Foreground and Background: Environment as Site and Social Issue [pre-print]

To examine how the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) has engaged with environmental issues throughout its 75-year history, we consulted five SPSSI-based data sources. Our analysis, attentive to the larger sociopolitical contexts over time, focuses on SPSSI\u27s attention to the physical environment, the places in which social living and interactions occur. In SPSSI\u27s early years, social issues research was often situated within specific locales. Since 1960 and the emergence of environmental psychology and the environmental movement, SPSSI increasing focuses on environment as a social issue in its own right as well part of other social issues. Over time there has been a decline in mentions of the physical environment in SPSSI\u27s methods texts. This historical analysis highlights the specifics of context in SPSSI\u27s environmental research and urges attention to the physical as well as social aspects of environment in research and activism

Dilemmatic human-animal boundaries in Britain and Romania: Post-materialist and materialist dehumanization

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2007 The British Psychological SocietyTheories of dehumanization generally assume a single clear-cut, value-free and non-dilemmatic boundary between the categories ‘human’ and ‘animal.’ The present study highlights the relevance of dilemmas involved in drawing that boundary. In 6 focus groups carried out in Romania and Britain, 42 participants were challenged to think about dilemmas pertaining to animal and human life. Four themes were identified: rational autonomy, sentience, speciesism, and maintaining materialist and postmaterialist values. Sentience made animals resemble humans, while humans’ rational autonomy made them distinctive. Speciesism underlay the human participants’ prioritization of their own interests over those of animals, and a conservative consensus that the existing social system could not change supported this speciesism when it was challenged. Romanian participants appealed to Romania’s lack of modernity and British participants to Britain’s modernity to justify such conservatism. The findings suggest that the human-animal boundary is not essentialized; rather it seems that such boundary is constructed in a dilemmatic and post hoc way. Implications for theories of dehumanization are discussed

Group belongingness and procedural justice: Social inclusion and exclusion by peers affects the psychology of voice

The authors focus on the relation between group membership and procedural justice. They argue that whether people are socially included or excluded by their peers influences their reactions to unrelated experiences of procedural justice. Findings from 2 experiments corroborate the prediction that reactions to voice as opposed to no-voice procedures are affected more strongly when people are included in a group than when they are excluded from a group. These findings are extended with a 3rd experiment that shows that people who generally experience higher levels of inclusion in their lives respond more strongly to voice as opposed to no-voice procedures. It is concluded that people's reactions to procedural justice are moderated by people's level of inclusion in social groups

The assignment of moral status: Age-related differences in the use of three mental capacity criteria

This study examined children's and young adults' use of three mental capacity criteria for treating an entity as one to which moral subjects have moral obligations, that is, as having moral status. In line with philosophical theorizing, these criteria were the capacity to (1) perceive; (2) suffer; and (3) think. In this study, 116 respondents aged 9 to 18 years old gave moral judgments and guilt and shame attributions in response to stories about perpetrators whose behaviour negatively affected entities with different mental capacities. The moral judgments revealed that 9-year-old children assigned moral status primarily on the basis of the victimized entity's ability to suffer. Eleven-year-old children also used the ability to suffer, but they assigned additional moral status when the victimized entity was able to perceive. Young adults also used perception as a criterion, but they assigned additional moral status when the victimized entity was simultaneously able to suffer and able to think. When compared to their moral judgments, the moral emotion attributions of respondents of all age groups were more strongly affected by the victimized entity's ability to think. © 2008 The British Psychological Society

Moral (dis)engagement with anthropogenic climate change in online comments on newspaper articles

Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is widely acknowledged to be morally significant, but little is known about everyday moralising around ACC. We addressed this gap via quantified thematic analysis of 300 online comments to British newspaper articles on ACC, drawing on Bandura’s moral disengagement theory. Moral disengagement through denial of ACC was widespread. Other disengagement strategies, such as palliative comparison and diminishing agency, occurred less often. There was also some moral engagement, most often through assertions of the existence of ACC and/or its harmful effects. Moral disengagement was significantly more common in comments on right wing than left wing newspapers, while the opposite was true of moral engagement. While Bandura’s framework provided a useful starting point to make sense of ACC moralising, it did not capture moral concerns that extended beyond its ‘harm / care’ remit. In particular, many ‘denial’ comments included a ‘dishonesty’ discourse, whereby ACC proponents were accused of deception for ulterior motives. To classify this discourse as moral disengagement obscures its engagement with a different set of moral issues around trust and honesty. We suggest that Bandura’s theory represents one possible ‘moral landscape’ around ACC, and could be extended to encompass a broader range of moral concerns

Double jeopardy:subordinates' worldviews and poor performance as predictors of abusive supervision

Purpose - To test a moderated mediation model where a positive relationship between subordinates’ perceptions of a dangerous world—the extent to which an individual views the world as a dangerous place—and supervisory abuse is mediated by their submission to authority figures, and that this relationship is heightened for more poorly performing employees. Design/Methodology/Approach - Data were obtained from 173 subordinates and 45 supervisors working in different private sector organizations in Pakistan. Findings - Our model was supported. It appears that subordinates’ dangerous worldviews are positively associated with their perceptions of abusive supervision and that this is because such views are likely to lead to greater submission to authority figures. But this is only for those employees who are performing more poorly. Implications - We highlight the possibility that individual differences (worldviews, attitudes to authority figures, and performance levels) may lead employees to become victims of abusive supervision. As such, our research informs organizations on how they may better support supervisors in managing effectively their subordinate relationships and, in particular, subordinate poor performance. Originality/Value - We add to recent work exploring subordinate-focused antecedents of abusive supervision, finding support for the salience of the previously untested constructs of individual worldviews, authoritarian submission, and individual job performance. In so doing we also extend research on dangerous worldviews into a new organizational setting. Finally, our research takes place within a new Pakistani context, adding to the burgeoning non-US based body of empirical work into the antecedents and consequences of abusive supervision

Perceiving pure evil: The influence of cognitive load and prototypical evilness on demonizing

The present research sought to investigate the psychological dynamics underlying demonizing, that is, the tendency to see others as personifications of pure evilness. Building on an integrative theoretical framework, it is hypothesized that the extent to which a perpetrator matches prototypical expectations of evilness shapes demonizing responses to offenders particularly when cognitive resources are impaired. In two experiments, participants were asked to memorize either a difficult or an easy telephone number (cognitive load vs. control), and were then asked to evaluate a perpetrator who murdered a young woman (Experiment 1) or who kidnapped a child (Experiment 2). Results revealed that the extent to which the description of the perpetrator was consistent with a prototypical evilness scheme influenced demonizing particularly under conditions of cognitive load. It is concluded that impairment of cognitive resources increases the influence of prototypical evilness on demonizin