Sociology: Moral dialogues and normative change

Moral dialogues are one mechanism of cultural change, allowing communities to resolve conflicts and revise the fundamental norms and values governing their members’ relationships. This essay illustrates the moral dialogue process with the debates over sexual harassment in the Trump era. Victimized women launched a transnational “megalogue” that pervaded politics, business, entertainment, academia, and other spheres. It transformed norms, institutions, and enforcement of acceptable behavior in employment and in public, resulting in a new shared moral understanding. However, the fact that the President is not punished for immorality demonstrates that normative change ultimately requires the rule of law.     

Political science: Moral dialogues and our understanding of American politics

This commentary focuses on the connection between Etzioni’s moral dialogues conception and the concepts of social capital, civil society and the ultimate outcome to be anticipated from the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The optimist view that a progressive social movement is in the making is called somewhat into question given the well documented decline in the very institutions and trust-based norms essential for the moral dialogues in question to transpire.     

浅谈英语教学中的关键要素

做任何事情,都要有浓厚的兴趣、热情、毅力和信心,这样才能成功.学习英语也是如此.现代教育的核心是把学生看作主体,又看作客体,重视学生的主动性、积极性,而兴趣则是学生心理活动的起点和动力.学习优劣的关键在于内部动机,而兴趣是动机中最现实、最活跃的因素.从这个最现实、最活跃的因素入手,有助于培养正确、有效的学习动机,从而提高教学质量.     

Friendship, transactive dialogues, and the development of scientific reasoning

This study investigated the significance of friendship for scientific reasoning. We had two main goals: First, assess whether collaborations between friends fostered greater development of scientific reasoning than collaborations between acquaintances, and second, identify which features of friends' collaborative dialogues mediated their greater problem solving accuracy. Fifth graders collaborated on isolation of variables problems of varying difficulty with either a friend or an acquaintance. The results showed that adolescents paired with friends obtained higher problem solving accuracy than adolescents paired with acquaintances during both the collaborative and the posttest sessions. However, the cognitive advantages of working with a friend were only evident in the most difficult isolation of variables problems. Analyses of friends' and acquaintances' dialogues showed that friends were more likely than acquaintances to evaluate their solutions, justify their proposals spontaneously, elaborate and critique each other's reasoning, and engage in transactive discussions. Evaluating outcomes and participating in transactive conflicts were significantly associated with better problem solving, and consequently these may be the two key mechanisms through which friendship effects developmental changes in scientific reasoning. The results are discussed in terms of the need to understand developmental features of relationships and how these features mediate cognitive development and the need to take a longitudinal approach to the study of the relation between transactive dialogues and the development of scientific reasoning.     

Allport's Legacy and the Situational Press of Stereotypes

This article focuses on two aspects of Allport's (1954) investigation of the psychology of being a target of prejudice. Whereas most researchers in this area view Allport as an expectancy theorist, we revisit another aspect of Allport's theory: the situational threat posed by negative stereotypes. First, we examine this issue, as it applies to the academic underachievement of negatively stereotyped groups, by contrasting the situational threat posed by stereotypes with traditional and current expectancy-oriented conceptions. Second, we show that stereotypes do not appear to affect self-expectations; instead, they appear to foster a climate of mistrust that results in depressed performance. Finally, we discuss how interventions that ameliorate the climate of mistrust, such as the presence of educators who are competent minority group members, tend to raise levels of performance.     

Situational Power and Interpersonal Dominance Facilitate Bias and Inequality

A model is proposed that describes interpersonal phenomena that maintain intergroup hierarchies and conflict. Situational control and interpersonal dominance are identified as conditions that promote motives to stereotype, leading to cognitive and judgment biases that cumulatively reinforce the status quo. Three general hypotheses are derived from the model. First, powerholders are predicted to use attention strategies that favor stereotype maintenance, stereotyping subordinates by default (ignoring counterstereotypic information) and by design (increasing attention to stereotypic information). Second, high-dominance perceivers are predicted to respond with the same cognitive biases as people with situational power. Finally, power and dominance are predicted independently to facilitate bias in explicit judgments. Results from our research program support the hypotheses. Implications for future change are discussed.     

Maternal Discipline and Children's Adjustment: The Role of the Cultural and Situational Context

This study examined how the cultural and situational contexts can jointly shape the consequences of discipline strategies. Israeli mothers who grew up in Israel or in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) (overall N = 110) reported regarding their use of psychologically controlling and punitive discipline with their seven‐years‐old to 10‐years‐old children, and teachers reported regarding children's behavior problems. We assessed both mothers' overall general use of the discipline strategies, and their use of the same strategies following transgressions in the academic domain, an area which the two groups emphasize to differing degrees. Consistent with hypothesis, controlling discipline in academic situations had more positive consequences in the FSU group compared with the Israeli‐origin group. In contrast, and as predicted, cultural group was not a moderator of mothers' overall, general use of the same discipline strategies. The findings illustrate how taking the situation into account can inform examination of the moderating role of cultural group.     

A Time to Hate: Situational Antecedents of Intergroup Bias

Shortly after the World Trade Center was destroyed, reports began to appear of hate crimes against Americans of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent. This article provides a summary of social psychological research that explains why certain events might promote intergroup bias. The literature on the correlation between hate crimes and potential precipitating factors is also reviewed. Finally, a few brief suggestions are made, based on previous research, as to how these crimes might be prevented.