The four experiments presented support Boyer's theory that counterintuitive concepts have transmission advantages that account for the commonness and ease of communicating many non-natural cultural concepts. In Experiment 1, 48 American college students recalled expectation-violating items from culturally unfamiliar folk stories better than more mundane items in the stories. In Experiment 2, 52 American college students in a modified serial reproduction task transmitted expectation-violating items in a written narrative more successfully than bizarre or common items. In Experiments 3 and 4, (...) these findings were replicated with orally presented and transmitted stimuli, and found to persist even after three months. To sum, concepts with single expectation-violating features were more successfully transmitted than concepts that were entirely congruent with category-level expectations, even if they were highly unusual or bizarre. This transmission advantage for counterintuitive concepts may explain, in part, why such concepts are so prevalent across cultures and so readily spread. (shrink)

This experimental study examines individuals’ legitimacy judgments. We develop a model that demonstrates the role of attributed motives and corporate credibility for the evaluation of organizational legitimacy and test this model with an experimental vignette study. Our results show that when a corporate activity creates benefits for the firm—in addition to social benefits—individuals attribute more extrinsic motives. Extrinsic motives are ascribed when a corporation is perceived as being driven by external rewards as opposed to an altruistic commitment to a social (...) cause. Extrinsic motives negatively affect corporate credibility and organizational legitimacy judgments. This article contributes to a better understanding of the complex process of organizational legitimacy judgment by shedding light on the individual’s perspective and expounding the relationship between attributed motives, corporate credibility, and organizational legitimacy. (shrink)

Corporate psychopathy thrives perhaps as the most significant threat to ethical corporate behaviour around the world. We argue that Human Resources Management professionals should formulate strategic solutions metaphorically by balancing what strategic military planners famously call ‘Search and Destroy’ and ‘Hearts and Minds’ counter-terrorist strategy. We argue that these military metaphors offer creative inspiration to help academics and practitioners theorise CP in richer, more reflective and more balanced and complementary ways. An appreciation of both metaphors is likely to favour the (...) use of hybrid strategies comprising SD and HM elements, which may provide the best HRM solutions to CP for the same reasons as the military now considers parallel hybrid solutions optimal for combating terrorist and guerrilla insurgency. (shrink)

A large campaign has sought to destigmatize psychiatric disorders by disseminating the view that they are in fact brain disorders. But when psychiatric disorders are associated with neurobiological correlates, laypeople's attitudes toward patients are harsher, and the prognoses seem poorer. Here, we ask whether these misconceptions could result from the essentialist presumption that brain disorders are innate. To this end, we invited laypeople to reason about psychiatric disorders that are diagnosed by either a brain or a behavioral test that were (...) strictly matched for their informative value. Participants viewed disorders as more likely to be innate and immutable when the diagnosis was supported by a brain test as compared to a behavioral test. These results show for the first time that people spontaneously essentialize psychiatric conditions that are linked to the brain, even when the brain probe offers no additional diagnostic or genetic information. This bias suggests that people consider the biological essence of living things as materially embodied. (shrink)

We describe and analyze 13 cases handled by our ethics consultation service (ECS) in which families requested continuation of physiological support for loved ones after death by neurological criteria (DNC) had been declared. These ethics consultations took place between 2005 and 2013. Patients’ ages ranged from 14 to 85. Continued mechanical ventilation was the focal intervention sought by all families. The ECS’s advice and recommendations generally promoted “reasonable accommodation” of the requests, balancing compassion for grieving families with other ethical and (...) moral concerns such as stewardship of resources, professional integrity, and moral distress. In cases we characterized as finitegoal accommodation, a “reasonable accommodation” strategy proved effective in balancing stakeholders’ interests and goals, enabling steady progress toward resolution. When a family objected outright to a declaration of DNC and asked for an indefinite accommodation, the “reasonable accommodation” approach offered clinicians little practical direction, and resolution required definitive action by either the family or the clinical team. Based on our analysis and reflections on these 13 cases, we propose ethically justified and practical guidelines to assist healthcare professionals, administrators, and ECSs faced with similar cases. (shrink)

At the UN, important projects laying down transnational corporations' (TNCs) human rights responsibilities have been launched without ever clarifying the relevant theoretical foundations. One of the consequences is that the human rights principles in projects like the 2000 UN Global Compact and the 2003 Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights can be understood in different ways, which should not cause surprise given that their authors come from diverse backgrounds, including economics (...) and public policy. An examination of these projects and the views of their authors reveals that, although they are superficially linked to international human rights law, they go well beyond it and attempt to deal with corporate social responsibility issues in ways that elude neat classification as fitting neatly in either legal or non-legal categories. Too little attention has been paid to how in the course of developing these projects the legal and ethical dimensions have become entwined and how lines have gotten blurred. Meanwhile, there has been recognition that these UN projects have emerged simply as ad hoc responses to practical concerns about the sustainability of globalization. The lack of any foundational theory or normative framework should be addressed; it is time to bring together specialists from different fields concerned with the human rights responsibilities of corporations to see if it is possible to define a coherent overarching theory for these UN projects. (shrink)

Various studies have shown a decrease in well-being and an increase in mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, only a few studies have explored fear, depression, and well-being cross-culturally during this time. Accordingly, we present the results of a cross-cultural study that compares these mental health scores for German and South African students, compares the correlations among them, and identifies COVID-19 fear, well-being, and depression predictors. German and South African societies differ from each other socio-culturally, politically, and economically. (...) Their university systems also differ to a large extent. University students in both countries completed the Fear of COVID-19 Scale, the World Health Organization-Five Well-Being Index, and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. Welch’s t-test, correlation, and multiple regression analyses were performed. German students were found to have statistically lower levels of COVID-19 fear and depression, but lower levels of general well-being than South African students. In both samples, fear of COVID-19 was negatively correlated with well-being and positively associated with female gender and depression. Additionally, female gender, depression, and lower well-being were identified as predictors of COVID-19 fear in both samples. The findings indicate that the fear of COVID-19 is associated with and varies according to gender, depression, and well-being across cultures, and that the difference in the intensity of fear between German and South African students may be partly explained by cultural and contextual differences. These findings can create a deeper understanding of the pandemic’s impact on student communities and may be used by mental health practitioners and researchers to develop and apply culture-specific interventions. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 5-62, Spring 2020.

Conventionally, multilevel analysis of covariance (ML-ANCOVA) has been the recommended approach for analyzing treatment effects in quasi-experimental multilevel designs with treatment application at the cluster-level. In this paper, we introduce the generalized ML-ANCOVA with linear effect functions that identifies average and conditional treatment effects in the presence of treatment-covariate interactions. We show how the generalized ML-ANCOVA model can be estimated with multigroup multilevel structural equation models that offer considerable advantages compared to traditional ML-ANCOVA. The proposed model takes into account measurement (...) error in the covariates, sampling error in contextual covariates, treatment-covariate interactions, and stochastic predictors. We illustrate the implementation of ML-ANCOVA with an example from educational effectiveness research where we estimate average and conditional effects of early transition to secondary schooling on reading comprehension. (shrink)

The interactions among the components of a biological system can be given a logical representation that is useful for reasoning about them. One of the relevant problems that may be raised in this context is finding what would explain a given behaviour of some component; in other terms, generating hypotheses that, when added to the logical theory modelling the system, imply that behaviour. Temporal aspects have to be taken into account, in order to model the causality relationship that may link (...) the behaviour of a given component to that of another one. This paper presents a hypothesis generation method for linear temporal logic theories whose formulae have a restricted syntactic form, which is however sufficient to model cellular and molecular interactions, as they are often represented by biologists. The method exploits the duality between hypothesis generation and consequence finding, and can therefore be also used to infer the consequences of a given fact. It is based on a resolution system proposed by Cavalli and Fariñas del Cerro in 1984. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, glycated haemoglobin (HbA1C) has been the gold standard for monitoring glycaemic control in people diagnosed as having either type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) or type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Discussions are underway about diagnosing diabetes mellitus on the basis of HbA1C titres and using HbA1C tests to screen for T2DM. These discussions have focused on the relative benefits for individual patients, with some attention directed towards reduced costs to healthcare systems and benefits to society. We argue that (...) there are strong ethical reasons for adopting HbA1C-based diagnosis and T2DM screening that have not yet been articulated. The rationale includes the differential impact of HbA1C-based diabetic testing on disadvantaged groups, and what we are beginning to learn about HbA1C vis-à-vis population health. Although it is arguable that screening must primarily benefit the individual, using HbA1C to diagnose and screen for T2DM may promote a more just distribution of health resources and lead to advances in investigating, monitoring and tackling the social determinants of health. (shrink)

This chapter considers the relationship between philosophy and literature both as forms of writing and thinking, but also (which is a more original contribution) as historically specific instititutions of enquiry. The argument is that part of the historical and cultural situatedness of philosophy is as a written form of cultural production, but one located within institutions (Universities above all) that already have a different 'department' specialising in understanding written forms of cultural production. This suggests that there might be an overlooked (...) reciprocal influence. In particular, what new challenges for its own thinking can philosophy discover in the contemporary practices of literary analysis? A case study is detailed concerning recent forms of ecological criticism. (shrink)

Boundaries between research and clinical practice blur in health research conducted by clinician-researchers. We describe a typology, of clinician-researcher dual-role tensions, with two overarching catalysts: acting as a clinical resource for patient-participants and forming researcher–participant relationships mirroring clinician–patient relationships. Using the typology as an analytic template we explored blurred boundaries in five illustrative, non-clinician, critical studies. Like clinician-researchers, critical researchers act in ways that promote rapport and relationships with their participants, which can blur boundaries. While clinician-researchers see tension between clinician (...) and researcher roles, we ask what roles critical researchers attempt to distinguish: ethically minded citizen and researcher, socially conscious community member and researcher, or friend and researcher? Anticipating catalysts of dual-role tension may assist critical researchers in planning and conducting robust research. (shrink)

Resumo O texto explora as afinidades que podem ser encontradas entre o pensamento de Nietzsche e o de Rousseau a partir da análise do interesse de ambos pela música. Não escamoteando o que os separa, procura-se esclarecer as razões deste interesse e a sua relação quercom a preocupaçãoque partilham acerca da cultura ocidental moderna, quer com crise da subjectividade que essa cultura parece acarretar.The text aims at exploring the affinities that might be found between Nietzsche’s and Rousseau’s thought through an (...) analysis of their common interest in music. Without ignoring the discrepancies between both of them, it tries to enlighten the reasons behind this interest and their shared concern for modern western culture, as well as for the subjective crisis that this culture seems to cause. (shrink)

In his final words to his son, Pallas, Evander interposes a prayer: ‘At uos, o superi, et diuum tu maxime rector Iuppiter, Arcadii, quaeso, miserescite regis…’ Of recent commentators, C. J. Fordyce alone is bothered by the reference to Evander's Arcadian origin; he reckons that it alludes to his exiled condition and so establishes a claim on Jupiter's mercy. That may be so, but it is worth suggesting that this is rather a piece of Virgil's Callimachean learning. For at the (...) opening of his first Hymn Callimachus had rejected the story that Zeus was born on Crete in favour of Arcadia . The Arcadian birth-place was known to Cicero . Yet Cicero is less likely to be in Virgil's mind than Callimachus, from whom he derived so much learned detail. Evander then is appealing to Jupiter as a fellow Arcadian, docte. (shrink)

Albert Camus (1913–1960) stands as one of the famous pioneers in the French history of existentialism. He was a novelist, political activist, essayist and editor, as well as a journalist and playwright. Although he was described as philosopher, he often denied this ascription. Through his professional and creative expressions, Camus focused on questions of existentialism, the aspect of the human fate, and meaning in life, death and suicide. These existential questions have experienced a strong revival during the Covid-19 occurrence. This (...) psychobiographical approach aims at understanding Albert Camus' life and work in the context of the terror management theory of Becker and Wong's 4 pillars of PP2.0 theory, namely virtue, meaning, resilience and well-being. Both theories have gained importance during the pandemic. Based on the findings of the research study, implications for future research in the context of the pandemic are given. Finally, this article provides recommendations and best practices on how to approach the Covid-19 pandemic from a terror management theory and PP2.0 perspective in the light of Albert Camus' philosophy. The contribution of this psychobiography is two-fold: first, it expands psychobiographical research on Albert Camus from absurdist and existentialist theories and thereby expands the theoretical framework of psychobiographies. Second, it aims at strengthening the importance of theoretical psychobiographical investigations and their application in real-world scenarios to address complex contemporary challenges on the basis of existentialist positive psychology theories. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.