We support the ambitious goal of unification within the behavioral sciences. We suggest that Darwinian evolution by means of natural selection can provide the integrative glue for this purpose, and we review our own work on selective investment theory (SIT), which is an example of how other-regarding preferences can be accommodated by a gene-centered account of evolution. (Published Online April 27 2007).

Depue & Morrone-Strupinsky (D&M-S) do not address how a reward system accommodates the motivational dilemmas associated with (a) the decision to approach versus avoid conspecifics, and (b) self versus other tradeoffs inherent in behaving altruistically toward bonded relationship partners. We provide an alternative evolutionary view that addresses motivational conflict, and discuss implications for the neurobiological study of affiliative bonds.

In recent years, we have seen a new concern with ethics training for research and development professionals. Although ethics training has become more common, the effectiveness of the training being provided is open to question. In the present effort, a new ethics training course was developed that stresses the importance of the strategies people apply to make sense of ethical problems. The effectiveness of this training was assessed in a sample of 59 doctoral students working in the biological and social (...) sciences using a pre-post design with follow-up and a series of ethical decision-making measures serving as the outcome variable. Results showed not only that this training led to sizable gains in ethical decision making but also that these gains were maintained over time. The implications of these findings for ethics training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

Ethical decision making measures are widely applied as the principal dependent variable used in studies of research integrity. However, evidence bearing on the internal and external validity of these measures is not available. In this study, ethical decision making measures were administered to 102 graduate students in the biological, health, and social sciences, along with measures examining exposure to ethical breaches and the severity of punishments recommended. The ethical decision making measure was found to be related to exposure to ethical (...) events and the severity of punishments awarded. The implications of these findings for the application of ethical decision making measures are discussed. (shrink)

It is commonly held that early career experiences influence ethical behavior. One way early career experiences might operate is to influence the decisions people make when presented with problems that raise ethical concerns. To test this proposition, 102 first-year doctoral students were asked to complete a series of measures examining ethical decision making along with a series of measures examining environmental experiences and climate perceptions. Factoring of the environmental measure yielded five dimensions: professional leadership, poor coping, lack of rewards, limited (...) competitive pressure, and poor career direction. Factoring of the climate inventory yielded four dimensions: equity, interpersonal conflict, occupational engagement, and work commitment. When these dimensions were used to predict performance on the ethical decision-making task, it was found that the environmental dimensions were better predictors than the climate dimensions. The implications of these findings for research on ethical conduct are discussed. (shrink)

Heisenberg'sgendanken experiments in quantum mechanics have given rise to a widespread belief that the indeterminacy relations holding for the variables of a quantal system can be explained quasiclassically in terms of a disturbance suffered by the system in interaction with a quantal measurement, or state preparation, agent. There are a number of criticisms of this doctrine in the literature, which are critically examined in this article and found to be ininconclusive, the chief error being the conflation of this disturbance with (...) the projection postulate. We present a critique of the disturbance theory based on the fact that the required disturbance will in general depend on the interaction time of the system and state-preparer. This point is exploited in the construction of a spin-interaction model which acts as a counterexample to the disturbance doctrine, while remaining faithful to the spirit of Heisenberg'sgedanken experiments. Several consequences of this result are discussed. (shrink)

Glowacki offers many new directions for understanding and even eliminating the problem of war, especially creating positive interdependencies with out-group members. We develop Glowacki's intriguing proposition that in-group dynamics provide a route to peace by describing a prosocial motivational system, the caregiving system, that aligns individual interests and eliminates the need to use coercion to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.

An implicit goal of many interventions intended to enhance integrity is to minimize peoples' exposure to unethical events. The intent of the present effort was to examine if exposure to unethical practices in the course of one's work is related to ethical decision making. Accordingly, 248 doctoral students in the biological, health, and social sciences were asked to complete a field appropriate measure of ethical decision making. In addition, they were asked to complete measures examining the perceived acceptability of unethical (...) events and a measure examining perceptions of ethical climate. When these criterion measures were correlated with a measure examining the frequency with which they had been exposed to unethical events in their day-to-day work, it was found that event exposure was strongly related to ethical decision making but less strongly related to climate perceptions and perceptions of event acceptability. However, these relationships were moderated by level of experience. The implications of these findings for practices intended to improve ethics are discussed. (shrink)

At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

Scholars have proposed a number of courses and programs intended to improve the ethical behavior of scientists in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the scientific enterprise. In the present study, we conducted a quantitative meta-analysis based on 26 previous ethics program evaluation efforts, and the results showed that the overall effectiveness of ethics instruction was modest. The effects of ethics instruction, however, were related to a number of instructional program factors, such as course content and delivery methods, in (...) addition to factors of the evaluation study itself, such as the field of investigator and criterion measure utilized. An examination of the characteristics contributing to the relative effectiveness of instructional programs revealed that more successful programs were conducted as seminars separate from the standard curricula rather than being embedded in existing courses. Furthermore, more successful programs were case based and interactive, and they allowed participants to learn and practice the application of real-world ethical decision-making skills. The implications of these findings for future course development and evaluation are discussed. (shrink)

Differences across fields and experience levels are frequently considered in discussions of ethical decision making and ethical behavior. In the present study, doctoral students in the health, biological, and social sciences completed measures of ethical decision making. The effects of field and level of experience with respect to ethical decision making, metacognitive reasoning strategies, social-behavioral responses, and exposure to unethical events were examined. Social and biological scientists performed better than health scientists with respect to ethical decision making. Furthermore, the ethical (...) decision making of health science students decreased as experience increased. Moreover, these effects appeared to be linked to the specific strategies underlying participants' ethical decision making. The implications of these findings for ethical decision making are discussed. (shrink)

Expressivists about normative thought and discourse traditionally deny that there are nondeflationary normative propositions. However, it has recently been suggested that expressivists might avoid a number of problems by providing a theory of normative propositions compatible with expressivism. This paper explores the prospects for developing an expressivist theory of propositions within the framework of cognitive act theories of propositions. First, I argue that the only extant expressivist theory of cognitive propositions—Michael Ridge's ‘ecumenical expressivist’ theory—fails to explain identity conditions for (...) normative propositions. Second, I argue that this failure motivates a general constraint—the ‘unity requirement’—that any expressivist theory of propositions must provide a unified nonrepresentational explanation of that in virtue of which propositional attitudes have the content that they have. Third, I argue that conceptual role accounts of content provide a promising framework in which to develop an expressivist theory of cognitive propositions. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

In this study, we comprehensively examine the relationships between ethical leadership, social exchange, and employee commitment. We find that organizational and supervisory ethical leadership are positively related to employee commitment to the organization and supervisor, respectively. We also find that different types of social exchange relationships mediate these relationships. Our results suggest that the application of a multifoci social exchange perspective to the context of ethical leadership is indeed useful: As hypothesized, within-foci effects (e.g., the relationship between organizational ethical leadership (...) and commitment to the organization) are stronger than cross-foci effects (e.g., the relationship between supervisory ethical leadership and commitment to the organization). In addition, in contrast to the “trickle down” model of ethical leadership (Mayer et al. in Org Behav Hum Decis Process 108:1–13, 2009), our results suggest that organizational ethical leadership is both directly and indirectly related to employee outcomes. (shrink)

We applaud Brown, Elliott, and Paine (2013) for their overarching goal of providing ethical justification for decisions to withdraw nonfutile life-sustaining medical treatments in some cases after...

Meeting of the Minds records the proceedings of the S.I.E.P.M. conference held in Boston from June 14-16, 1996. The conference participants centred their attention on the relationships between medieval and classical modern philosophy. These relationships have been painted in dramatically different ways by those who have presented overviews of the two eras. Hans Blumenberg, in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and his subsequent works, discovers the seeds of modernity in the medieval authors themselves. Leo Strauss and his followers see (...) a radical difference between the classical world views of the ancients and medievals and the successive layers of modern thought. These general portraits demand specifics, and the strength of the conference, whose results are contained in this volume, was that it provided many specific examinations of concrete relations between the philosophical positions of celebrated medieval and modern thinkers. Our hope is that this collection of papers will suggest the direction for further cooperative efforts on the interplay of the philosophical views represented by these two eras, and that the issues commonly debated by the medieval and early modern thinkers represented in this volume will give renewed consideration to important philosophical points that have been ignored in more recent debates. The volume contains contributions from E. Jennifer Ashworth (Waterloo, Ontario), Allan Back (Kutztown, Pennsylvania), Jos Decorte (Leuven), Thomas Dewender (Bochum), Idit Dobbs-Weinstein (Nashville), John P.Doyle (St.Louis), Jeremiah Hackett (Columbia, South Carolina), Simo Knuuttila (Helsinki), James McEvoy (Maynooth), A.Stephen McGrade (Storrs), Edward P.Mahoney (Durham, North Carolina), James D.Maliszewski (Toronto), Emily Michael (New York), Woosuk Park (Taejon, Korea), Horacio Santiago-Otero(+) (Madrid), Alison Simmons (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Jean-Luc Solere (Paris), Jose MariSoto Rabanos (Madrid), and Eileen C. Swe. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

The fourth volume of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is devoted to essays in honor of Professor John Ackrill on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Contributors include: David Wiggins, Colin Strand, Julius Moravcsik, Lesley Brown, Gail Fine, Julia Annas, David Charles, Michael Woods, Christopher Kirwan, Bernard Williams, Jonathan Barnes, and Richard Sorabji.

The fourth volume of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is devoted to essays in honor of Professor John Ackrill on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Contributors include: David Wiggins, Colin Strand, Julius Moravcsik, Lesley Brown, Gail Fine, Julia Annas, David Charles, Michael Woods, Christopher Kirwan, Bernard Williams, Jonathan Barnes, and Richard Sorabji.

Lucretius' poem, for which Epicurean philosophy provided the inspiration, attempts to explain the nature of the universe and its processes with the object of freeing mankind from religious fears. The third book not only seeks to demonstrate that, since the soul is mortal, there can be no after-life, but also aims to reconcile the reader to the prospect of the end of his consciousness. This edition incorporates a new text and prose translation and is designed to set the book in (...) the context of the whole poem and of the Epicurean philosophical system, to explain and elucidate its argument, and at the same time to analyse some of the literary and artistic features which contribute to Lucretius' poetic achievement and stature. Latin text with facing page translation. (shrink)

To understand adaptation (and exaptation), a more comprehensive view of development is required: one beyond a constraining force. Developmental plasticity may be an adaptation by natural selection simultaneously favored (or sometimes in conflict) at multiple levels of biological organization (e.g., cells, individuals, groups, etc.). To understand the interrelationships between developmental plasticity and adaptive evolution I borrow heavily from West-Eberhard (2003) and Frank (1995; 1997). Developmental plasticity facilitates evolution, results in particular patterns of evolutionary change, and may produce exaptations by design (...) rather than by chance. (shrink)

Genomic conflicts are potentially involved in the evolution and maintenance of culture. Maternal genes contributing to neocortical development could influence biases in the acquisition of information. Specifically, relatedness asymmetries due to multiple paternity are expected to lead to an increased reliability and receptivity of matrilineally-transmitted information. This view complements the gene-culture coevolutionary model adopted by Rendell and Whitehead.