Early exposure to stressful life events is associated with greater risk of chronic diseases and mental health problems, including anxiety. However, there is significant variation in how individuals respond to environmental adversity, perhaps due to individual differences in processing and regulating emotional information. Differences in cognitive control – processes necessary for implementing goal directed behavior – have been linked to both stress exposure and anxiety, but the directionality of these links is unclear. The present study investigated the longitudinal pathway of (...) environmental stress exposure during early adolescence on later adolescent anxiety, and the possible mediating mechanism of cognitive control. Participants were 674 Mexican-origin adolescents (mean age = 10.8 years, 50% male) enrolled in the California Families Project, an ongoing longitudinal study of Mexican-origin families. In the current analysis, we examined self-reports of environmental stressors at age 14 (Time 1), cognitive control at age 16 (Time 2), and anxiety at age 18 (Time 3). Structural equation modeling revealed that environmental stressors (Time 1) had both direct and indirect effects on later anxiety (Time 3) through their effects on cognitive control (Time 2), even when accounting for prior levels of anxiety (Time 2). Cognitive control accounted for 18% of the association between environmental stressors and adolescent anxiety: an increase in stressors decreased cognitive control (β = −0.20, p p = 0.004). These findings deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the development of anxiety and highlight the importance of cognitive control as a potential protective factor. (shrink)

Economics differs from physics, we are told, in that the laws economics studies hold only ceteris paribus whereas those of physics are supposed to obtain universally and without condition. Does this point to a metaphysical difference between the laws the two disciplines study or does it reflect merely a deficiency in the level of accomplishment of economics as compared to physics?

What is wisdom? What does a wise person know? Can a wise person know how to act and live well without knowing the whys and wherefores of his own action? How is wisdom acquired? This Element addresses questions regarding the nature and acquisition of wisdom by developing and defending a skill theory of wisdom. Specifically, this theory argues that if a person S is wise, then (i) S knows that overall attitude success contributes to or constitutes well-being; (ii) S knows (...) what the best means to achieve well-being are; (iii) S is reliably successful at acting and living well (in light of what S knows); and (iv) S knows why she is successful at acting and living well. The first three sections of this Element develop this theory, and the final two sections defend this theory against two objections to the effect that there are asymmetries between wisdom and skill. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 606-622, May 2022.

Contemporary philosophers have contributed to the development of the skill model of wisdom, according to which practical wisdom is practical skill. However, the model appears to be limited in its explanatory power, since there are asymmetries between wisdom and skill: A person with practical wisdom can and should deliberate about the end being pursued; by contrast, a person with a particular practical skill cannot deliberate about the end of the skill, and even if she can, she is not required to (...) do so. In this paper, I undermine these widely held asymmetries by elucidating the unnoticed nature of skill. (shrink)

The skill model of wisdom argues that practical wisdom can be best understood in terms of practical skill or expertise, and the model is thought to have the characteristic of focusing on how wise people think rather than how wise people feel. However, from the perspective of Kunzmann and Glück, “it is time for an ‘emotional revolution’ in wisdom research, which will contribute to a more balanced view on wisdom that considers emotional factors and processes as equally typical of wisdom (...) as are cognitive and reflective factors” (Kunzmann U, Gluck J [2019] Wisdom and emotion. In: Sternberg R, Gluck J (eds) The cambridge handbook of wisdom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 575–601). Kunzmann and Glück’s appeal for this emotional revolution is significant and intriguing because the inclusion of an explanation of the role of emotion in wisdom can contribute to developing the skill model of wisdom into a more comprehensive framework that recognizes the intricate relation between wisdom and emotions. In this paper, I shall propose and develop a skill account of the emotions of the wise to serve as a supplement to the skill model of wisdom. According to this account, first, at the critical level, having emotions and emotional competence as elements is not essential to wisdom; second, at the theoretical level, a wise person feels an emotion E if and only if E is strategically rational for the wise person; and third, at the metatheoretical level, the primary aim of the skill account is to explain why wise people feel in a particular way rather than to describe how wise people feel. (shrink)

Institutional review boards and investigators are used to talking about risks of harm. Both low risks of great harm and high risks of small harm must be disclosed to prospective subjects and should be explained and categorized in ways that help potential subjects to understand and weigh them appropriately. Everyone on an IRB has probably spent time at meetings arguing over whether a three-page bulleted list of risk description is helpful or overkill for prospective subjects. Yet only a small fraction (...) of all the time and attention lavished on risk disclosure has been devoted to discussing whether and when potential benefit to subjects can reasonably be claimed and, if so, how it should be described in the consent form and process.Traditionally, IRBs and regulators have worked to ensure that clear lines can be drawn between research that, by definition, carries no potential for direct benefit — because it uses healthy volunteers or because it is not foreseeably focused on the development of treatments — and research that does have the development of effective treatments as its goal. (shrink)

This paper argues that participation in an intimate relationship can generate additional or stronger reasons for one to act paternalistically toward the intimate. Moreover, participation in such a relationship can also weaken or cancel some of the presumptive reasons of respect one would otherwise have not to interfere. The paper also reflects, more generally, on the nature of intimate relationships, the normative significance of paternalism, and the normative differences between paternalism in larger-scale institutional contexts and paternalism in closer, interpersonal ones. (...) -/- . (shrink)

According to Dreyfusian anti-intellectualism, know-how or expertise cannot be explained in terms of know-that and its cognates but only in terms of intuition. Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus do not exclude know-that and its cognates in explaining skilled action. However, they think that know-that and its cognates (such as calculative deliberation and perspectival deliberation) only operate either below or above the level of expertise. In agreement with some critics of Dreyfus and Dreyfus, in this paper, I argue that know-that and (...) its cognates are constitutive of rather than external to know-how and expertise. However, unlike those critics, who argue for this point only from a phenomenological point of view, my argument adopts a (telic) normative point of view. (shrink)

The high turnover of nurses has become a global problem. Several studies have proposed that nurses' perceptions of the ethical climate of their organization are related to higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and thus lead to lower turnover. However, there is limited empirical evidence supporting a relationship between different types of ethical climate within organizations and facets of job satisfaction. Furthermore, no published studies have investigated the impact of different types of ethical climate on the three components of organizational (...) commitment. This study attempts to explore the different types of ethical climate that exist in hospitals, and the degree of job satisfaction and organizational commitment of nurses in Taiwan. It uses path analysis to understand which types of ethical climate influence different facets of job satisfaction. The study also examines the impact of different types of ethical climate and facets of job satisfaction on the three components of organizational commitment. Questionnaires were distributed to 352 nurses. The relationships among variables were assessed by factor analysis, reliability, descriptive statistics, correlations, and regression. The important conclusion is that hospitals can increase job satisfaction and organizational commitment by influencing an organization's ethical climate. Hospital administrators can foster within organizations the climate types of caring, independent, and rules climate that increase satisfaction, while preventing organizations from developing the type of instrumental climate that decreases it. (shrink)

Drawing on propositions from the signaling theory and expectancy theory, this study hypothesizes that the perceived corporate citizenship of job seekers positively affects a firm’s attractiveness and career success expectation. This study’s proposed research hypotheses are empirically tested using a survey of graduating MBA students seeking a job. The empirical findings show that a firm’s corporate citizenship provides a competitive advantage in attracting job seekers and fostering optimistic career success expectation. Such findings substantially complement the growing literature arguing that corporate (...) citizenship brings firms competitive advantages without solid evidence from the perspective of recruitment and human resources. Finally, managerial implications and limitations of this study are also discussed. (shrink)

Phronesis, or practical wisdom, is a capacity the possession of which enables one to make good practical judgments and thus fulfill the distinctive function of human beings. Nir Eisikovits and Dan Feldman convincingly argue that this capacity may be undermined by statistical machine-learning-based AI. The critic questions: why should we worry that AI undermines phronesis? Why can’t we epistemically defer to AI, especially when it is superintelligent? Eisikovits and Feldman acknowledge such objection but do not consider it seriously. In this (...) paper, we argue that there is a way to reconcile Eisikovits and Feldman with their critic by adopting the principle of epistemic heed, according to which we should exercise our rational capacity as much as possible while heeding a superintelligence’s output whenever possible. (shrink)

Public health ethics in the future will be distinguished from public health ethics in the past by this new subfield being labeled as such, acknowledged, and called upon for service. Ethical dilemmas have been present throughout the history of public health. The question of whether to force Henning Jacobson to be immunized in 1905 in accordance with the 1902 Massachusetts smallpox vaccination law was one of ethics as well as law. How Thomas Parran, Surgeon General in 1936, chose to respond (...) to a raging syphilis epidemic in the United States in the early part of the 2W century raised considerable moral debate in determining the appropriate public health response for a government? More recently, questions have arisen concerning the appropriate reach of government in controlling HIV banning smoking, or promoting healthy lifestyles. Debates over government infringement, morality, and justice recur throughout the history of public health. (shrink)

This study proposes a research model based on social identity theory, which examines the moderating role of organizational trust on the relationship between corporate citizenship and organizational commitment. In the model, organizational commitment is positively influenced by organizational trust and four dimensions of perceived corporate citizenship, including economic, legal, ethical and discretionary citizenship. The model paths are hypothesized to be moderated by organizational trust. Empirical testing using a survey of personnel from 12 large firms confirms most of our hypothesized effects. (...) Theoretical and managerial implications of our findings are discussed. (shrink)

Philosophical interest in state power has tended to focus on the state’s coercive powers rather than its expressive powers. I consider an underexplored aspect of the state’s expressive capacity: its capacity to use symbols (such as monuments, memorials, and street names) to promote political ends. In particular, I argue that the liberal state’s deployment of symbols to promote its members’ commitment to liberal ideals is in need of special justification. This is because the state’s exercise of its capacity to use (...) symbols may be in tension with respecting individual autonomy, particularly in cases in which the symbols exert influence without engaging citizens’ rational capacities. But despite the fact that the state’s deployment of symbols may circumvent citizens’ rational capacities, I argue that it may nonetheless be permissible when surrounded by certain liberal institutions and brought about via democratic procedures. (shrink)

Anti-intellectualists in epistemology argue for the thesis that knowing-how is not a species of knowing-that, and most of them tend to avoid any use of the notion “knowing-that” in their explanation of intelligent action on pain of inconsistency. Intellectualists tend to disprove anti-intellectualism by showing that the residues of knowing-that remain in the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action. Outside the field of epistemology, some philosophers who try to highlight the nature of their explanation of intelligent action in certain fields, such (...) as ethics, tend to classify themselves as intellectualist simply because they appeal to the notion of knowing-that in their explanation. In a word, the idea of knowing-that is harmful to the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action, whether from an insider or outsider perspective. In this paper, I argue that these tendencies are unjustified because they are based on an unclear conception of anti-intellectualism. I shall use Gilbert Ryle’s anti-intellectualism as a paradigm with which to describe anti-intellectualism and to illustrate why the notion of knowing-that is not harmful to but is, on the contrary, beneficial to the anti-intellectualist explanation of intelligent action. If my explication of Ryle’s anti-intellectualism is correct, then most anti-intellectualists in the literature blindly worry about the notion of knowing-that, most intellectualists fire into the wrong flock, and some philosophers outside epistemology mischaracterize their own position. (shrink)

Human excellences such as intelligence, morality, and consciousness are investigated by philosophers as well as artificial intelligence researchers. One excellence that has not been widely discussed by AI researchers is practical wisdom, the highest human excellence, or the highest, seventh, stage in Dreyfus’s model of skill acquisition. In this paper, I explain why artificial wisdom matters and how artificial wisdom is possible (in principle and in practice) by responding to two philosophical challenges to building artificial wisdom systems. The result is (...) a conceptual framework that guides future research on creating artificial wisdom. (shrink)

In “Knowing How”, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001) propose an intellectualist account of knowledge-how, according to which all knowledge-how is a type of propositional knowledge about ways to act. In this article, I examine this intellectualist account by applying it to the epistemology of language. I argue that (a) Stanley and Williamson mischaracterize the concept of knowledge-how in the epistemology of language, and (b) intellectualism about knowledge of language fails in its explanatory task. One lesson that can be drawn (...) from this case study is that Stanley and Williamson's intellectualism is limited in its explanatory scope and power insofar as it cannot explain the knowledge of language, which is usually conceived as knowledge-how and as non-propositional in character. Their intellectualist claim that all knowledge-how is knowledge-that should be withdrawn. (shrink)

Like more than two hundred thousand other Americans, George Floyd howled horribly for air before his death. But his breathlessness was not born from a virus. He was murdered with the burden of anti...

Knowing-how is currently a hot topic in epistemology. But what is the proper subject matter of a study of knowing-how and in what sense can such a study be regarded as epistemological? The aim of this paper is to answer such metaepistemological questions. This paper offers a metaepistemology of knowing-how, including considerations of the subject matter, task, and nature of the epistemology of knowing-how. I will achieve this aim, first, by distinguishing varieties of knowing-how and, second, by introducing and elaborating (...) the concept of hybrid knowing-how, which entails a combination of a ground-level ability and a meta-level perspective on that ability. The stance I wish to advocate is that the epistemology of knowing-how is a normative discipline whose main task is to study the nature and value of human practical intelligence required to do things in a particular manner. (shrink)

Intimate relationships such as love and friendship involve familiar patterns of vulnerability. Loving someone renders one susceptible to distress and sorrow when the beloved is harmed and when the loving relationship is impaired. The distinctive kind of vulnerability bound up with intimate relationships also presents an opportunity for wrongful exploitation: for one participant to unfairly use, take advantage of, the other. In the case of commercial exploitation (e.g., exploitation of sweatshop workers), the remedy typically involves either preventing those in the (...) relevant positions of power from taking advantage of the vulnerability of the powerless or removing the vulnerabilities of those in the relevant positions of powerlessness. I argue there are there limits to the application of these two strategies in the intimate relationship context, and I consider what (if anything) might guard against the possibility of exploitation in intimate relationships. (shrink)

Advance directives have been lauded by scholars and supported by professional organizations, Congress, and the United States Supreme Court. Despite this encouragement, only a small number of capable patients execute living wills or appoint health care agents. When patients do empower proxies, doctors may be uncertain about the scope of their duties and obligations to these persons who, in theory, stand in the shoes of the patient. This article argues for a conscious focus on the ethical duties, emotional supports, and (...) guidance owed by physicians to health care agents. (shrink)

Tennis champion Maria Sharapova has a habit of grunting when she plays on the court. Assume that she also has a habit of hitting the ball in a certain way in a certain situation. The habit of on-court grunting might be bad, but can the habit of hitting the ball in a certain way in a certain situation be classified as intelligent? The fundamental questions here are as follows: What is habit? What is the relation between habit and skill? Is (...) there such a thing as intelligent habit? In this paper I expound the nature of habit by developing and defending a Rylean conception of habit, according to which an acquired disposition is a habit if and only if the manifestation of the disposition is repeated, automatic, and uniform. One implication of this conception is that there is no such thing as intelligent habit. A practical application in athletic expertise is that sport coaches can help athletes go beyond repeated, automatic, and uniform dispositions in sport. (shrink)

Robustness has long been recognized as an important parameter for evaluating game-theoretic results, but talk of ‘robustness’ generally remains vague. What we offer here is a graphic measure for a particular kind of robustness (‘matrix robustness’), using a three-dimensional display of the universe of 2 × 2 game theory. In such a measure specific games appear as specific volumes (Prisoner’s Dilemma, Stag Hunt, etc.), allowing a graphic image of the extent of particular game-theoretic effects in terms of those games. The (...) measure also allows for an easy comparison between different effects in terms of matrix robustness. Here we use the measure to compare the robustness of Tit for Tat’s well-known success in spatialized games (Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation . New York: Basic Books; Grim, P. et al. (1998). The philosophical computer: Exploratory essays in philosophical computer modeling . Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press) with the robustness of a recent game-theoretic model of the contact hypothesis regarding prejudice reduction (Grim et al. 2005. Public Affairs Quarterly, 19 , 95–125). (shrink)

Approximately 20% of adult cancer patients are eligible to participate in a clinical trial, but only 2.5-9% do so. Accrual is even less for minority and medically underserved populations. As a result, critical life-saving treatments and quality of life services developed from research studies may not address their needs. This study questions the utility of the bioethical concern with therapeutic misconception (TM), a misconception that occurs when research subjects fail to distinguish between clinical research and ordinary treatment, and therefore attribute (...) therapeutic intent to research procedures in the safety net setting. This paper provides ethnographic insight into the ways in which research is discussed and related to standard treatment. (shrink)

I develop an account of the nature and value of being supportive in interpersonal relationships. In particular, I argue that the virtue of being supportive, construed as a modally demanding value, facilitates the autonomy of one's intimate and promotes a sense of unity in one's relationship. Moreover, the practice of being supportive plays an important role with regard to the familiar need to reconcile the normative demands of one's own projects with one's responsibilities to intimates.

Recently virtue ethicists, such as Julia Annas and Matt Stichter, in order to explain what a moral virtue is and how it is acquired, suggest modeling virtue on practical expertise. However, a challenging issue arises when considering the nature of practical expertise especially about whether expertise requires articulacy, that is, whether an expert in a skill is required to possess an ability to articulate the principles underlying the skill. With regard to this issue, Annas advocates the articulacy requirement, while Stichter (...) denies. Stichter raises two objections to Annas’s requirement: first, Annas provides no argument for the requirement; second, there exist counterexamples in which there are experts who cannot articulate what and why they did in skilled performance. In this paper I shall show that Annas did provide an argument and can respond to the counterexamples; however, her argument and response are not convincing. Instead, I construct a new argument for the articulacy requirement by which I call the argument from success-conduciveness. The main idea involved in this new argument, i.e., articulacy is success-conducive, supports further that ethical expertise requires articulacy due to the seriousness of morality. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of respect (specifically, the interest in having the respect of other people) in enabling blame to be effective: i.e., to achieve the desired effect of changing the blamed’s attitude and behavior. It develops an account of blame’s operations in three different cases: standard, intermediate, and proleptic. It ends by raising the worry that effective blame toward the morally distant approximates manipulation and coercion, leaving a moral residue.

The three important target articles make a strong case for regarding racism as a public health crisis. Each calls for advocacy by the bi...

Giving up the increasingly troubled distinction between “experiment” and “treatment” would make it easier to focus on informed consent and harder to beg questions about uncertainty and shared decisionmaking in medicine.

We are living at the dawn of the first truly scientific picture of the universe-as-a-whole, yet people are still dragging along prescientific ideas about God that cannot be true and are even meaningless in the universe we now know we live in. This makes it impossible to have a coherent big picture of the modern world that includes God. But we don't have to accept an impossible God or else no God. We can have a real God if we redefine (...) God in light of knowledge no one ever had before. The key question is, “Could anything actually exist in the scientific universe that is worthy of the name, God?” My answer is yes: God is an “emergent phenomenon,” as real as the global economy or the government or the worldwide web, which are all emergent phenomena. But God arose from something deeper: the complex interactions of all humanity's aspirations. An emerging God has enormous implications. (shrink)

Quite a few results concerning the decidability of mereological theories have been given in my previous paper. But many mereological theories are still left unaccounted for. In this paper I will refine a general method for proving the undecidability of a theory and then by making use of it, I will show that most mereological theories that are strictly weaker than CEM are finitely inseparable and hence undecidable. The same results might be carried over to some extensions of those weak (...) theories by adding the fusion axiom schema. Most of the proofs to be presented in this paper take finite lattices as the base models when applying the refined method. However, I shall also point out the limitation of this kind of reduction and make some observations and conjectures concerning the decidability of stronger mereological theories. (shrink)

The truth table method, natural deduction, and the truth tree method, the three validity proving methods standardly taught in an introductory logic course, are too clumsy for the battlefield of real-life. The “short truth table” test is handy at times, but it stumbles at many other times. In this paper, we set up a general method that can beat all the methods mentioned above in a contest of speed. Furthermore, the procedure can be step-by-step paraphrased in a natural language, so (...) that, unlike the other methods, a real-life logical problem can be analyzed and explained in a real-life language too. (shrink)

What is the role of faith in the familiar practice of supporting intimates in their personal projects? Is there anything distinctly valuable about such faith-based support? I argue that the virtue of being supportive, a characteristic of the good friend or lover, involves a distinctive kind of faith: faith in another persons’ chosen self-expressive pursuit. Support based on such faith enables the supported party to enjoy a more meaningful and autonomous exercise of agency in self-expressive arenas, and engenders a sense (...) of relational unity or solidarity, deepening the normative and emotional bonds of the relationship. (shrink)

How can we acquire understanding? Linda Zagzebski has long claimed that understanding is acquired through, or arises from, mastering a particular practical technê. In this paper, I explicate Zagzebski’s claim and argue that the claim is problematic. Based on a critical examination of Zagzebski’s claim, I propose, in conclusion and in brief, a new claim regarding the acquisition of understanding.

It is customary practice to define ‘x is composed of the ys’ as ‘x is a sum of the ys and the ys are pairwise disjoint ’. This predicate has played a central role in the debate on the special composition question and on related metaphysical issues concerning the mereological structure of objects. In this note we show that the customary characterization is nonetheless inadequate. We do so by constructing a mereological model where everything qualifies as composed of atoms even (...) though some elements in the domain are gunky, i.e., can be divided indefinitely into smaller and smaller proper parts. (shrink)

Mereology is the theory of the relation “being a part of”. The first exact formulation of mereology is due to the Polish logician Stanisław Leśniewski. But Leśniewski’s mereology is not first-order axiomatizable, for it requires every subset of the domain to have a fusion. In recent literature, a first-order theory named General Extensional Mereology can be thought of as a first-order approximation of Leśniewski’s theory, in the sense that GEM guarantees that every definable subset of the domain has a fusion, (...) and this has been achieved by positing an axiom schema which in effect defines infinitely many axioms. Intuitively, in order to range over every definable subset, such an axiom schema seems unavoidable. But this paper will show that GEM is finitely axiomatizable and that all we need are just finitely many instances of the said axiom schema. (shrink)

Regulative virtue epistemology argues that intellectual virtues can adjust and guide one’s epistemic actions as well as improve on the quality of the epistemic actions. For regulative virtue epistemologists, intellectual virtues can be cultivated to a higher degree; when the quality of intellectual virtue is better, the resulting quality of epistemic action is better. The intellectual virtues that regulative epistemologists talk about are character virtues (such as intellectual courage and open-mindedness) rather than faculty virtues (such as sight and hearing), since (...) they don’t think that faculty virtues could be cultivated. This article refers to Xunzi’s philosophy, explaining how a regulative faculty-based virtue epistemology is possible. If this explanation works, on the one hand, a new branch of contemporary virtue epistemology is shown, and, on the other hand, a clear theoretical framework of Xunzi’s epistemology is constructed. (shrink)

Corporate citizenship represents various organizational activities and status related to the organization's societal and stakeholder obligations. This study develops five different dimensions of corporate citizenship and examines the relationship between the five dimensions and purchase intention by including two key mediators. In the proposed model of this study, purchase intention is indirectly affected by economic, legal, ethical, general philanthropic, and strategic philanthropic citizenship via the mediation of corporate identification and brand trust. Empirical testing using a survey of 353 consumers from (...) various industries confirms most of our hypothesized effects. Last, managerial implications for corporate leaders and limitations of our findings are discussed in depth. (shrink)

This paper argues that debates between the Confucians and Mohists in Classical China anticipate contemporary discussions in political philosophy. Specifically, their debates about our responsibilities to other people are akin to debates between Rawlsans, Cosmopolitans, and Utilitarians about the content of our political obligations to other people, and about the proper scope of application of norms of justice.

BackgroundCommunity engagement in research is valuable for instrumental and intrinsic reasons. Despite existing guidance on how to ensure meaningful CE, much of what it takes to achieve this goal differs across settings. Considering the emerging trend towards mandating CE in many research studies, this study aimed at documenting how CE is conceptualized and implemented, and then providing context-specific guidance on how researchers and research regulators in Uganda could think about and manage CE in research.MethodsWe conducted qualitative interviews and focus group (...) discussions involving forty-one respondents who were experienced in HIV/aids biomedical research involving CE. Thirty-eight of these were directly or indirectly associated with Uganda’s leading research institution in the field of HIV/aids. They included Principal Investigators, Community Liaisons Officers, Research Ethics Committee members and Community Advisory Board Members. Three respondents were from Uganda National Council for Science and Technology. Data were collected between August 2019 and August 2020, using audio-taped focus group discussions and key informant interviews, transcribed and analyzed manually to generate themes and subthemes.ResultsThree major themes emerged: goals or value of CE; the means of CE, and, the evaluation of CE. Goals or value of CE generated four subthemes representing the overarching goals of CE: Promote communities’ agency; Generate and sustain trust; Protect and promote communities’ rights and interests; and, Help studies optimize participation in the form of enrolment and retention of participants. What usually comes under the nomenclatures of methods, strategies, and approaches of CE, such as town-hall meetings, sports events, drama, and the like, should simply be understood as the means of CE, and it is not desirable to hold pre-conceived and fixed ideas about the best means to conduct CE in research since a lot depend on the context. Finally, the study found that despite CE’s critical importance, which suggests the need to track and evaluate it, CE is currently intermittently evaluated, and for inadequate motivations.ConclusionsExisting guidance on how to conduct robust CE in research is no substitute for creativity, flexibility, and reflexivity on the part of both researchers and research regulators. (shrink)