Distant Others Research Articles

How a single particle simultaneously modifies the physical reality of two distant others: a quantum nonlocality and weak value study

The concept of wave-particle duality, which is a key element of quantum theory, has been remarkably found to manifest itself in several experimental realizations as in the famous double-slit experiment. In this specific case, a single particle seems to travel through two separated slits simultaneously. Nevertheless, it is never possible to measure it in both slits, which naturally appears as a manifestation of the collapse postulate. In this respect, one could as well ask if it is possible to “perceive” the presence of the particle at the two slits simultaneously, once its collapse could be avoided. In this article, we use the recently proposed entanglement mediation protocol to provide a positive answer to this question. It is shown that a photon which behaves like a wave, i.e., which seems to be present in two distant locations at the same time, can modify two existing physical realities in these locations. Calculations of the “weak trace” left by such photon also enforce the validity of the present argumentation.

The Limits of Individual Responsibility: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Reversal of Agent-Act-Consequence

This essay frames the question of responsibility as a problem of agency in relation to the systems and structures of globalization. Responsibility is a shattered (Paul Ricœur) when considered too narrowly as a problem of act, agency, and individual freedom. Constructively, the essay introduces Dietrich Bonhoeffer as the most promising theological dialogue partner for rethinking the meaning of responsibility today. His challenge is to find a way of talking about responsibility that does not collapse into individualism or become ensconced within a univocal logic that subsumes socioeconomic, cultural, and religious differences within itself. The claim is that Bonhoeffer's reflections on the center, boundaries, and limits of responsibility are helpful today to Christian people struggling with an increasingly exhausted concept of responsibility, when linear agent-act-consequence connections to distant others and far away harms are increasingly difficult to trace.

Centripetal and centrifugal forces in the moral circle: Competing constraints on moral learning

The idea of the moral circle pictures the self in the center, surrounded by concentric circles encompassing increasingly distant possible targets of moral concern, including family, local community, nation, all humans, all mammals, all living things including plants, and all things including inanimate objects. The authors develop the idea of two opposing forces in people’s moral circles, with centripetal forces pulling inward, urging greater concern for close others than for distant others, and centrifugal forces pushing outward, resisting “drawing the line” anywhere as a form of prejudice and urging egalitarian concern for all regardless of social distance. Review of the developmental literature shows very early emergence of both moral forces, suggesting at least partly intuitive bases for each. Moral education approaches favoring one force over the other are compared, to show how these forces can provide constraints on moral learning. Finally, the centripetal/centrifugal forces view is applied to current moral debates about empathy and about politics. The authors argue that this view helps us see how intercultural and interpersonal disagreements about morality are based in intrapersonal conflicts shared by all people.

Geodesic based centrality: Unifying the local and the global

A variety of node-level centrality measures, including purely structural measures (such as degree and closeness centrality) and measures incorporating characteristics of actors (such as the Blau's measure of heterogeneity) have been developed to measure a person's access to resources held by others. Each of these node-level measures can be placed on a continuum depending on whether they focus only on ego's direct contacts (e.g. degree centrality and Blau's measure of heterogeneity), or whether they also incorporate connections to others at longer distances in the network (e.g. closeness centrality or betweenness centrality). In this paper we propose generalized measures, where a tuning parameter δ regulates the relative impact of resources held by more close versus more distant others. We first show how, when a specific δ is chosen degree-centrality and reciprocal closeness centrality are two specific instances of this more general measure. We then demonstrate how a similar approach can be applied to node-level measures that incorporate attributes. When more or less weight is given to other nodes at longer distances with specific characteristics, a generalized measure of resource-richness and a generalized measure for diversity among one's connections can be obtained (following Blau's measure of heterogeneity). Finally, we show how this approach can also be applied to betweenness centrality to focus on more local (ego) betweenness or global (Freeman) betweenness. The importance of the choice of δ is illustrated on some classic network datasets.

Locating Animals in Political Philosophy

AbstractWhile animal rights have been a central topic within moral philosophy since the 1970s, it has remained virtually invisible within political philosophy. This article explores two key reasons for the difficulties in locating animals within political philosophy. First, even if animals are seen as having intrinsic moral status, they are often seen as ultimately distant others or strangers, beyond the bounds of human society. Insofar as political philosophy focuses on the governing of a shared social life, animals are seen as falling outside its remit. Second, even if animals are recognized as members of society, they are seen as lacking the capacities or competences said to be essential for politics, and for membership in the demos. We challenge both assumptions. Many animals live and work alongside us, within an interspecies society, and all members of society should have the right to shape decisions about how that society is governed. An interspecies society requires interspecies politics.

Sovereign Power, Biopower, and the Reach of the West in an Age of Diaspora‐Centred Development

AbstractWhy at this particular historical moment has there emerged a rousing interest in the potential contribution of diasporas to the development of migrant sending states and why is this diaspora turn so pervasive throughout the global South? The central premise of this paper is that the rapid ascent of diaspora‐centred development cannot be understood apart from historical developments in the West's approach to governing international spaces. Once predicated upon sovereign power, rule over distant others is increasingly coming to depend upon biopolitical projects which conspire to discipline and normalize the conduct of others at a distance so as to create self‐reliant and resilient market actors. We argue that an age of diaspora‐centred development has emerged as a consequence of this shift and is partly constitutive of it. We develop our argument with reference to Giorgio Agamben's “Homo Sacer” project and in particular the theological genealogy of Western political constructs he presents in his book The Kingdom and the Glory (2011). We provide for illustration profiles of three projects which have played a significant role in birthing and conditioning the current diaspora option: the World Bank's Knowledge for Development Programme (K4D); the US‐based International Diaspora Engagement Alliance (IdEA); and the EU/UN Joint Migration and Development Initiative Migration4Development project (JMDI‐M4D). Drawing upon economic theology, we make a case for construing these projects as elements of the West's emerging Oikonomia after the age of empire.

Mediating the agency of distant others: Proper distance in fair trade communication on Facebook

To introduce economic justice into global trade, fair trade organizations strive to ‘shorten the distance’ between producers and consumers through mediation. This article problematizes the idea of ‘shortening the distance’ through the notion of maintaining the ‘proper distance’ in representing distant others. This perspective is used in narratological analysis of the content that fair trade organizations curate on their Facebook pages to represent Southern producers. The two organizations studied are: (1) Fairtrade Finland, a non-governmental organization (NGO); (2) Pizca del Mundo, a commercial brand in Poland. This article identifies the discursive and narrative forms of mediated agency that are offered to producers. The analysis revealed that Fairtrade Finland utilized Facebook to extend the narrative of producers as active subjects. By using the affordances of Facebook, Pizca del Mundo increased the mediated agency of producers but problematized the maintenance of the proper distance in their representations.

Engagement in a Public Forum: Knowledge, Action, and Cosmopolitanism

Facing challenges to the civic purpose of higher education, some scholars and administrators turn to the rhetoric of engagement. Simultaneously, the political philosophy of cosmopolitanism has gained intellectual favor, advocating openness to the lived experiences of distant others. We articulate linkages between these two discourses in an extended case study, finding that a cosmopolitan ethos of engagement in a rural context can improve (1) understanding among people ordinarily separated by spatialized social-ecological differences, (2) prospects for longer term environmental sustainability, and (3) the visionary potential of collaborative inquiry. Despite globalization of food systems and neoliberal shifts in fishery management, an annual fisheries forum facilitates coalitions that overcome dichotomies between technocratic and local knowledge, extending benefits to fishing communities, academia, and public policy. Iterative and loosely structured capacity building expands informally through affective processes of recognition and care, as decentralized leadership supports collective mobilization toward alternate futures.

Irony in Adam Smith’s Critical Global History

This essay argues that attention to Adam Smith’s ironic framing of his historical narratives in the Wealth of Nations shows his critique of modern commercial society to have been more radical than is generally recognized. These narratives traced the pathologies of European development and the complex chains of causation that linked Smith’s readers—with often destructive and even catastrophic results—to other human beings distant from themselves. While Smith gave reasons to doubt that sympathy for distant others could bring about reform, I argue that he used irony and what he called ridicule to make the book’s British audience aware of the violence of the global commercial system and their place in it as both abettors and lesser victims of its abuses.

Being authentic or being responsible? Food consumption, morality and the presentation of self

Ethical consumption has become a popular topic in the sociology of consumption in recent years. However, extant research on explicit ‘ethical consumption’ and on implicit moralities of consumption has scarcely been linked. In the research on ethical consumption, tensions between an inner self and self-presentation to others have been reported. By examining the case of food consumption, the study asks how the idea of ‘taking responsibility’ as a consumer is negotiated by persons who do not identify strongly with ethical consumption. Theoretically, the article starts from two approaches that have located morality either as internal to the person or as external in communication. It is contended that this opposition is not merely a theoretical one, but empirically present in the accounts of the food consumers studied: While consumers have to present their moral motivation as authentic, they also have to communicate their actions as morally valid according to socially established ‘vocabularies of motive’. On the basis of a study of 25 in-depth interviews with consumers from a mid-sized German town, it is shown that the idea that consumers should ‘take responsibility’ for distant others is just one of several abstract constructions of ‘good’ consumption, and that not living up to this idea may be justified with references to personal taste and practical circumstances. It is argued that via references to authenticity, inner morality is part of the vocabulary of motive, and that these vocabularies frame the presentation of moral motivation as internal.

China and Disaster Governance: Assessing the Domestic Sources of a Global Responsibility

This article examines China’s engagement with global disaster governance. It reveals how international sentiments of humanitarian responsibility—understood as the imperative to help one’s own people as well as distant others—resonate deeply with Chinese political and social thought, with important implications for the Chinese leadership in managing the complex challenges presented by natural disasters. Here, modern conceptions of China’s global responsibilities are traced back to historic Chinese thinking on the nexus between political statecraft and able disaster management, and to its experiences in dealing with catastrophic events like the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake. Together, these have worked to inform China’s contemporary involvement in disaster relief operations within and beyond its borders.

Two Frontiers of Development?: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of Public-Private Partnerships for Women’s Empowerment

Since the economic crisis of the past decade, public development organizations have increasingly partnered with large private corporations to empower women through business. Existing feminist analyses focus on those public-private partnerships (PPPs) that are global, agenda-setting, benchmarking, and service initiatives. However, there are door-to-door initiatives that aim to empower women at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) by turning them into entrepreneurs in the global South. At the same time, and unconnected to these Southern initiatives, PPPs in the global North attempt to empower middle-income women to care for distant others by consuming ethically. While these two kinds of PPPs are each identified in their own literatures as new frontiers in development, thus far they have not been studied together. Using transnational feminist literacy practices as a methodology, this paper reanalyzes existing studies on PPPs in the global South and North that target women’s empowerment and have thus far been overlooked. It finds parallels and linkages between PPPs in the global South and North. The use of transnational feminist literacy practices deepens our understanding of the mechanisms by which market-led, corporate-sponsored, “smart economic” and “win-win-win” development approaches, justified in the name of women’s empowerment, obscure and/or transform structural inequalities.

Branded Solidarity in Fair Trade Communication on Facebook

The objective of fair trade to achieve economic justice through markets depends on establishing, via moral education, bonds of solidarity between Northern consumers and impoverished Southern producers. Moral education is increasingly realised by commercial brands who take advantage of the opportunities offered by social media. This article analyses the discursive construction of solidarity in the brand communication of Pukka (UK) and Pizca del Mundo (Poland) on Facebook. It identifies 3 discourses of solidarity: ‘solidarity through legitimation’, which presents the rationale for solidarity with Southern producers; ‘solidarity through affinity’, which constructs a moral economy between Southern producers and Northern consumers; and ‘solidarity through lifestyle’, which proposes everyday actions that can be undertaken by consumers to support Southern producers. These discourses are employed by the brands to different extents, with Pizca del Mundo attempting to establish a fair trade market in Poland and Pukka with an aim to increase sales of their fair trade products. The article concludes that primarily the discourses of ‘solidarity through legitimation’ and ‘solidarity through affinity’ serve moral education whose objective is to generate sustained commitment towards Southern producers as distant others.

Commentary: A construct divided: prosocial behavior as helping, sharing, and comforting subtypes.

Commentary: A construct divided: prosocial behavior as helping, sharing, and comforting subtypes.

Measuring Up to Distant Others: Expanding and Contracting the Scope of Social Comparison

People’s evaluations of their achievements and outcomes are strongly influenced by their standing relative to targets of comparison. Research suggests that, on the whole, people tend to compare themselves to interpersonally similar others. We qualify this finding by exploring the circumstances under which people compare themselves to dissimilar others — a behavior that entails expanding the breadth of what we term the “comparative scope,” or the range of targets deemed informative for comparison. Drawing on construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2014), which contends that people use mental abstraction to transcend psychological distance, we demonstrate that comparing themselves on high- (versus low-) level dimensions leads people to increase their interest in comparing to socially dissimilar others (Experiments 1 and 2); that high level mindsets result in similar expansion in the range of comparative interest (Experiment 3); that when distal others are used as targets of comparison, high level information exerts relatively more influence on people’s satisfaction with their outcomes (Experiments 4 and 5), and that this relative increase in the salience of high level information is congruent with the hypothesized link between distance and abstraction (Experiment 6). Overall, this research highlights the circumstances under which people compare themselves to distant targets, with significant interpersonal and societal implications.

Lessening the Construction of Otherness

Foreign reporting plays a significant role in shining a light on stories of conflict and hardship that would potentially remain untold, but a reoccurring problem in this practice, particularly when the reportage is about non-Western countries, is the construction of otherness. In the case of Africa, Western reportage has perpetuated particular ideas about racial difference. According to Stuart Hall, this “racialized regime of representation” persisted into the late twentieth century, and while racial stereotypes have been and always are being contested, there is extensive evidence that points to a particular rhetoric when writing about Africa. Focusing on this issue of representation, as well as the role of the individual media practitioner in telling the stories of distant Others, this paper examines the extent to which a methodology involving deeper engagement may provide an effective strategy for subverting negative and dehumanising representations. Specifically, it examines a set of principles for the practice of slow journalism derived from an action research project carried out by the author in Rwanda from 2012 to 2014. The results demonstrate how by taking the time to engage and collaborate with local communities, a richer, more nuanced, and ultimately more culturally responsive form of journalism is possible.

Ambient co-presence: transnational family practices in polymedia environments

In this article, I develop an argument about a new type of mediated co-presence termed ‘ambient co-presence’, which is the peripheral, yet intense awareness of distant others made possible through the affordances of ubiquitous media environments. Drawing on a long-term ethnography of UK-based Filipino migrants and their communication practices with their transnational families, I observe the increasing prevalence of an ‘always on’ culture of ubiquitous connectivity. The functions of a social networking site (SNS) such as the ‘news feed’, combined with the portability of internet-enabled devices and locative services, mean that users can be peripherally, yet constantly aware of the actions and daily rhythms of their peers. This peripheral awareness, which can be pervasive, complements other types of mediated co-presence and has powerful emotional consequences – both positive and negative – for relationships at a distance. Participants with weak relationships reported an increase in conflict especially through opportunities for surveillance. By contrast, those who enjoyed strong relationships associated ambient co-presence with low-level emotional reassurance. In this article, I also observe that ambient co-presence has implications for community and belonging. Notwithstanding the development of online norms that are culturally specific, I argue that the concept of ambient co-presence can have cross-cultural relevance for understanding the consequences of mediated communication.

Concern for close or distant others: The distinction between moral identity and moral inclusion

Research has analyzed the relationship between moral identity—the extent to which people experience their moral character as being central to their self-conception—and the inclusion of other people within one’s own moral circle. These studies underline that the higher the moral identity, the larger the moral circle. However, recent studies have observed that a person with a high moral identity feels morally obliged towards close people and may be intolerant towards distant groups. The aim of the present research was to deepen the differences between moral identity and moral inclusion considering prejudicial attitudes, ethnocentrism, altruism and values. The results indicated that moral identity alone does not imply a reduction in intolerant attitudes. Instead, when moral inclusion is considered, the results even show a positive effect of moral identity internalization on prejudice and ethnocentrism. Moreover, moral identity internalization has an effect on values of benevolence, security, tradition and conformity. Hence, a strong moral identity does not denote an extension of one’s own moral circle. Instead, this variable is related to intolerance towards those groups considered not to be included in one’s own moral community.

Editorial: The Construction of Culture‐Inclusive Approaches in Psychology

Editorial: The Construction of Culture‐Inclusive Approaches in Psychology

Social learning across psychological distance.

While those we learn from are often close to us, more and more our learning environments are shifting to include more distant and dissimilar others. The question we examine in 5 studies is how whom we learn from influences what we learn and how what we learn influences from whom we choose to learn it. In Study 1, we show that social learning, in and of itself, promotes higher level (more abstract) learning than does learning based on one's own direct experience. In Studies 2 and 3, we show that when people learn from and emulate others, they tend to do so at a higher level when learning from a distant model than from a near model. Studies 4 and 5 show that thinking about learning at a higher (compared to a lower) level leads individuals to expand the range of others that they will consider learning from. Study 6 shows that when given an actual choice, people prefer to learn low-level information from near sources and high-level information from distant sources. These results demonstrate a basic link between level of learning and psychological distance in social learning processes.