Moral Biases Research Articles

Between Languages and Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of Gabrielle Roy (review)

Reviewed by: Between Languages and Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of Gabrielle Roy Mariel O'Neill-Karch (bio) Rosemary Chapman . Between Languages and Cultures: Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of Gabrielle Roy. McGill-Queen's University Press. 2009. 320. $95.00 Manitoba-born Gabrielle Roy was exposed early to both French and English cultures. When she began to write fiction, however, she opted to do so exclusively in French, though many of her novels and short stories are set in Western and Northern Canada. Her best-known novel, Bonheur d'occasion (1945), depicting working-class Montreal, was awarded France's prix Femina, while its English translation, The Tin Flute, garnered the 1947 Governor General's Award. The fact that a 1978 poll conducted among professors of English at Canadian universities selected her as the best Canadian woman novelist (in English) shows how well this major French-Canadian writer is integrated into the Anglo-Canadian canon. Rosemary Chapman, a reader in French and Canadian studies at the University of Nottingham, has provided us with a welcome addition to the study of Roy's work by framing it in a carefully analyzed presentation of ongoing negotiations between competing languages and cultures. The objectives of the book are threefold. The first is to lay the groundwork and to provide a conceptual frame, which draws on a wide range of theoretical and empirical studies of both colonialism and postcolonialism, for a background study of the complexities of the Manitoba education system, where Roy was successively both pupil and teacher, and the changing status of the French language in the province. The second strand, based on archival research, aims to show what precisely Roy would have studied - and taught - in both English and French. The third, and most important strand, is a study of Roy's fiction, in French and in English translation, read from these perspectives. The first chapter, provocatively titled 'The Ambivalences of Learning to Be a Canadian,' provides a close reading of curriculum and, more specifically, of textbooks destined for pupils in both anglophone and francophone schools. Each has cultural and moral biases, typical of the time. For example, The Manitoba Reader, in use from 1911 to 1923, when Roy was in elementary school, contains the following ditty by Robert Louis Stevenson, called 'Foreign Children': [End Page 318] Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,Little Frosty Eskimo,Little Turk or Japanee,Oh don't you wish that you were me? This seemingly innocent sounding poem is indicative of the English curriculum that was meant to instil in the Caucasian child an attitude of racial - and linguistic - superiority. In an attempt to preserve the past, the French curriculum was peppered with references to Catholic teachings as well as to the heroes of New France. Roy was exposed to both curricula, and she quickly observed the differences between the discourse of visiting French Catholic dignitaries, who spoke of the survival of the French-Canadian cause, and that of members of the Manitoba Board of Education, who concentrated their remarks on allegiance to Britain, loyalty to the King, and a Canadian identity that stretched from sea to sea. Roy learned to play the game and seemed, though there is some ambivalence, to be equally at ease in both languages and in both cultures. This ambivalence came to a head when Roy wrote about the atmosphere surrounding Bill 101 to a friend, English-Canadian novelist Joyce Marshall, stating that 'the madness may pass over. Or deposit hatred on both sides, which would last almost forever. I was brought up in much the same atmosphere. I dread it like the worst evil.' For Roy, a long-time resident of Quebec who was not a separatist, it is clear that identity cannot be defined in purely linguistic terms. This meticulously researched and cogently argued book is a signal contribution to the study of Gabrielle Roy's oeuvre in that it reveals, along with an ambivalent attitude to Quebec as well as to Canada, 'a sense of fluidity, a constant attraction toward other identities and experiences, and a rejection of any fixed pattern of identification based solely on language or culture.' This monograph will be of great value to historians of...

No Patient Left Behind: Universal Screening for Palliative Care Needs (526)

Objectives 1. Define and distinguish between bias, prejudice, and judgment in the process of ethical discernment, and identify examples of each. 2. Describe a variety of current models for the relationship between palliative care and clinical ethics consultation in the hospital setting. 3. Gain appreciation of varying strategies to control for unjustified moral biases in ethics consultation. These strategies deploy a range of checks and balances. In many clinical settings ethics consultants and palliative medicine consultants overlap significantly in the patients and families they encounter. Though the role of an ethics consultant differs from that of a palliative care consultant, it is common for palliative care team members to be called upon as participants in the resolution of ethical disputes. Given the particularity and limitations of palliative care experience and expertise, it is possible that palliative care consultants are subject to unrecognized moral biases that impact the final resolutions of clinical-ethical conflicts. This session will draw on the experience of a panel of experts who serve both as palliative medicine and clinical ethics consultants to discuss whether palliative care consultants should concomitantly involve themselves in formal mechanisms of addressing clinical ethical disputes. The panel will use clinical cases to address the problem of dealing with moral biases and discerning when they make ethical consultation problematic. The panel will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a range of models for relating ethics and palliative care mechanisms in the clinical setting with particular focus on how those models accentuate or mitigate unjustified biases. Audience participants will be actively engaged in the discussion.

Social preferences and moral biases

An emerging consensus in economics is that three motives are at work in strategic decisions: distributive preferences, reciprocal preferences and self-interest. An important obstacle, however, has been moral biases: distortions created by self-interest can obscure our measures of social preferences. This paper describes a simple experiment to address this. We compare the decisions of implicated “stakeholders” with those of impartial “spectators.” We find that stakeholders are less inclined to respond to the generosity of others than are spectators. We also clarify a result in previous research [e.g., Offerman, T., 2002. Hurting hurts more than helping helps. European Economic Review 46, 1423–1437] that stakeholders punish unkindness more than they reward kindness. We find that this asymmetry in reciprocity has two sources: an asymmetry in the underlying preference that even impartial spectators display and a moral bias; stakeholders punish more and reward less than spectators. In sum, we find that all three motives have important and significant effects on final allocations.

Moral emotions in predatory and impulsive offenders using implicit measures

To date, no study has systematically investigated moral emotions in impulsive versus predatory psychopathy. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate whether these two subtypes of psychopathy differed in their sense of moral emotions. In the current study, 55 prison inmates completed two implicit computer tasks: one task measuring the association between moral cognitions of good and bad, while the other measured attentional biases regarding moral emotions of guilt and regret. Additionally, two questionnaires were administered, measuring psychopathy, and predatory and impulsive aggression. Results show that the predatory dimension best predicted a lack of moral cognitions of good and bad, while the general construct of psychopathy predicted a lack of guilt. The impulsive dimension was not specifically correlated with any of our measurements on moral cognitions. By investigating moral emotions and attentional biases in predatory and impulsive offenders, this study contributes to a better differentiation between diverse variations of psychopathy. Implications of the current findings in relation to treatment are discussed. (Netherlands Journal of Psychology, 63, 144-155.)

Double Standards: Social Preferences and Moral Biases

A consensus seems to be emerging in economics that at least three motives are at work in many strategic decisions: distributive preferences, reciprocal preferences and self-interest. An important obstacle to this research, however, has been moral biases, i.e., the distortions created by self-interest that can obscure social preferences. Among other things, this has led to disagreement about the relative importance of distributive preferences, reciprocal preferences, or both. This paper describes a simple experiment that decomposes behavior into these three forces and examines their interactions without the confounds that have compromised other designs. We compare the decisions of implicated “stakeholders” with those of impartial “spectators,” who have no stake. Several surprising and interesting results emerge. For example, stakeholders respond less forcefully to kindness and unkindness towards them than do spectators acting on their behalf. We also find an asymmetry in reciprocity: stakeholders punish but do not reward, whereas spectators both reward and punish. This result suggests that the lack of positive reciprocity found in other studies is not due to an asymmetry in underlying reciprocal preferences but rather to a moral bias by stakeholders in the application of that preference. More generally, we find that all three hypothesized motives have important and significant effects on final allocations.

Culture, Religion and ‘the Dialogical Self’: Roots and Character of a Secular Cultural Psychology of Religion

At present, the interest in the psychology of religion is clearly increasing, not only among students and the general public, but also among practitioners and re searchers (cf., for example, publications by the American Psychological Associa tion; e.g., Richards & Bergin 1997,2000; Shafranske 1996; for a review of the larger field, cf. Beizen 1998,2000). To a lesser extent this also applies to cultural psychol ogy: There is certainly more interest in the field than there was, say, ten years ago. Some authors and journals associated with this renewed attention to cultural psy chology also devote attention to religion; although usually not allied with the psy chology of religion, they give examples from religious domains, and certainly no longer treat religion as taboo (cf., e.g., Gergen 1993,1999; Gone etal. 1999; Much & Mahapatra 1995; Popp-Baier 1998; Sampson 1996). And perhaps even more im portant, a cultural psychological approach to the study of religion offers the op portunity to overcome some of the aprioris and moral biases that have dominated and hindered the psychology of religion for too long (especially the notion that religion is part of man's nature, and that it is therefore better, or more healthy or whatever, to be religious than non-religious; cf. Beizen 1999). When we under stand religion as an element of culture, we need concepts and units of analysis that will enable us to investigate the nexus between a certain culture (or cultural con text) and the person, such as activity, action, habitus, and also narrative or 'story'. The theorizing about the 'dialogical self as initiated by Hermans and Kempen may count as a case. Their work which has been well received by the interna tional cultural psychology 'movement' (Hermans 1999a,b; Valsinger 2001) is promising for a cultural psychological analysis of religion. It is particularly inter esting to take a closer look at this body of theory, as it simultaneously provides an opportunity for an analysis of the second type mentioned above: The develop ment of the concept of the dialogical self is inextricably bound up with the history of psychology at the Catholic University of Nijmegen (the Netherlands). The dia logical self may be regarded as a belated result of a much older Dutch initiative to integrate cultural psychology and the psychology of religion, which led to the es tablishment of a department for the psychology of culture and religion at Nij megen in 1956 (although its roots reach back to the founding years of psychology in general in the Netherlands). As well as this, it belatedly catches up with a stand that has been fundamental to all psychologies of religion for a long time: Psycho logical research on religion must be performed from a secular perspective (cf. Beizen 2001). To corroborate these claims, it is necessary to draw substantially on

The Flexible Loyalties of American Actors in the Eighteenth Century

Actors in eighteenth-century America encountered obstacles to their performances in almost every locale. They had to face repressive laws, hard-nosed Quakers, Puritans and Presbyterians, unrelenting legislators, sheriffs clutching warrants and an occasional rioting mob. As a result, they often adapted their theatrical offerings to conform to the religious and moral biases of the local citizenry, presenting them under the guise of concerts, dances, moral lectures, drolls, and histrionic academies. British actors had developed these techniques in order to perform in England in spite of the prohibitory Licensing Act of 1737 and the hostility of Londoners and provincials. Since almost all players in America had perfected their trade by strolling in England, they were prepared to adapt to most unfavorable situations except one: the political unrest surrounding the American Revolution. They did not want to appear as anyone's political enemy before or after the Revolution. It was a difficult task.

Jonson's Sick Society

Because Ben Jonson was a Renaissance man trained in the eloquent manipulation of language and thoroughly attuned to his times, he spoke to his audiences in a language which communicated not only through the ideas expressed but through the particular phrasing of those ideas. He consciously made use of rhetorical devices to achieve specific ends because he lived among and wrote for men schooled in a complex system of rhetoric. And perhaps none of the devices which he used was more tellingly handled than that dealing with man's physical and mental well-being; for through a complex method of equating social and cultural diseases with physiological ills, Jonson created a medical imagery which is inextricably a part of the development of character, the working out of plot, and the maintenance of an underlying theme which is basically the theme of all of his comediesthe deviation of man from the accepted norm. Renaissance man, as Jonson saw him, was often a hypocrite and a fraud; he engaged in chicanery and deceit; he cheated and lied and dissembled. And he was many times a prejudiced and unreasonable fool. Because he fell far short of the reasonable well-balanced creature that his place in the hierarchical scheme of the universe demanded that he be, he was sick; an attempt to cure him was necessary. Jonson's efforts to return him to health took the traditional satiric form of ridicule. The dramatist would hold a mirror up to his deviate and by allowing him to see how he appeared to others, laugh him out of his sickness. That mirror was subsequently to reflect unhealthy practices and attitudes in the individual, the family, the coterie, the economic group, even society as a whole. Jonson's major comedies are, therefore, permeated with medical and health imagery showing the analogy of man's moral and spiritual deviations to physical ills, and the cures to be used for such sufferings. That Jonson was in complete command of his satiric tool is clearly evidenced in his delineation of every segment of each of the little worlds that he created in his comedies; however, perhaps in no circumstance was the dramatist's use of medical and health terminology more significant than in the instances in which it related to the impact of the spiritual and moral biases of one member of a family upon the other members of that group. For example, in Every Man in his Humour, Kitely's humor is his jealousy, He sees the different members of his household and the various characters who visit his family as diseased and carriers of disease. His brother-in-law, Well-bred, makes ... [Kitely's] house here common as a mart/A Theater, a publike receptacle/For giddie humour, and diseased riot. . . .1 But