Well-meaning People Research Articles

Mistakes That Heterosexual People Make When Trying to Appear Non-Prejudiced

ABSTRACT In two studies, lesbians, gay men and bisexuals were queried concerning mistakes that well-meaning heterosexual people have made when interacting with them. In qualitative, open-ended research, we determined that the most common mistakes concerned heterosexuals' pointing out that they know someone who is gay, emphasizing their lack of prejudice, and relying on stereotypes about gays. Following up with a quantitative, close-ended questionnaire, we determined that the mistakes respondents experienced most often involved heterosexuals (a) relying on stereotypes and (b) ignoring gay issues; the most annoying mistakes were heterosexuals (a) using subtle prejudicial language and (b) not owning up to their discomfort with gay issues. We used two theoretical perspectives, shared reality theory and the contact hypothesis, to analyze the quantitative responses. Implications for intergroup relationships between heterosexual people and gay people are discussed.

Have Gavel, will travel: Dispute resolution's innocents abroad

AbstractAn increasing number of U.S.‐based conflict resolution providers and educators are now also working outside the country, carrying with them, in some sense, the mantle of “conflict resolution expert.” But it is possible that some well‐meaning people—though genuine experts in a given area—may inadvertently cause harm to persons and parties for whose culture, language, or circumstances these professionals' U.S. experience has left them inadequately prepared. This article describes how a group of professionals with substantial experience working outside the United States analyzed the dangers; it also makes suggestions for the “innocent abroad”.

Politics, Ethics, and Corporate Policy: U.S. Corporations' 1986 Position Papers on South Africa

This article analyzes 48 position papers U.S. corporations distributed in 1986 to define and defend their presence in South under aparthid. As public statements about one of the most difficult business and ethical issues ever faced by U.S. corporations, these papers constitute a special moment in the history of business writing. Unique in its economic, political, and ethical complexity, this situation required corporations to depart from traditional ways of making decisions and traditional ways of writing about those decisions. These corporations, all but one signatories to the Sullivan Principles, evolved a unique structure that allowed them to enter the debate on divestiture, yet minimize their rhetorical exposure. The limitations inherent in that new pattern became evident, however, in the mid-1980s as the debate became more intense and frustrating for executives and their corporations. The essay also examines the pivotal role of Leon Sullivan, the African American minister who organized these corpo rations in their anti apartheid efforts, monitored their efforts, pushed them to do more, served as their rhetorical point man in opposition to divestiture, and helped define them as a discourse community. Keywords: Corporate Policy, Ethics, History of Business Communication, South African Business Communication One of the most complex and difficult ethical issues faced by many U.S. corporations in the 1980s was whether to continue operations in South Africa, a decision made even more complex and political by pressure from individuals and organizations who believed that the mere presence of U.S. corporations in South supported that country's government and its unjust apartheid policies. [1] Debate on the issue became a high-profile, highly-emotional public issue. In response to these pressures, many of the companies who conducted business in South produced position papers to describe their operations and their reasons for maintaining operations there. This paper analyzes 48 of these position papers written and distributed by U.S. corporations shortly before or during 1986. The pressures on U.S. corporations doing business in South were at their height in 1986. As resistance to apartheid and violence in South increased, the South African government responded by declaring a state of emergency, which only served to escalate the tension and violence. In the United States, the debate over whether U.S.-based multinational corporations should divest themselves of their South African holdings intensified. Influential, well-meaning people such as religious leaders, university presidents, and politicians disagreed over what was the most moral and effective means of exerting pressure on the South African government to end its apartheid policies. Should U.S. corporations be asked or even forced to pull out of South thus isolating the government by denying it essential goods and services? Or should corporations continue to operate in South and work against apartheid by hiring black African employees, training them to become technicians and managers, providing th em with better housing and educational opportunities--in short, undercutting apartheid by creating growing enclaves of economic and personal equality within that repressive system? Should the United States government take a more active role in its opposition to apartheid by imposing economic and political sanctions? The debate raged in meetings of corporate boards, university trustees, church leaders, state legislatures, and congressional committees; and it spilled into the streets with demonstrations in Washington, on Wall Street, and on college and university campuses. [2] Many of those U.S. corporations who chose to stay in South were signatories to the Statement of Principles of U.S. Firms with Affiliates in the Republic of South Africa and the organization created to monitor the progress of these corporations in achieving the goals inherent in those principles. …

Science on the Bridge

Science on the Bridge

Leisure, Diversity and Social Justice

Issues of justice and injustice have only been tangentially addressed in the leisure literature. The justice may provide an important conceptual umbrella for leisure scholars to connect a range of research] scholarly endeavors including issues related to gender, race/ethnicity, social class, disability, age, and sexual orientation. This paper explores the viability of the social justice paradigm for leisure research by focusing on the work of Young (1990) in Justice and the Politics of Difference. According to Young, many historical discussions of justice are grounded in a distributive paradigm that emphasizes instrumental principles embedded in individualism, accrual of goods/resources, and a competitive marketplace ethos of survival of the fittest. Thus, the good has been defined within parameters of the possession and consumption of material goods and the acquisition of pleasure and comfortable lifestyles. Many post modern theories of justice, however, move beyond the distributive paradigm to assess the institutional conditions and arrangements that explain particular distributions of wealth, power, and status that exist among historically disenfranchised populations including women, people of color, individuals with disabilities, days and lesbians, the poor, and the elderly: As doers and actors we seek to promote many values of social justice in addition to fairness in the distribution of goods: learning and using satisfying and expansive skills in socially recognized settings; participating in forming and running institutions, and receiving recognition for such participation; playing and communicating with others, and expressing our experience, feelings, and perspective on social life in contexts where others can listen. (Young, 1990, p. 37) Social justice, then, concerns the degree to which societal institutions promote the conditions necessary for the realization of these values. Injustice is defined by the extent to which the pursuit of such values are inhibited by the oppressive institutional constraints and barriers that inhibit self determination and growth. Contemporary notions of justice and injustice thus move beyond the overt forms of racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and ageism toward uncovering the more covert and systemic properties of injustice that are embedded in everyday interaction (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1998; Young, 1990): Some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanism-in short, the normal processes of everyday life. (Young, 1990, p. 41) Although the social, cultural, historical and political histories of oppressed groups differ, there are five conditions that they share in common: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Exploitation refers to the control and domination of one group over the economic and social resources of less powerful groups. Issues about who gets which jobs, how that work is compensated, and what types of work are left for particular groups form the central dimension of economic exploitation. Not only is the distribution of types of labor important, but so to are the structural, societal features that continue to constrain the kinds of opportunities available to people of difference. Marginalization and powerlessness refer to the extent to which groups of people are expelled from useful participation in social (Young, p. 53). Marginalization and powerlessness may take on many forms including material deprivation as well as exclusion from decision-making, opportunities for personal and workplace development, and a range of life choices. Even if marginals were provided a comfortable material life within institutions that respected their freedom and dignity, injustice of marginality would remain in the form of uselessness, boredom, and lack of respect (Young, p. …

Examining the debate on the use of medical marijuana.

The opium poppy and the coca leaf offer useful perspectives on the current controversies over medical marijuana. In both cases, purified synthetic analogues of biologically active components of ancient folk remedies have become medical mainstays without undermining efforts to reduce nonmedical drug use. A decade ago, a campaign strove to legalize heroin for the compassionate treatment of pain in terminally ill patients. Like the current campaign to legalize medical marijuana, many well-meaning people supported this effort. The campaign for medical heroin was stopped by science when double-blind studies showed that heroin offered no benefits over the standard opioid analgesics in the treatment of severe cancer pain. Scientific medicine requires purified chemicals in carefully controlled doses without contaminating toxic substances. That a doctor would one day write a prescription for leaves to be burned is unimaginable. The Controlled Substances Act and international treaties limit the use of abused drugs or medicines. In contrast to smoked marijuana, specific chemicals in marijuana or, more likely, synthetic analogues, may prove to be of benefit to some patients with specific illnesses. Most opponents of medical use of smoked marijuana are not hostile to the medical use of purified synthetic analogues or even synthetic tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which has been available in the United States for prescription by any licensed doctor since 1985. In contrast, most supporters of smoked marijuana are hostile to the use of purified chemicals from marijuana, insisting that only smoked marijuana leaves be used as "medicine," revealing clearly that their motivation is not scientific medicine but the back door legalization of marijuana.

The Great Depression: an international disaster of perverse economic policies

The Great Depression was the worst economic catastrophe in modern history. Not only did it cause massive worldwide unemployment, but it also led to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, World War II in Europe, and the tragic deaths of tens of millions of people. This book describes the sequence of policy errors committed by powerful, well-meaning people in several countries, which, in combination with the gold standard in place at the time, caused the disaster. In addition, it details attempts to reduce unemployment in the United States by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and in Germany by Hitler's National Socialist economic policies.A comprehensive economic and historical explanation of the events pertaining to the Depression, this book begins by describing the economic setting in the major industrialized countries during the 1920s and the gold standard that linked theory economies together. It then discusses the triggering event that started the economic decline--the Federal Reserve's credit tightening in reaction to perceived overspeculation in the U.S. stock market. The policy bungling that transformed the recession into the Great Depression is detailed: Smoot Hawley, the Federal Reserve's disastrous adherence to the real bills doctrine, and Hoover's 1932 tax hike. This is followed by a detailed description of the New Deal's shortcomings in trying to end the Depression, along with a discussion of the National Socialist economic programs in Germany. Finally, the factors that ended the Depression are examined.This book will appeal to economists, historians, and those interested in business conditions who would like to know more about the causes and consequences of the Great Depression. It will be particularly useful as a supplementary text in economic history courses.Thomas E. Hall and J. David Ferguson are both Professors of Economics, Miami University.

The Ethics of Excess

The more I reflect on the health care system, the more I am struck by the divergence between the medical ethics of the individual and the social ethics of the health care system. We spend volumes agonizing and debating informed consent, autonomy, discontinuation of life surf port systems, and the like, but little time debating the ethics of the system. We myopically obsess about individual trees while the whole forest is being clear cut. Take my state, Colorado. Almost every hospital has an ethics committee, but no one asks ethical questions of the entire system. Over 50 percent of our hospital beds are empty; we have twenty-one hospitals doing open heart surgery, and three doing transplants (three times what is needed). We have for (for 3.5 million people) more MRI machines than Canada, and far too many specialists. This, in a state in which 450,000 citizens are uninsured and another 400,000 underinsured. We have a large excess capacity in neonatology, yet 21 percent of our women give birth without adequate prenatal care. Excess capacity sits cheek-by-jowl with great need. California is estimated to have over 400 MRI machines, far beyond any reasonable need, while 5 million of its citizens are uninsured. Half-empty hospitals in Denver hire marketing people to run expensive TV campaigns to get a market share from their neighboring half-empty hospitals, while many children go without vaccinations. Our health science center is constantly practicing supercolider medicine and looking for the next Lorenzo's oil, while in its own backyard large numbers of ordinary people lack basic health care. When asked, the well-meaning people who run these institutions all plead innocent and tell you of the good they are doing for their state. Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads `not guilty,' observed a wise friend. We all have a duty to the community as well as to the individual, yet we are trustees of a painfully inadequate system. The excesses in any one part of it are directly related to the inadequacies in another part. An individual institution may have a wonderful and thoughtful ethics committee, but the system itself does a poor job of producing health for the society. In no category (except life expectancy at age eighty) are we as healthy as citizens in Europe, or Great Britain, or Canada, or Japan. The inability to ask the larger questions of health policy and the refusal to adopt a larger ethical vision has taken a serious toll on our nation's health. Paul Starr, in his book The Social Transformation of Medicine, discusses the victory of allopathic health care over public health and the price society paid for relying so heavily on the least effective system of maximizing the health of the public. The excessive focus on the individual to the exclusion of the society caused us to train too many specialists and too few generalists. …

Colombian Street Cidldren: Their Mental Health and How they Can be Served

Children living without parents, managing somehow to survive, are common throughout Latin America. UNICEF has warned that personal and political tragedy looms in Latin America, where, it has been estimated, there are 40 million [1]. Yet, perceptions and descriptions of these children are varied and often contradictory. The characteristics of these children and policies that might be beneficial to them are the topic of this paper. In 1984 1 was fortunate to be a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia and to have an opportunity to examine the lives of street children in a systematic way. As part of my Fulbright work, I formed a research team with 2 Colombian psychologists and 12 graduate students in psychology from a Colombian university. Our first task was to get as close as possible to the street children in order to gain their confidence and thus learn about their lives. Initially we made contact through an open-door program called Bosconia that gives the children lunch and medical care. As we became acquainted with the children, we began to meet them on their own turf, despite admonitions from many well-meaning people that this would be dangerous. We spent time with the children as they ate, played, worked, and even as they slept so that we could share with them the variety of experiences they had as they moved around the city, living as they normally did. The second task, after we got to know the children, was to administer to 56 of them a series of psychological tests that gave us further

Contrastive Rhetoric: An American Writing Teacher in China

A recent delegation of American businessmen, trying to establish trade contacts in China, presented their hosts with generous gifts of cheddar cheese. The Americans were clearly unaware that the Chinese consider cheese disgusting and inedible, not fit for consumption. Such missteps and social blunders are all too common in Chinese-American interactions. Well-meaning people of good will all too often offend or confuse each other, and the causes are generally more complex than differences in taste. Rather, they are the result of speakers coming from entirely different cultures and approaching each other with entirely different systems of rhetoric. If we define rhetoric as a way of thinking about the relationships that exist among speaker, subject matter, purpose, and audience, then we might think of rhetoric as the verbal equivalent of ecology, the study of the relationships that exist between an organism and its environment. Both rhetoric and ecology are disciplines that emphasize the inescapable and, to a great extent, decisive influence of local conditions.

Nikolaj Chernyshevsky and the philosophy of realism in nineteenth-century Russian aesthetics

Among the thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century whom Soviet Marxists call "the Russian revolutionary democrats" Nikolaj Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), Nikolaj Aleksandrovich Dobroljubov (1836-1861), Dmitrij Ivanovich Pisarev (1840?1868), and others ? none is more extravagantly praised in the USSR or more frequently ridiculed in the West than Cherny shevsky. According to the standard Soviet view, Chernyshevsky's master's thesis 'The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality' (1855) ? inaugurated a new era in the history of thought that carried not only the philosophy of art but philosophy in general to unprecedented heights. Something on the order of six hundred Soviet university dissertations have been devoted to Chernyshevsky's life and works, and more are being produced each year. In the Soviet philosophical pantheon, Chernyshevsky is firmly enshrined as the third greatest thinker of all time, surpassed in intellectual talent and achieve ment only by Marx and Lenin. According to the common Western view, on the other hand, Chernyshevsky might well be considered a candidate for third worst thinker of all time, outdone in philosophical fatuousness only by Pisarev and Dobroljubov. Chernyshevsky's 'realist' views on art as well as his opinions on other subjects, it is widely held outside the USSR, could simply be dismissed as foolish were it not for the fact that they have been so damag ing to Russian culture. If the Soviet picture of the philosophical significance of Chernyshevsky and his fellow realists is ludicrously overdrawn, we must entertain the possi bility that the Western view is also inaccurate. It is a common tendency in intellectual life ? one both Newton and Hegel would have understood ? to react against an extreme view by embracing its opposite, at the cost of a truth that lies somewhere in between. The case of Chernyshevsky and his colleagues may be one of those in which a middling assessment is both more correct and more productive. Certainly there is substantial evidence that the realists' philosophy was taken seriously by many able and well-meaning people in the 1850s and later, and furthermore that it stimulated certain creative energies in Russian culture. Six hundred dissertations can scarcely be sustained

Triage 81

In recent years a number of disasters have been handled less than perfectly. Large numbers of patients are sent to the medical facility with little or no warning. Hysterical relatives and friends also arrive, plus the media and curiosity seekers. Well-meaning volunteers and off-duty medical people begin to fill in where each individual thinks he or she fits in best. Soon the rooms and the corridors of the hospital are filled with people lying, standing and sitting. All sorts of treatments are attempted, orders for assistance go unanswered and general confusion reigns.For many years the military have claimed leading roles in disaster care, giving and taking orders more readily than do most groups of medical civilians. It is the nature of their business to plan for disaster. They take the time to practice and may even be able to test their concepts during wartime.Primary to all these plans is triage or sorting with “the object being to provide preferential treatment for those who could be attended readily and returned to battle, leaving aside those with more complex injuries until either they could be transported or time became available” (1).Watt writes that in 1863 a Doctor Moyle tried to convince military sugeons to adopt a triage system to save lives: “Death, wounds, … limbs lacerated and torn off, wounds from muskets or splinters, bayonet wounds, all these appalling and horrible injuries have to be coped with in a few minutes…” He suggested a system of dividing casualties into three groups: slight, serious and fatal and argued that immediate live-saving surgery be done on the severely injured only if the slightly injured were deferred and the fatally injured put aside (2).

"Do Not Forget Us!"

One of America's senior black leaders, Bayard Rustin was organizer of Martin Luther King, Jr. 's 1963 March on Washington. His article on the Indochinese refugees and ‘ ‘boat people'’ appeared in black newspapers in the U.S.A new “invisible man” has been born within our midst—the Southeast Asian refugee. Shunted from country to country, over 150,000 -of these “invisible people” cling to a precarious existence in scores of refugee camps that dot non- Communist Asia. They have a simple and solitary message for the international community: “Do not forget us!“Some well-meaning people have said to me: “The black community suffers from record high unemployment. Why should blacks be concerned about Southeast Asian refugees? They'll only take jobs and housing that black people desperately need.” Such an attitude is understandable, but allow me to describe the enormity and urgency of the refugee problem.

The Astronomical Significance of the Crucuno Stone Rectangle

the two 3-4-5 Pythagorean triangles formed by the diagonal have sides which are multiples of 10 megalithic yards. Thom (1967, 1968) has shown that megalithic man, when constructing stone circles and rings in Britain, often dealt in multiples of 2 2, 5, and 10 megalithic yards, and employed perfect Pythagorean triangles in the geometry of the construction of numerous stone rings. Thom and Thom (1972) have shown that the main Carnac alignments were set out with a unit of 2 2 megalithic yards, and this is also found in the perimeters of practically all megalithic rings in Britain (Thom 1966, 1968). The Crucuno rectangle thus falls into line metrologically with other megalithic remains in both Britain and Brittany. At Crucuno, as elsewhere in Brittany, well-meaning people have reerected fallen stones without knowledge of the exact original positions. Knowing how accurately megalithic engineers could work, we think it unlikely that they left the untidy rectangle which we now see.4 While elsewhere, when erecting freestanding circles, they measured to the centers of the stones, here they may have placed the stones outside but touching the rectangle. This too is unlikely, but only excavation can settle the matter. On the south side of the rectangle, the whin bushes have grown so deep that some stones are obscured and are difficult to locate even when their presence is known-particularly the 3-ft. stone and the fallen stone in the southwest corner. The whin and the trees in the neighborhood make it impossible to measure the horizon alti

Medical School Deans

To the Editor.— Your discussion of Rosinski's Rule raises the question as to whether many well-meaning people are urging innovations upon medical institutions merely for the sake of doing something different. For some reason, we human beings, and particularly Americans, are utterly committed to the idea that because something is done differently, therefore it is done better and it is really contributing to the progress of the human race. This can be an exhausting and fruitless treadmill, since this year's innovation is next year's old hat, to be displaced promptly by the next innovation. Should we not be spending some amount of intelligence and effort to evaluating the effects of older innovations, such as the pioneer curriculum changes at Case Western Reserve in the early 1950's? Surely by this time a generation of physicians has grown up in this new system and the good effects can certainly be studied and

Experience with Reductions in the Small-Loan Rate in Wisconsin

r 9H E maximum rate of charge which the state permits licensed . personal finance companies to charge is often criticized as excessive. Lenders engaged in the business defend these rates on the ground that the high costs of extending small loans necessitate legal rates which are sufficiently high to induce capital to enter into the industry and engage in business under the licensing and regulation of the state. The lenders contend that if the maximum rate of charge is not high enough to permit profitable investment of capital, the business will disappear entirely, thus cutting off these credit facilities from the low-income groups which normally make up the market for personal finance loans,3 or it will be conducted illegally at still higher rates of charge by persons who are willing to risk criminal prosecution for violating the usury statutes.4 Since its inception the industry has been subjected to a great deal of pressure to reduce the maximum rates of charge permitted by the usury statutes or other regulatory legislation. In part, the pressure for rate reduction emanates from well-meaning people who are unfortunately suffering from a cultural lag. Accepting the widespread notion that any charge in excess of 6 per cent per annum is usurious, they consider a rate of 3 per cent per month on unpaid balances or 36 per cent per annum on the average outstanding balance as an immoral exaction. Actually, these companies operate under a statute specifically exempting them from the usury law and maximum rates charged are established by law.A The personal finance companies are credit agencies having relatively high costs of lending, and it is unlikely that they could operate under the ordinary usury statutes. Where small-loan laws do not exist, this type of credit-small loans to low-income borrowers-is either not available or available only from loan sharks.6 Another source of pressure for rate reductions comes from the illegal lenders. Their business is seriously limited by the competition of personal finance companies, and, in order to remove this competition, they exert pressure to lower the maximum rate of charge permitted to personal finance companies to a point where these lenders can no longer continue in business at a profit. Once the personal finance companies are driven I The author is indebted to Dr. Ralph A. Young, director, Financial Research Project, National Bureau of Economic Research, for his painstaking criticism of and contributions to the content of this article. However, all opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

NOSTRUM GUZZLING A CENTURY AGO

To the Editor: —The following quotation may shed some light on the status of the Propaganda for Reform a century and more ago. It is from A View of the Nervous Temperament, by Thomas Trotter, M.D., Late Physician to His Majesty's Fleet, etc., etc., first published in London in 1806: All nervous persons are uncommonly fond of drugs; and they are the chief consumers of advertised remedies, which they conceal from their medical friends. Among some well-meaning people, this inordinate desire for medicine has frequently become of itself a disease. With many of them, physic, to be useful, must be clothed in mystery; and the moment a discovery is made of the composition, the confidence is lost. Medical attendants have too often brought this punishment on themselves. Were they unanimous in combating the prejudices of mankind, by candour and openness of conduct, by a fair avowal of the imperfections of

The Ordovician Rocks of Western Caermarthenshire

I. Introduction This little contribution to the geology of Caermarthenshire is the result of leisure-work done during some years’ residence in the district. The ground dealt with is practically identical with that examined by the late Thomas Roberts, M.A., whose notes were published in the Quarterly Journal of this Society for May 1893 (vol. xlix): that is, from the River Cywyn on the east to the Tave on the west, and from the base of the Old Red Sandstone on the south to the top of the Dicranograptus -Shales on the north—roughly, a rectangular tract of country 11 miles long by 6 miles wide. (1) Previous work done.—George Owen, of Henllys, as long ago as the year 1595, had given some attention to the economic geology of the district, and in a manuscript, an extract from which is appended to Richard Fenton's ‘Historical Tour through Pembrokeshire,’ refers to certain limestone-bands that occur here, noting, by the way, the proximity of limestones to the coal-deposits of the country. This inference has, from time to time, led to much expenditure of labour and money in a futile search for coal. Levels were driven and pits were sunk; but, of course, no coal was found—except in the fertile imagination of credulous though well-meaning people. The district was examined by the officers of the Geological Survey in 1842, and the results of their labours are recorded in Sheets xli (Map) and 13 (Sections). John Phillips, in his Memoir on the Malvern and Abberley Hills, records