Capturing moral economic context

Multiple economic experiments suggest that the moral context of consumption and/or production influences willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept. Precisely how this influence should be modeled from a theoretical perspective, however, remains understudied. The prevailing view is that moral context can be captured using an extended utility approach in which “morality†enters the utility function as any other attribute of value. However, in our view the literature does not yet suggest practical modeling strategies that yield testable hypotheses. We show herein that the state-dependent preference approach quite naturally enables modeling of the moral concerns registered in experimental settings.

Perfectionism and attitudes toward cognitive enhancers (“smart drugs”)

Perfectionism is a personality disposition characterized by exceedingly high standards of performance and pressure to be perfect which may incline students to take cognitive enhancers (“smart drugs”) to boost their academic performance. So far, however, no study has investigated the relationships of multidimensional perfectionism and attitudes toward cognitive enhancers. The present study investigated these relationships in 272 university students examining different dimensions of perfectionism. Results showed that socially prescribed perfectionism, perfectionist concerns and doubts, and perceived parental pressure to be perfect showed positive correlations with attitudes favoring the use of cognitive enhancers. In contrast, self-oriented perfectionism, perfectionist personal standards, and organization showed negative correlations. The findings suggest that perfectionism may play a role as both a risk factor for and a protective factor against using cognitive enhancers depending on what dimensions of perfectionism are regarded

Avoidable Mortality Risks and Measurement of Wellbeing and Inequality

This paper proposes a data envelopment method to separate avoidable and unavoidable mortality risks. As unavoidable mortality is the result of nature, only avoidable mortality is of relevance in measuring wellbeing and inequality. The new method is applied to a dataset consisting of life tables for 191 countries in the year 2000 to obtain a reference distribution of unavoidable mortality risks. The reference distribution is used to improve on the standard age-at-death measure to obtain an age-at-avoidable-death measure. Comparing with the original measure, age-at-avoidable-death provides a very different picture of wellbeing, and more so when it comes to inequality measures.

Can absent leadership be positive in team conflicts? An examination of leaders' avoidance behavior in China

Purpose – Although conflict avoidance is one of the most commonly used conflict resolution styles in China, there has surprisingly been no explicit investigation of the effects of leaders’ avoidance. This paper therefore examines how leaders’ avoidance influences followers’ attitudes and well-being in China. Design/methodology/approach – Data was collected from 245 subordinates in three large companies in the People’s Republic of China through an online survey. Multiple regression analysis was adopted to test three sets of competing hypotheses. Findings – Leaders’ avoidance behaviour is positively related to followers’ perception of justice, supervisory trust and emotional well-being in Chinese organizations. Originality/value - Our paper joins growing attempts to consider conflict management in the context of leadership. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine empirically the relationships between a team leader’s avoidance behaviour and his or her subordinates’ perceptions of justice, supervisory trust, and emotional well-being in a single study. The findings are provoking by illustrating positive effect of leader's conflict avoidance behaviour in China. Our paper supports that conflict avoidance could be a sustainable rather than one-off strategy by a leader, and that identifying conditions (e.g. culture) that affect the outcomes of conflict avoidance is important

MoralStrength: Exploiting a Moral Lexicon and Embedding Similarity for Moral Foundations Prediction

Moral rhetoric plays a fundamental role in how we perceive and interpret the information we receive, greatly influencing our decision-making process. Especially when it comes to controversial social and political issues, our opinions and attitudes are hardly ever based on evidence alone. The Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) was developed to operationalize moral values in the text. In this study, we present MoralStrength, a lexicon of approximately 1,000 lemmas, obtained as an extension of the Moral Foundations Dictionary, based on WordNet synsets. Moreover, for each lemma it provides with a crowdsourced numeric assessment of Moral Valence, indicating the strength with which a lemma is expressing the specific value. We evaluated the predictive potentials of this moral lexicon, defining three utilization approaches of increased complexity, ranging from lemmas' statistical properties to a deep learning approach of word embeddings based on semantic similarity. Logistic regression models trained on the features extracted from MoralStrength, significantly outperformed the current state-of-the-art, reaching an F1-score of 87.6% over the previous 62.4% (p-value<0.01), and an average F1-Score of 86.25% over six different datasets. Such findings pave the way for further research, allowing for an in-depth understanding of moral narratives in text for a wide range of social issues

The Role of Humor as a Character Strength in Positive Psychology

In positive psychology, humor has been identified as one of twenty-four character strengths considered ubiquitously important for human flourishing. Unlike the other strengths, humor was a late addition to this classification system and its status as a strength continues to be somewhat controversial. Therefore the purpose of this thesis was to explore how humor fits within positive psychology. Four studies were conducted to achieve this goal. Study 1 involved a cross-sectional design and compared the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths - Humor Scale (the humor measure used in positive psychology, which assumes that humor is a unitary and positive construct) with the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ; a widely used multidimensional measure of humor) that assesses both adaptive and maladaptive styles of humor in their ability to predict well-being. Additionally, this study and Study 2 explored the ability of humor to predict well-being over and above the effects of gratitude, another more well-studied character strength. The results indicated that the HSQ was a better predictor of happiness, resilience, and morality than was the positive psychology humor scale and that humor added further variance to the prediction of well-being beyond the effects accounted for by gratitude. Study 3 extended these findings by using a longitudinal daily diary methodology to explore the relationships between daily humor styles, gratitude, and well-being. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed interesting differences in associations between positive and negative humor styles and well-being at the within-person and between-person levels and in interactions between these levels. For example, at the between-person level, self-defeating humor was correlated with all four outcome measures whereas at the within-person level, this style was unrelated to satisfaction with life, positive mood, and altruism. The cross-level interactions indicate that when this style is used infrequently, it does not appear to be detrimental with respect to well-being. However, when used habitually, it seems to be particularly associated with negative outcomes. Finally, Study 4 involved a longitudinal experimental manipulation to test two new positive psychology humor exercises designed to improve well-being. The first exercise was a more traditional humor exercise that did not require participants to distinguish among humor types whereas the second exercise taught participants to distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive humor (with the expectation that reduced maladaptive humor use would follow). While results indicated that there were no differences among interventions (traditional humor, humor styles, and a well-studied gratitude exercise) with respect to changes in well-being, all three interventions produced significant improvements in positive mood compared to a control group. Possible explanations for these findings and implications for future research are discussed

Corruption in the public organizations. Towards a model of cost-benefit analysis for the anticorruption strategies

The paper aims to evaluate how the anticorruption strategies lead to minimizing the corruption phenomenon in the public organizations, with special reference to those from public administration and health system in Romania. Based on some essential features, stated by Banfield (1975) about the capacity of the public organizations to minimize corruption inside the organizations, the authors achieved two parallel sociological researches in the public administration system and the health system in Romania. Thus, the researches reveal a paradox in the finality of the mentioned public organizations between the exclusive preoccupation for an ethical behaviour and the other objectives of the organizations: effectiveness, flexibility, dynamics etc. In the context of very interesting studies, such as those by Rose-Ackerman (1975, 2005), the premises of research are based on the idea that “the anticorruption strategies should orient, firstly towards improvement of the economic, technical and operational efficiency” of the public organization. Therefore, we may speak about “optimal” level of corruption rather than “zero” level. We justify this fact through the costs of supporting the anticorruption strategies, their direct impact on organizational effectiveness and performance.corruption; cost-benefit analysis

Should charity begin at home? An empirical investigation of consumers’ responses to companies’ varying geographic allocations of donation budgets

In our globalized and interconnected world, companies are increasingly donating substantial amounts to good causes around the globe. Many companies choose to donate “at home” while others give to causes in faraway places where recipients are in dire need of support. Interestingly, past research on corporate donations has neglected the question of whether consumers differentially reward companies for geographically varying allocations of donation budgets. Through a mixed methods approach, this paper remedies this gap by developing and empirically testing a conceptual framework of consumers’ preferences for geographically varying allocations of corporate donation budgets. In a first step, two preliminary field studies (N 1 = 76; N 2 = 80) involving real donations explored customers’ preferences for donation allocations varying in geographical focus. A qualitative focus group study then investigated underlying rationales to inform the research and led to the development of hypotheses. Subsequently a large-scale between-subjects scenario experiment (N = 5770) tested the predictions. Overall, results indicate that, in contrast with current managerial practice, customers prefer companies that split donations equally between domestic and foreign recipients or even donate only abroad