Pathological Altruism presents a number of new, thought-provoking theses that explore a range of hurtful effects of altruism and empathy.

​Engineers love to build “things” and have an innate sense of wanting to help society. However, these desires are often not connected or developed through reflections on the complexities of philosophy, biology, economics, politics, environment, and culture. To guide future efforts and to best bring about human flourishment and a just world, Engineering and Philosophy: Reimagining Technology and Progress brings together practitioners and scholars to inspire deeper conversations on the nature and varieties of engineering. The perspectives in this book are (...) an act of reimagination: how does engineering serve society, and in a vital sense, how should it. (shrink)

In most contexts, emotional support is crucial for the well-being of low-income single women and their children. Support from women may be especially important for single mothers because of precarious ties to their children’s fathers, the prevalence of extended matrifocal living arrangements, and gendered norms that place men as providers of financial rather than emotional support. However, in contexts marked by economic insecurity, spatial dispersion of families, and changing gender norms and kinship obligations, such an expectation may be problematic. Applying (...) theories of emotional capital and family bargaining processes, we address three questions: What is the gender composition of emotional support that single mothers receive? How does gender composition change over time? Does the gender composition of emotional support affect the self-reported stress of single mothers? Drawing on data from a unique data set on 462 low-income single mothers and their kin from Nairobi, Kenya, we uncover three key findings. One, whereas the bulk of strong emotional support comes from female kin, about 20 percent of respondents report having male-dominant support networks. Two, nearly 30 percent of respondents report change favoring men in the composition of their emotional support over six months. Three, having a male-dominant emotional support network is associated with lower stress. These results challenge what is commonly taken for granted about gender norms and kinship obligations in non-Western contexts. (shrink)

The study objective is to understand the perception of truthfulness among business managers as practiced in organizations, the critical situations that test their truthfulness, and their responses to such situations. A qualitative approach involving conventional content analysis was adopted to address the research objectives. The results indicate that managers carry a conventional and altered view of truthfulness. While the conventional view encourages them to expect perfection and righteousness in the workplace, the altered view convinces them that small compromises resulting in (...) a gain, lies to avoid interference, and dishonesty in response to non-transparency in management, are acceptable and judicious. Target pressure, coercion to conceal the fact, taking leave, or working from home tested the truthfulness of managers apart from incentives and promotion aspirations. To respond, business managers choose to fight, succumb, or cope by being diplomatic. The study provides meaningful implications for new employee orientation and management education. (shrink)

We have considered a simple word game called the word-morph. After making our participants play a stipulated number of word-morph games, we have analyzed the experimental data. We have given a detailed analysis of the learning involved in solving this word game. We propose that people are inclined to learn landmarks when they are asked to navigate from a source to a destination. We note that these landmarks are nodes that have high closeness-centrality ranking.

In my work as a transplant ethicist I have always been interested in the topic of altruism. Thus, when a book appeared with the title, Pathological Altruism, I was very intrigued to read it. An exceedingly heavy book, however, arrived in my mailbox, and I admit I was taken aback. But upon reading Pathological Altruism, edited by Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Sloan Wilson, I was not disappointed.