Beverley Shaw; Mixed Ability Grouping: some philosophical considerations, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 18, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 133–138, ht.

In 1997, the DfEE suggested that schools should consider 'setting' pupils by ability as it was believed that this would contribute to raising standards. This survey of primary schools aimed to establish the extent to which primary schools, with same and mixed age classes, implement different grouping practices including setting, streaming, within class ability and mixed ability groupings for different curriculum subjects. Schools were asked to complete a questionnaire indicating their grouping practices for each subject (...) in each year group. The findings showed that schools predominantly adopted within class ability groupings, either mixed or ability grouped, for most subjects. Ability grouping (within class and setting) was most common in mathematics, followed by English and science. Its implementation increased as pupils progressed through school. The type of setting adopted, same or cross-age, tended to reflect the nature of the class structures within the school. (shrink)

It is common practice within primary classrooms for teachers to spilt children into different ability groups so that children of similar level are taught together. Whilst this practice is used across the globe, research is mixed on the benefits of such grouping strategy. This paper presents data collected from mixed methods research which investigated teachers use of grouping strategies and social comparison, the act of comparing oneself with others. It focuses on when, why and with whom children (...) from different ability groups compare themselves and the impact this has on their self-perceptions. Drawing upon data from children aged between 10 and 11 years from 12 primary schools, social comparison was found to play a significant role in daily classroom life for some children. The study identified different strands of the social comparison process including acknowledgment, topic, target, and direction, and it revealed positive and negative effects of social comparison. A difference by ability group was identified. Children within the low ability group were particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of social comparison and found to engage in more frequent and intentional social comparisons which were heavily relied upon for self-evaluation and performance evaluation. The paper discusses the educational implications of social comparison regarding pupil ability grouping strategies, motivation, engagement, and academic performance. Implications for teacher education and professional development is discussed. (shrink)

Philosophers often talk as though each ability is held by exactly one agent. This paper begins by arguing that abilities can be held by groups of agents, where the group is not an agent. I provide a new argument for—and a new analysis of—non-agentive groups’ abilities. I then provide a new argument that, surprisingly, obligations are different: non-agentive groups cannot bear obligations, at least not if those groups are large-scale such as ‘humanity’ or ‘carbon emitters.’ This pair of conclusions (...) is important, since philosophers who endorse large-scale non-agentive groups’ abilities almost universally endorse their obligations. More importantly, the twin arguments (one for abilities, one against obligations) make the following novel contribution: abilities imply agency-involving explanations, while obligations imply action-guidance. This general conclusion should be of interest beyond social ontology. (shrink)

In this paper, we approach the idea of group cognition from the perspective of the “extended mind” thesis, as a special case of the more general claim that systems larger than the individual human, but containing that human, are capable of cognition (Clark, 2008; Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Instead of deliberating about “the mark of the cognitive” (Adams & Aizawa, 2008), our discussion of group cognition is tied to particular cognitive capacities. We review recent studies of group problem-solving and group (...) memory which reveal that specific cognitive capacities that are commonly ascribed to individuals are also aptly ascribed at the level of groups. These case studies show how dense interactions among people within a group lead to both similarity-inducing and differentiating dynamics that affect the group's ability to solve problems. This supports our claim that groups have organization-dependent cognitive capacities that go beyond the simple aggregation of the cognitive capacities of individuals. Group cognition is thus an emergent phenomenon in the sense of Wimsatt (1986). We further argue that anybody who rejects our strategy for showing that cognitive properties can be instantiated at multiple levels in the organizational hierarchy on a priori grounds is a “demergentist,” and thus incurs the burden of proof for explaining why cognitive properties are “stuck” at a certain level of organizational structure. Finally, we show that our analysis of group cognition escapes the “coupling-constitution” charge that has been leveled against the extended mind thesis (Adams & Aizawa, 2008). (shrink)

This study surveys the internal audit department of a large financial services organization. Respondents were challenged to recognize and evaluate ethical and unethical situations often encountered in practice. Four key demographic variables were investigated: gender, age, years of employment and peer group influence. For the most part, respondents view themselves as more ethical than their peers. There does appear to be a gender effect suggesting females' ability to identify ethical behavior better than their male counterparts. This study contributes to (...) the extant literature in that it has explored a previously unexplored profession, namely, the internal auditing profession. (shrink)

Most philosophers now accept that an agent may be responsible for an action even though she could not have acted otherwise. However, many who accept such a view about responsibility for actions nevertheless maintain that, when it comes to omissions, an agent is responsible only if she could have done what she omitted to do. If this Principle of Possible Action (PPA), as it is sometimes called, is correct, then there is an important asymmetry between what is required for responsibility (...) for actions and what is required for responsibility for omissions. However, I argue here that PPA is in fact false. It has been advanced on the basis of an insufficiently varied group of examples. Examination of a broader range of cases shows that responsibility for an omission sometimes is, and it sometimes is not, undermined by an inability to have acted. In Sections II and III, I offer two alternative principles to PPA governing ability and responsibility for omissions. (shrink)

The ability to extrapolate essential gist through the analysis and synthesis of information, prediction of potential outcomes, abstraction of ideas, and integration of relationships with world knowledge is critical for higher-order learning. The present study investigated the efficacy of cognitive training to elicit improvements in gist-reasoning and fact recall ability in 556 public middle-school students (grades seven and eight), versus a sample of 357 middle school students who served as a comparison group, to determine if changes in gist-reasoning (...) and fact recall were demonstrated without cognitive training. The results showed that, in general, cognitive training increased gist-reasoning and fact recall abilities in students from families in poverty as well as students from families living above poverty. However, the magnitude of gains in gist-reasoning varied as a function of gender and grade-level. Our primary findings were that seventh and eighth grade girls and eighth grade boys showed significant increases in gist-reasoning after training regardless of socioeconomic status. There were no significant increases in gist-reasoning or fact recall ability for the 357 middle school students who served in the comparison group. We postulate that cognitive training in middle school is efficacious for improving gist-reasoning ability and fact recall in students from all socioeconomic levels. (shrink)

Stephanie Collins’ Group Duties offers interesting new arguments and brings together numerous interconnected issues that have hitherto been treated separately. My critical commentary focuses on two particularly original and central claims of the book: (1) Only groups that are united under a group-level decision-making procedure can bear duties. (2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties” to each member of the group, duties to take steps responsive to the others with a view to (...) the group’s φ-ing or express willingness to do so. In support of the first claim, Collins argues that only groups that can make decisions can bear duties, and that the ability to make decisions requires the relevant sort of decision-making procedure. I suggest that both parts of this argument remain in need of further support. I furthermore argue that Collins’ account of coordination duties gets certain kinds of cases wrong, and suggest that attributions of duties to groups without decision-making procedures are more plausibly understood as attributing shared duties. (shrink)

In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to (...) grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as “replicators” which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be “vehicles” of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units.The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to “organs” of group-level “organisms.” Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently argued that group agents can be morally responsible for their actions in virtue of having a certain kind of structured decision-making procedure which is responsive to reasons. However, accounts of group agent blameworthiness face some objections. One is that group agents cannot be responsible for wrongdoing because they are unable to experience certain kinds of emotional responses (Thompson, 2018). Another is that group agents who regularly commit wrongdoing due to certain structural impediments will always (...) be excused for their wrongdoing. This paper demonstrates such problems can be avoided by adopting an Attributionist theory of group moral responsibility. On this approach, though group agents lack certain capacities, their ability to deny that certain facts provide moral reasons to act in certain ways is sufficient to mean they hold objectionable attitudes towards us, and those attitudes are sufficient to make group agents blameworthy. (shrink)

Teachers in inclusive schools are often faced with the challenge of providing appropriate educational experiences for classes of students with abilities ranging from gifted to severely learning disabled. This challenge can be addressed either by the individual teacher or by a whole school approach. This paper reports on a study of the responses of teachers and parents to a trial of 'cluster grouping', as a model for meeting the educational needs of exceptional students. Data were gathered from teachers and (...) parents by questionnaire. The results remind us that there are factors, other than the strengths and weaknesses of a particular model, that can influence success. (shrink)

The dynamic balance is a significant skill in all age groups and it is required for regular daily activities, such as walking and running. Therefore, this study aimed at identifying the differences in concentration of attention, aerobic endurance and dynamic balance among female students in age group (9-12) years. As well as the relationship between attention concentration and ability of female students on aerobic endurance and dynamic, balance. To achieve the objectives of the study the researchers used the descriptive (...) approach on a sample consisting of (130) female students within age group (9-12) years in Khawla bint Al Azur school, Amman. For study data, the researchers used the mental abilities test, aerobic endurance test and dynamic balance test. To Processing the study data, the researchers used means, standard deviations, ANOVA, Scheffe and correlation coefficients. The results showed that there were statistically significant differences between the means of the results in the concentration attention ability, aero aerobic endurance and dynamic balance and for the benefit of category (11-12) years. Consequently, there were statistically significant correlation between the level of concentration of attention abilities and the level of the aerobic endurance and the dynamic balance of the students in age group (9-12) years. Therefore, researchers recommend that female students in the age group (9-12) should be encouraged to exercise physically for coordination abilities and physical abilities. (shrink)

Down syndrome (DS) is the most common developmental disorder characterized by mild to moderate intellectual disability. Several studies have reported poor language and prosodic skills and contradictory results regarding individuals’ with DS socio-cognitive skills, whereas most of them have focused on children with DS. The present study attempts to explore adults’ with DS language, socio-cognitive and prosodic abilities via the use of story-retellings. Twenty adults with DS and two groups of TD children, one matched to their expressive vocabulary (TD-EVT) and (...) the other matched to their non-verbal mental age (TD-RCPM), took part in the present study. Participants listened to a story while viewing a wordless picture PowerPoint presentation on a computer screen, and then, they were instructed to retell the story while viewing the pictures for a second time. Each participant listened to two stories, one with “lively” and one with “flat” prosody. Results revealed that adults’ with DS performance was comparable with the one presented by the TD-RCPM group, whereas the TD-EVT group performed significantly better in almost all variables. Individuals’ with DS re-narrations, however, contained significantly less complement clauses and internal state terms (related or not related to Theory of Mind–ToM) compared to the re-narrations of both control groups. In contrast, the group with DS performed similarly to both control groups in comprehension questions related to main characters’ internal state terms and significantly better compared to the TD-RCPM group in questions related to ToM. In terms of prosody, all three groups performed significantly better on story structure and comprehension questions when prosody was “lively” compared “flat” prosody. DS group’s re-narrations did not contain enough internal state terms, not due to their inability in recognizing them, but due to their poor morphosyntactic abilities, which did not allow them to find the proper means to express the main characters’ internal states. Prosody facilitated participants with DS in the comprehension and re-narration. This suggests that intervention programs based on prosody could support the language skills of adults with DS. (shrink)

This article reports on a method of group mentoring to strengthen responsible research conduct. A key feature of this approach is joint exploration of the issues by trainees and their faculty research supervisors. These interactions not only help participants learn about current ethical norms for research practice, but also draw on the accumulated experience of faculty and staff about practical problems of research conduct, and help to make faculty more articulate about responsible research conduct and so better able to guide (...) their trainees. By working with departments or laboratories as a whole the method facilitates the formulation of specific norms appropriate to particular research situations and to strengthen the group’s ability to support appropriate behavior and deal with new issues as they arise. It also gives students more ways to ask questions about research practice and to benefit from the experience of all members of their department or group as well as their own research supervisors. The method is well tested and has been well received by a wide variety of departments and research groups. It provides the means for a constructive and enjoyable response to the Public Health Service’s (PHS) new Policy on Instruction in the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) that requires education in the responsible conduct of research for all those funded by PHS funds, including faculty and staff as well as trainees. (shrink)

Experimental research by social and cognitive psychologists has established that cooperative groups solve a wide range of problems better than individuals. Cooperative problem solving groups of scientific researchers, auditors, financial analysts, air crash investigators, and forensic art experts are increasingly important in our complex and interdependent society. This comprehensive textbook--the first of its kind in decades--presents important theories and experimental research about group problem solving. The book focuses on tasks that have demonstrably correct solutions within mathematical, logical, scientific, or verbal (...) systems, including algebra problems, analogies, vocabulary, and logical reasoning problems.The book explores basic concepts in group problem solving, social combination models, group memory, group ability and world knowledge tasks, rule induction problems, letters-to-numbers problems, evidence for positive group-to-individual transfer, and social choice theory. The conclusion proposes ten generalizations that are supported by the theory and research on group problem solving. Group Problem Solving is an essential resource for decision-making research in social and cognitive psychology, but also extremely relevant to multidisciplinary and multicultural problem-solving teams in organizational behavior, business administration, management, and behavioral economics. (shrink)

The Hong and Page ‘diversity trumps ability’ result has been used to argue for the more general claim that a diverse set of agents is epistemically superior to a comparable group of experts. Here we extend Hong and Page’s model to landscapes of different degrees of randomness and demonstrate the sensitivity of the ‘diversity trumps ability’ result. This analysis offers a more nuanced picture of how diversity, ability, and expertise may relate. Although models of this sort can (...) indeed be suggestive for diversity policies, we advise against interpreting such results overly broadly. (shrink)

Epistemic justification of non-summative group beliefs is studied in this paper. Such group beliefs are understood to be voluntary acceptances, the justification of which differs from that of involuntary beliefs. It is argued that whereas epistemic evaluation of involuntary beliefs can be seen not to require reasons, justification of voluntary acceptance of a proposition as true requires that the agent, a group or an individual, can provide reasons for the accepted view. This basic idea is studied in relation to theories (...) of dialectical justification in which justification is taken to require ability to justify. Since the reasons offered can in principle always be challenged, there is no ultimate end to the dialectical chain of justification. This makes justification of acceptance, and thus group belief, social and, in a way, contextual, but this does not seem to entail strong forms of epistemic relativism. (shrink)

This article investigates National Defense Education Act and National Defense Education Act-related calls in the late 1950s for the training of guidance counselors, an emergent profession that was to play an instrumental role in both the measuring and placement of students in schools by “intelligence” or academic “ability”. In analyzing this mid-century push for more guidance counseling in schools, this article will first explore a foundational argument for the fairness of intelligence testing made by Educational Testing Service psychometrician William (...) Turnbull in 1951, and then later taken up and employed by other National Defense Education Act-era advocates of testing and grouping. Secondly, this analysis will proceed to National Defense Education Act expert testimony, examining here assertions of the necessity of guidance counseling in schools, and an emergent and shared vision articulating the role guidance counseling was supposed to play in school life. A pattern or structure to this vision emerges here. According to its advocates, guidance counseling would not only inform the self-understanding of the measured individual, but it would also work to condition the ideology of individual intelligence across numerous layers of social life around the student: through peer group, through teachers and school administrators, and finally through home, family, and the wider community. (shrink)

Within social psychology, group identification refers to a mental process that leads an individual to conceive of herself as a group member. This phenomenon has recently attracted a great deal of attention in the debate about shared agency. In this debate, group identification is appealing to many because it appears to explain important forms of intentionally shared actions in a cognitively unsophisticated way. This paper argues that, unless important issues about group identification are not illuminated, the heuristic function ascribed to (...) this notion for an understanding of shared agency remains dubious at best and unfulfilled at worst. This paper offers such a clarification by distinguishing and describing two different mental processes that constitute group identification: adoption of the group perspective and transformation in self-understanding. It is claimed that the latter process consists in the production of what Ruth Millikan labels “Pushmi-Pullyu representations” and that it is developmentally prior with respect to the ability of adopting the group perspective. (shrink)

A fundamental characteristic of human visual perception is the ability to group together disparate elements in a scene and treat them as a single unit. The mechanisms by which humans create such groupings remain unknown, but grouping seems to play an important role in a wide variety of visual phenomena. I propose a neural model of grouping; through top-down control of its circuits, the model implements a grouping strategy that involves both a connection strategy (which elements (...) to connect) and a selection strategy (spatiotemporal properties of a selection signal that segments target elements to facilitate identification). With computer simulations I explain how the circuits work and show how they can account for a wide variety of Gestalt principles of perceptual grouping. Additionally, I extend the model so that it can simulate visual search tasks. I show that when the model uses particular grouping strategies, simulated results closely match empirical results from replication experiments of three visual search tasks. In these experiments, perceptual grouping was induced by proximity and shape similarity (Palmer & Beck, 2007), by the spacing of irrelevant distractors and size similarity (Vickery, 2008), or by the proximity of dots and the proximity and shape similarity of line figures (Trick & Enns, 1997). Thus, I show that the model accounts for a variety of grouping effects and indicates which grouping strategies were likely used to promote performance in three visual search tasks. (shrink)

The high prevalence of brain injury incidents in adolescence and adulthood demands effective models for re-learning lost cognitive abilities. Impairment in brain injury survivors’ higher-level cognitive functions is common and a negative predictor for long-term outcome. We conducted two small-scale interventions (N = 12; 33.33% female) with persons with acquired brain injuries in two municipalities in Sweden. Age ranged from 17 to 65 years (M = 51.17, SD = 14.53). The interventions were dialogic, inquiry-based, and inspired by the Philosophy for (...) Children Programme, a participatory thinking skills approach with documented higher-order cognitive outcomes, such as developed argumentation skills, in other target groups. Philosophical dialogues were conducted once a week in the two groups, totalling 12 dialogues per group. Group argumentation development was measured through compared scores from structured observations of filmed dialogues early and late in the intervention. Large positive changes in mean scores from early to late in the intervention, together with constantly high facilitator quality, suggest argumentation development in the sample due to the intervention. (shrink)

Many important harms result in large part from our collective omissions, such as harms from our omissions to stop climate change and famines. Accounting for responsibility for collective omissions turns out to be particularly challenging. It is hard to see how an individual contributes anything to a collective omission to prevent harm if she couldn’t have made a difference to that harm on her own. Some groups are able to prevent such harms, but it is highly contentious whether groups can (...) be loci of responsibility. This paper takes an existing and plausible framework of moral responsibility—one based on abilities—and scales it up to accommodate responsibility for collective omissions. This centrally involves identifying what the relevant collective abilities are and how they work. One significant benefit of this approach is that we can do this while remaining neutral on the debates about collective agency and collective responsibility by showing how individualist and collectivist versions of the theory work. Finally, I explore several further upshots of the scaled-up ability-based account, including that degrees of responsibility can be cashed out in terms of strengths of the relevant abilities, which has both theoretical and applied implications. (shrink)

We consider a proportional-prize contest to forecast future events, and show that, in equilibrium, this mechanism possesses perfect forecasting ability for any group size when the contestants share common knowledge about the probabilities by which future events realize. Data gathered in a laboratory experiment confirm the performance invariance to group size. By contrast, when realization probabilities are not common knowledge, there are some differences across group sizes. The mechanism operates marginally better with three or four compared to two players. (...) However, this effect is mainly driven by players’ behavior rather than by differences in the beliefs they form about the realization probabilities. (shrink)

Using a Solomon four-group design, we investigate the effect of a case-based critical thinking intervention on students’ critical thinking skills. We randomly assign 31 sessions of business classes to four groups and collect data from three sources: in-class performance, university records, and Internet surveys. Our 2 × 2 ANOVA results showed no significant between-subjects differences. Contrary to our expectations, students improve their critical thinking skills, with or without the intervention. Female and Caucasian students improve their critical thinking skills, but males (...) and non-Caucasian do not. Positive performance goals and negative mastery goals enhance and decrease improvements of their CTA scores, respectively. ACT and age are related to pre- and post-test. Gender is related to pre-test. GPA is related to post-test. Results shed light on the Pygmalion effect, the Galatea effect, ability, motivation, and opportunity as signals for human capital, and business ethics. (shrink)

According to some collectivists, purposive groups that lack decision-making procedures such as riot mobs, friends walking together, or the pro-life lobby can be morally responsible and have moral duties. I focus on plural subject- and we-mode-collectivism. I argue that purposive groups do not qualify as duty-bearers even if they qualify as agents on either view. To qualify as a duty-bearer, an agent must be morally competent. I develop the Update Argument. An agent is morally competent only if the agent has (...) sufficient positive and negative control over updating their goal-seeking states. Positive control involves the general ability to update one’s goal-seeking states, whereas negative control involves the absence of other agents with the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with updating one’s goal-seeking states. I argue that even if purposive groups qualify as plural subjects or we-mode group agents, these groups necessarily lack negative control over updating their goal-seeking states. This creates a cut-off point for groups as duty-bearers: Organized groups may qualify as duty-bearers, whereas purposive groups cannot qualify as duty-bearers. (shrink)

Introspection, or metacognition, is the capacity to reflect on our own thoughts and behaviours. Here, we investigated how one specific metacognitive ability develops in adolescence, a period of life associated with the emergence of self-concept and enhanced self-awareness. We employed a task that dissociates objective performance on a visual task from metacognitive ability in a group of 56 participants aged between 11 and 41 years. Metacognitive ability improved significantly with age during adolescence, was highest in late adolescence (...) and plateaued going into adulthood. Our results suggest that awareness of one’s own perceptual decisions shows a prolonged developmental trajectory during adolescence. (shrink)

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that “the good [that] men do separately is small compared with what they may do collectively” (Isaacson 2004). The ability to join with others in groups to accomplish goals collectively that would hopelessly overwhelm the time, energy, and resources of individuals is indeed one of the greatest assets of our species. In the history of humankind, groups have been among the greatest workers, builders, producers, protectors, entertainers, explorers, discoverers, planners, problem-solvers, and decision-makers. During the late (...) 19th and early 20th century, many social scientists employed the notorious “group mind” idiom to express the sensible idea that groups can function as the seats of cognition, intelligence, and agency in their own right (Allport 1968; Wilson 2004). In their quest to stress (rightly) that group phenomena are something “over and above” the sum of individual contributions, a fondness for vitalist metaphors led them to believe (wrongly) that genuine group cognition must be the result of tapping into individualistically inaccessible, “holistic” forces. Today, inspired in part by historically unparalleled forms of mass collaboration enabled by the internet, it has once again become popular to speak of collective intelligence, group agency, or even the emergence of a “global brain” (cf. the wiki-edited MIT Handbook of Collective Intelligence). -/- In this chapter, I review some contemporary developments of the idea of group cognition, defined broadly as the collaborative performance of cognitive tasks such as remembering, problem-solving, decision-making, or verbal creativity for the purpose of producing a group-level outcome. My discussion serves a two-fold purpose. First, by discussing how the idea of group cognition can be operationalized, I seek to show that we can retain some central theoretical insights of the “group mind” thesis without succumbing to its eccentric metaphysical overtones. Second, by providing a useful array of generalizable taxonomic resources, I hope to foster greater degrees of mutual awareness among insufficiently integrated areas of research on group performance. (shrink)

Most philosophers believe that humans have far greater moral worth than nonhuman animals. This consensus position invites the following question: What characteristic or group of characteristics of human beings differentiates us from nonhuman animals so that we have greater moral worth than nonhuman animals? Philosophers have offered a number of characteristics that allegedly show human beings to be superior to nonhuman animals. At the top of the list we find thinking and the ability to be rational. Further down the (...) list we find more subtle abilities, for example, such as the ability to be self- conscious. Neither of these nor a host of other prospects provide an adequate ground for the claim of greater human worth.1 But philosophers attribute one ability to humans, or to most humans, that seems immune to the usual criticisms: the ability to be moral. In this essay I want to explore whether the ability to be moral plausibly makes humans more valuable than nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Our research brings to light features of the social world that impact moral judgments and how they do so. The moral vignette data presented were collected in rural and urban Croatian communities that were involved to varying degrees in the Croatian Homeland War. We argue that rapid shifts in moral accommodations during periods of violent social strife can be explained by considering the role that coordination and social agents' ability to reconfigure their social network (i.e., relational mobility) play in (...) moral reasoning. Social agents coordinate on (moral) norms, a general attitude which broadly facilitates cooperation, and makes possible the collective enforcement of compliance. During social strife interested parties recalibrate their determination of others' moral standing and recast their established moral circle, in accordance with their new or prevailing social investments. To that extent, social coordination—and its particular promoters, inhibitors, and determinants—effects significant changes in individuals' ranking of moral priorities. Results indicate that rural participants evaluate the harmful actions of third parties more harshly than urban participants. Coordination mediates that relationship between social environment and moral judgment. Coordination also matters more for the moral evaluation of the harmful actions of moral scenarios involving characters belonging to different social units than for scenarios involving characters belonging to the same group. Participants high in relational mobility—that ability to recompose one's social network—moralize similarly wrongdoings perpetrated by both in- and out-group members. Those low in relational mobility differentiate when an out-group member causes the harm. Additionally, perceptions of third-party guilt are also affected by specifics of the social environment. Overall, we find that social coordination and relational mobility affect moral reasoning more so than ethnic commitment. (shrink)

According to the diversity-beats-ability theorem, groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers. We argue that the model introduced by Lu Hong and Scott Page is inadequate for exploring the trade-off between diversity and ability. This is because the model employs an impoverished implementation of the problem-solving task. We present a new version of the model which captures the role of ‘ability’ in a meaningful way, and use it to explore the trade-offs (...) between diversity and ability in scientific problem solving. (shrink)

The paper aims to assess the theory of mind of sexual offenders. We administered to 21 sexual offenders and to 21 nonoffenders two classical first- and second-order ToM tasks, a selection of six Strange Stories, and a semi-structured interview, the Theory of Mind Assessment Scale , which provides a multi-dimensional evaluation of ToM, investigating first- vs. third-person and egocentric vs. allocentric perspectives. Results show that sexual offenders performed worse than controls on second-order ToM tasks, on Strange Stories and on each (...) of the Th.o.m.a.s dimensions, whereas they did as well as the control group on first-order ToM tasks. A detailed analysis of participants’ performance on Th.o.m.a.s. showed that sex offenders performed worse on the third-person than on the first-person ToM scale, and worse on the allocentric than on the egocentric perspective; these findings did not apply to the controls. Implications for future research and treatment are discussed. (shrink)

The present study had two goals: to test the validity of Planned Happenstance Career Inventory in the Italian context and to explore the relations between PHC skills and vocational identity processes within a sample of 472 undergraduate students attending university in the southern of Italy. Moreover, we examined relations between the PHCI and measures of vocational identity processes. With regard to the first goal, results show that for the Italian version of the instrument was confirmed the multifactor structure of the (...) original version. The multi-group analyses showed that invariance between genders is supported. Convergent validity and divergent validity of the measure were reported. Concerning the second goal, the skills of planned happenstance show different associations with Vocational Identity Dimensions. As hypothesized, the exploration and commitment dimensions of vocational identity status are positive related to Planned Happenstance Skills. These findings suggest implications for career guidance and counseling. (shrink)

In an effort to further explore ostensible macroscopic psychokinesis (macro-PK) effects like those previously reported by Batcheldor (1966), Bourgeois (1994), Owen and Sparrow (1976), and Ullman (2001) in a sitter group setting, the first author designed and conducted a series of fifteen experimental sessions in which sitters claiming exceptional abilities attempted to generate a pseudo-spirit named "Daniel," to whom physical phenomena were attributed. To explore possible physical correlates of macro-PK, two approaches to measurement were utilized. In the first, sample data (...) from a local random number generator (RNG) continuously running as part of the Global Consciousness Project were extracted and examined for statistical deviations from randomness occurring in conjunction with the sitter group sessions. In the second, the Multi-Energy Sensor Array (MESA) was used to collect onsite environmental data during one of the sessions. While displays of ostensible macro-PK were observed during several of the sitter group sessions, the RNG data did not show a significant overall correlation with the sessions. The MESA data indicated notable drops in infrared and visual light, as well as changes in DC magnetic field strength, that are comparable to those observed in field studies of haunts. Keywords: sitter groups--macroscopic psychokinesis (macro-PK)--random number generator (RNG)--Multi-Energy Sensor Array (MESA). (shrink)

Adam Hochman has recently argued for comprehensive anti-realism about race against social kind theories of race. He points out that sceptics, often taken as archetypical anti-realists, may admit race in certain circumstances even if they are eliminativists about race. To be comprehensively anti-realist about races, which also means rejecting all ‘race talk’, he suggests that racial formation theory should be abandoned in favour of interactive constructionism. Interactive constructionism argues for the reality of racialized individuals and racialized groups to the exclusion (...) of realism about races. Its supplementation of comprehensive anti-realism is meant to give us the ability to account for all relevant phenomena of interest surrounding the question of race without having to admit that races are real in any sense. I argue that although Hochman’s interactive constructionism succeeds in establishing the existence of racialized individuals and groups, it does not do so to the exclusion of realism about social races. Furthermore, I show that his comprehensive anti-realism, even when it is supplemented with interactive constructionism, is inadequate to deal with all relevant phenomena of interest surrounding the question of race. (shrink)

Most previous research has demonstrated that receiving ability-focused praise negatively affects intrinsic motivation following failure. Surprisingly, a recent study showed that ability-focused praise affects not only the praisee but also the person offering praise, that is, the praiser. However, evidence of the effects on the praiser is quite limited, despite the utility of praise in education. Therefore, the present study employed face-to-face interaction to advance the knowledge of the effects of praise on the praiser. Two experiments were conducted (...) in which undergraduate participants praised a research confederate. We measured attentional engagement using an eye-tracker as a behavioral indicator of intrinsic motivation, as well as self-reported task enjoyment. To estimate the effect of praise, we combined the results of two experiments and conducted a Bayes factor meta-analysis. The results showed that in the ability praise group, participants’ attentional engagement in a task was significantly lower than in the control group. The present finding indicates that ability-focused praise negatively affects the praiser’s intrinsic motivation and suggests that praise should be used with caution in social and educational contexts. (shrink)