Complete Strangers Research Articles

Motivation of emergency medical services volunteers: a study of organized Good Samaritans

BackgroundEarly professional care in emergencies is beneficial in general and its utility has been proven in many studies, particularly in regard to out-of-hospital cardiopulmonary arrest. A person in distress can expect help from two sources: bystanders, including family members, community members, and complete strangers; and professionals, including emergency medical services, first responders, firefighters, and police officers. Emergency Medical Services try to achieve faster first response times through various approaches. Recent technological and social developments have enabled a new form of Emergency Medical Services volunteering, called Organized Good Samaritans, which represents a new layer between occasional volunteers and time-donation volunteers. Organized Good Samaritans are people with a medical background, particularly off-duty medical professionals who are willing and able to provide first aid in emergencies in their vicinity.MethodsA qualitative formalization of technology-enabled Organized Good Samaritans is presented. One thousand eight hundred Israeli National Emergency Medical Services volunteers were surveyed using Clary and Snyder’s Volunteer Functions Inventory instrument. Demographics, professional backgrounds, and volunteering functions of Time-Donation Volunteers and Organized Good Samaritans are compared.ResultsSignificant differences between Organized Good Samaritans and Time Donation Volunteers were found. Demographically, Organized Good Samaritans are older and the percentage of males is higher. Professionally, the percentage of physicians and nurses among Organized Good Samaritans is higher. Motivation measures find that the motivation of Organized Good Samaritans is higher and the order of importance of the volunteering functions differs.ConclusionA clearly identifiable and differently motivated class of emergency services volunteers has emerged. An appropriate information technology infrastructure enables Emergency Medical Services organizations to integrate Organized Good Samaritans into core business processes to shorten response times to emergencies. Organized Good Samaritans provide a volunteering opportunity for highly skilled people unable to be Time-Donation Volunteers. Our findings provide an empirical basis for further research on Organized Good Samaritans integration into Emergency Medical Services operations. Emergency Medical Services administrators can use these findings to establish an Organized Good Samaritans infrastructure and adjust recruitment and retention. This study is limited to one national Emergency Medical Services organization in Israel. Cultural differences can impact results in other countries. Organized Good Samaritans effectiveness should also be studied in terms of response times and medical outcomes.

Life-Debt as Rhetorical Resources for Contractarian Discourse in Daniel Defoe’s Narrative Fictions

ABSTRACT Defoe’s fictional Englishmen turn to the notion of a life-debt as rhetorical resources for spinning fictions generative of reliable contractarian bond/bondage. This article explores what vexes Defoe as tough questions: how to set the conditions of a newfangled tie-up between complete strangers in the New World, or how to adjudicate broken political contracts between the Crown and the outlaws. In the era when the Civil War denaturalised the existing discourse on man’s duty to his monarch, Defoe strives to address early modern crisis of political obligation by reformulating a classical concept of a life-debt into a cement that would hold together precarious social relations into a sustainable form of paternalism. In the thick of their checkered criminal and colonial career, Defoe’s protagonists often slip into the Hobbesian states of nature that present itself in the form of major confrontations with the national sovereign and racial others. Thus, Defoe’s characters reconstruct them into sentimental hierarchies, suggesting a life-debt as a rationale for voluntary subjection. Furthermore, Defoe’s fictional narratives including Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, and Colonel Jack demonstrate how such contractarian discourse necessarily produces fiction-writing moments and rhetorical exemplars that complicate the morality of the author’s writings.

Exploring Care Through Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van: Extending Meanings, Encountering Otherness.

This article explores care relationships as they are represented within "The Lady in the Van," a sequence of interconnected texts by English writer Alan Bennett. By mainly taking the memoirs and film of the same title as primary sources, and in the light of key concepts related to care theory and aging studies, the article shows the extent to which Bennett goes beyond the accustomed portrayal of domestic relationships of care by placing himself as the protagonist of a narrative-and a relationship-in which caring for and about a complete stranger entails coming to terms with both social and personal issues. The article examines the ways in which the relationship of care portrayed by Bennett entails exploring forms of Otherness that both caring and aging unveil, which are related to age, gender, and sexuality, and that in Bennett's narrative end up favoring a dialogue of which the author himself is the main beneficiary.

Distinct affective responses to second- and third-party norm violations

Social norm violations provoke strong emotional reactions that often culminate in punishment of the wrongdoer. This is true not only when we are the victims of the norm violation (second-party), but also when witnessing a complete stranger being victimized (third-party). What remains unclear, however, is whether second- and third-party punishments are associated with different emotions. To address this question, here we examine how subjects respond affectively to both second- and third-party norm violations in an economic game. Our results indicate that while second- and third-parties respond to norm violations by punishing wrongdoers similarly, they report experiencing distinct emotional states as a result of the violation. Specifically, we observed a cross-over interaction between anger and moral outrage depending on the party's context: while anger was more frequently reported for second- than for third-party violations, moral outrage was more evoked by third-party than second-party violations. Disgust and sadness were the most prevalently reported emotions, but their prevalence were unaffected by party contexts. These results indicate that while responses to second- and third-party violations result in similar punishment, they are associated with the expression of distinct affective palettes. Further, our results provide additional evidence that moral outrage is a critical experience in the evaluation of third-party wrongdoings.

Beyond Global Apartheid: Polarization and (De)Radicalisation in Tanzania

This contribution studies polarization and (de)radicalization in Tanzania. It is based on interviews with 175 people conducted between 2012 and 2018. For this contribution the author focuses on one of them, a well-known Muslim leader in Dar es Salaam. The author analyses the interview with him from a Dialogical Self Theory perspective, using Critical Discourse Analysis as a method. The aim of the contribution is to test the fruitfulness of bridging these two approaches in understanding (de)radicalization. The author assumes that both approaches are compatible and complementary. Both are rooted in social constructivism, dialogism and narrative theory. The author concludes that both approaches have strengths and weaknesses. A strength of Dialogical Self Theory is that it conceptualizes the self in society. Critical Discourses Analysis conceptualizes better the society in the self. For understanding social polarization and (de)radicalization, critical discourse analysis has the advantage that it shows that words constitute and are constituted by political agendas. Dialogical Self Theory can better explain that the other is not a complete stranger but already part of me. This makes compromises between quite different positions possible.

Strong, Weak and Invisible Ties: A Relational Perspective on Urban Coexistence

The dichotomy between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ ties is a common theme in sociological scholarship dealing with urban space, yet urban ethnographers have long been describing the prevalence of impersonal relations. Such relations can be described as fleeting encounters between complete strangers, while others – as in the case of ‘nodding’ relationships – are durable and have yet to be conceptualised. The notion of ‘invisible ties’ is proposed as a conceptual handle for studying typical urban relations that complement the established notions of strong and weak ties. Through an empirical study of four residential buildings in Geneva (Switzerland), these ‘invisible ties’ are revealed by means of a systemic approach to social urban life, from which two key actors emerge: ‘socialisers’ and ‘figures’. This research addresses gaps in the literature on interpersonal relations in urban contexts by focusing on the interplay between different types of social ties, encompassing the whole continuum from anonymity to intimacy.

Perceived Skill and Willingness to Address Child Sexual Abuse: Assessing Serbian and Montenegrin Pediatricians

ABSTRACTMost research on pediatricians’ reporting of child sexual abuse (CSA) is based in western countries. Only recently have studies focused on low-income countries. We are the first to survey pediatricians in Serbia and Montenegro on their encounters, competence and beliefs regarding CSA. Pediatricians in Serbia (n = 358) were recruited during a professional conference; pediatricians in Montenegro (n = 121) were sent an online survey. Demographic information was not obtained. Frequencies and percentages were calculated. A quarter of pediatricians in both countries felt competent detecting medical evidence of CSA. Twenty-seven percent in Serbia and 7% in Montenegro felt adequately trained to assess and diagnose CSA. Forty percent believed that CSA occurs predominately in poor, unstable or disorganized families. Twenty-nine percent in Montenegro and 15% in Serbia believed that complete strangers perpetrate CSA. Both Serbian (23%) and Montenegrin (30%) pediatricians were uncomfortable asking questions about possible abuse. One third of pediatricians in both countries were interested in further training. CSA is underreported at a concerning rate in Serbia and Montenegro, yet only a third of pediatricians in both countries were interested in further training. Future studies should focus on barriers to reporting in these regions, to increase awareness and competencies related to CSA.

Seeing me, seeing you: Testing competing accounts of assumed similarity in personality judgments.

A recurrent observation in personality judgments is that individuals' ratings of others' personalities are positively linked to their self-description, and that such "assumed similarity" effects appear to be trait-specific. However, the extent of and explanations for assumed similarity have been addressed only insufficiently. To close this gap, we first provide a meta-analytic summary of evidence on assumed similarity of basic personality traits. More importantly, we then critically test different theoretical accounts of assumed similarity (i.e., lack of information, relation to personal values, and known/spurious similarity) in nine studies. Specifically, we investigated assumed similarity of the HEXACO personality traits among strangers, using tailored experimental tests tackling the different theoretical accounts. Across studies, we consistently found the strongest assumed similarity effects for those traits being most strongly linked to personal values: Honesty-Humility and (albeit somewhat weaker) Openness to Experience. For the remaining traits, no consistent evidence for assumed similarity occurred, even when raters had very limited information about the target person. This contradicts that assumed similarity reflects a lack-of-information effect. In turn, the findings could also neither be accounted for by actual similarity, nor by a shared group membership (i.e., spurious similarity) between rater and target. Overall, our studies support the idea that assumed similarity of basic traits is closely tied to personal values and suggest that this finding is attributable to the high personal relevance of value-related traits. This implies that assumed similarity reflects the assumption that others share basic parts of one's identity, even if these others are complete strangers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Fatherless: A Memoir by Keith Maillard

Reviewed by: Fatherless: A Memoir by Keith Maillard Katie Mitchell (bio) Keith Maillard. Fatherless: A Memoir. Morgantown, W.Va.: West Virginia University Press, 2019. 240 pages. Softcover. $23.99. Keith Maillard. Fatherless: A Memoir. Morgantown, W.Va.: West Virginia University Press, 2019. 240 pages. Softcover. $23.99. Keith Maillard's memoir Fatherless explores the void left when a father is absent and the insatiable curiosity that grows as his son searches for answers. What begins in his Vancouver kitchen with a simple phone call from a stranger to explain that his estranged father has died becomes a meandering journey to discern precisely who this man was and why he was so reluctant to call Maillard his son. The result is a book that is sometimes heartbreaking, often lighthearted, and always honest. An experienced novelist, Maillard manages to examine the roughest edges of his family history with harsh truth without begging for the reader's sympathy. What emerges is a portrait of a man who may not have fulfilled all of his son's needs but who was a vibrant presence in the lives of many others nonetheless. Maillard pieces together the fragments of a father who holds the key to his own history but stands as a complete stranger. He handles this complexity with a narrative voice that is many things at once—curious and angry, reluctant and voracious, soft and brutal. As the pages progress, an experience that begins with bitterness eases to a more tender portrait of a man who lived his life with full and round possibilities and, like the rest of us, didn't always make perfect choices. While the memoir begins in Vancouver, it winds itself through decades of history and miles of territory to land in [End Page 115] Maillard's native West Virginia. The distance between regions and cultures mirrors the distance between the writer and his father. He reconstructs not only the history of a person but also the history of a region and a time that is long gone. What results is a study of working life in the early twentieth century and the people who stem from it. Sketching the lines of his father's character, Maillard fills in the colorful pieces as they are revealed to him in interviews and letters. He searches for answers with a sharp tenacity and interviews his father's old friends, former students, coworkers, fellow Masons, ex-wives, and anyone else who can help him better understand where he comes from. A musician and a tap dancer with a distinct youthful bravado, his father becomes a character the reader approaches with fascination and frustration. The central tension in the book stems from the ways Maillard finds mirrors of his own experiences in his father's life despite his resistance to these similarities. They are both artists, one a writer and one a musician. They both had periods of feeling lost and untethered. And eventually, they both settled into solid lives as their fragmented pieces came together. The story can be heartbreaking at times, but Maillard keeps his distance, even calling his father Gene as he writes, always holding him at arm's length. Readers who crave a memoir with more heart will sometimes become frustrated with his journalistic approach to reconstructing his father's character. Between the lines of this distance, we feel the sting of his unanswered questions. He does not idealize Gene, but instead he leads us to see him as a man made of flaws resulting both from his own making and from the time and region that built him. Maillard's prose refuses to shy away from the truth of his discoveries, but never once does he paint this portrait with oversentimentality. The journalistic style becomes less [End Page 116] apparent as the pages progress, and we see a rejected son reckon with the rejection of a father who didn't measure up to expectations. What is unsaid often speaks louder than what is directly stated in this memoir, and Maillard does not blur the edges with description and softness. In the end, we are left with an honest record of a forsaken son coming to terms with his troubling...

The Social Anthropology of Rage and Its Psychotherapeutic Challenge

Rage – a sudden outburst of explosive and often destructive anger – is part of the human condition. Yet it is one that often hits the headlines in the context of celebrity outburst, domestic violence and road rage. Whether this violent anger is directed at complete strangers or people within our social spheres, it has developed its own terminology – ‘losing one’s cool, air rage, road rage, trolley rage are all increasingly accepted as a part of the pressures of modern day. This essay offers case studies which supply new socio-psychological and therapeutic insights, based on social-anthropological data. The author goes on to explore the triggers and characteristics associated with rage, from the perspective of both perpetrator and victim. He argues that there are evolutionary factors behind the physiological manifestations of rage – conflicts between our animal instincts and our need to function as a human, in a group. Using the analogy of a volcano to capture the intense energy and unpredictability of episodes of sudden rage, he puts forward several theories for the increasing prevalence of rage in modern society. His social phenomenological research suggests that the incidence of rage is significantly higher in densely populated, industrialized and computerized societies. Drawing on his own in-depth study, carried out in Switzerland, he estimates that around of a quarter of the population are prone to rage attacks – a startlingly high proportion. Itten argues that the therapeutic practitioner has a clear role to play in helping rage sufferers to devise positive strategies to manage their explosive emotions, developing routes out of rage. An open and frank appraisal of the ugly and destructive nature of sudden rage is the starting point, working with sufferers to build a deeper sense of self-esteem and self-confidence, so that they are de-sensitized and learn strategies to defuse anger and cope with situations which previously might have resulted in another explosion.

Obligation at zero acquaintance.

Social obligation begins far before people establish explicit cooperative relationships. Research on trust suggests that people feel obligated to trust other people even at zero acquaintance, thus trusting complete strangers even though they privately expect to be exploited. Such obligations promote mutually beneficial behavior among strangers and likely help people build goodwill needed for more long-lasting relationships.

Nursing as Love: A Hermeneutical Phenomenological Study of Creative Thought Within Nursing

For 35 years, the researcher has observed nurses in practice: when caring for complete strangers and performing acts of caring in the most intimate way. Compassion, duty to act, caring, tenderness, and love are qualities associated with the loving care that nurses provide. The word, love, is seldomly used in nursing schools and in nursing practice. However, the love exhibited daily by nurses for patients may not be adequately described as love. This study describes love, its attributes, and its connection to nursing as compared to when nursing was a trained profession, based on the duty to care.

Welcome from the Editors

Welcome from the Editors

Walkie-Talkies, Wandering, and Sonic Intimacy

Walkie-Talkies, Wandering, and Sonic Intimacy

Making decisions for oneself and others: How regulatory focus influences the ‘decision maker role effect’ for intertemporal choices

We examined self-other differences in an intertemporal choice context, investigating whether choices vary according to different types of regulatory focus. In Study 1, the role of chronic regulatory focus on self-other intertemporal choice was investigated. In Study 2, we designed a causal chain of studies (Study 2a and 2b) to further examine the role of situational regulatory focus in the context of self-other intertemporal choice. Overall, we found a self-other difference for intertemporal choice: individuals who make choices for themselves or for an intimate friend prefer later and larger (LL) rewards than those making choices for a complete stranger, thus demonstrating a ‘decision maker role effect’. Secondly, regardless of chronic or induced regulatory focus, participants with a promotion focus preferred more immediate rewards, while participants with a prevention focus preferred deferred rewards. The self-other difference in intertemporal choice was manifested differently for those holding a chronic promotion focus versus those holding a chronic prevention focus; situationally induced regulatory focus, on the other hand, was found to play a mediating role in self-other intertemporal choice.

Liquidity and attachment in the mobile hookup culture. A comparative study of contrasted interactional patterns in the main uses of Grindr and Tinder

ABSTRACTThis study compares the interactional practices for the main types of uses of the mobile dating applications Grindr and Tinder. The analysis shows that in both cases, a majority of users share a similar orientation towards a linguistic ideology regarding ordinary conversation as a social institution, as topic-based, as allowing individuals to share and update knowledge so as to enable rapport and intimacy. However, Grindr and Tinder users take almost opposite conversational stances regarding the organization of casual hookups as sexual, one-off encounters with strangers. While many gay Grindr users have to chat to organize quick sexual connections, they become wary of the way their electronic conversations might waylay them into more personal relationships and they try to prevent this by developing an interactional genre made of laconic, fact-checking and very short exchanges. On the other hand, many heterosexual users on Tinder are looking to achieve topically-rich chat conversations. Their interactional dilemma, then, is the achievement of such topically-rich conversation, but with complete strangers. The interaction-oriented comparison provides a more detailed and subtle perspective of the alleged ‘liquefaction’ of romantic relationships into a casual hookup culture through the use of location-aware mobile dating applications.

Why People Trust: Solved Puzzles and Open Mysteries

Interpersonal trust is essential for a productive and rewarding social life, yet it presents many theoretical puzzles, particularly among strangers, because its existence violates the rational-actor model. Here, we focus on two mysteries. One is cognitive, focusing on why people cynically underestimate how trustworthy their peers are. The second is behavioral, focusing on why so many people trust others, including complete strangers, given their social cynicism and aversion to taking risks. Regarding the behavioral mystery, we adopt a normative approach, proposing that people trust at unexpectedly high rates because they feel a social obligation to do so. This approach implies that trust may be more about the behavior itself than about downstream consequences, that people are not “giving” so much as “giving in” to social pressures, and that their choices may have more to do with emotion than calculation.

Infants discriminate the source of social touch at stroking speeds eliciting maximal firing rates in CT-fibers

The evaluation of interpersonal touch is heavily influenced by its source. For example, a gentle stroke from a loved one is generally more pleasant than the same tactile stimulation from a complete stranger. Our study tested the early ontogenetic roots of humans’ sensitivity to the source of interpersonal touch. We measured the heart rate of three groups of nine-month-olds while their legs were stroked with a brush. The participants were stroked at a different speed in each group (0.3 cm/s, 3 cm/s, 30 cm/s). Depending on the Identity condition (stranger vs. parent), the person who acted as if she was stroking the infant’s leg was either an unfamiliar experimenter or the participant’s caregiver. In fact, the stimulation was always delivered by a second experimenter blind to the Identity condition. Infants’ heart rate decreased more in reaction to strokes when their caregiver rather than a stranger acted as the source of the touch. This effect was found only for tactile stimulations whose velocity (3 cm/s) is known to elicit maximal mean firing rates in a class of afferents named C-tactile fibers (CTs). Thus, the infants’ reaction to touch is modulated not just by its mechanical properties but also by its social source.

A Descriptive Study to Assess the Internet Addiction and its Impact on Psychosocial Health among Adolescents

Internet is largely seen as one of the world's biggest technology platform. Easy and continuous access to the Internet provides tremendous opportunities for adolescent socialization, allowing them to connect with their peers as well as with complete strangers from across the world. It is a source of knowledge, entertainment, brand building, commerce, education and much more. However, Internet, which has over the years changed the way we live, work and communicates, also has a darker side: Addiction. Internet addiction has been a headache for several countries. The use of Internet, especially online social networks, is fast rising in India. Number of Internet users in Asia is 5, 29, 701, 704. Though Asia has only 16% of populations of the world, 37.6% of total internet users are Asian which is great. Of them around 60 million are from India. India is 3rd in Asia and 4th in world. Impact of ionternet addiction leads to feelings of isolation, depression and anxiety. “A descriptive study to assess the internet addiction and its impact on psychosocial health among adolescents at selected schools of district Mohali, Punjab.” Total 100 adolescents of age 15–18 years were taken by using simple random sampling technique. The level of internet addiction was assessed by using Standardized rating scale ie. Internet addiction test and self-structured rating scale was used to assess impact of internet addiction on psychosocial health among adolescents. Collected data was analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed that majority of adolescents had moderate level of internet addiction i.e. 89(89%), and had moderate impact of internet addiction on psychosocial health among adolescents i.e. 85(85%).

The Guy

The Guy Daniel T. Durbin (bio) It had been a busy week and the return trip from Moscow, Idaho (pronounced “mos-cō” not “mos-cow,” though the locals tend to think of it as a Marxist stronghold) was always a dog-leg of flights. Worn and flight-weary, I wanted just a small sip of wine. I asked the flight attendant how much a small cup of the red would cost me. “That’s eight dollars.” On my worst day in university hell, I could never justify eight dollars for the dreck they serve on airplanes. I wasn’t going to tell her that. So, I smiled and said, “No thanks. I think I’m fine.” About twenty minutes later, the attendant returned to my seat from the back of the plane, a big smile lighting up her face, a plastic cup and a bottle of wine in her hands. “Are you working for that African American man back there? Are you his caretaker or something?” I looked back several rows. We’d been separated on this flight. But there he was, the man with the gentlest eyes I’d ever seen, an attendant kneeling in the aisle, a second one bent over his seat, all three laughing, talking, having a great time. “Well, yeah, you could say that.” She put the cup in my hand and filled it to the brim with wine. “You enjoy this and, when you’re done, you just call me back. Have as much wine as you want. Your friend is so great. We just love him. He played baseball or something, didn’t he?” “Yeah, he was a pretty good player in his day.” I held my cup of wine and turned around to see the party once again. Their laughter rang up and down the aisle. He shot me a quick glance, smiled and kept right on telling stories. “Yup,” I thought. “That’s Mudcat Grant.” Now, if you have never been a true baseball fan, then you will never get the story I have to tell. Being a middle-aged or older longtime acolyte of the game, having a room filled with autographed baseball memorabilia, or being able [End Page 28] to drop Tony Lazzeri’s lifetime triples into casual conversation with complete strangers does not make you a true baseball fan. At best, you are the ghost of a true baseball fan. Anyone who has been one knows that the true baseball fan is roughly 8–12 years of age and is not a fan of baseball. The true baseball fan is an acolyte of The Team. On that team, the true fan idolizes The Guy. An older and somewhat jaded sports scholar might aver that this should be “The Player.” But, in the kid world of true baseball fandom, this was never “The Player.” It was always “The Guy.” I was once a true baseball fan. For me, The Team was the forever frustrating and underachieving 1970 Oakland A’s. The A’s had moved to Oakland in 1968, their Kelly-green uniforms and white shoes gaudily lighting up the bay and a fleet of young talent stocking up their minor league teams. The 1970 “Swingin’ A’s” had the core set of players who would go on to become one of baseball’s great dynasties in the next half decade. But, in 1970, the entire organization was hopelessly self-destructive. A series of unnecessary mishaps kept the team firmly entrenched in second place, far behind the aging Minnesota Twins. Finding The Guy on that team was especially challenging. Reggie Jackson held out through spring training and entered the season ticked off at owner Charlie Finley (whose penny-pinching was already legendary). As a consequence, Reggie had perhaps the worst season of his long career. Joe Rudi, the steady, soon-to-be star left fielder had his fingers gruesomely crushed by an errant pitch and was out for half the season. Hall-of-Famer Rollie Fingers, two years from being a handle-bar mustachioed relief specialist, was still being uncomfortably forced into starting duties. In his infinite baseball wisdom, Finley had a revolving door of three, sometimes four, periodically...