Pragmatic trials aim to directly inform health care decision-making through the collection of so-called ‘real world data’ from observations of comparative treatment effects in clinical practice. In order to ensure the applicability and feasibility of a pragmatic trial, design features may be necessary that deviate from standard research ethics requirements. Examples are traditional requirements to seek written informed consent and to perform extensive data and safety monitoring. Proposals for deviations from standard research ethics practice have resulted in controversy about their (...) ethical acceptability. One of the justifications for altered procedures is the allegedly high social value of pragmatic trials. In order to properly operationalize the concept in the ethical assessment of pragmatic trial designs, specification is warranted. We identified three determinants from common claims about a pragmatic trial's social value: the extent to which the research question has real world relevance, the trial design's ability to generate a real world answer and the probability of direct uptake of the results by decision-makers in practice. Subsequently, we discuss how these determinants should be applied to the practice of pragmatic trials, and to what extent they might be applicable to explanatory trials. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that it is ethical to conduct research with human subjects only if the research has social value. There are two standard arguments for this view. The allocation argument claims that public funds should not be devoted to research that lacks social value. The exploitation avoidance argument claims that subjects are exploited if research has no social value. The primary purpose of this article is to argue that these arguments do not (...) succeed. The allocation argument has little relevance to commercial research. Social value is not necessary to avoid exploitation if subjects benefit from participation. Although the standard arguments for a social value requirement do not succeed, that view might be justified in a different way. It might be justified by appeal to the importance of social trust or the integrity of physician investigators. It is possible but doubtful that these arguments succeed. (shrink)

The ‘death of evidence’ issue in Canada raises the spectre of politicized science, and thus the question of what role social values may have in science and how this meshes with objectivity and evidence. I first criticize philosophical accounts that have to separate different steps of research to restrict the influence of social and other non-epistemic values. A prominent account that social values may play a role even in the context of theory acceptance is the argument from (...) inductive risk. It maintains that the more severe the social consequences of erroneously accepting a theory would be, the more evidence is needed before the theory may be accepted. However, an implication of this position is that increasing evidence makes the impact of social values converge to zero; and I argue for a stronger role for social values. On this position, social values may determine a theory’s conditions of adequacy, which among other things can include co.. (shrink)

Despite the growing importance of ‘social value’ as a central feature of research ethics, the term remains both conceptually vague and to a certain extent operationally rigid. And yet, perhaps because the rhetorical appeal of social value appears immediate and self-evident, the concept has not been put to rigorous investigation in terms of its definition, strength, function, and scope. In this article, we discuss how the anthropological concept of liminality can illuminate social value and (...) differentiate and reconfigure its variegated approaches. Employing liminality as a heuristic encourages a reassessment of how we understand the mobilization of ‘social value’ in bioethics. We argue that social value as seen through the lens of liminality can provide greater clarity of its function and scope for health research. Building on calls to understand social value as a dynamic, rather than a static, concept, we emphasize the need to appraise social value iteratively throughout the entire research as something that transforms over multiple times and across multiple spaces occupied by a range of actors. (shrink)

The main goal of publicly funded biomedical research is to generate social value through the creation and application of knowledge that can improve the well-being of current and future people. Prioritising research with the greatest potential social value is crucial for good stewardship of limited public resources and ensuring ethical involvement of research participants. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), peer reviewers hold the expertise and responsibility for social value assessment and resulting prioritisation (...) at the project level. However, previous research has shown that peer reviewers place more emphasis on a study’s methods (‘Approach’) than on its potential social value (best approximated by the criterion of ‘Significance’). Lower weighting of Significance may be due to reviewers’ views on the relative importance of social value, their belief that social value is evaluated at other stages of the research priority-setting process or the lack of guidance on how to approach the challenging task of assessing expected social value. The NIH is currently revising its review criteria and how these criteria contribute to overall scores. To elevate the role of social value in priority setting, the agency should support empirical research on how peer reviewers approach the assessment of social value, provide more specific guidance for reviewing social value and experiment with alternative reviewer assignment strategies. These recommendations would help ensure that funding priorities align with the NIH’s mission and the obligation of taxpayer-funded research to contribute to the public good. (shrink)

The literature on Base of the Pyramid strategies emphasizes that creating social value requires collaborative, multi-stakeholder business approaches. However, there is limited understanding of how businesses can successfully coordinate such value creation processes in the developing economies that face significant institutional voids. This study adopts a business model perspective for analyzing social value creation processes that span organizational boundaries. We introduce a novel, theoretically grounded business model framework that helps conceptualize social value by (...) locating the various loci of value creation, and the stakeholders that partake in creating and capturing this value. We subsequently analyze the mechanisms of social value creation in M-Pesa, a renowned boundary-spanning mobile money system that has advanced financial inclusion among tens of millions of users in Kenya. The results show that information and communications technology can help advance social value creation by reducing the cost of coordinating boundary-spanning business models that integrate diverse societal stakeholders. The results further point to uneven distributional outcomes in self-governing social value creation strategies where the focal firm plays a coordinating role. (shrink)

In this study, bullying is examined in light of the “prosocial security hypothesis”— i.e., the hypothesis that insecure attachment, with temperamental dispositions such as sensation seeking, may foster individualistic, competitive value orientations and problem behaviors. A group of 375 Italian students (53% female; Mean age = 12.58, SD = 1.08) completed anonymous questionnaires regarding attachment security, social values, sensation seeking, and bullying behaviors. Path analysis showed that attachment to mother was negatively associated with bullying of others, both directly (...) and through the mediating role of conservative socially oriented values, while attachment to father was directly associated with victimization. Sensation seeking predicted bullying of others and victimization both directly and through the mediating role of conservative socially oriented values. Adolescents’ gender affected how attachment moderated the relationship between sensation seeking and problem behavior. (shrink)

Research shows that the physician’s personal attributes and social characteristics have a strong association with their end-of-life decision making. Despite efforts to increase patient, family and surrogate input into EOL decision making, research shows the physician’s input to be dominant. Our research finds that physician’s social values, independent of religiosity, have a significant association with physician’s tendency to withhold or withdraw life sustaining, EOL treatments. It is suggested that physicians employ personal social values in their EOL medical (...) coping, because they have to cope with existential dilemmas posed by the mystery of death, and left unresolved by medical decision making mechanisms such as advanced directives and hospital ethics committees. (shrink)

Ethicists have long recognized that two necessary features of ethical research are scientific validity and social value. Yet despite a significant literature surrounding the validity component of this dictate, until recently there has been little attention paid to unpacking what the social value component might require. This article introduces a framework for assessing the social value of research, and in particular, for determining whether a given research program is likely to have significant social (...) value of the kind necessary to fulfill the social value requirement. The article goes on to illustrate how this framework can provide a clearer account of the responsiveness requirement, an ethical dictum that is oft-repeated but whose content and value as a guideline in international research remains contested. Although I introduce this conception of social value in the context of the responsiveness requirement, the account offered can, and is intended to, stand alone as a tool for the assessment of the social value of research. As such it can be usefully applied to discussions about the value of comparative effectiveness trials, the assessment of the continued proliferation of me-too drugs and the research done to develop them, the demand for public access to study-generated data, and persistent deficits in the publication of negative results. (shrink)

Clinical researchers should help respect the autonomy and promote the well-being of prospective study participants by helping them make voluntary, informed decisions about enrollment. However, participants often exhibit poor understanding of important information about clinical research. Bioethicists have given special attention to “misconceptions” about clinical research that can compromise participants’ decision-making, most notably the “therapeutic misconception.” These misconceptions typically involve false beliefs about a study’s purpose, or risks or potential benefits for participants. In this article, we describe a misconception involving (...) false beliefs about a study’s potential benefits for non-participants, or its expected social value. This social value misconception can compromise altruistically motivated participants’ decision-making, potentially threatening their autonomy and well-being. We show how the social value misconception raises ethical concerns for inherently low-value research, hyped research, and even ordinary research, and advocate for empirical and normative work to help understand and counteract this misconception’s potential negative impacts on participants. (shrink)

A growing body of research looks into business-led efforts to create social value by improving the socio-economic well-being of Base of the Pyramid (BoP) communities. Research shows that businesses that pursue these strategies—or BoP businesses—face distinct sets of challenges that require unique capabilities. There is, however, limited effort to synthesize current evidence on the mechanisms through which these businesses create social value. We systematically review the literature on BoP businesses, covering 110 studies published in business and (...) management journals. We start by using bibliographic analysis to map the broad contours of the literature in terms of its common theoretical and empirical approaches, intellectual core, and evolution in time. We subsequently conduct a qualitative content analysis on the identified articles to synthesize their main findings. The analysis leads to a conceptual framework that explicates the antecedents, constraints, capabilities, and contingencies that drive social value creation. In addition to providing a rich and systematically organized account of the evidence, our analysis provides a critical reflection on the ethical dilemmas of social value creation efforts for the BoP, and outlines promising avenues for future research. (shrink)

According to prominent bioethics scholars and international guidelines, researchers and sponsors have obligations to ensure that the products of their research are reasonably available to research participants and their communities. In other words, the claim is that research is unethical unless it has local social value. In this article, we argue that the existing conception of reasonable availability should be replaced with a social value obligation that extends to the global poor. To the extent the (...) class='Hi'>social value requirement has been understood as geographically constrained to the communities that host research and the countries that can afford the products of research, it has neglected to include the global poor as members of the relevant society. We argue that a new conception of social value obligations is needed for two reasons. First, duties of global beneficence give reason for researchers, sponsors, and institutions to take steps to make their products more widely accessible. Second, public commitments made by many institutions acknowledge and engender responsibilities to make the products of research more accessible to the global poor. Future research is needed to help researchers and sponsors discharge these obligations in ways that unlock their full potential. (shrink)

In light of the growth in the conduct of international clinical research in developing populations, this paper seeks to explore what is owed to developing world communities who host international clinical research. Although existing paradigms for assigning and assessing benefits to host communities offer valuable insight, I criticize their failure to distinguish between those benefits which can justify the conduct of research in a developing world setting and those which cannot. I argue that the justification for human subjects research is (...) fundamentally grounded in the social value of knowledge, and that this value is context-dependent in a manner which should inform our ethical evaluation of the conduct of research in specific settings. I propose a new framework for the assessment of research benefits assigned to developing world host communities, a natural implication of which is to limit the types of research projects which may permissibly be conducted in developing world settings. (shrink)

Introducción: Los docentes universitarios requieren nuevos saberes para enfrentar los diversos retos que plantea la educación superior; dichos desafíos se relacionan con el dominio de saberes disciplinarios, profesionales, laborales, pedagógicos y didácticos e incluso axiológicos. Lo que aquí se presenta son los resultados de una investigación llevada a cabo en la Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México en el periodo de enero de 2014 a abril de 2015. El objetivo: fue determinar los saberes específicos, métodos de enseñanza y valores sociales (...) que deben poseer los profesores universitarios desde la perspectiva de los estudiantes para la identificación de aquellos principios que deben orientar la formación y actualización docente. Método: consideró el cualitativo y la técnica de la encuesta; fueron aplicados 119 cuestionarios diseñados en Escala de Likert, a igual número de estudiantes; el instrumento de 48 reactivos fue construido con base en tres grandes "baterías" o ejes: "Saberes de un buen docente", "Métodos o estrategias de enseñanza", y "Actitudes y valores". Resultados: se resaltan los saberes pedagógicos y didácticos como aquéllos que los estudiantes visualizan que les hacen falta a sus docentes; de éstos, son los métodos de enseñanza eminentemente prácticos, y aquellos vivenciales o más cercanos a la realidad los que se consideran como importantes. En términos de las actitudes y valores sociales que deben tener y demostrar los profesores, se encuentran la actitud profesional, la actitud de servicio, así como la responsabilidad y la ética. Conclusiones: se discute aquello que se considera deben saber, y lo que necesitan mejorar los docentes universitarios. Introduction: Professors require new knowledge to face the different challenges that higher education has. Those challenges are related with the mastery of disciplinary, professional, pedagogic, work-related, didactic and even axiological knowledge. The results of a research that was carried out at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México from January, 2014 to April, 2015; are presented in this article. Objective: To determine specific knowledge, teaching methods and social values that professors must have from the perspective of the students for identifying the principles which should lead teaching formation and updating. Method: The qualitative method and the survey as a procedure were considered. One hundred nineteen questionnaires that were designed in Likert scale were also applied to the same number of students; the instrument of 48 reagents was based on 3 axes: 'Knowledge of a good professor', 'Teaching methods or strategies' and 'Attitudes and values'. Results: Pedagogic and didactic knowledge is emphasized, for instance the one students consider their professors should have. However, the professors consider those teaching methods essentially practical, based on past experiences or closer to the reality as the most important ones. There are some attitudes and social values that professors must have and demonstrate, as well as the professional attitude, the service attitude, responsibility and ethics. Conclusions: the ideas that must be known and improved by the professors are discussed here. (shrink)

International documents on ethical conduct in clinical research have in common the principle that potential harms to research participants must be proportional to anticipated benefits. The anticipated benefits that can justify human research consist of direct benefits to the research participant, and societal benefits, also called social value. In first-in-human research, no direct benefits are expected and the benefit component of the risks-benefit assessment thus merely exists in social value. The concept social value is (...) ambiguous by nature and is used in numerous ways in the research ethics literature. Because social value justifies involving human participants, especially in early human trials, this is problematic. (shrink)

With twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy of science’s unfolding acceptance of the nature of scientific inquiry being value-laden, the persistent worry has been that there are no means for legitimate negotiation of the social or non-epistemic values that enter into science. The rejection of the value-free ideal in science has thereby been coupled with the spectres of indiscriminate relativism and bias in scientific inquiry. I challenge this view in the context of recently expressed concerns regarding Canada's death of (...) evidence controversy. The worry, raised by Stathis Psillos, is that as constructivist accounts of science demoted the previously secure status of evidence for drawing justified conclusions in science, we were left with no rational delineation between the right and wrong values for science. The implication for the death of evidence controversy is that we may have no rational grounds for claiming that the Canadian Government is wrong to interfere with scientific enterprise. But he does offer another avenue for reaching the conclusion that the wrong social values are directing the current stifling of some sectors of Canadian science. Psillos draws from standpoint epistemologies to devise a salient defence of ‘valuing evidence’ as a universalizable social value. That is, government bodies ought to enable scientific research via adequate funding as well as political non-interference. In this paper, I counter that non-epistemic values can be rationally evaluated and that standpoint epistemology’s universalizable standpoint provides an inadequate framework for negotiating social values in science. Regarding, I draw from the evidence-based medicine debate in philosophy of medicine and from feminist empiricist investigations into the science–values relationship in order to make the argument for empirically driven value arbitration. If social values can be rationally chosen in the context of justification, then we can have grounds for charging the Canadian leadership with being ‘at war with science’. I further argue that my recommended empiricist methodology is preferable to Psillos’s search for universalizable perspectives for negotiating social values in science because the latter method permits little more than the trivial conclusion that evidence is valuable to science. (shrink)

Introducción: Los docentes universitarios requieren nuevos saberes para enfrentar los diversos retos que plantea la educación superior; dichos desafíos se relacionan con el dominio de saberes disciplinarios, profesionales, laborales, pedagógicos y didácticos e incluso axiológicos. Lo que aquí se presenta son los resultados de una investigación llevada a cabo en la Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México en el periodo de enero de 2014 a abril de 2015. El objetivo: fue determinar los saberes específicos, métodos de enseñanza y valores sociales (...) que deben poseer los profesores universitarios desde la perspectiva de los estudiantes para la identificación de aquellos principios que deben orientar la formación y actualización docente. Método: consideró el cualitativo y la técnica de la encuesta; fueron aplicados 119 cuestionarios diseñados en Escala de Likert, a igual número de estudiantes; el instrumento de 48 reactivos fue construido con base en tres grandes "baterías" o ejes: "Saberes de un buen docente", "Métodos o estrategias de enseñanza", y "Actitudes y valores". Resultados: se resaltan los saberes pedagógicos y didácticos como aquéllos que los estudiantes visualizan que les hacen falta a sus docentes; de éstos, son los métodos de enseñanza eminentemente prácticos, y aquellos vivenciales o más cercanos a la realidad los que se consideran como importantes. En términos de las actitudes y valores sociales que deben tener y demostrar los profesores, se encuentran la actitud profesional, la actitud de servicio, así como la responsabilidad y la ética. Conclusiones: se discute aquello que se considera deben saber, y lo que necesitan mejorar los docentes universitarios. Introduction: Professors require new knowledge to face the different challenges that higher education has. Those challenges are related with the mastery of disciplinary, professional, pedagogic, work-related, didactic and even axiological knowledge. The results of a research that was carried out at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México from January, 2014 to April, 2015; are presented in this article. Objective: To determine specific knowledge, teaching methods and social values that professors must have from the perspective of the students for identifying the principles which should lead teaching formation and updating. Method: The qualitative method and the survey as a procedure were considered. One hundred nineteen questionnaires that were designed in Likert scale were also applied to the same number of students; the instrument of 48 reagents was based on 3 axes: 'Knowledge of a good professor', 'Teaching methods or strategies' and 'Attitudes and values'. Results: Pedagogic and didactic knowledge is emphasized, for instance the one students consider their professors should have. However, the professors consider those teaching methods essentially practical, based on past experiences or closer to the reality as the most important ones. There are some attitudes and social values that professors must have and demonstrate, as well as the professional attitude, the service attitude, responsibility and ethics. Conclusions: the ideas that must be known and improved by the professors are discussed here. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the social value of health research should be conceptualized as a function of both the expected benefits of the research and the priority that the beneficiaries deserve. People deserve greater priority the worse off they are. This conception of social value can be applied for at least two important purposes: in health research priority setting when research funders, policy-makers, or researchers decide between alternative research projects; and in evaluating the ethics (...) of proposed research proposals when research ethics committees assess whether the social value of the research is sufficient to justify the risks and burdens to research participants and others. In assessing how far a proposed research project will advance the interests of people who are more disadvantaged, research priority setters and RECs should examine the diseases that the research targets and the type of research. Just as certain diseases impose a greater burden on people who are more disadvantaged, so certain types of intervention and forms of research are more likely to benefit people who are more disadvantaged. We outline which populations are likely to be representative of the global worst off and identify what types of health research, and which disease categories, are priorities for these populations. (shrink)

This article contributes to the concept of social values by presenting analytical tools that explore how social values are classified, re-presented and interpersonally performed in the construction of identities. I approach social values as classificatory systems of acceptability and desirability that are collectively generated. The meanings of social values are embedded in culture and in power imbalanced social relations; they constantly undergo reformulation in identification processes and are also used to define the social order. (...) I suggest that social values can be analysed in relation to aspects of representation and interpersonal positioning that are also involved in the construction of identities: Value classifications involve compartmentalising moral orders into e.g. good, desirable, important, necessary; value projects are concerned with how value classifications and content occupy roles and become oriented to action; and value positioning is concerned with how narrators align with value classifications and projects as well as with individuals and groups seen to share or reject such classifications and projects. (shrink)

In controlled human infection (CHI) studies, investigators deliberately infect healthy individuals with pathogens in order to study mechanisms of disease or obtain preliminary efficacy data on investigational vaccines and medicines. CHI studies offer a fast and cost‐effective way of generating new scientific insights, prioritizing investigational products for clinical testing, and reducing the risk that large numbers of people are exposed to ineffective or harmful substances in research or in practice. Yet depending on the pathogen, CHI studies can involve significant risks (...) or burdens for participants, pose risks to individuals or communities not involved in the research, and lead to public controversy. It is therefore essential to ensure that the risks of CHI studies are justified by their social value—that is, their potential to generate benefits for society—and that public trust can be maintained. In this paper, we aim to clarify how research sponsors, research ethics committees and other reviewers should judge the social value of CHI studies. We develop a list of relevant considerations for making social value judgments based on the standard view of social value. We then use this list to discuss the example of potentially conducting dengue virus CHI studies in endemic settings. We argue that dengue virus CHI studies in endemic settings would fall on the higher end of the spectrum of social value, mostly because of their potential to redirect all fields of future dengue research. Drawing on this discussion, we derive several general recommendations for how reviewers should judge the social value of CHI studies. (shrink)

Several have argued that the aims of scientific research are not always independent of social and ethical values. Yet this is often assumed only to have implications for decisions about what is studied, or which research projects are funded, and not for methodological decisions or standards of evidence. Using the case of the recently developed HPV vaccines, we argue that the social aims of research can also play important roles in justifying decisions about (1) how research problems are (...) defined in drug development, (2) evidentiary standards used in testing drug “success”, and (3) clinical trial methodology. As a result, attending to the social aims at stake in particular research contexts will produce more rational methodological decisions as well as more socially relevant science. (shrink)

PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to consider some of the philosophical and bioethical issues raised by the creation of the draft social values framework developed to facilitate data collection and country-specific presentations at the inaugural workshop on "Social values and health priority setting" held in February 2011. -/- DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Conceptual analysis is used to analyse the term "social values", as employed in the framework, and its relationship to related ideas such as moral values. The structure (...) of the framework (process and content values) is considered in light of current debate in philosophy and bioethics about the political and moral aims served by these kinds of values, and the extent to which they are either suited to, or sufficient for, the policy context. -/- FINDINGS: There is much to be gained by engaging with the arguments presented in the philosophical literature in order to further refine the framework. The framework should remain neutral in respect of the importance of procedural values in different contexts and should be as inclusive as possible in respect of the principles it includes. Further development would be best served by taking a multidisciplinary approach. The framework could provide a valuable space in which future debates about procedural/substantive values can be considered. -/- ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The paper brings philosophical and bioethics perspectives to bear on a new framework proposed for the analysis of social values in health priority setting. It identifies how such a practical, policy-focused framework might be informed by engagement with deeper, and often unresolved, questions or principle around resource allocation in health. (shrink)

This article reports on qualitative research conducted in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, among researchers and gate-keepers of health facilities in the province. Results suggest disparate but not irreconcilable perceptions of the social value of research in provincial health facilities. This study found that researchers tended to emphasize the contribution of research to the generation of knowledge and to the health of future patients while gate-keepers of health facilities tended to emphasize its contribution to the healthcare system and to current (...) patients. Furthermore, relations between research stakeholders were perceived to be somewhat fragile, making it difficult for stakeholders to achieve consensus about the social value of research, as well as on ways to maximize value. Interventions to negotiate a shared perspective on the social value of research would appear to be warranted, and the findings of this study suggest some focus areas for such intervention. (shrink)

It has long been taken for granted that clinical research involving human subjects is ethical only if it holds out the prospect of producing socially valuable knowledge. Recently, this social value requirement has come under scrutiny, with prominent ethicists arguing that the social value requirement cannot be substantiated as an ethical limit on clinical research, and others attempting to offer new support. In this paper, I argue that both criticisms and existing defenses of the social (...) value requirement are predicated on what I call the “transactional model of stakeholder obligations”. I go on to problematize this framework, and to introduce an alternative framework for conceptualizing ethical obligations within clinical research. In defending this framework, which I call the “basic structure model of stakeholder obligations”, I also demonstrate how it provides a stronger grounding for the social value requirement that is not vulnerable to critiques grounded in the transactional model. (shrink)

Economic environmental valuation remains a much debated and contested issue. Concerns have been voiced that it is unable to capture the manifold immaterial values of ecosystems due to conceptual and methodological issues. Thus, additional value categories (social values) as well as novel valuation approaches like deliberative (monetary) valuation are areas of growing interest, yet the theoretical foundations are rather weak. Against this background, this article aims to develop a consistent conceptual framework for making sense of social values (...) in economic environmental valuation. Based on a holistic view of society and individuals, the role of institutions, the social environment, culture and transcendental values is emphasised. To synthesise diverging concepts of value into an economic concept and to account for the multidimensionality of social values, the framework consists of three spheres: social, natural and contextual. The novel framework demonstrates that social values may be integrated into a preference-based utility framework when denoting a holistic understanding of social preferences and human embeddedness in nature and society. (shrink)

Acute stress is believed to lead to prosocial behaviors via a “tend-and-befriend” pattern of stress response. However, the results of the effect of acute stress on prosocial behavior are inconsistent. The current study explores the moderating effect of gender and social value orientation on the relationship between acute stress and individuals’ pure prosocial behaviors. Specifically, eighty-one participants were selected and underwent the Trier Social Stress Test, followed by the third-party punishment task and the dictator game. The results (...) showed that, in general, the main effect of condition or respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity on individual prosocial behaviors was significant and did not vary between genders. Furthermore, social value orientation might moderate the impact of RSA reactivity on the amount of punishment in the third-party punishment task. That is, individuals with self-orientation exhibited more prosocial third-party punishment as RSA reactivity decreased, while the effect did not occur for individuals with prosocial orientation. Taken together, the findings of the current study provide further evidence for the “tend-and-befriend” hypothesis and highlight the underlying physical mechanisms as well as the individual dependence of the effect of psychosocial stress on individuals’ pure prosocial behaviors. (shrink)

Although the concept of _social value_ has been present in business literature for over a century, it lacks definitional consensus, is often imprecise, and has not been sufficiently theorized. With social value becoming more prevalent across business scholarship domains, the lack of conceptual clarity and consistency hampers substantive research progress. We conduct an integrative review of 288 articles drawn from 60 peer-reviewed journals covering a wide spectrum of business domains. We synthesize the review findings into a polythetic typology (...) that identifies five distinct approaches to understanding and managing social value in business. The proposed typology of social value organizes and consolidates the theoretical and conceptual heterogeneity of the social value concept providing much-needed clarity and structure for future research. It allows scholars to structure and unify various conceptualizations into a more holistic yet nuanced understanding, and the necessary (but currently lacking) clarity to enable new theorizing and guide future research. The proposed typology further offers new ways of thinking about social value and provides direction to managerial practice on the desirability and feasibility of implementing different social value approaches into firms’ core business operations and strategies. (shrink)

Among industrialized nations the United States is relatively unique in relying on a mix of public and private financing and delivery of healthcare: federal and federal-state programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid; employment-based health insurance ; and state-subsidized insurance pools for high-risk individuals. In recent years, however, there have been efforts to apply the principles of private employment-based health insurance to the other forms of healthcare, and there is speculation that rising healthcare costs can only be addressed by further extending (...) capitated payment plans. This suggests that U.S. healthcare may increasingly be organized according to market principles. For some, this represents a historic departure from an emphasis on public responsibility for healthcare and a sacrifice of the value principles embodied in health relationships between patient and provider. But defenders of HMOs and a larger role for markets argue that managed care allows for a more rational allocation of scarce healthcare resources by minimizing inefficient low-benefit–high-cost care. More individuals receive essential care if inessential care is eliminated. HMOs are also said to encourage non-HMOs to provide lower priced healthcare. (shrink)

Starting from the observation that in morally questionable situations managers tend to act in accordance with a so-called political utilitarianism, this paper seeks to answer the question: why is it important for managers to behave morally? It argues that managers should adopt the deontological notion of self-respect and respect for others as a basic presumption, bearing in mind management’s central role of dealing with people. It is suggested that this is especially so in transition economies. By adopting a deontological perspective, (...) organisations could benefit significantly, although this should not be the primary motivation for acting on this basis. (shrink)

Several have argued that the aims of scientific research are not always independent of social and ethical values. Yet this is often assumed only to have implications for decisions about what is studied, or which research projects are funded, and not for methodological decisions or standards of evidence. Using the case of the recently developed HPV vaccines, we argue that the social aims of research can also play important roles in justifying decisions about (1) how research problems are (...) defined in drug development, (2) evidentiary standards used in testing drug “success”, and (3) clinical trial methodology. As a result, attending to the social aims at stake in particular research contexts will produce more rational methodological decisions as well as more socially relevant science. (shrink)

On the basis of interviews conducted in Bradford, Glasgow and Rotterdam, this article seeks to explore the issue of changing social values as they are affected by or affect the capacity (or incapacity) to participate in community and/or political life. The issue explored is in the context of globalisation and its impact on the communities in question. The aim is to offer some empirical basis for a theological reflection upon the nature and scope of value change and the (...) opportunities and challenges thus posed for publicly engaged Christians. (shrink)

People often make less risky decisions for themselves than others. We examined how people allocated risks (i.e., determining the ratio of uncertain outcomes to certain outcomes) between themselves and others. We also investigated gain (vs. loss) domain and social value orientation as predictors of risk allocations. The results of three experiments demonstrated that participants were more likely to share their risks equally between themselves and others than distribute risk unequally. In the gain (vs. loss) domain, participants allocated fewer (...) risks to themselves and more risks to the other person for unequal risk allocations. Compared to proselfs, prosocials were more likely to allocate risks equally. We also found stronger domain effects on unequal risk allocations for proselfs than for prosocials. Therefore, our findings clarify the effects of risk distribution, domain, and social value orientation on interpersonal allocation decisions and highlight equal risk distribution between oneself and others. (shrink)

BackgroundPromoting the social value of global health research undertaken in resource poor settings has become a key concern in global research ethics. The consideration for benefit sharing, which concerns the elucidation of what if anything, is owed to participants, their communities and host nations that take part in such research, and the obligations of researchers involved, is one of the main strategies used for promoting social value of research. In the last decade however, there has been (...) intense debate within academic bioethics literature seeking to define the benefits, the beneficiaries, and the scope of obligations for providing these benefits. Although this debate may be indicative of willingness at the international level to engage with the responsibilities of researchers involved in global health research, it remains unclear which forms of benefits or beneficiaries should be considered. International and local research ethics guidelines are reviewed here to delineate the guidance they provide.MethodsWe reviewed documents selected from the international compilation of research ethics guidelines by the Office for Human Research Protections under the US Department of Health and Human Services.ResultsAccess to interventions being researched, the provision of unavailable health care, capacity building for individuals and institutions, support to health care systems and access to medical and public health interventions proven effective, are the commonly recommended forms of benefits. The beneficiaries are volunteers, disease or illness affected communities and the population in general. Interestingly however, there is a divide between "global opinion" and the views of particular countries within resource poor settings as made explicit by differences in emphasis regarding the potential benefits and the beneficiaries.ConclusionAlthough in theory benefit sharing is widely accepted as one of the means for promoting the social value of international collaborative health research, there is less agreement amongst major guidelines on the specific responsibilities of researchers over what is ethical in promoting the social value of research. Lack of consensus might have practical implications for efforts aimed at enhancing the social value of global health research undertaken in resource poor settings. Further developments in global research ethics require more reflection, paying attention to the practical realities of implementing the ethical principles in real world context. (shrink)

Many guidelines and commentators endorse the view that clinical research is ethically acceptable only when it has social value, in the sense of collecting data which might be used to improve health. A version of this social value requirement is included in the Declaration of Helsinki and the Nuremberg Code, and is codified in many national research regulations. At the same time, there have been no systematic analyses of why social value is an ethical (...) requirement for clinical research. Recognizing this gap in the literature, recent articles by Alan Wertheimer and David Resnik argue that the extant justifications for the social value requirement are unpersuasive. Both authors conclude, contrary to almost all current guidelines and regulations, that it can be acceptable across a broad range of cases to conduct clinical research which is known prospectively to have no social value. The present article assesses this conclusion by critically evaluating the ethical and policy considerations relevant to the claim that clinical research must have social value. This analysis supports the standard view that social value is an ethical requirement for the vast majority of clinical research studies and should be mandated by applicable guidelines and policies. (shrink)

The 2016 CIOMS International ethical guidelines for health‐related research involving humans states that ‘health‐related research should form an integral part of disaster response’ and that, ‘widespread emergency use [of unproven interventions] with inadequate data collection about patient outcomes must therefore be avoided’ (Guideline 20). This position is defended against two lines of criticism that emerged during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. One holds that desperately ill patients have a moral right to try unvalidated medical interventions (UMIs) and that it is therefore (...) unethical to restrict access to UMIs to the clinical trial context. The second holds that clinical trials in contexts of high‐mortality diseases are morally suspect because equipoise does not exist between a standard of care that offers little prospect of clinical benefit and a UMI that might offer some clinical advantage. (shrink)

Several influential ethical guidelines and frameworks endorse the view that research with human participants is ethically acceptable only when it has “social value,” meaning that it generates knowledge which can be used to benefit society. For example, the Nuremberg Code requires that medical experiments on human beings “yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study”. The Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences guidelines hold that “health-related research with humans... must (...) have social value” or the “prospect of generating the knowledge and the means necessary to protect and promote people’s health” (CIOMS... (shrink)

This article aims to measure both the economic and social value of Tecnocampus, a Science and Technology Park in its region of influence. Our results show that the impact of Tecnocampus has a socioeconomic cost–benefit ratio of 2.39. Measuring the impact of this multifaceted centre requires a diverse approach. Although the methods used are not new, the combination of them presents a novel approach to measure the impact of an institution of this nature. We have measured the economic (...) value with the Input–Output model, including the Social Accounting Matrix. On the other hand, for social value calculations, we have used cost–benefit analysis adding measurements of firm localisation to estimate externality effects. Our main results present an economic value of more than 0.054% of the Catalan GDP, whereas the employment impact represents almost 0.37% of total employment in the region. The total economic multiplier of Tecnocampus activity is estimated to be 1.89. Social value generates an additional 0.50 euros to the multiplier according with our analysis. This additional social value represents an increase of productivity estimated in 20 million euros of operational income for Catalan firms and the creation of seven additional firms in the Maresme region as a result of knowledge spillovers. The social value also includes reduction of over-education caused by a better matching between graduates and enterprises, a more direct application of research, and an increase in consumer surplus. Finally, we discuss the policy implications of our findings to promote investments in this kind of infrastructures. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 7, Page 18-20, July 2011.

The case describes researchers who are seeking ethics guidance on communicating with participants in a phase-1 COVD-19 vaccine trial about FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines (Wilfond, Duenas, and Johnson 2023). The researchers want help choosing among three options they have identified for encouraging participants to obtain one of the authorized vaccines. We argue that research ethics consultants should consider going beyond this question to address another ethics concern the researchers might have overlooked.