A standard methodology in philosophy of language is to use intuitions as evidence. Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich challenged this methodology with respect to theories of reference by presenting empirical evidence that intuitions about one prominent example from the literature on the reference of proper names vary between Westerners and East Asians. In response, Sytsma and Livengood conducted experiments to show that the questions Machery and colleagues asked participants in their study were ambiguous, and that this ambiguity affected the responses (...) given by Westerners. Sytsma and Livengood took their results to cast doubt on the claim that the current evidence indicates that there is cross-cultural variation in intuitions about the Gödel case. In this paper we report on a new cross-cultural study showing that variation in intuitions remains even after controlling for the ambiguity noted by Sytsma and Livengood. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty has serious consequences for human lives, social values, and economy. The main aim of the study was to explore a model of relations between personal and cultural variables and academic dishonesty. The participants in the study were N = 2,586 individuals from nine countries (Pakistan, Israel, Italy, India, the USA, Peru, Romania, Ghana, and Poland). The authors administered the Academic Dishonesty Scale to measure academic dishonesty, the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale to measure distress, the Almost Perfect Scale (...) – Revised to measure perfectionism, the Brief Self-Control Scale to measure self-control, and the Singelis Scale to measure independent self-construal. The results showed that the theoretical model was well fitted to the dataset in six countries: Pakistan, the United States, Romania, Ghana, Israel, and Poland. However, it was not well fitted in Italy, India, and Peru. Our results also showed that perfectionism significantly predicted academic dishonesty, but not in all countries. Self-control significantly predicted cheating, falsification, and plagiarism in the USA. Moreover, we found that distress was related to cheating o0nly in Ghana. Finally, independent self-construal predicted academic dishonesty. Our findings provide a cross-cultural contribution to the debate on academic dishonesty by highlighting its significant predictors and may inform interventions aimed at eliminating it. Our results can be used in preventing and curbing academic dishonesty. Knowledge on cross-cultural differences can be useful in international education for example, as an indicator accepting or relaxing attitude toward academic dishonesty in students from different countries. (shrink)

Climate change has increasingly been recognised and associated with consumer behaviour: Practitioners are developing their strategies to reduce environmental degradation while increasing the management of sustainable consumption; it needs to better understand consumer attitudes and eco-friendly factors about the issue. Therefore, the current study focused to understand the effects of pro-environmental factors on individuals’ environmental attitudes through the lens of theory of planned behaviour in a cross-cultural setting. Moreover, present research focuses on the moderating role that religiosity plays (...) in causal pathways between certain determinants and intentions in this context. A multi-wave time-lagged research design was employed in this study, and university students from two developing countries were surveyed. The findings revealed pronounced similarities between the two examined countries. Overwhelmingly, pro-environmental factors examined were found to be positively related to attitude formation. Further results showed that attitude and subjective norms are significant predictors of the intention to purchase products with recycled packaging. Moreover, with the exception of perceived behavioural control, religiosity moderates the relationships between all the determinants of TPB and intention to purchase recycled packaged products. Present study offers insightful implications to management of these emerging and/or similar cultural markets regarding customer value for green products. Using TPB, present study broadened and deepen extant stream of literature on consumption of recycled packaged products in two highly emerging markets; Pakistan and Malaysia. (shrink)

While previous studies have examined the negative effects of work-related smartphone use after hours, little is known about whether and how it influences employees’ unhealthy sleep behavior. Drawing on the ego depletion theory, this study explored the effects of work-related smartphone use after hours on bedtime procrastination. To further uncover potential cross-cultural differences, a sample of 210 public employees from the United States and 205 public employees from China were used. Results via path analysis revealed that off-time (...) work-related smartphone use positively influenced bedtime procrastination via the mediating role of self-control depletion. These findings were consistent between the United States and Chinese sample; however, off-time work-related smartphone use after hours increased the likelihood of self-control depletion more strongly in the United States than in China. The implications of our findings for both theory and practice were discussed. (shrink)

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has become a remarkable experimental paradigm of dynamic emotion decision making. In recent years, research has emphasized the “prominent deck B (PDB) phenomenon” among normal (control group) participants, in which they favor “bad” deck B with its high-frequency gain structure—a finding that is incongruent with the original IGT hypothesis concerning foresightedness. Some studies have attributed such performance inconsistencies to cultural differences. In the present review, 86 studies featuring data on individual deck (...) selections were drawn from an initial sample of 958 IGT-related studies published from 1994 to 2017 for further investigation. The PDB phenomenon was found in 67.44% of the studies (58 of 86), and most participants were recorded as having adopted the “gain-stay loss-randomize” strategy to cope with uncertainty. Notably, participants in our sample of studies originated from 16 areas across North America, South America, Europe, Oceania, and Asia, and the findings suggest that the PDB phenomenon may be cross-cultural. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine the cross-cultural validity of the Organizational Stressor Indicator for Sport Performers scale by investigating its psychometric properties with Ghanaian footballers. The study particularly sought to assess in the Ghanaian context, 1, the convergence validity and reliability of the OSI-SP scale, 2, the discriminant validity of the OSI-SP scale to understand the applicability of its factor structure, and 3, whether the OSI-SP hypothesized model fits the data collected within the study context. (...) The intensity aspect of the OSI-SP questionnaire was administered to 424 Ghana Premier League male footballers who took part in the 2020/2021 season. Quality control strategies were put in place to ensure consistency across interpreters and as well improve the validity of the data. The results from a multi-factor first-order confirmatory factor analysis showed some level of convergence validity of the OSI-SP scale in the Ghanaian context using football players. Out of the 23 items on the original scale, 20 met the factor loadings criterion. In assessing the discriminant validity of the OSI-SP scale using Heterotrait-monotrait, 50% of the correlation ratios met the criterion for the original 23-item instrument. Comparing the new model with the original model using the Akaike Information Criterion value, the model fit indices for the modified model appeared better than the original model with 23-items. Generally, there was minimal support for the applicability of the OSI-SP instrument across the sample of Ghanaian footballers. The implications of these findings are discussed in detail. (shrink)

The current study investigated the possible existence of a relationship between authoritarianism and religiousness and the possible strength of this potential relationship. The study involved samples from four cultural environments known to differ substantially in terms of religious salience and content: Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the United States. Religiousness was assessed by way of religious orientation as proposed by Allport, whereas authoritarianism was tapped by a modified Lane scale. Results from zero-order correlations indicated a strong and positive (...) association between authoritarianism and all types of religious orientation, regardless of the sample analyzed. Residualizing the main study constructs by demographic variables did not alter the results. The association changed only when each dimension of religious orientation was controlled for the effect of other dimensions. Results did not lend support to the hypothesis that authoritarianism is more strongly linked to those who are more extrinsically oriented. (shrink)

The present study investigated the cross-cultural variations in parents' views on the role of play in child development and the primary purpose of preschool education from Ethiopia and Hungary. It also examined the cross-cultural variations in preschoolers' executive functions, the frequency of their engagement in home activities, and the role of these activities in the development of EF skills. Participants included 266 preschoolers with their parents. The independent samples t-test showed that Ethiopian parents view fostering academic (...) skills for preschooler significantly more important than their Hungarian counterparts do. We also found that while Ethiopian parents hold the belief that academic and cognitive development is the major purpose of preschool education, Hungarian prioritize social-emotional development and entertainment. Additionally, preschoolers in Ethiopia were reported to engage in academic and arts and crafts activities after preschool significantly more frequently than their Hungarian counterparts. On the contrary, preschoolers in Hungary were found to engage in fine-motor activities, solitary play, sports and other physical activities significantly more frequently than their Ethiopian counterparts. No significant differences were found in EF skills between preschoolers from Ethiopia and Hungary. Results from hierarchical regression analyses showed that, after accounting for age and SES, preschoolers' frequency of pretend play and their parents' play support beliefs were found to be small to medium-sized predictors of inhibitory control skills in both samples. However, children's frequency of having breakfast at home was another significant predictor in the Ethiopian sample only. The frequency of participation in arts and crafts and other fine-motor activities were found to be important predictors of preschoolers' visual-spatial working memory skills in the Ethiopian and the Hungarian samples, respectively. We also found that, after controlling for SES, parental play support was an important factor associated with preschoolers' shifting skills only in the Hungarian sample. Based on the findings, we made important conclusions. (shrink)

Accumulating empirical evidence suggests that anger elicited in one situation can influence trust behaviors in another situation. However, the conditions under which anger influences trust are still unclear. The present study addresses this research gap and examines the ways in which anger influences trust. We hypothesized that the social distance to the trustee, and the trusting person’s gender would moderate the effect of anger on trust. To test this hypothesis, a study using a 2 (Anger vs. Control) × 2 (...) (Low vs. High social distance) × 2 (Men vs. Women) factorial design was conducted in Germany (N= 215) and in China (N= 310). Results reveal that in both countries men’s trust behavior was not influenced by the manipulations (i.e., anger and social distance). The pattern for women, however, differed by country. In Germany, women’s trust to a stranger (i.e., high social distance) was increased by anger; while in China, women’s trust to someone who they have communicated with (i.e., low social distance) was increased by anger. These results indicate that women’s trust levels seem to be more context-sensitive than men’s. (shrink)

Background: An external locus of control is associated with poorer psychopathology in individualist cultures, but associations are reported to be weaker in collectivist cultures where an external style is less maladaptive. We investigated the prospective association between externality and psychotic-like experiences and depressive symptoms and compared the strength of associations between a UK and a Japanese cohort.Method: Cross-cultural cohort study of a UK and a Japanese cohort. Externality was assessed using the Children's Nowicki and Strickland Internal, External (...) Scale and DS using the Short Moods and Feelings Questionnaire in both cohorts, PLE were assessed with the Psychosis-Like Experiences Questionnaire, and the Adolescent Psychotic-Like Symptom Screener. Associations were investigated using multivariable regression models and bivariate regression models to compare the strength of associations.Results: Mean externality in both childhood and adolescence was higher in ALSPAC than in the TTC. Childhood externality was associated with PLE in late childhood and adolescence in both cohorts and adolescent externality was associated with PLE in young adulthood in the ALSPAC cohort. There was a more mixed pattern of association between externality and DS scores. There was little evidence of any differences in the strength of associations between externality and different psychopathologies, or between cohorts. In ALSPAC adolescent externality and early adult psychopathology were more strongly associated than childhood externality and adolescent and early adult psychopathology. There was no evidence that change in externality between childhood and adolescence was associated with new onset PLE or DS in early adulthood.Conclusion: An external locus of control is associated with poor mental health regardless of cultural context. (shrink)

BackgroundThe issue of stigma is very important in the battle against HIV/aids in Africa since it may affect patient attendance at healthcare centres for obtaining antiretroviral medications and regular medical check-ups. Stigmatization creates an unnecessary culture of secrecy and silence based on ignorance and fear of victimization. This study was designed to determine if there is external stigmatization of people living with HIV and AIDS by health care workers at a tertiary hospital in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa. The study investigated (...) the impact of knowledge of HIV/aids by HCWs on treatment of patients, as well as the comfort level and attitude of HCWs when rendering care to PLWHA.MethodsA descriptive cross sectional study was designed to collect data using an anonymous self-administered structured questionnaire from 334 HCWs. The study was conducted in clinical departments of a large multidisciplinary 922-bed tertiary care teaching hospital in Durban, KZN.ResultsOverall HCWs had an above average knowledge about HIV/aids although some gaps in knowledge were identified. Tests of statistical significance showed that there was association between level of education and knowledge of HIV/aids ; occupation and knowledge of HIV/aids ; and gender and knowledge of HIV/aids. Test for comfort level was only significant for gender, with males showing more comfort and empathy when dealing with PLWHA. The study also revealed that patients were sometimes tested for HIV without informed consent before surgery, due to fear of being infected, and there was some gossiping about patients' HIV status by HCWs, thereby compromising patient confidentiality. The majority of HCWs showed a willingness to report incidents of stigmatization and discrimination to higher authorities, for better monitoring and control.ConclusionsAlthough knowledge, attitude and comfort level of HCWs taking care of PLWHA was above average, enforcement of existing antidiscrimination laws and continuing education in medical ethics and healthcare law, would greatly improve the performance of HCWs taking care of PLWHAs. More psychological support and counselling should be provided to HCWs, to further reduce the impact of stigmatization and discrimination against PLWHA. (shrink)

For years, violence against doctors and healthcare workers has been a growing social issue in China. In a recent series of studies, we provided evidence for a motivated scapegoating account of this violence. Specifically, individuals who feel that the course of their (or their family member's) illness is a threat to their sense of control are more likely to express motivation to aggress against healthcare providers. Drawing on existential theory, we propose that blaming and aggressing against a single (...) individual represents a culturally afforded scapegoating mechanism in China. However, in an era of healthcare crisis (i.e., the global COVID-19 pandemic), it is essential to understand cultural variation in scapegoating in the context of healthcare. We therefore undertook two cross-cultural studies examining how people in the United States and China use different scapegoating responses to re-assert a sense of control during medical uncertainty. One study was conducted prior to the pandemic and allowed us to make an initial validating and exploratory investigation of the constructs of interest. The second study, conducted during the pandemic, was confirmatory and investigated mediation path models. Across the two studies, consistent evidence emerged that, both in response to COVID-related and non-COVID-related illness scenarios, Chinese (relative to U.S.) individuals are more likely to respond by aggressing against an individual doctor, while U.S. (relative to Chinese) individuals are more likely to respond by scapegoating the medical industry/system. Further, Study 2 suggests these culture effects are mediated by differential patterns of primary and secondary control-seeking. (shrink)

Although several studies provide evidence that trait self-control contributes to subjective well-being, the way in which self-control promotes happiness and life satisfaction remains unknown. The present study aims to shed light on this relation by investigating the mediating role of four self-control strategies: situation selection, attentional deployment, reappraisal, and inhibition. To test the hypothesis that self-control strategies mediate trait self-control’s effect on well-being, an online questionnaire on trait self-control, self-control strategies, and cognitive (...) and affective well-being was administered to 4,036 participants from four countries (ages 18 to 65 and 56.4% female), whose responses were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Our analysis replicates previous studies that trait self-control positively relates to subjective well-being. Moreover, our analysis provides evidence that this relation is indeed partially mediated by the tendency to employ particular self-control strategies. Attentional deployment and reappraisal positively relate to subjective well-being, whereas inhibition exhibits a negative relation. Situation selection was unrelated to subjective well-being. The incorporation of self-control strategies represents the first attempt to empirically disentangle the positive relation between trait self-control and subjective well-being. The heterogeneous effects of self-control strategies suggest the importance of obtaining a better understanding of which aspects of trait self-control positively contributes to subjective well-being. (shrink)

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the mediational path of the influence of cultural orientation on the COVID-19 pandemic outcome at the national level and find out whether some culture-related factors can have a moderating effect on the influence of culture.MethodologyCultural dimension theory of Hofstede is used to quantify the degree of each dimension of culture orientation. The cross-section regression model is adopted to test if culture orientations affect the pandemic outcome, controlling for democracy, economy, education, population, age, and (...) time. Then, a mediational analysis is conducted to examine if policy response is the mediator that culture makes an impact on the pandemic outcome. Finally, a moderation analysis is carried out to determine how each control variable has moderated the influence.FindingsThe cross-section regression results showed that culture orientation influences the outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic at the 99% confidence level and that among the six cultural dimensions, collectivism-individualism has the most significant impact. It has also been found that policy response is the mediator of cultural influence, and culture-related factors can moderate the influence.ContributionThe contribution of this research lies in developing the assertion that culture influences pandemic outcomes. Our findings indicate that collectivism-individualism culture orientation affects the effectiveness of epidemic controls the most among the six culture dimensions. Additionally, our research is the first to study the mediating effect of policy responses and the moderating effect of culture-related factors on the influence of cultural orientation on the pandemic outcome. (shrink)

BackgroundThe issue of stigma is very important in the battle against HIV/aids in Africa since it may affect patient attendance at healthcare centres for obtaining antiretroviral medications and regular medical check-ups. Stigmatization creates an unnecessary culture of secrecy and silence based on ignorance and fear of victimization. This study was designed to determine if there is external stigmatization of people living with HIV and AIDS by health care workers at a tertiary hospital in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa. The study investigated (...) the impact of knowledge of HIV/aids by HCWs on treatment of patients, as well as the comfort level and attitude of HCWs when rendering care to PLWHA.MethodsA descriptive cross sectional study was designed to collect data using an anonymous self-administered structured questionnaire from 334 HCWs. The study was conducted in clinical departments of a large multidisciplinary 922-bed tertiary care teaching hospital in Durban, KZN.ResultsOverall HCWs had an above average knowledge about HIV/aids although some gaps in knowledge were identified. Tests of statistical significance showed that there was association between level of education and knowledge of HIV/aids ; occupation and knowledge of HIV/aids ; and gender and knowledge of HIV/aids. Test for comfort level was only significant for gender, with males showing more comfort and empathy when dealing with PLWHA. The study also revealed that patients were sometimes tested for HIV without informed consent before surgery, due to fear of being infected, and there was some gossiping about patients' HIV status by HCWs, thereby compromising patient confidentiality. The majority of HCWs showed a willingness to report incidents of stigmatization and discrimination to higher authorities, for better monitoring and control.ConclusionsAlthough knowledge, attitude and comfort level of HCWs taking care of PLWHA was above average, enforcement of existing antidiscrimination laws and continuing education in medical ethics and healthcare law, would greatly improve the performance of HCWs taking care of PLWHAs. More psychological support and counselling should be provided to HCWs, to further reduce the impact of stigmatization and discrimination against PLWHA. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychology is a science in the making, working toward the goal of showing how psychological adaptation underlies much human behavior. The knee-jerk reaction that sociobiology is unscientific because it tells “just-so stories” has become a common charge against evolutionary psychology as well. My main positive thesis is that inference to the best explanation is a proper method for evolutionary analyses, and it supplies a new perspective on the issues raised in Schlinger's (1996) just-so story critique. My main (...) negative thesis is that, like many nonevolutionist critics, Schlinger's objections arise from misunderstandings of the evolutionary approach.Evolutionary psychology has progressed beyond telling just-so stories. It has found a host of ingenious special techniques to test hypotheses about the adaptive significance and proximate mechanisms of behavior. Naturalistic data using the comparative method combined with controlled tests using statistical analyses of data provide good evidence for a variety of hypotheses about behavioral control mechanisms — whether in nonhumans or in humans. For instance, the work of Gangestad and Thornhill on evolved mate preferences and fluctuating asymmetry of body type (FA) is a model of success. As the quantity and quality of evidence increase, we are entitled not just to regard such evolutionary hypotheses as preferable, but also as true. Such studies combine to show that the best explanation of “the psychic unity of humankind” — common patterns across societies, history, and cultures exposed by evolutionists — is the gendered, adapted, evolved species-typical design of the mind. (shrink)

Finding ways to foster intellectual humility (IH)—the willingness to own one’s limitations—is an important goal for facilitating effective learning. We report the results of a longitudinal, quasi-experimental study, conducted across six undergraduate, culturally diverse (58% racial/ethnic minority) introductory philosophy courses, that evaluates how social perceptions and cross-cultural reasoning change following a course on epistemology and social ethics. Critically, we manipulated whether each class received a standardized lesson in IH at the start of the course or not. Participants provided (...) self-ratings of IH, gave round-robin judgments of their classmates, and completed a wise-reasoning writing exercise focusing on a cultural conflict at both the beginning and end of the summer course session. Results revealed no change in self-reported IH, but an increase in perceived peer IH and conscientiousness within classes where IH was taught. Moreover, an analysis of the participants’ writing suggested greater levels of compromise-seeking when dealing with a cultural conflict among the students taught about IH, relative to those in the control classes. This study provides initial insights regarding the relationship between IH and cultural humility, as well as the efficacy of facilitating the development of IH among undergraduate students. (shrink)

This study is set forth to explore whether the susceptibility to persuasion—as articulated by Cialdini’s persuasion strategies—could vary with culture and acculturation. We examined individuals from the Arabic culture and their susceptibility to persuasion, according to the following strategies: reciprocity, commitment, liking, scarcity, consensus, and authority. The study involved 1,315 Arab Muslims between 18 and 60 years old. The respondents were recruited from among residents of the Arab region, immigrant Arabs in non-Arabic Muslim countries, immigrant Arabs in East Asian countries, (...) and immigrant Arabs in Western countries. Respondents completed an online Qualtrics survey. Controlling for socio-demographic variables, our results indicated that susceptibility to the strategies differed significantly among Arab Muslims in the Arab region, with reciprocity being the highest and authority the lowest prevailing strategies. The same pattern of susceptibility emerged among immigrant Arab Muslims, regardless of their host country and the acculturation mode they endorse. These findings suggest that there is a consistent persuasion susceptibility pattern in the Arabic Muslim culture that does not seem to be modified by immigration and acculturation modes. Our findings are contrasted with the scarce research on cross-cultural differences in susceptibility to Cialdini’s persuasion strategies. (shrink)

Cross-disciplinary studies carried out lately by Russian scholars discovered a causal relationship between the three variables: technological potential, cultural regulation quality, and social sustainability. The patterns called techno-humanitarian balance law, states that the higher production and war technologies' power, the more refined the behaviorregulation means that are required for self-preservation of the society. The article shows that the law has controlled social selection for all of human history and prehistory, discarding unbalanced social organisms, as far as they (...) could not cope with ecological and geopolitical crises, which had been caused by their own activities. It also shows how successive growth of instrumental opportunities in long-term retrospection has dramatically led to the consecutive perfection of cultural and psychological regulation mechanisms. Relevant calculations, comparative-anthropological evidence, and historical illustrations are provided. Regularities in mental processes are described that precede and accompany crisis-causing behavior, to certain extent regardless of population's historical and cultural peculiarities. (shrink)

In the target article, we presented the hypothesis that parasite-stress variation was a causal factor in the variation of in-group assortative sociality, cross-nationally and across the United States, which we indexed with variables that measured different aspects of the strength of family ties and religiosity. We presented evidence supportive of our hypothesis in the form of analyses that controlled for variation in freedom, wealth resources, and wealth inequality across nations and the states of the USA. Here, we respond to (...) criticisms from commentators and attempt to clarify and expand the parasite-stress theory of sociality used to fuel our research presented in the target article. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:464 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Claire Raymond and Sarah Corse A Distorting Mirror: Educational Trajectory After College Sexual Assault This article focuses on the broad and specific impacts of college sexual assault on student-survivors’ academic performance, academic trajectory, and their sense of self in relation to the university community. We frame this study with, and relate our findings to, the (...) historic and theoretical literatures that provide the context for this essay, including the large and burgeoning literature on the sexual assault of women college students and recent studies analyzing the role of fraternities in sexual assault, students’ fears and perceptions about college assault, bystander intervention training, and survivors’ grade-point averages after assault.1 Our study also builds on the history of feminist resistance to rape, feminist writings about rape, and campus activism against rape, with the 1. Cortney Franklin, Leana Allen Bouffard, and Travis C. Pratt, “Sexual Assault on the College Campus: Fraternity Affiliation, Male Peer Support, and Low Self-Control,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 39, no. 11 (2012): 1457– 80; Christine A. Gidycz, John R. McNamara, and Katie M. Edwards, “Women ’s Risk Perception and Sexual Victimization: A Review of the Literature,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 11, no. 5 (2006): 441–56; Jennifer Katz and Jessica Moore, “Bystander Education Training for Campus Sexual Assault Prevention: An Initial Meta-Analysis,” Violence and Victims 28, no. 6 (2013): 1054–67; Douglas W. Pryor and Marion R. Hughes, “Fear of Rape among College Women: A Social Psychological Analysis,” Violence and Victims 28, no. 3 (2013): 443–65; Carol E. Jordan, Jessica L. Combs, and Gregory T. Smith, “An Exploration of Sexual Victimization and Academic Performance among College Women,” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 15, no. 3 (2014): 191–200. Claire Raymond and Sarah Corse 465 goal of shedding light on one aspect of the problem. Groundbreaking (and in some cases controversial) works analyzing the cultures of rape, such as Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will and Peggy Sanday’s “The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape” (in which Sanday creates the concept of the rape-producing culture—a concept that is central to our argument in this essay), found immediate reception with feminist activists of the 1970s and early 1980s.2 Mary Koss’s work regarding the scope of rape in college settings is also foundational to our study of campus rape.3 Susan Estrich, Catharine MacKinnon, and other feminist theorists in the mid-1980s developed critical apparatuses to shift the understanding of rape, providing a feminist framework wherein rape is interpreted as violence committed against a woman—in opposition to the patriarchal argument that rape is caused by a woman’s actions or is the product of her distortion of events after the fact.4 Angela Davis and bell hooks were deeply influential in framing understandings of the racial and racist aspects of feminist discussions of rape, while legal scholar Sarah Deer has more recently broadened understandings of the racialized discourse of rape, and Lisa Wade has written on twenty-first century hookup culture and the ways that this social landscape promulgates rates of maleon -female rape that are significantly higher on college campuses than in the general population.5 2. Peggy Reeves Sanday, “The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Journal of Social Issues 37, no. 4 (1981): 5–27; Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). 3. Mary P. Koss, Christine A. Gidycz, and Nadine Wisniewski, “The Scope of Rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Higher Education Students,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 55, no. 2 (1987): 162–70. 4. Susan Estrich, Real Rape: How the Legal System Victimizes Women Who Say No (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Duncan Chappell, Robley Geis, and Gilbert Geis, eds., Forcible Rape: The Crime, the Victim and the Offender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). 5. Angela Davis, “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist,” in her Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 172–201; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End... (shrink)

Conflicts over rangeland exploitation have been a serious challenge in Iran, rooted in human behavior. Accordingly, this study aimed to provide a comprehensive theoretical framework in the field of analyzing conflict behavior among rangeland exploiters. This research is a descriptive-correlational and causal-relational study conducted using a cross-sectional survey. The statistical population of the study was rangeland exploiters in one of the northwest provinces of Iran (N= 66,867) of whom 384 people were selected as a sample and stratified random sampling (...) method with proportional assignment. The research instrument was a questionnaire, the validity of which was confirmed by a panel of academic experts and the reliability of its items was verified using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. The results showed that the variables of personal norms (PN) and the perceived behavioral control were able to predict 25.9% of the variance in terms of the conflicting behavior of rangeland exploiters; besides, ascription of responsibility, PN, perceived behavioral control, and awareness of consequences, which have been proposed as activators of PN, were able to explain a significant percentage (63.5%) of the variance in terms of PN. Furthermore, analysis of the effects of environmental and cultural values showed that conflict behaviors of exploiters were mostly affected by their underlying values. Generally, the results of this study would help in the development of more integrated and comprehensive models in the field of exploiters’ conflict behavior. Eventually, to change and improve the environmental behavior of exploiters to better management of conflict in rangelands, providing a list of considerations and competencies for agricultural extension and education, this article comes to the end. (shrink)

Exploration of the meanings, dimensions, levels of the umbrella-notion of wisdom. I added a discussion between the academics of the notion and research into it (on Wisdom list [email protected] ) as second appendix. I added on 7/09/2017 a new appendix http://www.drrogerwalsh.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/What-is-Wisdom-Cross-Cultural-Cross-Disciplinary-Syntheses-Roger-Walsh-2015-Review-of-General-Psychology.pdf . -/- Most people involved in this discourse will be aware of the meaning of the word philosophy. The love part might be familiar to many of the human beings, although each individual will probably have (...) his/her own superficial notion of this idea. It is the second part of the word that will baffle anyone who reflects at all. The notion of wisdom is another umbrella-word, like mind, consciousness, reality, the world, etc. Notions that cover a whole range of ideas and concepts, but that are frequently employed as if it has one specific, precisely defined meaning and usage. When we are informed about the three, four or five features, aspects or characteristics of the word wisdom, we are actually presented with some form of conceptual analysis of possible meanings of the word wisdom. In the following 7 dimensions (characteristics?) of the notion or idea of wisdom are proposed. This is like a conceptual analysis of the word wisdom. Brown and Greene outline their efforts to developing and testing a reliable ‘Wisdom Development Scale’. Their study provides evidence to support the theory that wisdom is a multidimensional construct with the following 7 dimensions: (1) Self-Knowledge (2) Emotional Management (3) Altruism (4) Inspirational Engagement (5) Judgment (6) Life Knowledge (7) Life Skills Jeste suggests that: Most of us agree that wisdom is a complex trait. It’s not just one thing – it’s not like ‘optimism,’ which is a single specific trait. Wisdom is far more complex, comprised of different components. He says: He found six such dimensions or components. Social decision-making. ‘Emotional Regulation’ – control over one’s emotions. ,The third one is ‘Prosocial Behaviours’ – things that we do for others ,Then comes ‘Insight’ – knowing yourself. It includes self-reflection,The fifth is ‘Acceptance of uncertainty’, which also means ‘acceptance of diversity of views.’ ,The last component in that list was still being ‘Decisive’, in that you accept uncertainty, you accept diversity of views, and yet you cannot sit on the fence all the time. You cannot be ambivalent all the time. You have to make a decision. We found that those six were still the most common components, but there were three others that some people have proposed as components of wisdom. Those three are ‘Spirituality’, ‘Sense of Humor’ and ‘Openness to new experience.’ -/- . (shrink)

Photo ID 72893750 © Rawpixelimages|Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT Solidarity is a concept increasingly employed in bioethics whose application merits further clarity and explanation. Given how vital cooperation and community-level care are to mitigating communicable disease transmission, we use lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic to reveal how solidarity is a useful descriptive and analytical tool for public health scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Drawing upon an influential framework of solidarity that highlights how solidarity arises from the ground up, we reveal how structural forces can (...) impact the cultivation of solidarity from the top down, particularly through ensuring robust access to important social determinants of health. Public health institutions can support solidarity movements among individuals and communities by adopting a lens of social justice when considering public health priorities and, in turn, promote health equity. INTRODUCTION Over the past two decades, scholars have invoked the concept of solidarity when assessing a wide range of topics in bioethics, from CRISPR-Cas9 technology to organ donation to structural racism.[1] However, the growing literature on solidarity has not fully examined the roles and responsibilities of institutions and governments in fostering solidarity, especially regarding public health measures that implicate entire populations. We argue that it remains unclear how public health institutions should engage with solidarity and how their engagement will affect public health and its ethics. We first take Prainsack and Buyx’ three-tiered framework as an analytical starting point.[2] We then explore how public health institutions can foster solidarity by carefully considering factors that may bolster it on an interpersonal, community, and national scale. We conclude that public health institutions should adopt a lens of social justice to promote solidarity at the interpersonal and community levels, thereby promoting equity in future public health efforts. BACKGROUND Calls for solidarity in bioethics raise longstanding normative questions about the nature and limits of our duties to one another and how to weigh autonomy over considerations of justice.[3] Though the term is diversely applied, Prainsack and Buyx propose a potentially unifying definition in the 2011 Nuffield Council report, “Solidarity: Reflections On An Emerging Concept in Bioethics.” The report defines solidarity as an activity involving “shared practices reflecting a collective commitment to carry financial, social, emotional, and or other ‘costs’ to assist others.” Their conceptualization also includes important features that distinguish solidarity from other values like empathy or altruism: solidarity emphasizes action rather than mere internal feeling and recognition of connection as motivation.[4] Bioethicists have since applied this conceptualization when analyzing issues in public and global health, given that population-level efforts need cooperation from individuals and communities. Prainsack and Buyx further note that solidarity is relevant in bioethics discourses about justice and equity, in support of providing aid to low- and middle-income countries, and as a value exemplified by European welfare states.[5] Other bioethicists have argued that promoting solidarity can contribute to community engagement, partnership with Tribal communities, and global health equity.[6] Most recently, scholars have applied solidarity as a lens to assess the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the pitfalls of national mitigation efforts and global disparities in disease outcomes.[7] I. Solidarity at Three Levels It seems impossible to foster solidarity in public health if we cannot identify it in general contexts. Prainsack and Buyx articulate three levels of solidarity: interpersonal solidarity, group solidarity, and legal or contractual codifications of solidarity.[8] They argue that each level inherently informs the one ‘above’ it in a unilateral direction. In other words, solidarity is fundamentally a bottom-up phenomenon. Solidarity among individuals influences group norms, which then have the potential to shape policy and institutional practice.[9] Within the Prainsack and Buyx framework, it would seem nonsensical to posit how solidarity might be expressed vertically or from the “top down.” It appears intuitively odd to imagine how a government entity might ‘be’ in solidarity with a person or group if solidarity requires some cognition about their condition per Prainsack and Buyx’ definition. Some have argued that solidarity does not seem like something that one can impose, as instances of it arise from agents recognizing and acting upon some bond rather than in response to a command. Indeed, people may be rightfully hesitant to engage in solidarity if the official messaging is overly paternalistic or coercive.[10] However, some authors have countered that governments can express solidarity through enacting structural and policy changes, though it is ambiguous how these actions are distinct from a justice-driven approach.[11] If a bottom-up approach is thus the most practical means of achieving policy that reflects solidarity, then it does not add much to public health. Institutions would be ineffective without the population’s initiation of the corresponding social norms. However, we find this conclusion overly pessimistic. Fostering a culture of solidarity to improve public health has potential merit. Prainsack and Buyx’ framework overlooks how public health actors can influence solidarity between individuals and across communities. To clarify, we agree with the view that solidarity is a bottom-up phenomenon. Solidarity may not be able to originate in a top-down fashion, but we suggest that public health institutions can take a more active role in providing the public with accurate information, promoting social justice, and intervening in the social determinants of health. II. The COVID-19 Pandemic as a Case Study Lessons learned from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic support our argument. The pandemic deepened socioeconomic disparities in the US and hindered access to vital resources such as food, housing, and healthcare.[12] Prainsack recently noted: “[n]ext to the immediate health effects of the virus, poverty and grave inequalities have been the root causes of human suffering during the pandemic.”[13] Prior to the pandemic, many rural and low-income populations lacked reliable access to the internet and devices like laptops or smartphones. This continued lack of access restricts the flow of information and prevents people from accessing telemedicine services.[14] Preexisting social, political, and health inequities worsened health outcomes among many marginalized racial and ethnic groups. It is well-documented that communities of color, including Black, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Latinx populations, had greater COVID-related mortality and morbidity due to the effects of structural racism.[15] Although federal US agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention enacted laws that provided safety nets (e.g., the Federal Eviction Moratorium), the majority of such programs have ended, leaving many with little assistance and the threat of further hardship.[16] These disparities are relevant because Prainsack, Buyx, and others note that solidarity arises from agents recognizing and acting on some perceived attainable collective goal(s). Income inequality and disparate access to food, education, and health care may lead people to consider public health goals unattainable. This could limit the desire to work toward those goals collectively.[17] The existing literature on collective action theory supports this intuition. It emphasizes that structural conditions, such as an absence of perceived hope for social change among a group, can lead to low ‘group efficacy’ and little willingness to cooperate, both within and across socioeconomic strata.[18] The pandemic spurred countless messages from public health agencies. The messaging did not recognize or attend to the different material realities and circumstances of the US population. How can people feel comfortable getting vaccinated if they deeply distrust the government, including public health institutions? How can people remain motivated to wear masks and distance themselves if they cannot afford basic necessities and work jobs without adequate pay and leave policies? We ask these questions to illustrate how socioeconomic disparities can marginalize people if they feel ignored, apathetic, or resentful of those better off or those in power whom they perceive to “not be doing enough.” This marginalization precludes the formation of solidarity. There are instances when a population has disparate access to resources and social capital, but solidarity may still emerge from a shared goal or vision for the future. For example, a heterogeneous population living in the same town may come together to protest an environmental injustice that impacts their water supply with the common goal of securing access to safe drinking water. However, many populations in the US failed to recognize shared goals of this kind during the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant minority of the US population was reluctant to acknowledge the severity of COVID-19 infection and thus refused to participate in efforts to mitigate its spread. Even between groups who shared the goal of slowing COVID-19 transmission, the methods were widely debated. Approximately 20 percent of the adult population eligible for vaccination remains unvaccinated.[19] Governmental bodies responsible for disseminating information, coordinating the allocation of resources, and establishing guidelines have a large role in mediating these disagreements and intervening in socioeconomic conditions that impact people's ability and willingness to engage in solidarity. III. Solidarity, Social Justice, and the Role of Public Health Institutions Adopting a lens of social justice provides further insights into how public health actors impact solidarity. Powers and Faden argue that the “foundational moral justification for the social institution of public health is social justice.”[20] Their theory of social justice has two aims. First, it ensures that everyone has a sufficient amount of the six core elements of well-being and that public health institutions are responsible for “adopting policies and creating environments” where all can flourish.[21] Second, public health institutions should distribute resources meant to promote well-being and focus on the “needs of those who are the most disadvantaged.”[22] Public health institutions should enact policies that address injustice. In doing so, public health institutions can seed the opportunity to build solidarity from the bottom up. Equipping individuals and communities with resources will foster cooperation and adherence to policies that require solidarity, such as masking and vaccination. This is consistent with arguments illustrating how institutions such as Tribal governments promote the conditions needed for their group, and especially its most vulnerable members, to flourish.[23] Addressing social determinants of health with a social justice lens will create the circumstances under which more individuals and groups can find common causes and foster solidarity. In the long run, such efforts may result in the establishment of values and practices from the bottom up. There are societal and public health preconditions required before institutions can expect their audience to act in solidarity with one another. Through their great influence over information and resources, public institutions do have the power to impact what values are most widespread. Furthermore, public health may foster trust and hope, which are important psychosocial factors that influence collective action,[24] if policies increase access to resources that promote well-being. Messaging efficacy also depends on the context of public trust, education, and whether the institutions meet one’s basic needs. Disparate messaging across different public institutions may confuse or disillusion individuals. To apply our theory of solidarity to the decision to vaccinate, a policy would be to foster conditions that facilitate access to vaccines and information about vaccine efficacy instead of imposing a top-down mandate without first eliciting public trust. IV. Counterargument Some argue that discordant public health messaging, ineffective government, and inadequate social programs can also bring people together under pressure and foster solidarity. One may argue that the most powerful motivators towards solidarity are strife and disparity, as evidenced throughout history. During the pandemic alone, political struggle and personal hardship inspired solidarity in the US, from individual neighbors helping each other to mutual aid groups forming across communities. We thus do not claim that solidarity is possible only when our government programs and public health institutions are most effective. We instead point out that solidarity can be further hindered when people feel alienated, hopeless, and pitted against each other. CONCLUSION Many competing conceptualizations of solidarity persist in the bioethics literature, and Prainsack and Buyx offer one compelling framework that public health ethicists continue to draw upon.[25] However, their framework fails to acknowledge how public health institutions impact interpersonal and group solidarity. Public health institutions can foster solidarity through actions other than mere messaging, invoking catchphrases like “we are all in this together.” Efforts to address socioeconomic preconditions and alleviate health disparities can cultivate group solidarity. As we saw during the pandemic, cooperation and solidarity go hand-in-hand with disease mitigation efforts; solidarity has clear intrinsic value.[26] As this relationship becomes more apparent, we will continue to see attempts from public health institutions to foster or invoke solidarity. Therefore, public health institutions would be remiss to ignore their role in addressing the social determinants of health. Adopting a social justice lens when planning public health interventions will clarify and strengthen their role in facilitating solidarity. Ultimately, if health disparities continue to persist or widen, it is very hard to imagine how group solidarity can ever be achieved. The widescale adoption of many public health measures needed to promote health and well-being would be conducive to solidarity. - Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are the authors’ and do not represent the views of the NIH, DHHS, or the U.S. government. Funding Disclosure: This work was supported in part by the Intramural Program of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. - [1] John J Mulvihill et al., “Ethical Issues of CRISPR Technology and Gene Editing through the Lens of Solidarity,” British Medical Bulletin 122 (2017): 17–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/bmb/ldx002; Ben Saunders, “Altruism or Solidarity? The Motives for Organ Donation and Two Proposals,” Bioethics 26, no. 7 (September 2012): 376–81, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8519.2012.01989.x; -Vanessa Y Hiratsuka, “SPECIAL REPORT: A Critical Moment in Bioethics: Reckoning with Anti-Black Racism through Intergenerational Dialogue A Call for Solidarity in Bioethics: Confronting Anti-Black Racism Together,” 2022, https://doi.org/10.1002/hast.1380. [2] Prainsack and Buyx, Solidarity: Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2011; Prainsack and Buyx, “Solidarity in Contemporary Bioethics--towards a New Approach.” Bioethics 26, no. 7 (September 2012): 343–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1467-8519.2012.01987.X. [3] Bob Simpson, “A ‘We’ Problem for Bioethics and the Social Sciences: A Response to Barbara Prainsack,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 43, no. 1 (January 12, 2018): 45–55, https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243917735899. [4] Barbara Prainsack and Alena Buyx, Solidarity: Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics (London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2011). [5] Barbara Prainsack and Alena Buyx, “Solidarity in Contemporary Bioethics--towards a New Approach,” Bioethics 26, no. 7 (September 2012): 343–50, https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1467-8519.2012.01987.X. [6] Bridget Pratt, Phaik Yeong Cheah, and Vicki Marsh, “Solidarity and Community Engagement in Global Health Research,” The American Journal of Bioethics : AJOB 20, no. 5 (May 3, 2020): 43–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2020.1745930; Sara Chandros Hull, F. Leah Nez (Diné), and Juliana M. Blome, “Solidarity as an Aspirational Basis for Partnership with Tribal Communities,” The American Journal of Bioethics 21, no. 10 (October 3, 2021): 14–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1965258; Mbih J. Tosam et al., “Global Health Inequalities and the Need for Solidarity: A View from the Global South,” Developing World Bioethics 18, no. 3 (September 1, 2018): 241–49, https://doi.org/10.1111/DEWB.12182. [7] Peter West-Oram, “Solidarity Is for Other People: Identifying Derelictions of Solidarity in Responses to COVID-19,” Journal of Medical Ethics 47, no. 2 (February 1, 2021): 65–68, https://doi.org/10.1136/MEDETHICS-2020-106522; Barbara Prainsack, “Solidarity in Times of Pandemics,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (December 1, 2020): 124–33, https://doi.org/10.3167/DT.2020.070215; F. Marijn Stok et al., “Social Inequality and Solidarity in Times of COVID-19,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 12 (June 2, 2021), https://doi.org/10.3390/IJERPH18126339; Ming Jui Yeh, “Solidarity in Pandemics, Mandatory Vaccination, and Public Health Ethics,” American Journal of Public Health 112, no. 2 (February 1, 2022): 255–61, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306578; Barbara Prainsack, “Beyond Vaccination Mandates: Solidarity and Freedom During COVID-19.,” Am J Public Health 112, no. 2 (February 1, 2022): 232–33, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306619. [8] Prainsack and Buyx, Solidarity: Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2011; Prainsack and Buyx, “Solidarity in Contemporary Bioethics--towards a New Approach.” Bioethics 26, no. 7 (September 2012): 343–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1467-8519.2012.01987.X. [9] Prainsack and Buyx, Solidarity: Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2011; Prainsack and Buyx, “Solidarity in Contemporary Bioethics--towards a New Approach.” Bioethics 26, no. 7 (September 2012): 343–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1467-8519.2012.01987.X. [10] Yeh, “Solidarity in Pandemics, Mandatory Vaccination, and Public Health Ethics”; Prainsack, “Beyond Vaccination Mandates: Solidarity and Freedom During COVID-19.” [11] Ho, Anita, and Iulia Dascalu. "Relational solidarity and COVID-19: an ethical approach to disrupt the global health disparity pathway." Global Bioethics 32, no. 1 (2021): 34-50; West-Oram, Peter. "Solidarity is for other people: identifying derelictions of solidarity in responses to COVID-19." Journal of Medical Ethics 47, no. 2 (2021): 65-68. [12] Monica Webb Hooper, Anna María Nápoles, and Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, “COVID-19 and Racial/Ethnic Disparities,” JAMA 323, no. 24 (June 23, 2020): 2466, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.8598. [13] Prainsack, Barbara. “Beyond Vaccination Mandates: Solidarity and Freedom During COVID-19.” Am J Public Health 112, no. 2 (February 1, 2022): 232–33. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306619. [14] Camille A Clare, “Telehealth and the Digital Divide as a Social Determinant of Health during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics 10 (2021): 26, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13721-021-00300-y. [15] Patrick Nana-Sinkam et al., “Health Disparities and Equity in the Era of COVID-19,” Journal of Clinical and Translational Science 5, no. 1 (March 16, 2021): e99, https://doi.org/10.1017/cts.2021.23. [16] Kathryn M Leifheit et al., “Expiring Eviction Moratoriums and COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality,” American Journal of Epidemiology 190, no. 12 (December 1, 2021): 2503–10, https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwab196. [17] Barbara Prainsack, “Solidarity in Times of Pandemics,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (December 1, 2020): 124–33, https://doi.org/10.3167/DT.2020.070215 [18] Maximilian Agostini and Martijn van Zomeren, “Toward a Comprehensive and Potentially Cross-Cultural Model of Why People Engage in Collective Action: A Quantitative Research Synthesis of Four Motivations and Structural Constraints.,” Psychological Bulletin 147, no. 7 (July 2021): 667–700, https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000256. [19] Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (HHS/CDC), “COVID Data Tracker,” 2023, https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker. [20] Powers, Madison, and Ruth Faden. Social Justice: The Moral Foundation of Public Health and Health Policy. 1st editio. New York: Oxford Press, 2006, p. 9 and Chapter 4 [21] Powers and Faden, Social Justice: The Moral Foundation of Public Health and Health Policy; Madison Powers and Ruth Faden, Structural Injustice: Power, Advantage, and Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). [22] Powers, Madison, and Ruth Faden. Social Justice: The Moral Foundation of Public Health and Health Policy. 1st editio. New York: Oxford Press, 2006, p. 10 [23] Bobby Saunkeah et al., “Extending Research Protections to Tribal Communities,” The American Journal of Bioethics 21, no. 10 (October 3, 2021): 5–12, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2020.1865477. [24] Agostini and van Zomeren, “Toward a Comprehensive and Potentially Cross-Cultural Model of Why People Engage in Collective Action: A Quantitative Research Synthesis of Four Motivations and Structural Constraints.” [25] Prainsack and Buyx, Solidarity: Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics. [26] Ruth Chadwick, “COVID‐19 and the Possibility of Solidarity,” Bioethics 34, no. 7 (September 8, 2020): 637–637, https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12813. (shrink)

BackgroundThe issue of stigma is very important in the battle against HIV/aids in Africa since it may affect patient attendance at healthcare centres for obtaining antiretroviral medications and regular medical check-ups. Stigmatization creates an unnecessary culture of secrecy and silence based on ignorance and fear of victimization. This study was designed to determine if there is external stigmatization of people living with HIV and AIDS by health care workers at a tertiary hospital in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa. The study investigated (...) the impact of knowledge of HIV/aids by HCWs on treatment of patients, as well as the comfort level and attitude of HCWs when rendering care to PLWHA.MethodsA descriptive cross sectional study was designed to collect data using an anonymous self-administered structured questionnaire from 334 HCWs. The study was conducted in clinical departments of a large multidisciplinary 922-bed tertiary care teaching hospital in Durban, KZN.ResultsOverall HCWs had an above average knowledge about HIV/aids although some gaps in knowledge were identified. Tests of statistical significance showed that there was association between level of education and knowledge of HIV/aids ; occupation and knowledge of HIV/aids ; and gender and knowledge of HIV/aids. Test for comfort level was only significant for gender, with males showing more comfort and empathy when dealing with PLWHA. The study also revealed that patients were sometimes tested for HIV without informed consent before surgery, due to fear of being infected, and there was some gossiping about patients' HIV status by HCWs, thereby compromising patient confidentiality. The majority of HCWs showed a willingness to report incidents of stigmatization and discrimination to higher authorities, for better monitoring and control.ConclusionsAlthough knowledge, attitude and comfort level of HCWs taking care of PLWHA was above average, enforcement of existing antidiscrimination laws and continuing education in medical ethics and healthcare law, would greatly improve the performance of HCWs taking care of PLWHAs. More psychological support and counselling should be provided to HCWs, to further reduce the impact of stigmatization and discrimination against PLWHA. (shrink)

Researchers have suggested that ethical judgments about “right” and “wrong” are the result of deep and thoughtful principles and should therefore be consistent and not influenced by factors, such as language :e94842, 2014b, p. 1). As long as an ethical scenario is understood, individuals’ resolution should not depend on whether the ethical scenario is presented in their native language or in a foreign language. Given the forces of globalization and international convergence, an increasing number of accountants and accounting students are (...) becoming proficient in more than one language, and they are required to interpret and apply complex ethical pronouncements issued by various global standard setters both in their native language and in English. There have been calls in the literature to examine whether subjects make systematically different ethical judgments in a foreign language than in their native language. We contribute to the literature by drawing on culture, linguistics, and psychology research to provide empirical evidence that Chinese subjects are more aggressive in interpreting the concept of control when providing their consolidation reporting recommendations in English than in Simplified Chinese. We applied a 2 × 2 within-subject and between-subject randomized experimental design using a sample of Chinese final year undergraduate accounting students at a leading Chinese university, where accounting courses are taught in both Simplified Chinese and English. Students in our study are proxy for entry-level accounting practitioners. Our findings have implications for the globalized business world and cross-cultural research by challenging the commonly held assumption that an individual’s ethical judgment is consistent in different languages. We suggest that systematically different ethical judgments in native and foreign languages needs to be recognized. (shrink)

Social factors have so far been neglected in embodied theories of perception despite the wealth of phenomenological insights and empirical evidence indicating their importance. I examine evidence from developmental psychology and neuroscience and attempt an initial classification according to whether social factors play a contextual, enabling, or constitutive role in the ability to perceive objects in a detached manner, i.e. beyond their immediate instrumental use. While evidence of cross-cultural variations in perceptual styles and the influence of social (...) cues on visual attention could not be said to play more than a contextual role, other factors such as the intricate developmental links between dyadic and triadic interactions in infancy, as well as episodes of peer-learning in children, play enabling roles. A common element in these factors is the presence and resolution of interpersonal conflict. Detached object perception could not develop without these social factors. I argue, in addition, that social skills such as managing partial social acts which are addressed to and completed by others, linguistic mediation, makebelieve play, and the ability to control perspectival switches are constitutive -- i.e. are of the essence -- of the ability to see objects as present with a detached attitude. I discuss the prospects of incorporating such social elements into dynamical interpretations of the sensorimotor approach through the enactive notion of participatory sense-making. (shrink)

Although norms of premarital sex vary cross-culturally, the sexuality of adolescent girls has been consistently more restricted than that of adolescent boys. Three major theories that attempt to explain restrictions on female premarital sex (FPS) concern male, female, and parental control. These competing theories have not been tested against each other cross-culturally. In this study, we do this using a sample of 128 nonindustrial societies and socioecological predictors capturing extramarital sex, paternal care, female status, sex ratio, parental (...) control over a daughter’s mate choice, residence, and marriage transactions, while also controlling for phylogenetic non-independence across societies. We found that multiple parties benefit from restrictions on FPS. Specifically, FPS is more restricted in societies intolerant of extramarital sex and where men transfer property to their children (male control), as well as where marriages are arranged by parents (parental control). Both paternity uncertainty (partitioned among marital fidelity and paternal investment) and parent–offspring conflict (prompting parents to control their daughter’s sexuality) were identified as possible mechanisms of FPS restrictions. The evidence for female control is ambiguous, mainly because it can be equally well interpreted as both male control and parental control, and because fathers, rather than mothers, are often the primary decision makers about a daughter’s mate choice. Our results also emphasize the importance of social roles, rather than stereotyped sex roles, as a more useful approach to understanding the evolution of FPS restrictions. (shrink)

This study examined cross-sectional links of the theistic and non-theistic sanctification of marriage and positive and negative religious coping with marital adjustment for 316 married Muslims from Iran. Perceiving marriage to be a manifestation of God and reflective of sacred qualities as well as engaging in positive and negative religious/spiritual coping strategies each uniquely contributed variance to marital adjustment, after controlling for each other and global indicators of devotion to Islam, and demographic variables. Specifically, theistic sanctification, non-theistic sanctification, and (...) positive r/s coping were uniquely tied to higher marital adjustment whereas negative r/s coping was uniquely tied to lower marital adjustment theistic in a hierarchical regression model with all primary variables and controls entered. These findings replicate and extend prior findings on the perceived sanctity of marriage with US samples of predominantly Christians to Muslims living in the Middle East, and offer novel cross-cultural insights into the possible roles that sanctification of marriage and r/s coping may play for marital well-being for non-distressed married Muslims. (shrink)

A growing group of Chinese students is returning to China following graduation, especially young returnees. This group is seen as one of the most innovative sectors of Chinese society. Based on the theory of planned behavior and three kinds of capital theories, this study explores entrepreneurial intention and its influencing factors among Newly Returned Chinese International Students. A survey of 211 NRCIS showed a low level of EI and little knowledge of supporting policies about entrepreneurship. Influencing factors included culture harmony (...) as culture capital, overseas social networks as social capital, and foreign entrepreneurship education and foreign language proficiency as human capital. Attitude mediated the effects of foreign language proficiency, culture harmony, and foreign entrepreneurship education on EI. Perceived behavior control mediated the effect of foreign language proficiency, Chinese language proficiency, culture harmony, foreign entrepreneurship education, domestic entrepreneurship education, and overseas social networks on EI, and subjective norms have no significant mediating effect in any mediation path. Based on these findings, policymakers could pay attention to examining whether the current policies are working and accessible for NRCIS, and domestic entrepreneurship education could keep cultivating students' cross-cultural communication and understanding abilities, and society and education sectors could encourage positive cognition of entrepreneurship and guide students to form a positive attitude toward entrepreneurship and enhance their confidence. (shrink)

Though educators often deal with stressful social conflicts, many face them ad hoc without much training. We studied if and how virtual agents can help University staff manage student-teacher conflicts. We explored educators' verbal, behavioral, and physiological reactions to a virtual agent that brought up a student-teacher conflict and held exit-interviews. Our qualitative analysis revealed that virtual agents for conflict training were positively received, but not for conflict mediation with cross-cultural differences. Those with non-Western backgrounds felt that an (...) agent could help “save face,” whereas Westerners preferred to resolve conflicts in person. In line with this, participants with a Western background rated the virtual agent to be less competent compared to those with non-Western backgrounds. While physiological measures only allow for limited conclusions, we found that participants who believed that the agent was controlled by a human had higher normalized hear rate variability than people who thought that the agent was autonomous. We discuss implications for implementing virtual agents for training purposes, the impact of physiological signals, and the need to consider cultural and individual differences. (shrink)

This study describes a preliminary test of the hypothesis that, when people engage in musical and linguistic activities designed to enhance the interactive, turn-taking properties of typical conversation, they benefit in ways that enhance empathy and self-esteem, relative to people who experience activities that are similar except that synchronous action is emphasized, with no interactional turn-taking. Twenty-two 12–14 year olds identified as socially vulnerable received six enjoyable 1-h sessions of musical improvisation, language games that developed sensitivity to linguistic rhythm and (...) melody, and cross-over activities like rap. The Turn-taking group, practiced characteristics of conversation in language games, and these were also introduced into musical activities. This involved much turn-taking and predicting what others would do. A matched control group, the Synchrony group, did similar activities but in synchrony, with less prediction and no turn-taking. Task complexity increased over the six sessions. Psychometric testing before and after the series showed that the Turn-taking group increased in empathy on self-report and behavioral measures, and in the General subtest of the Culture-Free Self-Esteem Inventory. While more work is needed to confirm the conclusions for relevant demographic groups, the current results point to the social value of musical and linguistic activities that mimic entrained, tightly coordinated parameters of everyday conversational interaction, in which, at any one time, individuals act as equal participants who have different roles. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)