Putting ourselves in another’s skin: using the plasticity of self-perception to enhance empathy and decrease prejudice

The self is one the most important concepts in social cognition and plays a crucial role in determining questions such as which social groups we view ourselves as belonging to and how we relate to others. In the past decade, the self has also become an important topic within cognitive neuroscience with an explosion in the number of studies seeking to understand how different aspects of the self are represented within the brain. In this paper, we first outline the recent research on the neurocognitive basis of the self and highlight a key distinction between two forms of self-representation. The first is the “bodily” self, which is thought to be the basis of subjective experience and is grounded in the processing of sensorimotor signals. The second is the “conceptual” self, which develops through our interactions of other and is formed of a rich network of associative and semantic information. We then investigate how both the bodily and conceptual self are related to social cognition with an emphasis on how self-representations are involved in the processing and creation of prejudice. We then highlight new research demonstrating that the bodily and conceptual self are both malleable and that this malleability can be harnessed in order to achieve a reduction in social prejudice. In particular, we will outline strong evidence that modulating people’s perceptions of the bodily self can lead to changes in attitudes at the conceptual level. We will highlight a series of studies demonstrating that social attitudes towards various social out-groups (e.g. racial groups) can lead to a reduction in prejudice towards that group. Finally, we seek to place these findings in a broader social context by considering how innovations in virtual reality technology can allow experiences of taking on another’s identity are likely to become both more commonplace and more convincing in the future and the various opportunities and risks associated with using such technology to reduce prejudice

Ethics of Corporate Taxation: A Systematic Literature Review

In recent times, corporations have been scrutinized for their tax behavior. Various groups of stakeholders have expressed their concern over certain corporate tax strategies that allow multinationals to pay ridiculous amounts of tax in the countries where they operate. Although national governments and international institutions are developing initiatives to reform tax rules to ensure that companies pay their fair share of tax, the international tax framework still offers MNEs several opportunities for minimizing their tax burden. In order to help businesses self-regulate their behavior in those “gray areas” where the tax law is imperfect and to drive changes in legislation, corporate taxation has recently been included in the business ethics field. In other words, the ethical responsibilities associated with corporate taxation have started to be investigated and companies are increasingly expected to exhibit a morally responsible approach to tax planning, above and beyond compliance with the letter of the law. The purpose of this chapter is to present a systematic review of literature dealing with the ethical issues associated with corporate taxation. A better understanding of the evolution, the scope and the state of the art of this academic debate is provided by the literature review. Three main topics will be critically discussed: the ethics of tax evasion, the ethics of tax avoidance and the ethics of tax practitioners. Finally, suggestions and future research paths will be offered, in order to encourage studies to foster the debate on the ethics of corporate taxation