Online research in philosophy

This study examines ethical transgressions of school psychology graduate students using the critical incidents technique. Program directors of school psychology programs listed in the Directory of School Psychology Graduate Programs (Thomas, 1998) were asked to describe ethical violations committed by their students during the past 5 years. Violations dealt primarily with issues involving confidentiality, competence, and professional and academic honesty. Directors believed that the majority of students would not find most ethical issues problematic. Implications for training are discussed.

In the experimental psychology of attention, the phenomenon of attentional context has been underappreciated, while focal attention has taken center stage. Similar problems of context are found in certain realist arguments in .the philosophy of science. Through the lens of Aron Gurwitsch's phenomenology of attention, this paper discusses and evaluates the ways in which context is or is not brought into focus in experimental psychology and the philosophy of science. It concludes that recent developments in both realms show promise. Also some ways are indicated in which phenomenology, experimental psychology, and philosophy of science can benefit from each other.

Recent years have seen an explosion of new work at the intersection of philosophy and experimental psychology. This work takes the concerns with moral and conceptual issues that have so long been associated with philosophy and connects them with the use of systematic and well-controlled empirical investigations that one more typically finds in psychology. Work in this new field often goes under the name "experimental philosophy".

This commentary notes the emergence of a “People are Stupid” school of thought that describes social behavior as mindless, automatic, and unconscious. I trace the roots of this “school,” particularly in the link between situationism in social psychology and behaviorism in psychology at large, and suggest that social psychology should focus on the role of the mind in social interaction.

This paper is an exercise in the phenomenology of science. It examines the tendency to prefer formal accounts in a familiar body of experimental psychology. It will argue that, because of this tendency, psychologists of this school neglect those forms of human cognition typical of the humanities disciplines. This is not a criticism of psychology, however. Such neglect is compatible with scientific rigour, provided it does not go unnoticed. Indeed, reflection on the case in hand allows us to refine the characterisation of the formalising tendency.