Virtuousness refers to the pursuit of the highest aspirations in the human condition. It is characterized by human impact, moral goodness, and unconditional societal betterment. Several writers have recently argued that corporations, in addition to being concerned with ethics, should also emphasize an ethos of virtuousness in corporate action. Virtuousness emphasizes actions that go beyond the “do no harm” assumption embedded in most ethical codes of conduct. Instead, it emphasizes the highest and best of the human condition. This research empirically (...) examines the buffering and amplifying effects of virtuousness in organizations. The study hypothesizes that virtuousness has a positive effect on organizations because amplifying dynamics make subsequent virtuous action more likely, and buffering dynamics reduce the harmful effects of downsizing. The study reveals that two types of virtuousness – tonic and phasic – are associated with these effects. (shrink)

A persistent belief in American culture is that males both outperform and have a higher inherent aptitude for mathematics than females. Using data from two school districts in two different states in the United States, this study used longitudinal multilevel modeling to examine whether overall performance on standardized as well as classroom tests reveals a gender difference in mathematics performance. The results suggest that both male and female students demonstrated the same growth trend in mathematics performance (as measured by standardized (...) test scores) over time, but females' mathematics grade-point average is significantly higher than males. These results are discussed in the context of present day standardized assessment in the United States that may motivate teachers to focus on higher expectations for mathematics performance regardless of gender, thus challenging cultural beliefs that stigmatize mathematics as masculine in the United States. (shrink)

Studies suggest that when a language requires grammatical marking of future events, speakers prefer immediate payoffs and engage in less future-oriented behavior. If future costs of tax avoidance are non-trivial, we posit that strong future time reference in languages would lower managers’ perceptions about costs, encouraging more tax avoidance. Using a large sample of 56,243 firm-year observations across 31 countries, we find that tax avoidance is higher where FTR in the language is strong. We also find that tax avoidance is (...) more prevalent in Swiss regions with strong FTR and in US firms whose CEOs were born in countries with strong FTR. Collectively, our evidence suggests that costs of tax avoidance can be non-trivial, and that linguistically driven time perception helps explain the cross-country variation in tax avoidance. (shrink)

Trustworthy eco-labels provide consumers with valuable information on environmentally friendly products and thus promote green consumerism. But what makes an eco-label trustworthy and what can government do to increase consumer confidence? The scant existing literature indicates that low governmental involvement increases confidence. This suggests that government should just provide the basic legal framework for eco-labeling and leave the rest to non-governmental organizations. However, the empirical underpinning of this conclusion is insufficient. This paper analyses consumer confidence in different organic food labeling (...) regimes with varying degrees of governmental involvement. Using unique and detailed survey data from the US, United Kingdom, Denmark, and Sweden, the analysis shows that confidence is highest in countries with substantial state involvement. This suggests that governments can increase green consumerism through active and substantial involvement in eco-labeling. (shrink)

Narrative Science examines the use of narrative in scientific research over the last two centuries. It brings together an international group of scholars who have engaged in intense collaboration to find and develop crucial cases of narrative in science. Motivated and coordinated by the Narrative Science project, funded by the European Research Council, this volume offers integrated and insightful essays examining cases that run the gamut from geology to psychology, chemistry, physics, botany, mathematics, epidemiology, and biological engineering. Taking in shipwrecks, (...) human evolution, military intelligence, and mass extinctions, this landmark study revises our understanding of what science is, and the roles of narrative in scientists' work. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

It is shown that the jet mechanism derivable from the Lorentz deformation picture leads to a nearly constant average jet transverse momentum. It is pointed out that this is consistent with the high-energy experimental data. It is pointed out further that this result strengthens the physical basis for the minimal time-energy uncertainty combined covariantly with Heisenberg's space-momentum uncertainty relation.

A common and driving assumption in agricultural research is that the introduction of research trials, new practices and innovative technologies will result in technology adoption, and will subsequently generate benefits for farmers and other stakeholders. In Lao PDR, the potential benefits of introduced technologies have not been fully realised by beneficiaries. We report on an analysis of a survey of 735 smallholder farmers in Southern Lao PDR who were questioned about factors that influenced their decisions to adopt new technologies. In (...) this study, we have constructed measures or states of adoption which identify key elements of an adoption decision-making nexus. Analysis was conducted to statistically group explanatory factors of adoption. The key explanatory factors represented attributes of the farmer, the factors considered when undertaking production decisions and elements of the agricultural value chain that present as opportunities or constraints. We describe the combination of farmer’s personal attributes, perceptions of the value chain, and the introduction of new technologies by external actors as an “agricultural research value chain”, where agricultural research activities intervene to derive greater benefits for local farmers. A generalised linear model, via Poisson regression analysis on the identified explanatory factors, was applied to explore how they influence adoption measures and we found several significant relationships. (shrink)

Background: Financial conflict of interest in clinical research is an area of active debate. While data exist on the perspectives and roles of academic institutions, investigators, industry sponsors, and scientific journals, little is known about the perspectives of potential research participants.Methods: The authors surveyed potential research participants over the internet, using the Harris Interactive Chronic Illness Database. A potential research participant was defined by: self report of diagnosis by a health care professional and willingness to participate in clinical trials. Email (...) invitations were sent to 20 205 persons with coronary artery disease, breast cancer, or depression; a total of 6363 persons were screened; of these, 86% or 5478 met inclusion criteria and completed the survey. The outcome measures were respondents’ ratings on: importance of knowing conflict of interest information, whether its disclosure ought to be required, and its effect on willingness to participate—across seven widely discussed scenarios of financial conflicts of interest .Results: Majority responded that knowing conflict of interest information was “extremely” or “very” important; a larger majority felt financial conflicts of interest should be disclosed as part of informed consent . In all seven scenarios, a majority was still willing to participate but in some scenarios a sizable minority would be wary of participation. Respondents were more wary of individual than institutional conflicts of interest. Illness group and sociodemographic factors had modest effects and did not affect the main trends.Conclusions: The prevailing practice of non-disclosure of financial conflicts of interest in clinical research appears contrary to the values of potential research participants. (shrink)

The chromosome passenger complex (CPC) localizes to chromosomes and microtubules, sometimes simultaneously. The CPC also has multiple domains for interacting with chromatin and microtubules. Interactions between the CPC and both the chromatin and microtubules is important for spindle assembly and error correction. Such dual chromatin‐microtubule interactions may increase the concentration of the CPC necessary for efficient kinase activity while also making it responsive to specific conditions or structures in the cell. CPC‐microtubule dependent functions are considered in the context of the (...) first meiotic division. Acentrosomal spindle assembly is a process that depends on transfer of the CPC from the chromosomes to the microtubules. Furthermore, transfer to the microtubules is not only to position the CPC for a later role in cytokinesis; metaphase I error correction and subsequent bi‐orientation of bivalents may depend on microtubule associated CPC interacting with the kinetochores. (shrink)

Aggleton & Brown (A&B) propose that the hippocampal-anterior thalamic and perirhinal-medial dorsal thalamic systems play independent roles in episodic memory, with the hippocampus supporting recollection-based memory and the perirhinal cortex, recognition memory. In this commentary we discuss whether there is experimental support for the A&B model from studies of long-term memory in semantic dementia.

The authors assess the collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley’s Community Assessment of Renewable Energy and Sustainability program and the Pinoleville Pomo Nation, a small Native American tribal nation in northern California. The collaboration focused on creating culturally inspired, environmentally sustainable housing for tribal citizens using a codesign methodology developed at the university. The housing design process is evaluated in terms of both its contribution to Native American “cultural sovereignty,” as elaborated by Coffey and Tsosie, and as a potential (...) example of the democratization of scientific practice. (shrink)

China is a country that has undertaken a great transformation since the late 1970' s, and among these changes, has seen a massive growth in the advertising industry with the influx of foreign advertisers, and the development of regional and global media, such as satellite television and the Internet. This has resulted in the Chinese people of all ages having a greater opportunity of exposure to different types of advertising, including the advertising of potentially controversial products, which could clash with (...) traditional Chinese values. Using a stakeholder theory approach, this study analyzes the responses of 630 Chinese respondents to discover who is offended by controversial advertisements and determine ways potentially offensive advertising messages can be reduced, thereby assisting marketers in being more socially responsible in their advertising messages. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to study the general and contextual issues related to prayers for the departed with a focus on the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania (ELCT). In 2012, the ELCT published a new hymnal, which included a number of prayers for those mourning their deceased friends and relatives, as well as prayers for the deceased individuals themselves. As a result of considerable criticism, this hymnal was replaced by a new edition in 2017, in which the prayers (...) for the departed were omitted. The article further scrutinises the historical and theological aspects of praying for the departed in Lutheranism. It studies examples of prayers for the dead in Lutheran churches in two other countries, Finland and Sweden, and relates these to the situation in the ELCT. (shrink)

The advertising of controversial products/services and the use of controversial images to "cut through the clutter" in the marketplace appears to be increasing around the world. However, apart from the general ethical issue regarding the deliberate use of controversial/offensive images for public viewing that may offend some people, it is important to determine what makes a controversial advertisement offensive? A questionnaire was distributed to 1014 students across four different countries in the Asia Pacific region to determine what type of products (...) are seen as offensive and the reasons they are offensive. The results present some important implications for international marketers. (shrink)

Recent data indicate that under a specific posthypnotic suggestion to circumvent reading, highly suggestible subjects successfully eliminated the Stroop interference effect. The present study examined whether an optical explanation could account for this finding. Using cyclopentolate hydrochloride eye drops to pharmacologically prevent visual accommodation in all subjects, behavioral Stroop data were collected from six highly hypnotizables and six less suggestibles using an optical setup that guaranteed either sharply focused or blurred vision. The highly suggestibles performed the Stroop task when naturally (...) vigilant, under posthypnotic suggestion not to read, and while visually blurred; the less suggestibles ran naturally vigilant, while looking away, and while visually blurred. Although visual accommodation was precluded for all subjects, posthypnotic suggestion effectively eliminated Stroop interference and was comparable to looking away in controls. These data strengthen the view that Stroop interference is neither robust nor inevitable and support the hypothesis that posthypnotic suggestion may exert a top-down influence on neural processing. (shrink)

Through imaginative engagement readers of fiction become, to an extraordinary extent, the narrator’s ‘children’: they often submit themselves to the narrator’s authority without reserve. But precisely because of that, readers are deeply at a loss when their trust is betrayed. This underscores a core function of fiction, namely to evoke emotional response in the reader. In this paper, we hypothesize how a reader’s imaginative engagement can be subjected to narrative frustration due to processing or moral complexity. The types of narrative (...) frustration we consider differ in terms of their sources, and their emotional and behavioral impacts on the reader. Here, we break down these frustrations into their component parts, in an effort to better characterize the different classes of frustrations. We propose that frustrations arise from different combinations of local uncertainty, moral clash and global uncertainty. These sources of frustration in turn explain the reader’s emotional response and their consequent reading behavior as they imaginatively engage with fiction. (shrink)

Philosophers ask just whose expression, if anyone’s, we hear in lyric poetry. Walton provides a novel possibility: it’s the reader who “uses” the poem (just as a speech giver uses a speech) who makes the language expressive. But worries arise once we consider poems in particular social or political settings, those which require a strong self-other distinction, or those with expressions that should not be disassociated from the subjects whose experience they draw from. One way to meet this challenge is (...) to consider the poem expressive of a plural subject, which frees us from looking for a particular individual whose voice we hear in the work, whether she be fictional or actual. Some lyrics give voice to a group whose experience is attended to in the work. This may be done through a posited fictional speaker, but the ontology of the speaker is shown to be less important. Attending to a group whose concerns are voiced allows us to explain how poems can manage to address our-worldly concerns even when lacking actual persons whose expressions we encounter in the poems. (shrink)

In this book, field and laboratory researchers show that the Great Apes are capable of thinking at symbolic levels, traditionally considered uniquely human.

Volume 34, Issue 8, December 2020, Page 1573-1590.

The COVID-19 pandemic put a large burden on many healthcare systems, causing fears about resource scarcity and triage. Several COVID-19 guidelines included age as an explicit factor and practices of both triage and ‘anticipatory triage’ likely limited access to hospital care for elderly patients, especially those in care homes. To ensure the legitimacy of triage guidelines, which affect the public, it is important to engage the public’s moral intuitions. Our study aimed to explore general public views in the UK on (...) the role of age, and related factors like frailty and quality of life, in triage during the COVID-19 pandemic. We held online deliberative workshops with members of the general public. Participants were guided through a deliberative process to maximise eliciting informed and considered preferences. Participants generally accepted the need for triage but strongly rejected ‘fair innings’ and ‘life projects’ principles as justifications for age-based allocation. They were also wary of the ‘maximise life-years’ principle, preferring to maximise the number of lives rather than life years saved. Although they did not arrive at a unified recommendation of one principle, a concern for three core principles and values eventually emerged: equality, efficiency and vulnerability. While these remain difficult to fully respect at once, they captured a considered, multifaceted consensus: utilitarian considerations of efficiency should be tempered with a concern for equality and vulnerability. This ‘triad’ of ethical principles may be a useful structure to guide ethical deliberation as societies negotiate the conflicting ethical demands of triage. (shrink)

Feminized care work occupations have traditionally paid lower wages compared to non–care work occupations when controlling for human capital. However, when men enter feminized occupations, they often experience a “glass escalator,” leading to higher wages and career mobility as compared to their female counterparts. In this study, we examine whether men experience a “wage penalty” for performing care work in today’s economy, or whether the glass escalator helps to mitigate the devaluation of care work occupations. Using data from the Survey (...) of Income and Program Participation for the years 1996-2011, we examine the career patterns of low- and middle-skill men in health care occupations. We found that men in occupations that provide the most hands-on direct care did experience lower earnings compared to men in other occupations after controlling for demographic characteristics. However, men in more technical allied health occupations did not have significantly lower earnings, suggesting that these occupations may be part of the glass escalator for men in the health care sector. Minority men were significantly more likely than white men to be in direct care occupations, but not in frontline allied health occupations. Male direct care workers were less likely to transition to unemployment compared to men in other occupations. (shrink)

Systematic study of the intersection of ethics consultation services and solid organ transplants and recipients can identify and illustrate ethical issues that arise in the clinical care of these patients, including challenges beyond resource allocation. This was a single-centre, retrospective cohort study of all adult ethics consultations between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2017, at a large academic medical centre in the north-eastern United States. Of the 880 ethics consultations, sixty (6.8 per cent ) involved solid organ transplant, thirty-nine (...) (65.0 per cent) for candidates and twenty-one (35.0 per cent ) for recipients. Ethics consultations were requested for 4.3 per cent of heart, 4.9 per cent of lung, 0.3 per cent of liver, and 0.3 per cent of kidney transplant recipients over the study period. Nurses were more likely to request ethics consultations for recipients than physicians (80.0 per cent vs 20.0 per cent, p = 0.006). The most common reason for consultation among transplant candidates was discussion about intensity of treatment or goals of care after the patient was not or was no longer a transplant candidate. The most common reason for ethics consultation among transplant recipients was disagreement between transplant providers and patients/families/non-transplant healthcare professionals over the appropriate intensity of treatment for recipients. Very few consultations involved questions about appropriate resource allocation. Ethics consultants involved in these cases most often navigated communication challenges between transplant and non-transplant healthcare professionals and patients and families. (shrink)

This book is not a conventional introduction to the philosophy of mind, nor is it a contribution to the physicalist/ dualist debate. Instead The Representational Theory of Mind demonstrates that we can construct physicalist theories of important aspects of our mental life. Its aim is to explain and defend a physicalist theory of intelligence in two parts: the first six chapters consist of an exposition, elaboration and defence of human sentience (the functionalist theory of mind), and the second part considers (...) rivals and objections to this theory. Kim Sterelny aims to introduce people to this area of philosophy by exemplifying it, to show that philosophical and empirical investigations can be synthesized to the benefit of both. --From publisher's description. (shrink)

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom-up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top-down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of one's cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations (...) between those individuals. We administered a multi-gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture. (shrink)

Identity construction — the process of creating and building a new future self — is an integral part of a person’s professional career development. However, at present we have little understanding of the psychological mechanisms that underpin this process. Likewise, we have little understanding of the barriers that obstruct it, and which thus may contribute to inequality in career outcomes. Using a social identity lens, and particularly the Social Identity Model of Identity Change (SIMIC), we explore the process of academic (...) identity construction among doctoral students. Through thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 22 PhD candidates, we observe that the identity construction process relies on a person’s perception of a navigable pathway between their current self and their future self. Importantly, participants who were able to access multiple identity resources were more likely to perceive a navigable pathway to a future professional self (e.g., as an academic), unless they perceived these identities to be incompatible with those held by leading members of the profession (e.g., their supervisors). This research suggests that the identities that people are able to access as they progress in their careers may play an important role in their ongoing professional identity construction and career success. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page 57-59.

An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we (...) witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved. (shrink)

Xenophobia is conceptually distinct from racism. Xenophobia is also distinct from nativism. Furthermore, theories of racism are largely ensconced in nationalized narratives of racism, often influenced by the black-white binary, which obscures xenophobia and shelters it from normative critiques. This paper addresses these claims, arguing for the first and last, and outlining the second. Just as philosophers have recently analyzed the concept of racism, clarifying it and pinpointing why it’s immoral and the extent of its moral harm, so we will (...) analyze xenophobia and offer a pluralist account of xenophobia, with important implications for racism. This analysis is guided by the discussion of racism in recent moral philosophy, social ontology, and research in the psychology of racism and implicit attitudes. (shrink)

Emotion regulation (i.e. either up- or down-regulating affective responses to emotional stimuli) has been shown to modulate long-term emotional memory formation. Further, research has demonstrated that the emotional aspects of scenes are preferentially remembered relative to neutral aspects (known as the emotional memory trade-off effect). This trade-off is often enhanced when sleep follows learning, compared to an equivalent period of time spent awake. However, the interactive effects of sleep and emotion regulation on emotional memory are poorly understood. We presented 87 (...) participants with pictures of neutral or negative objects on neutral backgrounds paired with instructions to either increase or decrease their emotional response by altering personal relevance, or to passively view the stimuli. Following a 12 h period of sleep or wakefulness, participants were tested for their memory of objects and backgrounds separately. Although we replicated the emotional memory trade-off effect, no differences in the magnitude of the trade-off effect were observed between regulation conditions. Sleep improved all aspects of memory, but it did not preferentially benefit memory for emotional components of scenes. Irrespective of a period of sleep or wake following encoding, findings suggest emotion regulation during encoding did not influence memory for emotional items at a 12-hour delay. (shrink)

This study examined the role of religion in xenophobic responses to the threat of Ebola. Religious communities often offer members strong social ties and social support, which may help members cope with psychological and physical threat, including global threats like Ebola. Our analysis of a nationally representative sample in the U.S. found that overall, the more vulnerable to Ebola people felt, the more they exhibited xenophobic responses, but this relationship was moderated by importance of religion. Those who perceived religion as (...) more important in their lives exhibited weaker xenophobic reactions than those who perceived religion as less important. Furthermore, social connectedness measured by collectivism explained the moderating role of religion, suggesting that higher collectivism associated with religion served as a psychological buffer. Religious people showed attenuated threat responses because they had a stronger social system that may offer resources for its members to cope with psychological and physical threats. The current research highlights that different cultural groups react to increased threats in divergent ways. (shrink)