Egocentric Ethics

Ethical judgments are often egocentrically biased, such that moral reasoners tend to conclude that self-interested outcomes are not only desirable but morally justifiable. Although such egocentric ethics can arise from deliberate self-interested reasoning, we suggest that they may also arise through unconscious and automatic psychological mechanisms. People automatically interpret their perceptions egocentrically, automatically evaluate stimuli on a semantic differential as positive or negative, and base their moral judgments on affective reactions to stimuli. These three automatic and unconscious features of human judgment can help to explain not only why ethical judgments are egocentrically biased, but also why such subjective perceptions can appear objective and unbiased to moral reasoners themselves.     

Sustainable development at the sharp end

This paper takes an actor-oriented approach to understanding the significance for policy and practice of field-worker experience at the interface between project and people. It is set in the context of an Indian project which aims to reduce poverty through sustainable, participatory agricultural change, based on low-cost inputs, catalysed by village-based project staff. Diaries kept by such staff are analysed to reveal how the social position of field-workers enables and constrains their interactions within and without the project, and the ways in which ‘street level bureaucrats’ shape projects through their discretionary actions. They show the Village Motivators struggling to communicate project objectives, to establish their roles and distinguish themselves fromother village-level bureaucrats, to negotiate participation, to overcome hostility to Participatory Rural Appraisal, to arbitrate access to consultants and seniors, to interpret project objectives and lobby for changes in these without admission of failure, and finally to develop a shared vocabulary of participation and belief in success. Some of the implications for participatory approaches are that there may be significant contradictions between sustainability and participatory development.     

Toward the Assessment of Procedural and Distributive Justice in Resolving Family Disputes

The first phase of this study focused on the development of comprehensive, conceptually integrated measures of procedural and distributive justice in the context of family decision making. In the second phase, these measures were used to examine older adolescents' justice appraisals of specific family disputes and the relation of these justice appraisals to family systems functioning along dimensions of conflict and cohesion. A Family Justice Inventory was constructed, which included two global indices (one for procedural justice and one for outcome fairness) and 13 subscales: 9 measuring specific facets of the procedural justice construct and 4 measuring specific dimensions of the distributive justice construct. Factor analysis revealed that the 13 Family Justice Inventory subscales could be reduced to 5 interpretable procedural justice factors (personal respect, status recognition, process control, correction, and trust) and 4 interpretable distributive justice factors (decision control, need, equality, and equity). Using procedural justice factor scores in regression analyses, personal respect, status recognition, correction, and trust each accounted for unique variance in family conflict and family cohesion. Using distributive justice factor scores in regression analyses, both decision control and need accounted for unique variance in family conflict and family cohesion. Using both procedural and distributive justice factor scores in regression analyses, personal respect, status recognition, and trust each accounted for unique variance in both family conflict and family cohesion. Additionally, equity also accounted for unique variance in family conflict but not family cohesion and the direction of the relationship was positive, that is, more equity in resolving specific family disputes was associated higher levels of general family conflict.     

Are hypnotically induced pseudomemories resistant to cross-examination?

Two experiments examined the effects of hypnotic procedures in response to interrogation and crossexamination in subjects who viewed a simulated robbery. Experiment 1 found that hypnotic and nonhypnotic leading interrogations were equally likely to produce misattributions and misidentification of mug shots. Moreover, under cross-examination subjects who had been given an hypnotic interrogation and those given nonhypnotic interrogations were equally likely to disavow their earlier misattributions and misidentifications. In both hypnotic and nonhypnotic treatments high hypnotizables were more likely than low hypnotizables to misattribute characteristics during interrogation and to disavow earlier misattributions during cross-examination. In Experiment 2 high hypnotizables given a cross-examination that legitimated their earlier errors as honest mistakes and that enabled them to disavow earlier testimony without discrediting themselves (hidden observer treatment) showed the highest and most consistent rates of disavowel. A stringent cross-examination that implied that subjects had been careless or dishonest during interrogation produced the lowest rates of disavowel.