Core Assumptions Research Articles

Team effectiveness model for science (TEMS): Using a mutual learning shared mindset to design, develop, and sustain science teams.

In this paper, we introduce the Team Effectiveness Model for Science (TEMS) and describe a multiphase set of interventions for forming a new team or developing an existing team. TEMS uses a shared mutual learning mindset as the model's central and guiding element. It shows how team mindset leads to behavior and to results and how this affects the characteristics of effective team functioning. TEMS addresses two related questions: What are the variables that contribute to effective teams? and How do the variables need to be designed to make their relevant contributions? Team models often answer the first question without fully answering the second. By addressing three gaps, TEMS contributes to enhancing science team effectiveness. Gap 1 is the absence of explicit core values, assumptions, and norms that serve as the foundation for developing and maintaining science team effectiveness. Gap 2 is the absence of a process for integrating the science and relationship aspects of a science team. Gap 3 is the absence of team processes and structures that are derived from the team's values, assumptions, and norms. Using TEMS to design new or intervene with existing teams focuses on shifting mindset, developing behavioral skills, and designing processes and structures congruent with the new mindset.

Assuming Access to Professional Advice.

Access to reliable health advice can make the difference between life and death. But good advice is hard to come by. Within the confines of the professional-client or doctor-patient relationship, the First Amendment operates in a way that protects good and sanctions bad advice. Outside of this relationship, however, the traditional protections of the First Amendment prohibit content- and viewpoint discrimination. Good and bad advice are treated as equal. A core assumption of First Amendment theory is the autonomy of speakers and listeners. Another assumption, as this Article demonstrates in the health context, is the availability of access to professional advice. This assumption, however, is erroneous because access to health advice in fact is unevenly distributed.This Article argues that assuming access to professional advice creates indefensible inequality. Lack of access to expert advice puts some listeners at much higher risk than others. Current First Amendment doctrine is largely unproblematic for those who can afford expert advice, and makes expert advice much costlier where health provider access is needed to obtain good advice. Those who lack access must place a higher degree of trust in widely-available information because they have no more reliable alternative. In other words, First Amendment doctrine places a higher burden on those who can least afford expert advice and who are most dependent on experts in public discourse.

Should Institutional Conscientious Objection to Assisted Dying be Accommodated?

The contentious, topical debate about whether faith-based health care organizations should be granted accommodation on the basis of institutional conscientious objection to medical assistance is dying (MAiD) is addressed through a comparative analysis of arguments on both sides of the issue that references such relevant considerations as: claimed ‘moral-authority’, competing rights-based claims, obligations arising from patient welfare principles, formal justice, dissimilarity in consequences, and two illustrative arguments from analogy. The analysis leads to the conclusion that nonconditional accommodation on the basis of institutional conscientious objection to MAiD is not ethically acceptable in Canada. A compromise mechanism, consisting of a suggested set of pragmatic conditions, is proposed that could effectively balance the competing moral responsibilities that arise from this conclusion and a core assumption of the paper, i.e., that some dominant faith-based health institutions can legitimately request, and expect, that provincial/territorial governments pay them a measure of respect in their operational, health-care-delivery decision making because of these institutions’ long history of providing high quality, health care in Canada. It is further suggested that provincial/territorial governments only allow large, publicly funded, faith-based health care organizations to enact a conditional version of accommodation on the basis of institutional conscientious objection to MAiD in circumstances where the organization has entered into a formal agreement with the relevant health department to meet the proposed, compromise conditions (or a relevantly-similar set of conditions).

Intransitive Encounter : Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange by Nan Z. Da

Reviewed by: Intransitive Encounter : Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange by Nan Z. Da Hsuan L. Hsu Intransitive Encounter : Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange. Nan Z. Da. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. $75.00 (cloth); $74.99 (eBook). A Chinese translation of "Rip Van Winkle." A speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson honoring the Burlingame-Seward treaty. A translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life" inscribed on a Mandarin fan. The autobiography and poetry of Yale's first Chinese graduate, who founded a school for Chinese exchange students in Hartford. Judging by the stature of the figures and institutions involved, we might expect that the archive of nineteenth-century literary encounters between China and the United States would have generated lasting networks of influence. However, as Nan Z. Da demonstrates in Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange, these transnational, cross-cultural events were characterized not by cross-pollination but by intransitivity: they were "simultaneously momentous and superficial," exchanges in which nothing is exchanged (2). Although this quality of intransitivity, wherein the content of communication "slides like water off a duck's back," might appear to minimize the value of these Sino-U.S. encounters, Da makes [End Page 587] the persuasive, counterintuitive argument that the very "formality" of these occasions enables us to understand the distinctive way in which literature mediated Sino-U.S. communication (28, 1). Writing against a core assumption of many transnational literary scholars, Da argues that foreign literature was mobilized not for the transmission of new ideas but "as a conceptual shortcut that eased social projects and political enunciation" (3). Rather than take at face value the multitude of diplomatic, historical, and literary historical celebrations of moments of cultural transmission, Da argues that we should attend to the lightness and ephemerality of cross-cultural contact. By closely analyzing the formality and intransitivity inherent in some of the nineteenth century's most frequently cited episodes of transpacific literary encounter, Da models an empirical approach to the study of literary exchange—one that is sensitized to the myriad ways in which other people's literature was mobilized without any investment in transpacific cultural or political transmission (whether in the form of lasting literary influence, cultural assimilation, or political reform). Intransitive Encounter develops a historicized method of reading that blends "surface reading"—with its close attention to material and linguistic surfaces rather than a search for deeper hidden meanings—with clearly articulated insights drawn from sociologists of communication such as Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, and Bruno Latour. Each of the book's six chapters considers a fascinating and carefully curated instance of Sino-U.S. literary encounter. Drawing on an impressive knowledge base that spans theory, sociology, China studies, American studies, Asian American studies, and book history—as well as her unusual (for an Americanist) capacity to rigorously interpret texts as they flow between English and Chinese translations—Da provides compelling accounts of the historical context and theoretical stakes underpinning each of these encounters. Drawing on China's role as a site of intransitivity in Western historiography, Washington Irving's writings about China, and an unattributed Chinese translation of "Rip Van Winkle," chapter one reframes Irving's tale of historical insularity as a staging of unsociability set in a counterfactual "Chinese-Dutch America." Chapter two coins the term "reformality" to resolve the apparent contradiction between the late Emerson's disassociation from political reform and his appearances as a speaker uttering "rote niceties" at public events dedicated to rehearsing Sino-U.S. formalities (64). Da articulates the theorization of influence as an ephemeral transfer of energy that shaped Emerson's thinking about both literary influence and reform (63). Continuing to examine the idea of "mutually reinforcing reform projects" energized by Sino-U.S. encounter, chapter three turns to the figure of Yung Wing: at once "the first Chinese to make a career out of Sino-U.S. relations and institutionalized cultural exchange" and a writer who "had surprisingly little to say about the cultural exchange [he] actually enjoyed" (102). Reading Yung's autobiography alongside his Chinese-language poems, Da offers a nuanced corrective...

Assuming Access to Professional Advice

Access to reliable health advice can make the difference between life and death. But good advice is hard to come by. Within the confines of the professional-client or doctor-patient relationship, the First Amendment operates in a way that protects good and sanctions bad advice. Outside of this relationship, however, the traditional protections of the First Amendment prohibit content- and viewpoint discrimination. Good and bad advice are treated as equal. A core assumption of First Amendment theory is the autonomy of speakers and listeners. Another assumption, as this Article demonstrates in the health context, is the availability of access to professional advice. This assumption, however, is erroneous because access to health advice in fact is unevenly distributed. This Article argues that assuming access to professional advice creates indefensible inequality. Lack of access to expert advice puts some listeners at much higher risk than others. Current First Amendment doctrine is largely unproblematic for those who can afford expert advice, and makes expert advice much costlier where health provider access is needed to obtain good advice. Those who lack access must place a higher degree of trust in widely-available information because they have no more reliable alternative. In other words, First Amendment doctrine places a higher burden on those who can least afford expert advice and who are most dependent on experts in public discourse.

Intrahousehold Resource Allocation and Individual Poverty: Assessing Collective Model Predictions Against Direct Evidence on Sharing

Welfare analyses conducted by policy practitioners around the world usually rely on equivalized or per-capita expenditures and ignore the extent of within-household inequality. Recent advances in the estimation of collective models suggest ways to retrieve the complete sharing process within families using homogeneity assumptions (typically preferences stability upon exclusive goods across individuals or household types) and the observation of exclusive goods. So far, the prediction of these models has not been validated, essentially because intrahousehold allocation is seldom observed. We provide such a validation by leveraging a unique dataset from Bangladesh, which contains information on the fully individualized expenditures of each family member. We also test the core assumption (efficiency) and homogeneity assumptions used for identification. It turns out that the collective model predicts individual resources reasonably well when using clothing, i.e., one of the rare goods commonly assignable to male, female and children in standard expenditure surveys. It also allows identifying poor individuals in non-poor households while the traditional approach understates poverty among the poorest individuals.

Stylistic variation in Hebrew reading tasks

AbstractOne of the core assumptions of the sociolinguistic interview methodology is that read speech tasks may be used to elicit more standard variants from a speaker. This link between reading and standardness, however, is a socially constructed relationship that may differ across cultures. Standard language ideologies in Israel differ from those in well-studied English speaking communities, and exhibit a complex tension between the notions of standardness and correctness. Drawing on a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews of 21 Hebrew speakers, this paper analyzes the variation in two Hebrew morpho-phonological variables. The results show a pattern of use that differs from the cline typically observed, which suggests that Hebrew speakers have a specialized reading register that recruits distinctive stylistic resources. These findings highlight the nature of reading as a stylistic performance that may manifest differently according to local language ideologies.

A Review of Cognitive Dissonance Theory and Its Relevance to Current Social Issues

More than 60 years ago, Cognitive Dissonance Theory was introduced by Leon Festinger (1957), and arguably, this classic theory is still relevant to this day. Festinger described that cognitive dissonance occurs whenever people are confronted with facts that contradict their beliefs, values, and ideas; they will thrive on finding a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort. The theory applies to all social situations involving the formation and changes of human attitude, and it is particularly pertinent to the process of decision-making and problem-solving. The relevance of the theory is still reflected today in the era of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). The information overload and exposure of conflicting opinions on the Internet lead people to a state of mental fatigue where they become confused to seek the right information and may result in social and psychological conflicts. Hence, this review paper attempts to provide an overview of the classic theory by exploring the core assumptions of the theory, causes of dissonance, and the theoretical implications on current social issues. It is expected that the results of the review could provide a sound basis for further practical study within the field of social studies.

Review of Directed motivational currents and language education: Exploring implications for pedagogy; Author: Christine Muir; Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2020; ISBN: 978-1-78892-884-7; Pages: 252

The construct of a directed motivational current (DMC), or “. . . a surge of motivational energy that seemingly picks an individual up and carries them sometimes unimaginable distances” (p. xvi) was introduced into research on motivation in second and foreign language (L2) learning less than a decade ago (e.g., Dörnyei, Ibrahim, & Muir, 2015; Muir & Dörnyei, 2013). Despite being a relative newcomer to the field, the concept has provided an impulse for empirical investigations which have primarily focused on validating its core assumptions and proposed dimensions using largely qualitative methodology (e.g., Safdari & Maftoon, 2007; Zarrinabadi & Tavakoli, 2017). The book Directed Motivational Currents in Language Education: Implications for Pedagogy by Christine Muir is another valuable addition to this line of inquiry and it can be seen in a way as a follow-up to and extension of the monograph Motivational Currents in Language Learning: Frameworks for Focused Interventions that she co-authored with Zoltán Dörnyei and Alastair Henry in 2016. Since I had the opportunity to write a review of this volume for Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching (Pawlak, 2017), I was all the more curious to see how research on DMCs has progressed and what promise it currently holds for L2 pedagogy. Therefore, the moment the publisher contacted me with the suggestion that SSLLT might be a good venue for a review, I immediately jumped on the offer and simply felt compelled to take on this task myself. I have to say from the get-go that the book has lived up to my expectations and, although I might be somewhat skeptical about some of the implications for classroom practice, I have to admit that Christine Muir’s work represents a so-much-needed step forward in the study of DMCs. This certainly cannot too often be said about all the apparently innovative ideas introduced into the domain of second language acquisition research.

Strong representationalism and bodily sensations: Reliable causal covariance and biological function

ABSTRACT Bodily sensations, such as pain, hunger, itches, or sexual feelings, are commonly characterized in terms of their phenomenal character. In order to account for this phenomenal character, many philosophers adopt strong representationalism. According to this view, bodily sensations are essentially and entirely determined by an intentional content related to particular conditions of the body. For example, pain would be nothing more than the representation of actual or potential tissue damage. In order to motivate and justify their view, strong representationalists often appeal to the reliable causal covariance between bodily sensations and certain kinds of bodily conditions or to the corresponding biological function that these bodily sensations are supposed to fulfill. In this paper, I argue on the basis of recent empirical research that arguments from reliable causal covariance and biological function cannot motivate the introduction of corresponding intentional content. In particular, I argue that bodily sensations are caused by a heterogeneous class of physiological and psychological factors and their biological functions are too diverse to be reduced to the representation of a particular bodily condition. Responses are available to strong representationalists, but they either require substantial alterations to their core assumptions or incur a significant empirical burden.

Assessment and treatment planning for schizotypal personality disorder: A metacognitively oriented point of view.

The aim of this study was to pilot test a novel assessment and treatment plan for patients with a schizotypal personality disorder by integrating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.) alternative model of personality disorders, metacognitively oriented psychotherapies, and recovery approaches. I recruited 12 patients diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder. I report results from the global assessment including measures on symptoms, maladaptive traits, Big Five personality traits, schizophrenia proneness, and metacognition. I also describe how I planned treatment to promote an individualized understanding of a person's agenda and recovery. The treatment plans were also evaluated through in-depth qualitative interviews at the end of the intervention. Interviews were analyzed through a phenomenological framework and a computer-aided qualitative analysis software. Assessment results and qualitative interviews highlight the importance of a multilevel, progressive treatment plan aimed at considering the personality functioning from a recovery-oriented, nonpathologizing approach. On 1 hand, an assessment that focuses on both healthy and maladaptive traits fosters a progressive redefinition of the therapeutic agenda. On the other hand, a constant and recursive evaluation of metacognition and personality traits offers a treatment strategy that supports my core assumption that recovery from schizotypal personality disorder is possible. A twofold focus on personality traits and metacognition seems to represent a viable strategy for treating patients with schizotypal personality disorder. A metacognitively oriented rehabilitation may be a flexible, personalized and effective approach toward recovery. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United StatesRethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson

The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United StatesRethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson

Are Moral Intuitions Heritable?

Two prominent theoretical frameworks in moral psychology, Moral Foundations and Dual Process Theory, share a broad foundational assumption that individual differences in human morality are dispositional and in part due to genetic variation. The only published direct test of heritability, however, found little evidence of genetic influences on moral judgments using instrumentation approaches associated with Moral Foundations Theory. This raised questions about one of the core assumptions underpinning intuitionist theories of moral psychology. Here we examine the heritability of moral psychology using the moral dilemmas approach commonly used in Dual Process Theory research. Using such measures, we find consistent and significant evidence of heritability. These findings have important implications not only for understanding which measures do, or do not, tap into the genetically influenced aspects of moral decision-making, but in better establishing the utility and validity of different intuitionist theoretical frameworks and the source of why people differ in those frameworks.

The Old Tune: English Professors on Science and Literature

AbstractIan Duncan’s Human Forms and Devin Griffiths’s Age of Analogy attempt to illuminate inter­actions between evolutionary theories and literature from the late eighteenth century up through the nineteenth century. They do not advance knowledge about this subject. Both authors treat evolution as a semi-fictional construction that owes more to literary inspiration than to the scientific method, and they reduce literature to a battleground for ideological forces. They write using dense terminology, shifting rhetoric, and flights of verbal performance that obscure their claims. In all these respects, they are representative of the field “science and literature”-and particularly of the subfield that studies evolution and literature. I analyze the history of this subfield of literary scholarship and attempt to explain how it developed into its present form. The subfield was founded in the 1980s on the basis of poststructuralist theory and has never escaped the core assumptions of that theory: our minds cannot reach outside culture; our thoughts, behaviors, and ideas about the world are primarily the result of our culture; some cultural traditions are oppressive while others are liberating; and the meaning of texts cannot be determined. Though Duncan and Griffiths represent the highest level of schol­arship on evolution and literature, I argue that they fail their fascinating subject by offering very little that is new within their own field, and nothing that is of value to other fields.

The Anti-Realist Explanation for Science's Success: Semantics, Method and Attitude

Abstract Antirealist explanations for the success of science have been widely discussed up to today and have received several formulations. This makes it rather complex to assess them all. The objective of this paper is to help understand and assess the proposal of an anti-realist explanation for science's success. I show the core assumptions contained in the several anti- realist explanations, how they relate to each other, and which background assumptions are required in order to warrant each position. I argue that, since the many anti-realist explanations are only plausible when maintained conjointly, there is essentially only one anti-realist account to science's success: scientists find successful (and even fertile) theories because they use methods of theory-selection and theory-construction that preserve only successful theories; the fact that these theories prove themselves successful will not be mysterious if it is conjointly assumed that false theories are often empirically successful. This explanation relies on a semantic and a methodological view concerning the probabilistic relation between success and truth, and also on an epistemic stance regarding the limits of explanatory reasoning. The crucial divergence between realist and antirealist accounts of science's success lies in how probable they assess the possibility of a theory to be false and empirically successful. Since the stale-mate between realist and antirealist explanations results from a prior disagreement about the probabilistic connection between success and truth (or the underdetermination thesis), the challenge raised by the antirealist explanation to realism becomes equivalent to the traditional charge that the no-miracles argument is circular.

Experimental evidence for stabilizing selection on virulence in a bacterial pathogen.

The virulence‐transmission trade‐off hypothesis has provided a dominant theoretical basis for predicting pathogen virulence evolution, but empirical tests are rare, particularly at pathogen emergence. The central prediction of this hypothesis is that pathogen fitness is maximized at intermediate virulence due to a trade‐off between infection duration and transmission rate. However, obtaining sufficient numbers of pathogen isolates of contrasting virulence to test the shape of relationships between key pathogen traits, and doing so without the confounds of evolved host protective immunity (as expected at emergence), is challenging. Here, we inoculated 55 isolates of the bacterial pathogen, Mycoplasma gallisepticum, into non‐resistant house finches (Haemorhous mexicanus) from populations that have never been exposed to the disease. Isolates were collected over a 20‐year period from outbreak in disease‐exposed populations of house finches and vary markedly in virulence. We found a positive linear relationship between pathogen virulence and transmission rate to an uninfected sentinel, supporting the core assumption of the trade‐off hypothesis. Further, in support of the key prediction, there was no evidence for directional selection on a quantitative proxy of pathogen virulence and, instead, isolates of intermediate virulence were fittest. Surprisingly, however, the positive relationship between virulence and transmission rate was not underpinned by variation in pathogen load or replication rate as is commonly assumed. Our results indicate that selection favors pathogens of intermediate virulence at disease emergence in a novel host species, even when virulence and transmission are not linked to pathogen load.

Theoretical perspectives on organizations and organizing in a post-growth era

The fundamental assumption we base this Special Issue on is that narrow concepts of growth have become the ruling ideas of this age, entrenched both in everyday life and to a considerable extent in the theoretical thinking and traditions of research conducted by organization and management studies scholars. We explain how tacit (or overt) endorsement of unbridled economic growth (the growth imperative) has pernicious practical effects and how it tends to restrict the intellectual base of the field. We argue that notions of degrowth present scholars with challenges as well as opportunities to reframe core assumptions and develop new directions in theory and research. Envisioning a post-COVID 19 world where societies and organizations can flourish without growth is one of the most difficult tasks facing theorists. We approach this challenge first by discussing the hegemonic properties of growth ideology and second by sketching an alternative political economy as a context for reimagining social and economic relations within planetary capacities in a post-growth era. Drawing on degrowth literature in ecological economics, sociology and political ecology, we identify key principles relevant to processes of organizing for a more just and environmentally sustainable future: frugal abundance, conviviality, care, and open relocalization. We conclude by introducing the three articles we feature in this issue along with some thoughts about theorizing policy and regulatory changes needed to generate transformational change and a future research agenda.

Development and validation of the Good Lives Questionnaire

ABSTRACT The Good Lives Model (GLM) is a framework of rehabilitation when working with individuals who have committed criminal offenses. However, its core assumptions (i.e. that the ‘good life’ is comprised of various universal primary human goods) have not been tested, and there is no standardized measure of these concepts. We used a large community sample (N = 1,309) to develop a measure of primary human goods. Our 100-item draft Good Lives Questionnaire (GLQ) was reduced to 35 items via exploratory principal components analysis (n = 900), with its five-factor structure supported by confirmatory factor analysis (n = 409). This structure runs counter to the existing scholarship related to the GLM, which proposes eleven primary human goods. We found each of our factors – ‘Inner Peace’, ‘Energy and Agency’, ‘Social Connectedness’, ‘Varied Leisure Activities’, and ‘Spirituality’ – to be differentially associated with measures of self-reported aggression, criminality, and delinquency, supporting its validity as a measure of crime- and delinquency-related constructs. They were also associated with measures of psychological wellbeing, personal agency, social connectedness, and personality. We discuss the future validation of the GLQ, as well as its potential utility in clinical and forensic settings. An open access preprint of this paper is available at https://psyarxiv.com/5trj9.

Embodiment and cognitive neuroscience: the forgotten tales

In this paper, I suggest that some tales (or narratives) developed in the literature of embodied and radical embodied cognitive science can contribute to the solution of two longstanding issues in the cognitive neuroscience of perception and action. The two issues are (i) the fundamental problem of perception, or how to bridge the gap between sensations and the environment, and (ii) the fundamental problem of motor control, or how to better characterize the relationship between brain activity and behavior. In both cases, I am going to propose that cognitive neuroscience could incorporate embodied insights—coming from the sensorimotor approach to perception and action, and from ecological psychology—to advance the solution for each issue without the need for abandoning or undergoing a substantial revision of its core assumptions. Namely, cognitive neuroscience could incorporate the forgotten tales of embodiment without undergoing through a complete revolution. In this sense, I am proposing not a call but a farewell to arms.

Terrible choices in the septic child: a response to the PALOH trial round table authors

In this response article, we challenge a core assumption that lies at the centre of a round table discussion regarding the Pharmacogenetics to Avoid Loss of Hearing trial. The round...