Lower levels of news use are generally understood to be associated with less political engagement among citizens. But while some people simply have a low preference for news, others avoid the news intentionally. So far little is known about the relationship between active news avoidance and civic engagement in society, a void this study has set out to fill. Based on a four-wave general population panel survey in the Netherlands, conducted between April and July 2020 (N = 1,084) during a (...) crisis situation, this research-in-brief investigates the development of news avoidance and pro-social civic engagement over time. Results suggest that higher news topic avoidance results in higher levels of civic engagement. The study discusses different explanations for why less news can mean more engagement. (shrink)

Why do policies fail? How can we objectively choose the best policy from two (or more) competing alternatives? How can we create better policies? To answer these critical questions this book presents an innovative yet workable approach. Avoiding Policy Failure uses emerging metapolicy methodologies in case studies that compare successful policies with ones that have failed. Those studies investigate the systemic nature of each policy text to gain new insights into why policies fail. -/- In addition to providing intriguing directions (...) for research, this book also suggests a bold new standard for evaluating policies. While this method is broadly generalizable, specific examples are provided showing how to develop better Economic Policy, Military Policy, and Constitutional Organizations. This book shows scholars, researchers, and policy analysts how to develop more effective policies so that we may achieve our highest aspirations and avoid the horrendous failures of the past. (shrink)

This study investigates the ability of individuals with psychopathy to perform passive avoidance learning and whether this ability is modulated by level of reinforcement/punishment. Nineteen psychopathic and 21 comparison individuals, as defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised (Hare, 1991), were given a passive avoidance task with a graded reinforcement schedule. Response to each rewarding number gained a point reward specific to that number (i.e., 1, 700, 1400 or 2000 points). Response to each punishing number lost a point punishment specific (...) to that number (i.e., the loss of 1, 700, 1400 or 2000 points). In line with predictions, individuals with psychopathy made more passive avoidance errors than the comparison individuals. In addition, while the performance of both groups was modulated by level of reward, only the performance of the comparison population was modulated by level of punishment. The results are interpreted with reference to a computational account of the emotional learning impairment in individuals with psychopathy. (shrink)

The reach-avoid game theory is an ideal tool to handle the conflicts among intelligent agents and has been previously studied assuming full state information and no time limits on the players in the past decades. In this article, we extend the problem by requiring the defender to detect the attacker and adding maximum operation time constraints to the attacker. The attacker aims to reach the target region without being captured or reaching its time limit. The defender can employ strategies to (...) intercept the attacker only when the attacker is detected. A geometric method is proposed to solve this game qualitatively. By analyzing the geometric property of the Apollonian circle and the detection range, we give the barrier under the condition that the attacker is initially detected and the attacker’s shortest route which guarantees its arrival at the target region when it is initially outside the detection range. Then, a barrier that separates the game space into two respective winning regions of the players is constructed based on the shortest route and the time limit of the attacker. The main contributions of this work are that this paper provides the first attempt to introduce the abovementioned two concepts simultaneously, which makes the game more practical, and we provide the complete solution of the game in all possible situations. (shrink)

In this concluding piece, we identify and discuss various aspects of convergence and, to a lesser degree, divergence in the ideas expressed in the contributions to this special section. These contributions emphatically illustrate that approach–avoidance motivation is integral to the scientific study of emotion. It is our hope that the articles herein will facilitate cross-talk among researchers and research traditions, and will lead to a more thorough understanding of the role of approach–avoidance motivation in emotion.

_Avoiding Emotions, Living Emotions_ explores the psychoanalytic encounter and examines how emotions are formed and experienced by both the patient and analyst. The author narrates key theoretical concepts through the presentation of clinical material from adult and child analysis and emphasises the importance of being able to foster these narrations. Offering new insights into how the mind works, topics of discussion include: Bion’s thinking and its fertilization: clinical implications variations on transference and countertransference image and narration. Providing the reader with (...) clinical exercises and case reports, this book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychiatrists, as well as being a helpful tool in psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic work on a day-to-day basis. (shrink)

This study was conducted with the purpose of analyzing the combined and mediating effect of actor’s withdrawal–partner’s demand conflict resolution strategies between avoidance attachment dimension and relationship satisfaction. We conducted a dyadic study with 175 heterosexual couples who filled in the questionnaires. Six hypotheses were tested using the actor–partner interdependence model with mediation analysis. Results showed that the avoidance dimension of attachment was more strongly associated with actor’s withdrawal strategy than with demand/aggression strategy. Furthermore, avoidance attachment was negatively associated with (...) both actor’s and partner’s relationship satisfaction, the actor effect being higher. Withdrawal strategy was a mediator between actor’s avoidance and actor’s relationship satisfaction, but it was not a mediator for partner’s relationship satisfaction. The interactive pattern of actor’s withdrawal–partner’s demand/aggression was associated with low levels of both actor’s and partner’s relationship satisfaction. These results point out to the need of discerning the interactive pattern of conflict-solving strategies as well as their intertwined effect on relationship satisfaction. (shrink)

Compared to approach motivation, avoidance motivation evokes vigilance, attention to detail, systematic information processing, and the recruitment of cognitive resources. From a conservation of energy perspective it follows that people would be reluctant to engage in the kind of effortful cognitive processing evoked by avoidance motivation, unless the benefits of expending this energy outweigh the costs. We put forward three empirically testable propositions concerning approach and avoidance motivation, investment of energy, and the consequences of such investments. Specifically, we propose that (...) compared to approach-motivated people, avoidance-motivated people (a) carefully select situations in which they exert such cognitive effort, (b) only perform well in the absence of distracters that occupy cognitive resources, and (c) become depleted after exerting such cognitive effort. (shrink)

Labor is something everyone hates, and something everyone longs to escape. Labor Avoidance explores American capitalism, the only social system that openly avoids labor, and how it has become responsible for so much human struggle and misery throughout history.

Women heard another person state attitudes that were either in high agreement or high disagreement with their own attitudes. The potency of an approach-avoidance dependent variable was compared with traditional dependent variables for this situation, ratings of inter-personal attraction. Eighty-five percent of those hearing high agreement volunteered to return to the laboratory to continue participation in the study at a later time. Nobody who heard high disagreement volunteered to return. This difference between the two treatment conditions was considerably greater than (...) the difference for ratings of attractiveness. It was concluded that the increased potency of the approach-avoidance measure came from its importance to the subjects and that approach-avoidance would be a good measure to use in comparing different predictions from the several theoretical positions that attempt to account for the effects of agreement and disagreement. (shrink)

This commentary cites evidence to argue that girls growing up in a competitive and aggressive environment are more likely to shift to avoidant attachment than to ambivalent attachment in middle childhood. These avoidant women are also more likely to favor a short-term mating strategy. The role of oxytocin (OT) and early experience in shaping an avoidant attachment in females is also discussed.

The influence of attachment style—anxious and avoidant attachment—on subjective responses to socially excluded experiences termed “Need-Threat” remains inconsistent. Need-Threat is a composite score of four fundamental needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. Individuals with high AX tend to spend much effort maintaining strong connections with others, while those with high AV tend to maintain high levels of self-esteem by distancing themselves from others. Therefore, attachment style is most likely to influence the need associated with each style. In addition, since (...) individuals with high AV satisfy their needs by keeping independence from others, they would experience the Need-Threat against excessive inclusion from others. This study aimed to investigate the influence of attachment style on each Need-Threat response to various inclusionary statuses. A total of 133 undergraduate students were equally assigned to low or high groups for each attachment style. Participants played one of the three types of the cyberball task : excluded, included, or over-included situation. The high AV group felt fewer threats to self-esteem than the low AV group in the excluded situation. Furthermore, only in the over-included situation did the high AV group feel more threats to belonging and self-esteem than the low AV group. AX did not influence any situation. These findings suggest that individuals with high AV would have a restrictive alleviation effect on adverse subjective responses to socially excluded experiences but demonstrate maladaptive subjective responses to over-included experiences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experiential Avoidance and Superstition: Considering Concepts in ContextRoger Vilardaga (bio) and Steven C. Hayes (bio)Keywordsacceptance, contextualism, influence, therapyThe target article (García-Montes et al. 2008) explores the application of the concept of superstition, examined from a Sartrian perspective, to psychopathology such as obsessive–compulsive disorder and psychosis. They compare their analysis to two different technical terms taken from current research programs in psychology, which are the notions of Thought–Action Fusion and (...) Experiential Avoidance (EA). We have been asked to respond because our work in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT; Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson 1999) and Relational Frame Theory (RFT; Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, and Roche 2001) are part of the foundational work in EA, and thus in this short commentary we comment on the article from the point of view of our research program.The article notes several areas of overlap between the ACT/RFT work on EA and their Sartrian perspective on superstition, such as the holistic and contextualistic nature of the analysis, but also several differences which the authors feel advantage their own view.It is difficult to compare the two lines of work without appreciating their context and purpose. Sartre was not a scientific psychologist; ACT/RFT are part of a specific effort at scientific system building, which we term here “contextual behavioral science” (AKA, post-Skinnerian behavior analysis).Contextual behavioral science is a social enterprise that has as its purpose the development of increasingly organized statements of relations among events that allow actions embedded in their historical and situational context to be predicted and influenced with precision, scope, and depth. “Precision” means that a limited set of analytic constructs apply to any one event; “scope” means that a limited set of constructs are needed to analyze a broad range of events; and “depth” means that constructs should cohere across different levels of analysis.Although a real world (or at least the one world) is assumed, the partitioning of the world is thought to be the result of our continuous interactions in and with it. These partitions are not ontological constructions from the perspective of contextual behavioral science because they, too, are actions that are purposive and embedded in their historical and situational contexts. The [End Page 269] deliberate attempt to analyze the world scientifically does not contradict the holistic standpoint of contextualism. When analytic goals are accomplished, constructs are “true,” but multiple truths are possible given multiple goals and historical and situational contexts. Conversely, all forms of contextualism become dogmatic and self-contradictory if their goals are not stated. It is common for contextualists of all varieties to state and defend the ultimate apprehension of reality as a whole, for example, without realizing that any statement about the world including such a defense is a form of breaking down this whole into parts. As we will try to show, the target article seems to fall into this usual contextualistic trap by arguing for what is better, without stating clearly “better for what, assessed how” and without viewing concepts with relevance to their purpose.Prediction and influence with precision, scope, and depth is a purpose, stated naked and in the wind. It is not defended, justified, or given ontological status. To generate powerful ways of speaking as measured against that purpose, contextual behavioral science has embraced a wide variety of methodologies, including laboratory research designed to refine behavioral principles with high levels of precision and scope, and applied research such as randomized controlled trials, analog research, and measure development that test the scope of the principles and theories that result (e.g., Hayes et al. 2006). Whether concepts like EA are helpful is a matter to be considered relevant to the goals of the analysis.As example of the kind of problems the authors create for themselves, consider the following quote from the target article:Although the post-Skinnerians who proposed the EA concept call themselves “contextualists,” they pay no more than lip service to the role of the “social/verbal community” and the cultural context. Their research focuses almost exclusively on laboratory experiments, and does not consider the important role of particular social practices and contexts, such as modernity.(García... (shrink)

Recent research indicates that angry facial expressions are preferentially processed and may facilitate automatic avoidance response, especially in socially anxious individuals. However, few studies have examined whether this bias also expresses itself in more complex cognitive processes and behavior such as decision making. We recently introduced a variation of the Iowa Gambling Task which allowed us to document the influence of task-irrelevant emotional cues on rational decision making. The present study used a modified gambling task to investigate the impact of (...) angry facial expressions on decision making in 38 individuals with a wide range of social anxiety. Participants were to find out which choices were (dis-) advantageous to maximize overall gain. To create a decision conflict between approach of reward and avoidance of fear-relevant angry faces, advantageous choices were associated with angry facial expressions, whereas disadvantageous choices were associated with happy facial expressions. Results indicated that higher social avoidance predicted less advantageous decisions in the beginning of the task, i.e., when contingencies were still uncertain. Interactions with specific skin conductance responses further clarified that this initial avoidance only occurred in combination with elevated responses before choosing an angry facial expressions. In addition, an interaction between high trait anxiety and elevated responses to early losses predicted faster learning of an advantageous strategy. These effects were independent of intelligence, general risky decision-making, self-reported state anxiety, and depression. Thus, socially avoidant individuals who respond emotionally to angry facial expressions are more likely to show avoidance of these faces under uncertainty. This novel laboratory paradigm may be an appropriate analog for central features of social anxiety. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that any attempt to model changing the past will either be contradictory or really model avoiding the past. Using Nicholas Smith's (1997) argument as a basis, I formulate a generic version of this Avoidance Argument. I argue that the Avoidance Argument fails because (i) it involves an equivocation of what is meant by ‘bifurcation of the time of an event’ and (ii) resolving the equivocation results in the falsity of at least one of the premises. Hence, the (...) Avoidance Argument will not support the claim that changing the past is logically impossible. (shrink)

IntroductionIn the context of giving risk information for obtaining informed consent, it is not easy to comply with the ethical principle of “primum nihil nocere.” Carelessness, ignorance of nocebo effects and a misunderstood striving for legal certainty can lead doctors to comprehensive and brutal risk information. It is known that talking about risks and side effects can even trigger those and result in distress and nonadherence to medication or therapy.MethodsRecently, we have reported on significant clinically relevant effects of verbal and (...) non-verbal suggestions on maximal muscular arm strength in healthy volunteers and in patients at two time points before surgery. Maximal strength during arm abduction was measured by dynamometry of the deltoid muscle group. Suggestions from clinical everyday life were formulated as presumed negative and neutral versions.ResultsHere, we report on the effects of two versions of risk information in 45 patients. After sole mentioning risks of a puncture for the placement of a pain catheter, the maximal arm muscle strength was significantly reduced to 83% of baseline several days, and to 84% the evening before surgery. Strength was not significantly decreased and close to baseline at T1 and T2 when risks and benefits of a pain catheter were combined in one sentence. The difference between both versions was significant. With persistent normal distribution of values, the effect was due to uniform reactions of many patients, not to strong reactions of a few. High suggestibility and increase of anxiety with approaching surgery were identified as influencing factors for the neutralizing effect of modified wording.ConclusionWe not only suggest an alternative formulation for risk information to avoid nocebo effects but present an objective method to quantify and compare effects of different wordings. Thereby, we provide evidence that concurrently given positive aspects can neutralize negative effects during medical interview. (shrink)

Much clinical and ethnographic evidence suggests that humans, like many other organisms, are selected to avoid close inbreeding because of the fitness costs of inbreeding depression. The proximate mechanism of human inbreeding avoidance seems to be precultural, and to involve the interaction of genetic predispositions and environmental conditions. As first suggested by E. Westermarck, and supported by evidence from Israeli kibbutzim, Chinese sim-pua marriage, and much convergent ethnographic and clinical evidence, humans negatively imprint on intimate associates during a critical period (...) of early childhood.There is also much evidence that, like other social animals, humans do not seek to maximize outbreeding, but rather to maintain an optimal balance between outbreeding and inbreeding.Closeinbreeding reduces fitness through inbreeding depression, butsomeinbreeding brings the benefits of nepotism. For simple, stateless, horticultural societies, the optimal balance seems to be achieved by a combination of precultural inbreeding avoidance of relatives with anr≤·25 and cultural rules of preferential marriage with kin withr≥·25. Adjustment of the coefficient of inbreeding to other ecological settings seems to be largely cultural. An interactive model of “culture in nature” is presented, in which culture is seen as coevolving with genes to produce the maxiniization of individual inclusive fitness. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAvoidance towards innocuous cues is a key diagnostic criterion across anxiety-related disorders. Importantly, the most effective intervention for anxiety-related disorders, exposure therapy with response prevention, sometimes does not prevent the relapse of anxiety's symptomatology. We tested whether extinction effects, the experimental proxy of exposure, are enhanced by increasing the discrepancy between the prediction of an unpleasant event happening, and the actual event. Forty-eight individuals first saw pictures of three stimuli. Two pictures were followed by a shock and one was not. (...) Next, participants learned to avoid the US by pressing a computer key. An extinction and response prevention procedure followed. In the first part of it, participants saw unreinforced presentations of all CSs. In the second part, the single group saw unreinforced presentations of the CSA and CS-. The compound group encountered compound unreinforced prese... (shrink)

(2002). Avoiding a Jekyll-And-Hyde Approach to the Ethics of Clinical Research and Practice. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 14-17.

Approach–avoidance generally describes appetitive motivation and fear of punishment. In a social context approach motivation is, however, also expressed as social aggression and dominance. We therefore link approach–avoidance to dominance–submissiveness, and provide a neural framework that describes how the steroid hormone testosterone shifts reflexive as well as deliberate behaviors towards dominance and promotion of social status. Testosterone inhibits acute fear at the level of the basolateral amygdala and hypothalamus and promotes reactive dominance through upregulation of vasopressin gene expression in the (...) central-medial amygdala. Finally, the hormone can, depending on social context and prenatal hormone exposure, promote both pro- and antisocial behaviors and decisions through its effects on prefrontal–amygdala interactions. All these effects of testosterone, however, serve to increase and maintain social status. (shrink)

Bayes Rule specifies how probabilities over parameters should be updated given any kind of information. But in some cases, the kind of information provided by both simulation and physical experiments is information on how certain output parameters may change when other input parameters are changed. There are three different approaches to this problem, one of which leads to the Garbage-In/garbage-out Paradox, the second of which violates the Borel Paradox, and the third of which is a supra-Bayesian heuristic. This paper shows (...) how to derive a fully Bayesian formula which avoids the Garbage-In/garbage-out and Borel Paradoxes. We also compare a Laplacian approximation of this formula with Bayesian synthesis and Bayesian melding and find that the Bayesian formula sometimes coincides with the Bayesian melding solution. (shrink)

I evaluate three replies to skepticism, drawing conclusions about the meaning of "justified", the viability of foundationalism, the value of knowledge, and the role of belief in rational action. ;In the first chapter, I examine the following skeptical argument: Something is justified only if justified by a justified thing; circular and infinite chains of justification are illegitimate; therefore, no belief is justified. A linguistic investigation reveals that this argument contains two ambiguities not yet noticed by epistemologists. The linguistic observations favor (...) foundationalism about justification, showing how the foundationalist can maintain his view, while explaining away the force of the skeptical argument. However, in the second chapter, I argue that foundationalism is unsatisfactory, for non-skeptical reasons. If a foundationalist tries to explain how some things can be basic, then she must endorse a certain kind of circularity. But a foundationalist should not endorse this circularity. ;Dissecting a single skeptical argument is an interesting although limited endeavour. In the third chapter, I argue that an entire class of skeptical arguments can be avoided. Distinguishing rational action from rational belief change, I claim that certain changes in belief cannot occur during a rational act. In particular, I argue, some skeptical conclusions cannot be accepted while performing an ordinary rational act. The main conclusion of this chapter is: to avoid acting irrationally, it is rational to avoid certain skeptical arguments. ;Sometimes it is better to concede to skepticism than to flee. In the fourth chapter, I argue that knowledge is no more valuable than stable true belief. This surprising claim supports the conclusion that skepticism about knowledge is harmless. Even if we cannot know anything about the external world---or even if we cannot know anything at all---we may have something just as valuable as knowledge: stable true beliefs. (shrink)

This article investigates the role of historical references and arguments in the current policy debate on non‐invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) in Germany. It analyses major documents and opinion statements, including the recent parliamentary debate (2019). The implementation of NIPT is accompanied by concerns and strong criticism, particularly in Germany. Many perceive the new test to be a problematic step that facilitates selective practices and is reminiscent of eugenics. Analysis of the German policy discourse shows that ‘eugenics’, and even more strongly, (...) ‘selection’, are pivotal terms for rejecting NIPT and its coverage by public health insurance. They touch on a historical dimension in public deliberation, namely the fundamental distancing from the inhuman practices of the National Socialist period and anything that resembles them. However, using these terms to criticize prenatal genetic testing is controversial, and recent discourse demonstrates their avoidance as well, with many supporters of a limited coverage by public health insurance contrasting their approach with more widespread screening. Here, ‘screening’ has a negative connotation, and functions to demarcate the debate in a way that may reflect distance from certain modes of historical reasoning, but still expresses a special need to reconcile prenatal testing with the principles of dignity, inclusion and diversity. This article aims to elucidate the concerns involved in the national debates on prenatal testing and to increase awareness of the historical dimensions of the language and reasoning with which such methods are negotiated today and in future. (shrink)

In recent years, many studies have examined conservative Christian responses to shifting societal attitudes about sexuality. In this article we examine official discourse from the LDS Church found in General Conference talks and the official adult magazine of the Church, Ensign, to better understand how leaders of the religion have taught the members to abstain from the use of pornography. Using a grounded-theory approach, we noted a pattern to the lessons that included four elements: avoiding dangerous associations, taking personal responsibility, (...) maintaining inner purity, and seeking spiritual treatment. This study extends previous research by examining how Mormon leaders taught their followers to interpret and protect themselves from pornography. As such, our analysis demonstrates the elaboration of religious teachings that may facilitate the negative reactions to pornography researchers have observed in survey and outcome-based research on members of conservative religions. (shrink)

Altering physical actions when responding to changing environmental demands is important but not always effectively performed. This ineffectiveness, which is an error of social behavior generated by mutual interactions, is not well understood. This study investigated mechanisms of a hesitant behavior that occurs in people walking toward each other, causing people to move in the same direction when attempting to avoid a collision. Using a motion capture device affixed to 17 pairs, we first confirmed the hesitant behavior by a difference (...) between the experimental task, which involved an indeterminate situation to assess the actions of another individual, and the control task, which involved a predetermined avoiding direction, in a real-time situation involving two people. We next investigated the effect of three external factors: long distance until an event, synchronized walking cycle, and different foot relations in dyads on the hesitant behavior. A dramatic increase in freezing and near-collision behavior occurred in dyads for which the avoiding direction was not predetermined. The behavior related with the combination of long distance until an event, synchronized walking cycle, and different foot relations in dyads. We found that the hesitant behavior is influenced by an interpersonal relationship under enough distance to predict other movement. The hesitant behavior has possibly emerged as an undesired by-product of joint action. These results contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms of adaptive control of perception-action coupling in mutual interaction. (shrink)

Lowering compensation to research subjects to protect them from “undue inducement” is a misguided attempt to shoehorn a concern about exploitation into the framework of autonomy. We suggest that oversight bodies should be less concerned about undue influence than about exploitation of subjects. Avoiding exploitation in human subjects research requires not only increasing compensation, but enhancing the dignity of research participation.

Some people will confront Alzheimer's with a measure of resignation, a determination to struggle against the progressive debilitation and to extract whatever comforts and benefits they can from their remaining existence. They are entitled to pursue that resolute path. For other people, like myself, protracted maintenance during progressive cognitive dysfunction and helplessness is an intolerably degrading prospect. The critical question for those of us seeking to avoid protracted dementia is how best to accomplish that objective.One strategy is to engineer one's (...) own death while still mentally competent to do so (even in the stage of mild dementia). If I were to use a preemptive strategy in the face of a dementia diagnosis, I would probably choose to stop eating and drinking, a process known as voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. An alternative tactic for avoiding prolonged dementia would be to allow oneself to decline into moderate dementia—thus losing capacity to perform self‐deliverance or even to make serious medical decisions—but before getting to that point to provide advance instructions rejecting prospective life‐sustaining medical interventions. These advance instructions would authorize palliative but not curative measures. My current personal instructions define the point of intolerable cognitive decline triggering medical nonintervention as “mental deterioration to a point when I can no longer read and understand written material such as a newspaper or financial records such as a checkbook.” These instructions dictate allowing my demise at a point of moderate dementia when I may not be perceptibly suffering, when I may still be getting some rudimentary satisfaction from my debilitated life, and when I no longer recall the preoccupation with personally intolerable indignity that motivated my instructions. Can I expect that my advance instructions will be implemented in those circumstances? Is it lawful, and is it moral for a surrogate decision‐maker and associated caregivers to allow an uncomprehending, ostensibly content but demented individual to die? My analysis herein contends that it is not only lawful and moral but also legally required to implement clear, considered advance instructions even at a stage of moderate dementia. (shrink)

In a fascinating recent article, Michael Otsuka seeks to bypass the debates about the Principle of Alternative Possibilities by presenting and defending a different, but related, principle, which he calls the “Principle of Avoidable Blame.” According to this principle, one is blameworthy for performing an act only if one could instead have behaved in an entirely blameless manner. Otsuka claims that although Frankfurt-cases do undermine the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, they do not undermine the Principle of Avoidable Blame. In this (...) brief paper, we offer a critical discussion of the core of Otsuka’s argument, especially the claim that his favored principle cannot be refuted by Frankfurt-cases. We do not believe that Otsuka has offered good reason to suppose that the Principle of Avoidable Blame—and the related incompatibilism—fares any better than the original Principle of Alternative Possibilities. (shrink)

The Westermarck Effect posits that intimate association during childhood promotes human incest avoidance. In previous work, I articulated and defended a version of the Westermarck Effect by developing a phylogenetic argument that has purchase within primatology but that has had more limited appeal for cultural anthropologists due to their commitment to conventionalist or culture-first accounts of incest avoidance. Here I look to advance the discussion of incest and incest avoidance beyond culture-first accounts in two ways. First, I shall dig deeper (...) into the disciplinary grooves within cultural anthropology that make attractive the view that incest has a naturalness to it that is countered only or primarily by explicit social rules, such as taboos. Second, I further explore the emerging, post-conventionalist view of incest avoidance in a more positive vein by elaborating on the nature of the Westermarckian mechanism and how it relates to such explicit social rules and our innate biological endowments. One general aim here is to overcome the bifurcation between perspectives that are seen as biological and those seen as cultural, preempting or countering the claim that rejecting culture-first accounts entails a form of biological reductionism, a general aim I have pursued in related publications on bioessentialism about kinship. (shrink)

Common‐sense intuition suggests that, when people are engaged in informational exchanges, they communicate so as to be reasonably sure that they perform the exchanges faithfully. Over the years, we have found evidence suggesting that this intuition, which is woven into several influential theories of human communication, may be misleading. We first summarize this evidence and discuss its potential limitations. Then, we present a new study that addresses the potential limitations. A confederate instructed participants to “pick up the skask” from a (...) tray containing six objects and move it to a specific location. Since skask is a non‐word invented by us, participants had to ask for clarification to perform the instruction faithfully. In contradiction with the intuition that people pursue faithfulness when engaged in informational exchanges, 29 of the 48 participants we tested performed the instruction without asking for clarification. We identified a possible cause for this behavior, which occurred more frequently when avoiding the clarification was unlikely to result in an overt consequence (an error in the execution of the instruction that could be noticed by the confederate or the experimenter). Other factors such as individual differences and the specific interpersonal dynamics of the experimental settings, if they played a role at all, did it to an extent that is unlikely to be comparable to that of the role played by overt consequences. Considered together, our various assessments of the extent to which people engage in faithful informational exchanges converge on a simple conclusion: Communicating faithfully is a substantially demanding task, and people often fail at it. We discuss the implications of this conclusion and speculate on its relevance for understanding the evolutionary past of human communication. (shrink)

If we’re the kind of people who care both about not being racist, and also about basing our beliefs on the evidence that we have, then the world presents us with a challenge. The world is pretty racist. It shouldn’t be surprising then that sometimes it seems as if the evidence is stacked in favour of some racist belief. For example, it’s racist to assume that someone’s a staff member on the basis of his skin colour. But what if it’s (...) the case that, because of historical patterns of discrimination, the members of staff with whom you interact are predominantly of one race? When the late John Hope Franklin, professor of history at Duke University in North Carolina, hosted a dinner party at his private club in Washington, DC in 1995, he was mistaken as a member of staff. Did the woman who did so do something wrong? Yes. It was indeed racist of her, even though Franklin was, since 1962, that club’s first black member. (shrink)

Lara Buchak defends a Weight-Ranked Utilitarianism (WRU) that she says avoids the critique of Rawls’s that is sometimes thought fatal: utilitarianism unjustifiably blurs the distinction between persons. Buchak’s defence depends upon (i) a version of Harsanyi’s assumption that parties to a social contract should reason as if they have an equal chance of being anyone and (ii) a hypothesis she explores in a recent article. I argue that her assumption and hypothesis are untenable. WRU fails of the generality to which (...) Buchak aspires because it fails for one of her most important cases: the distributive question posed by Rawls. (shrink)

Recent research and theory highlights the distinctive features of shame vs. guilt, as well as the important implications of that distinction for typical and atypical behaviour regulation. Briefly, shame is characterised by withdrawal and hiding from judgemental others, and guilt by making amends–repairing and confessing. The present study was aimed at determining whether a shame-relevant and a guilt-relevant pattern of responses to a standard violation could be distinguished in toddlers.Two-year-old children participated in a play session, during which a mishap occurred (...) that the children appeared to have caused. Based upon whether or not children avoided the experimenter (E) after the mishap, they were dichotomised into a shame-relevant group of subjects (Avoiders) who avoid E after the mishap, are slow to make reparation, and are slow to tell E about the mishap; and a guilt-relevant group (Amenders) showing the opposite pattern. All guilt-relevant behaviours were greater for Amenders than Avoiders, and all but one shame-relevant behaviour was greater for Avoiders than for Amenders, suggesting coherence in the organisation of responses. Moreover, convergent evidence from a maternal report questionnaire indicated that in non-laboratory settings as well, Amenders manifested greater guilt relative to shame than did Avoiders. Further research is needed to determine developmental antecedents and consequences of the Avoider/Amender dichotomy. (shrink)

Cross-cultural sex differences in mobility and harm avoidance have been widely reported, often emphasizing fitness benefits of long-distance travel for males and high costs for females. Data emerging from adults in small-scale societies, however, are challenging the assumption that female mobility is restricted during reproduction. Such findings warrant further exploration of the ontogeny of mobility. Here, using a combination of machine-learning, mixed-effects linear regression, and GIS mapping, we analyze range size, daily distance traveled, and harm avoidance among Hadza foragers during (...) middle childhood and adolescence. Distance traveled increased with age and, while male adolescents had the longest daily ranges, average daily distance traveled by each sex was similar. We found few age- or sex-related patterns in harm-avoidant responses and a high degree of individual variation. When queried on the same issues, children and their parents were often in alignment as to expectations pertaining to harm avoidance, and siblings tended to behave in similar ways. To the extent that sex differences in mobility did emerge, they were associated with ecological differences in physical threats associated with sex-specific foraging behaviors. Further, we found no strong association between harm avoidance and mobility. Young Hadza foragers of both sexes are highly mobile, regardless of how harm avoidant they are. Taken together, our findings indicate that the causal arrows between harm avoidance and mobility must be evaluated in ecologically specific frameworks where cultural expectations of juvenile mobility can be contextualized. (shrink)