A comment on the homosexual role

Following deep relaxation, 100 college females listened to erotic guided imagery consisting of (1) sexual invitation, (2) coital contact, and (3) reflection sequences, and responded after each sequence to three measures of subjective sexual arousal and one measure of 10 discrete emotions. The sexual invitation and coital contact sequences contained 24 interspersed cues that portrayed either a casual or a committed interpersonal context. Subjects were partitioned at their respective medians on measures of sex guilt and sex history with loved and with unloved partners. Three mixed 2 (casual, committed) × 2 (median split) × 3 (sequences) MANOVAs analyzed the 13 dependent variables. The hypothesized importance of a committed context on females' subjective sexual arousal and emotional reactions received almost no support. Imagining casual sex may, however, produce more guilty emotion than imagining committed sex. As hypothesized, higher sex guilt was associated with attenuated sexual arousal and reduced enjoyment and increased frequencies and/or intensities of guilt, shame, distress, fear, surprise, disgust, anger, and contempt in response to the erotic guided imagery. Women with a history of more involved sex experience reacted to the guided imagery with less frequent and/or intense surprise, fear, guilt, shame, disgust, and contempt than less sexually experienced women. The discussion included designs of several additional studies using the promising technique of guided imagery to answer experimentally remaining questions about the place of casual sex in females' erotic response and in personalities disposed to sex guilt.     

Progress in sociology: A reply to Cole's reply

A reply to the former editor argues the priority of standardized empirical definitions in scientific studies of causation, proposes a small set of definitions to be standardized in sociology, and cites exemplars of such standardization in other fields.     

A reply to “On Structure-Dependent Grammars: A reply to Mabry” by Nathan Stemmer

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior -     

Letter to the Editor: A reply to Zipp and Fenwick

March 2007 In the Fall 2006 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, John F.Zipp and Rudy Fenwick published "Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony?,"an article openly framed as a reaction to "right-wing activistsand scholars" (304). The scholarship they cite is principallyours (Klein and Stern 2005a; Klein and Western 2005). They arriveat findings about ideological ratios said to be "far lower thanthe ratios found by Klein ..." (309). Unfortunately, ZF misrepresent us. We wrote and submitted afull reply, but the Editor Peter Miller asked us to keep to     

Letter to the Editor: A reply to Klein and Stern

Klein and Stern (hereafter KS-2007) have several problems withour article ("Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony"), with themost general being their contention that we "misrepresent" theirwork. Most of this hinges on their claim that, while they studiedthe proportion of faculty who register or vote Democratic orRepublican (their D:R ratio), we treated this as equivalentto a measure of liberalism versus conservatism. KS-2007 go onto say that we "impute ideological content" to their resultswhile they themselves claim the intellectual high road as havingbeen very careful not to conflate voting or party registrationwith     

On structure-dependent grammars: A reply to Mabry

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - In a recent paper, Mabry (1993) examines various aspects of Skinner’s (1957) treatment of grammar, and he compares it with cognitivist approaches. Mabry...     

From locality to continent: A comment on the generalization of an experimental study

Kocher et al. (2008) find that conditional willingness to contribute to a public good is considerably stronger at a U.S. research site, Appalachian State University, than at sites in Europe and Asia. I find that the willingness at Brown University, in Rhode Island, is not significantly different from that in Europe and Asia in Kocher et al. (2008). Clear evidence on significantly different demographic statistics between these two U.S. research sites is provided. This implies that in the experimental study of societies, or more generally in empirical studies, we need exercise care to generalize from results at a specific research site to geographically broader conclusions.     

Dwelling in epistemic disobedience: A reply to Go

In Thinking Against Empire: Anticolonial Thought as Social Theory, Julian Go continues his vital work on rethinking and redirecting the discipline of sociology. Go’s piece relates to his wider oeuvre of postcolonial sociology – found in works such as his Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016) as well as multiple journal articles on epistemic exclusion (Go 2020), Southern theory (Go 2016), metrocentrism (Go 2014), and the history of sociology (Go 2009). In this response article, my aim is to think alongside some of the central themes outlined in Go’s paper rather than offering a rebuttal of any sorts. In particular, I want to think through how the recent work on ‘decoloniality’ may play more of a central role in Go’s vision of sociology and social theory than he acknowledges. In doing so, I hope to engage in Go’s prodigious scholarship through centering discussions of the geopolitics of knowledge, double translation, and border thinking. Before proceeding to this discussion, I will offer a brief review of my reading of Go’s paper.     

Using social theory to leap over historical contingencies: A comment on Robinson

Conclusion To be fair to Robinson, it is worth mentioning that he does offer a number of qualifications to his thesis. He tries to avoid excessive determinism and at one point suggests: A satisfactory account should not imply an evolutionary notion and should leave open the possibility of historic discontinuities and of contingencies that generate alternative pathways of development, including alternative futures. In other words, maybe this embryonic TNS will never progress beyond its current stage or perhaps it will continue to grow but it will never become a real state. But the main thrust of Robinson’s account is strongly deterministic. In fact, he does not consider a single factor that might impede the unity of the global bourgoisie or derail transnational state formation. In a sense, Robinson’s mistake is that he has tried to derive a theoretical solution to a concrete problem that global capitalism has not yet solved in practice. While it might well be a logical step for capitalist elites to create a Transnational State, it is always risky to attribute too much rationality to an order that is notorious for its contradictions.     

Legal standards for evaluation research: A reply to Smith

Smith (1981), asserting that not all evaluative studies require the same degree of evidence for decision-making, suggests a legal paradigm for determining how much certainty is necessary for informed decision-making. Specifically, he argues for the use of three levels of certainty, i.e., suggestive, preponderant, or conclusive evidence, modeled after the legal standards of proof. Unfortunately, such an approach is untenable for several reasons. Smith's suggestion that decision-makers adopt legal terminology, for example, is really a recommendation of form rather than substance and, furthermore, his analogy from the law to the evaluation context is based upon a misunderstanding of the trial process. These and other problems with Smith's suggestions are discussed.