We examined the “othering” of Asian Americans in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given past evidence that pathogen-related threat perceptions can exacerbate intergroup biases, as well as salient public narratives blaming the Chinese for the pandemic, we assessed whether individuals experiencing a greater sense of threat during the pandemic were more likely to apply the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype to Asian Americans. Over a seven-week period, we recruited 1,323 White Americans to complete a measure of the perceived Americanness of Asian, (...) Black, and White targets. Asian targets were consistently perceived as less American than White targets, across variations in subjective health threat and regional case counts. The direct and indirect connections of political ideology to the observed patterns were examined, revealing that White participants who blamed China for the pandemic were more likely to apply the perpetual foreigner stereotype to Asian Americans. These results indicate that the othering of Asian Americans is pervasive among White Americans and that variables related to social conditions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic can predict the potency of this association. (shrink)

Decades of research have investigated the complex role of source credibility in attitude persuasion. Current theories of persuasion predict that when messages are thoughtfully scrutinized, argument strength will tend to have a greater effect on attitudes than source credibility. Source credibility can affect highly elaborated attitudes, however, when individuals evaluate material that elicits low attitude extremity. A recently proposed model called the guru effect predicts that source credibility can also cause attitudinal change by biasing the interpretation of pragmatically ambiguous material. (...) The present studies integrate models of explanatory pragmatics and persuasion in order to empirically assess these hypotheses. Experiment 1 found that text difficulty and attitude neutrality reflect independent persuasion variables. Experiment 2 found that higher source credibility causes more favorable attitudes toward messages eliciting low attitude extremity. Text difficulty was not found to have a significant effect on attitudes. These results confirm the predictions of prior social cognition research but no do not support the guru effect model. The implications of these studies for pragmatics and persuasion research as well as the value of interdisciplinary research between these fields are discussed. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

THE MOST SACRED FREEDOM includes eight essays that were first presented at the 2014 A.V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the seventh annual conference sponsored by Mercer Universitys Thomas C. and Ramona E. McDonald Center for Americas Founding Principles. Together, these essays explore the great principle of religious liberty by charting its development in the Western tradition and reconsidering its place at Americas founding. The book begins with a comparison between the flood accounts in Genesis and the Mesopotamian (...) Atra-Has's and advances all the way to the 2014 Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. The intervening chapters examine the contributions of figures such as Emperor Julian, Roger Williams, Cecilius Calvert, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the American Founders. Contributors to the volume are Steven Grosby, Jeremiah H. Russell, Maura Jane Farrelly, Daniel Cullen, John Witte, Jr., Scott Yenor, David Ramsey, and Michael Novak. (shrink)

In “Genetic Privacy, Disease Prevention, and the Principle of Rescue,” Madison Kilbride argues that patients have a duty to warn biological family members about clinically actionable adverse genetic findings. The duty does not stem from the special obligations that we may have to family members, she argues, but rather follows from the principle of rescue, which she understands as the idea that one ought to prevent, reduce, or mitigate the risk of harm to another person when the expected harm is (...) serious and the cost or risk to oneself is sufficiently moderate. We doubt, however, whether the principle of rescue can ground a duty to warn in the cases Kilbride envisages, and we suggest that Kilbride may have underappreciated the role that special obligations could play in generating a duty to warn family members. (shrink)

Toward a neurobiologically grounded approach to explaining self-control we discuss the case of a patient with a bilateral lesion in frontal ventromedial cortex. Patients with such lesions display a marked deficit in social decision making. Compared with an account that examines the causal antecedents of self-control, Rachlin's behaviorist approach seems lacking in explanatory strength.

The present paper describes a joint action paradigm in which individuals or pairs utilized two computer keys to keep a dot stimulus moving inside a larger rectangle. Members of a pair could neither see nor hear each other. This paradigm allowed us to combine the discrete-trial type dependent variables commonly utilized by representational theorists, with the continuous, temporal dependence variables utilized by dynamical theorists. Analysis revealed that individuals kept the dot in the rectangle longer than dyads and did so by (...) moving it back and forth within the rectangle. Dyads, however, pressed their individual buttons as quickly as possible in order to keep the dot near the middle of the rectangle. These findings indicate that joint action constitutes a multi-scale phenomena that is best investigated via multiple, complementary methodologies versus single-measure, competing theories. (shrink)

High temporal resolution event-related brain potential and electroencephalographic coherence studies of the neural substrate of short-term storage in working memory indicate that the sustained coactivation of both prefrontal cortex and the posterior cortical systems that participate in the initial perception and comprehension of the retained information are involved in its storage. These studies further show that short-term storage mechanisms involve an increase in neural synchrony between prefrontal cortex and posterior cortex and the enhanced activation of long-term memory representations of material (...) held in short-term memory. This activation begins during the encoding/comprehension phase and evidently is prolonged into the retention phase by attentional drive from prefrontal cortex control systems. A parsimonious interpretation of these findings is that the long-term memory systems associated with the posterior cortical processors provide the necessary representational basis for working memory, with the property of short-term memory decay being primarily due to the posterior system. In this view, there is no reason to posit specialized neural systems whose functions are limited to those of short-term storage buffers. Prefrontal cortex provides the attentional pointer system for maintaining activation in the appropriate posterior processing systems. Short-term memory capacity and phenomena such as displacement of information in short-term memory are determined by limitations on the number of pointers that can be sustained by the prefrontal control systems. Key Words: coherence; event-related potentials; imaging; long-term memory; memory; short-term memory; working memory. (shrink)

We report on the development and initial validation of the Moralization of Everyday Life Scale, designed to measure variations in people's assignment of moral weight to commonplace behaviors. In Study 1, participants reported their judgments for a large number of potential moral infractions in everyday life; principal components analysis revealed 6 main dimensions of these judgments. In Study 2, scores on the 30-item MELS showed high reliability and distinctness from the Big 5 personality traits. In Study 3, scores on the (...) MELS were strongly correlated with scores on an early scale of moral judgments, suggesting convergent validity. (shrink)

Demonstrating value is an ongoing process and requirement for institutional survival for ethics programs. Although our ethics program has significantly increased our ethics consultation volume and maintains a robust database that tracks ethics consultation data, these data regarding ethics consultations alone do not accurately represent the program’s overall activities and value to the institution. The roles and responsibilities of clinical ethicists extend beyond clinical ethics consultation, and there are many other ways that clinical ethicists contribute and add value to their (...) institutions. This article describes our ethics program’s early efforts to systematically track ethics program activities outside of ethics consultations as a way to demonstrate additional value to the institution that goes beyond ethics consultation. By systematically tracking activities such as internal ethics education sessions, conference presentations, publications, grants, committee/policy work, and other activities, our ethics program has been able to gather substantial quantitative data that highlight our program’s numerous activities and outreach, both within and outside the institution, that provide additional value to the institution beyond our ethical consultation activities. (shrink)

Some individuals devalue positivity previously associated with negativity (Winer & Salem, 2016). Positive emotions (e.g. happiness) may be seen as threatening and result in active avoidance of futu...

What does everyone in the modern world need to know? Renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson's answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research. Humorous, surprising and informative, Dr. Peterson tells us why skateboarding boys and girls must be left alone, what terrible fate awaits those who criticize too easily, and why you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street. What (...) does the nervous system of the lowly lobster have to tell us about standing up straight (with our shoulders back) and about success in life? Why did ancient Egyptians worship the capacity to pay careful attention as the highest of gods? What dreadful paths do people tread when they become resentful, arrogant and vengeful? Dr. Peterson journeys broadly, discussing discipline, freedom, adventure and responsibility, distilling the world's wisdom into 12 practical and profound rules for life. [This book] shatters the modern commonplaces of science, faith and human nature, while transforming and ennobling the mind and spirit of its readers. (shrink)

Alternative schools are popular interventions for marginalized students, including students with disabilities, but little research has focused on professionals in these settings. Today, close to 11,000 public alternative schools or programs are believed to exist in the United States education system (Foley & Pang, 2006) and as many as one million students are currently attending alternative learning programs in the United States (Lehr, Tan, & Ysseldyke, 2009). While public alternative schools can vary from one another in many ways, they exist (...) to serve youth marginalized in traditional public settings. In this study, we explore the ways teachers, administrators, and nurses in alternative settings collaborate to support mentally healthy school environments for marginalized student populations. Drawing on the process of rationale development ( Hawley & Crowe, 2016 ; Hawley & Jordan, 2014 ; Shaver, 1977 ; Shaver & Strong, 1982) as rooted in social studies education, we explore the perceived purposes of these professionals as they work with some of the nation's most marginalized children. Through focus groups and one-on-one interviews, the data bridge social studies themes rooted in democracy and equity with special education themes of inclusiveness. This work offers insight into the rationales of teachers and professionals engaged in critical work, and provides a platform for helping professionals undergo the rationale development process. (shrink)

The goal of our target article is to establish that electrophysiological data constrain models of short-term memory retention operations to schemes in which activated long-term memory is its representational basis. The temporary stores correspond to neural circuits involved in the perception and subsequent processing of the relevant information, and do not involve specialized neural circuits dedicated to the temporary holding of information outside of those embedded in long-term memory. The commentaries ranged from general agreement with the view that short-term memory (...) stores correspond to activated long-term memory (e.g., Abry, Sato, Schwartz, Loevenbruck & Cathiard [Abry etal.], Cowan, Fuster, Grote, Hickok & Buchsbaum, Keenan, Hyönä & Kaakinen [Keenan et al.], Martin, Morra), to taking a definite exception to this view (e.g., Baddeley, Düzel, Logie & Della Sala, Kroger, Majerus, Van der Linden, Colette & Salmon [Majerus et al.], Vallar). (shrink)

This Element examines Kant's innovative account of labour in his political philosophy and develops an intersectional analysis of Kant. By demonstrating that Kant's analysis of slavery, citizenship, and sex developed in inter-linked ways over several decades, culminating in his development of a 'trichotomy' of Right, the author shows that Kant's normative account of independence is configured through his theory of labour, and is continuous with his anthropological accounts of race and gender, providing a systemic justification for the dependency of women (...) and non-whites embedded in his philosophy of right. By examining Kant's arguments about slavery as intertwined with his account of domestic labour, the author argues that his ultimate rejection of slavery may owe more to his changing conceptualization of labour than to his theory of race, and that his final arguments against slavery rehearse strategies for embedding intersectional patterns of domestic dependence in his account of the rightful state. (shrink)

This article details an interpretive, qualitative interview study that explored rationales developed by seven social studies graduate students, all experiencedteachers, at a large Midwestern university. Interviews revealed three common themes regarding the influence of the rationale development process. The threethemes were: providing structure, connecting purpose and practice, and improving professionalism. The themes demonstrate the complex nature of articulating a sense of purpose, even for experienced teachers. While similar, there were considerable differences in the ways the participants conceptualized their purposes. Untangling (...) these differences has implications for social studies teacher educators interested in integrating rationale development into their work with experienced teachers. (shrink)

With the increasing professionalization of clinical ethics, some hospitals and health systems utilize both ethics committees and professional clinical ethicists to address their ethics needs. Drawing upon historical critiques of ethics committees and their own experiences, the authors argue that, in ethics programs with one or more professional clinical ethicists, ethics committees should be dissolved when they fail to meet minimum standards of effectiveness. The authors outline several criteria for assessing effectiveness, describe the benefits of a model that places primary (...) responsibility for ethics work with professional clinical ethicists—the PCE-primary model, and offer suggestions for alternative ethics program structures that empower healthcare professionals to contribute to ethics work in ways more tailored to their strengths and skills while minimizing the shortcomings of ethics committees. (shrink)

The #MeToo movement generated a feminist insistence that we “believe women.” But the men accused of assault, harassment, and other violations frequently defended themselves with the insistence that they had always “respected women” – sometimes, going so far as to get numerous women to sign letters swearing that these men had always respected them. This common MeToo defense reveals the core inconsistency – and the core entitlement – at the heart of misogyny and sexual injustice: some women deserve respect. But (...) the duty to respect those women relies on an invisible entitlement to disrespect – indeed, to assault, harass, dominate, or exploit – others. This chapter explores consent’s role within the superstructure of misogyny and sexual injustice, arguing what consent is a key apparatus of white supremacy. It argues that consent has been constructed through dynamics of colonial and racist sexual entitlement, mapping some (white) women as deserving of respect and the right to consent, while marking other women as expendable or disposable within the sexual economy. This means not only that consent is historically constructed as white, but also that whiteness, and in particular, white womanhood, is constructed through consent. Thus, white women’s right to consent – or to refuse – is premised upon the inability of other women to do so. In this way, the right to sexual consent does not disrupt the norm of male sexual entitlement. Consent has always been premised on non-consent, from coloniality and slavery to contemporary porn, which offers a vision of the world without proper consent, so that granting consent to actual women is an exceptional practice, an “act of respect.” By including race and class alongside gender in my analysis of consent, I argue that contemporary feminist visions of sexual justice must do more than defend or ameliorate consent, but develop intersectional interrogations of sexual justice that reckon with the complicities of consent. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Pereboom’s empirical objection to agent causation fails to undermine the most plausible version of agent-causal libertarianism. This is significant because Pereboom concedes that such libertarianism is conceptually coherent and only falls to empirical considerations. To substantiate these claims I outline Pereboom’s taxonomy of agent-causal views, develop the strongest version of his empirical objections, and then show that this objection fails to undermine what I consider the most plausible view of agent-causal libertarianism, namely, reconciliatory integrationist (...) agent-causalism. I then strengthen my criticism of Pereboom by responding to three objections to my view. I show that these objections, though initially challenging, fail to undermine my argument. I therefore conclude that, to this extent, agent-causal views remain a viable option in the contemporary free will debate. (shrink)

Recognising and responding appropriately to emotions is critical to adaptive psychological functioning. Psychopathic traits (e.g. callous, manipulative, impulsive, antisocial) are related to differences in recognition and response when emotion is conveyed through facial expressions and language. Use of emotional music stimuli represents a promising approach to improve our understanding of the specific emotion processing difficulties underlying psychopathic traits because it decouples recognition of emotion from cues directly conveyed by other people (e.g. facial signals). In Experiment 1, participants listened to clips (...) of emotional music and identified the emotional content (Sample 1, N = 196) or reported on their feelings elicited by the music (Sample 2, N = 197). Participants accurately recognised (t(195) = 32.78, p <.001, d = 4.69) and reported feelings consistent with (t(196) = 7.84, p <.001, d = 1.12) the emotion conveyed in the music. However, psychopathic traits were associated with reduced emotion recognition accuracy (F(1, 191) = 19.39, p <.001) and reduced likelihood of feeling the emotion (F(1, 193) = 35.45, p <.001), particularly for fearful music. In Experiment 2, we replicated findings for broad difficulties with emotion recognition (Sample 3, N = 179) and emotional resonance (Sample 4, N = 199) associated with psychopathic traits. Results offer new insight into emotion recognition and response difficulties that are associated with psychopathic traits. (shrink)

Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are shaped in critical ways by our beliefs about how we compare to other people. Prior research has predominately focused on the consequences of believing oneself to be better than average (BTA). Research on the consequences of worse-than-average (WTA) beliefs has been far more limited, focusing mostly on the downsides of WTA beliefs. In this paper, we argue for the systematic investigation of the possible long-term benefits of WTA beliefs in domains including motivation, task performance, (...) and subjective well-being. We develop a conceptual framework for examining these possible benefits, we explore the usefulness of this framework to generate novel insights in an important psychological domain (skill learning), and we conclude with broader recommendations for research in other domains such as friendship formation, moral, and political decision making. (shrink)

Rules are meant to apply equally to all within their jurisdiction. However, some rules are frequently broken without consequence for most. These rules are only occasionally enforced, often at the discretion of a third-party observer. We propose that these rules—whose violations are frequent, and enforcement is rare—constitute a unique subclass of explicitly codified rules, which we call ‘phantom rules’ (e.g., proscribing jaywalking). Their apparent punishability is ambiguous and particularly susceptible to third-party motives. Across six experiments, (N = 1440) we validated (...) the existence of phantom rules and found evidence for their motivated enforcement. First, people played a modified Dictator Game with a novel frequently broken and rarely enforced rule (i.e., a phantom rule). People enforced this rule more often when the “dictator” was selfish (vs. fair) even though the rule only proscribed fractional offers (not selfishness). Then we turned to third person judgments of the U.S. legal system. We found these violations are recognizable to participants as both illegal and commonplace (Experiment 2), differentiable from violations of prototypical laws (Experiments 3) and enforced in a motivated way (Experiments 4a and 4b). Phantom rule violations (but not prototypical legal violations) are seen as more justifiably punished when the rule violator has also violated a social norm (vs. rule violation alone)—unless the motivation to punish has been satiated (Experiment 5). Phantom rules are frequently broken, codified rules. Consequently, their apparent punishability is ambiguous, and their enforcement is particularly susceptible to third party motives. (shrink)

Roy Sorensen introduced the concept of an epistemic blindspot in the 1980s. A proposition is an epistemic blindspot for some individual at some time if and only if that proposition is consistent but unknowable by that individual at that time. In the first half of this paper, I extend Sorensen work on blindspots by arguing that there exist blindspots that essentially involve hopes. In the second half, I show how such blindspots can contribute to and impair different pursuits of self-understanding. (...) My arguments throughout this paper draw on Luc Bovens’s account of hope. (shrink)

Is it true that innovation occurs only in abundant environments? Baumard defends that increased standards of living are a necessary condition for a change in life history strategy to help understand the Industrial Revolution. Here, we argue that many examples of innovations occur in scarce environments when there is near-zero opportunity cost. We suggest potential psychological pathways to explain this dual-cognitive process.

Jerry Fodor (Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) famously argued that lexical concepts are unstructured. After examining the advantages and disadvantages of both the classical approach to concepts and Fodor's conceptual atomism, I argue that some lexical concepts are, in fact, structured. Roughly stated, I argue that structured lexical concepts bear a necessary biconditional entailment relation to their structural constituents. I develop this account of the structure of lexical concepts within the framework of Pavel (...) Tichy's (The foundations of Frege's logic. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1988) theory of constructions. I argue that concepts are constructions which can be combined by way of Tichy's construction-forming operations of composition and closure and an additional operation, simplification, which I propose in section 6. The last of these construction-forming operations plays a central role in my account of lexical concept structure. Stated generally, structured lexical concepts are a result of simplifying their structural constituents. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on mental health interact with preexisting health risks and disparities to impact varying populations differently. This study explored the relationship between demographic variables, distress and mental health, and vulnerability factors for COVID-19. An online cross-sectional study was conducted from 18 June to 17 July 2020, reflecting the impact of early phase COVID-19 pandemic and related shelter-in-place measures in the United States. Participants were adults residing in the United States, with substantial subsamples of American Indian, Asian American, (...) African-American, and Hispanic and/or Latinx participants, as well as people with disabilities and sexual minorities. Outcomes measured were depression, hopelessness, somatic complaints, anxiety-related disorders, locus of control, and a novel measure of pandemic-related distress. Data were analyzed using analyses of covariance, chi-square test, and correlation coefficients. Generally, younger individuals, and those with less financial power—across all identities—suffered more distress. When controlling for age, lower financial power was associated with higher scores on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale-Revised, Beck Hopelessness Scale, Patient Health Questionnaire-15, Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders for Adults Panic Disorder, SCARED-A generalized anxiety disorder, SCARED-A obsessive–compulsive disorder, and the COVID-19 Pandemic Distress restriction/disconnection scale. In addition, disparities were found, in general, for marginalized identities by gender, sexual orientation, and disability status. Importantly, each ethnicity subsample showed a unique pattern of relationships between COVID-19 risk variables and mental health symptoms. The results support the hypothesis that any pandemic may amplify preexisting social and financial disparities. Overall, interventions at the clinical, governmental, or health equity level should take into consideration the needs of vulnerable groups. (shrink)

In the debate surrounding the morality and legality of the practices of physician-assisted death and euthanasia, a common logical argument regularly employed against these practices is the “slippery slope argument.” One formulation of this argument claims that acceptance of physician-assisted death will eventually lead down a “slippery slope” into acceptance of active euthanasia, including its voluntary, non-voluntary, and/or involuntary forms, through psychological and social processes that warp a society’s values and moral perspective of a practice over an extended period of (...) time. This formulation is known as the psychological slippery slope argument. This paper analyzes the psychological slippery slope argument as it is applied to the practice of physician-assisted death, and utilizing recent empirical evidence from various nations around the world that practice physician-assisted death and/or euthanasia, the paper argues that employing the psychological slippery slope argument against physician-assisted death is logically fallacious, this kind of slippery slope is unfounded in practice, and thus the psychological slippery slope argument is insufficient on its own to justify continued legal prohibition of physician-assisted death. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Luce Irigaray’s aesthetic of sexual difference, which she develops by extrapolating from Paul Klee’s idea that the role of painting is to render the non-visible rather than represent the visible. This idea is the premise of her analyses of phenomenology and psychoanalysis and their respective contributions to understanding art and sexual identity. I claim that Irigaray assembles an aesthetic of sexual difference that exceeds these familiar intellectual traditions, one that articulates the encounter of non-visible, material (...) forces that engender modes of sexuate being and becoming. I further claim that this encounter is the very matter of artistry and art-making. (shrink)

Many have argued that human enhancement, in particular bioenhancement via genetic engineering, brain-interventions or preimplantation embryo selection, is problematic even if it can be safely implemented. Various arguments have been put forward focusing on issues such as the undermining of autonomy, uneven distribution and unfairness, and the alteration of one’s identity, amongst others. Nevertheless, few, if any, of these thinkers oppose vaccines. -/- In what follows, I argue for the permissibility of a limited set of cognitive enhancements – in particular, (...) the enhancement of evaluative judgment and self-control – by analogy with the permissibility of vaccines. As a result, it follows that if one accepts the permissibility of vaccines one will also, other things being equal, be committed to the permissibility of these enhancements. I then consider and respond to a number of possible objections in order to defend and clarify my position. (shrink)

No consensus yet exists on how to handle incidental fnd-ings in human subjects research. Yet empirical studies document IFs in a wide range of research studies, where IFs are fndings beyond the aims of the study that are of potential health or reproductive importance to the individual research participant. This paper reports recommendations of a two-year project group funded by NIH to study how to manage IFs in genetic and genomic research, as well as imaging research. We conclude that researchers (...) have an obligation to address the possibility of discovering IFs in their protocol and communications with the IRB, and in their consent forms and communications with research participants. Researchers should establish a pathway for handling IFs and communicate that to the IRB and research participants. We recommend a pathway and categorize IFs into those that must be disclosed to research participants, those that may be disclosed, and those that should not be disclosed. (shrink)

This paper formulates a response to standard accounts of Kantian sexual morality, by first clarifying why sex should be understood as a case of using a person as a thing, rather than merely as a means. The author argues that Kant’s remedy to this problem is not sexual consent, but a model of setting and sharing sexual ends. Kant’s account of sexual morality, read in this way, is a critical framework for contemporary moves to think beyond consent, and to grapple (...) with concerns about sexual violation and “bad sex” that have gained uptake in the wake of the MeToo movement. The author defends an account of sex as a process of setting and sharing sexual ends in a Kantian key, which provides us with resources for thinking about the robust ongoing project of making our sexual selves in nonideal conditions, as well as for identifying the wrongs of both “bad” sex and sexual harassment. In doing so, they offer a critical middle ground between contemporary accounts of sexual morality that center questions of individual agency or autonomy, and those that foreground the intersubjective nature of sex. (shrink)

In The End of Progress, Amy Allen connects post- and decolonial concerns about the implications of the concept of progress to contemporary critical theory. In the work of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, progress—as historical development and sociocultural learning—has taken on the load-bearing role in grounding normativity. Allen seeks to decolonize critical theory “from within” by recuperating Adorno and Foucault’s more ambivalent conceptions of progress. While such a move does not itself amount to “decolonizing” critical theory, Allen helps to inaugurate (...) this important exchange via her convincing critique of some of the leading figures of critical theory today. (shrink)

This article explores the genealogy of a paradox in the evidentiary logic of the press photograph. While such photographs are supposed to gain their special authority from their unmediated relationship to the events they represent, they are often illegible without supplementary graphical material. The picture press of the 1920s and 1930s, saturated with re-creations of brutal crimes and messy accidents, fashioned an elaborate system of arrows, daggers, circles and crosses added by hand in paint or ink to help guide the (...) viewer's attention to the salient detail. Examining the hybrid idiom of the photo-diagram, this article investigates how photography's indexicality and its multiplicity seek reconciliation at this revealing juncture in media history, and explores the ramifications for the evidentiary status of the press photograph in the digital era. (shrink)