental or physical health problems, 4) being excluded, and 5) feeling discomfort. The four effects of indirect discrimination on individuals are 1) hiding sexual orientation or gender identity, 2) experiencing negative emotions, 3) mental or physical health problems, and 4) lack of promotion. Finally, the five categories of consequences of direct discrimination on organizations are 1) lack of commitment and satisfaction, 2) lack of trust in the organization, 3) loss of workforce, 4) decreased performance, and 5) harassment. The only identified effect of indirect discrimination on the organization is a deteriorated work climate.     

Managing religions: state responses to religious diversity

After 9/11 there is a general sense of the crisis of liberalism and secularism, and the need for greater security and surveillance. Diasporic Muslim communities have been increasingly the target of government interventions and investigations, resulting in various forms of governmentality that in fact constitute a ‘management of Muslims.’ The traditional strategies of benign neglect have been replaced by periods of intense governmental activity. The idea of ‘managing Muslims’ is often disguised by a more neutral terminology such as pluralism or multiculturalism. This article examines two versions of the management of religions from policies of ‘upgrading’ or retraining of Muslims for modernity to more robust policies of containment, rendition and seclusion. The result of securitisation and globalisation is the rise of a new type of society that I call ‘the enclave society.’ In such societies governments are creating new policies of ‘enclavement’ to quarantine communities that are undesirable or unwanted or dangerous. The mobility of a global society is now being constrained by encirclement and enclavement through building walls, ghettoes, catchments and no-go areas. Such policies are likely to be counter productive, requiring an escalation of draconian interventions.     

Militant Islam and Weber’s Social closure: interrelated secular and religious codes of exclusion

Weber’s concept of social closure can help to illuminate the social processes that result in the development of militant Muslim groups. Adapting and applying the concept helps to establish the interrelationships between secular processes and Islamification that are designed by the militants to exclude others and usurp governments. These processes include the implementation of secularisation, conversely concessions to religion and the reinvigoration of Islamic concepts that are used as codes of closure to unite followers and ostracize other Muslims and religious denominations.

Linguistic ostracism causes prejudice: Support for a serial mediation effect

ABSTRACT

This research investigated the effects of linguistic ostracism, defined as any communication setting in which a target individual (or group) is ostracized by another individual (or group) in a language that the target has extremely limited ability to understand. Participants were included or ostracized by their group members during a computer-mediated group discussion. Half of the ostracized participants were linguistically ostracized via their group members conversing with one another in a language the participant did not know well (Spanish Ostracism: SO), or in a language the participant did know well (English Ostracism: EO). SO participants reported feeling less similar than both included and EO participants. SO participants also reported being angrier and expressed more prejudice than included participants (and EO participants using effect size estimates). Results also provided support for the hypothesized serial mediation model. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for intergroup relations.     

Social rejection and self- versus other-awareness

Recent research (Twenge, Catanese, & Baumeister, 2003) demonstrated decreased self-awareness among socially-rejected individuals as a defensive strategy designed to buffer the self from the acute distress of rejection. In the present study, we sought to demonstrate that this decreased self-awareness among socially-rejected individuals is: (a) primarily evident in social domains, as opposed to non-social domains and (b) accompanied by increased awareness of others’ behavior. Using a social memory paradigm, we found that rejected participants exhibited better memory for other-related social behaviors, but poorer memory for self-related social behaviors in comparison to accepted participants. These data provide evidence for a two-pronged response to social rejection characterized by both self-protective strategies and strategies aimed at regaining and maintaining social relationships.     

Getting rid of the bad ones: The relationship between group identification, deviant derogation, and identity maintenance

Two studies investigated the impact of the presentation of an undesirable group member on group stereotype judgments among participants with varying degrees of ingroup identification. In Study 1 (N = 67), identification was associated with stereotype change following presentation of an undesirable, but not a desirable, ingroup member. This relationship was mediated by evaluations of the undesirable ingroup member: the stronger the identification, the more negative the evaluation, and the greater the shift towards a more positive ingroup stereotype. In Study 2 (N = 180), identification was positively associated with ingroup stereotype ratings following presentation of an undesirable ingroup member but was negatively associated with outgroup ratings following presentation of an undesirable outgroup member. As in Study 1, the association between ingroup identification and ingroup stereotype ratings was mediated by evaluations of the undesirable ingroup member. Results are discussed in relation to the black sheep effect and identity maintenance strategies.     

Access is mainly a second-order process: SDT models whether phenomenally (first-order) conscious states are accessed by reflectively (second-order) conscious processes

Access can either be first-order or second-order. First order access concerns whether contents achieve representation in phenomenal consciousness at all; second-order access concerns whether phenomenally conscious contents are selected for metacognitive, higher order processing by reflective consciousness. When the optional and flexible nature of second-order access is kept in mind, there remain strong reasons to believe that exclusion failure can indeed isolate phenomenally conscious stimuli that are not so accessed. Irvine’s [Irvine, E. (2009). Signal detection theory, the exclusion failure paradigm and weak consciousness—Evidence for the access/phenomenal distinction? Consciousness and Cognition.] partial access argument fails because exclusion failure is indeed due to lack of second-order access, not insufficient phenomenally conscious information. Further, the enable account conforms with both qualitative differences and subjective report, and is simpler than the endow account. Finally, although first-order access may be a distinct and important process, second-order access arguably reflects the core meaning of access generally.