Behavioral Immune Trade-Offs: Interpersonal Value Relaxes Social Pathogen Avoidance

Behavioral-immune-system research has illuminated how people detect and avoid signs of infectious disease. But how do we regulate exposure to pathogens that produce no symptoms in their hosts? This research tested the proposition that estimates of interpersonal value are used for this task. The results of three studies ( N = 1,694), each conducted using U.S. samples, are consistent with this proposition: People are less averse to engaging in infection-risky acts not only with friends relative to foes but also with honest and agreeable strangers relative to dishonest and disagreeable ones. Further, a continuous measure of how much a person values a target covaries with comfort with infection-risky acts with that target, even within relationship categories. Findings indicate that social prophylactic motivations arise not only from cues to infectiousness but also from interpersonal value. Consequently, pathogen transmission within social networks might be exacerbated by relaxed contamination aversions with highly valued social partners.

Behavioral immune tradeoffs: Interpersonal value relaxes social pathogen avoidance

Behavioral immune system research has illuminated how people detect and avoid signs of infectious disease. But how do we regulate exposure to pathogens that produce no symptoms in their hosts? This manuscript tests the proposition that estimates of interpersonal value are used for this task. Three studies (N = 1694), each conducted using U.S. samples, are consistent with this proposition: people are less averse to engaging in infection-risky acts not only with friends relative to foes, but also with honest and agreeable strangers relative to dishonest and disagreeable ones. Further, a continuous measure of how much a person values a target covaries with comfort with infection-risky acts with that target, even within relationship categories. Findings indicate that social prophylactic motivations arise not only from cues to infectiousness, but also interpersonal value. Consequently, pathogen transmission within social networks might be exacerbated by relaxed contamination aversions with highly valued social partners.

Notes toward a History of Tragedy and the “Tragic”

This essay addresses the rather complex questions of the history and function of the word tragedy: Is there a historically and logically consistent use of the word that can serve as a constant in discussions of both drama and dramatic theory? I will try to address some of the reasons why questioning the historical uses and transformations of the word tragedy and the notion of the “tragic” may be important today. Such an effort matters not just for theater critics or historians but also for anyone who wishes to discover the active links between these normative generic concepts and their lived context, including their use value in the social and ideological framing of “life” in society or across societies. In times of cultural or intercultural conflict, including our own, the process of defining a theatrical genre can even become a tool, a weapon almost, in defining interpersonal value and human meaning as such.

Achieving Moralised Compassion in Higher Education

This paper engages with a philosophical conception of moralised compassion. This involves imaginative dwelling on the condition of the other person, an active regard for her good, and a view of her as a fellow human being. We will suggest that we ought, following Schopenhauer, to cultivate moralised compassion if we are to have just relations and just institutions. This will enable us to consider compassion not just as a private interpersonal value, but as a broader institutional and global value. Many universities still proclaim a three–stranded mission: to educate for personal development, to create public/societal benefit, and to prepare students for the labour market. There is an emerging set of voices critically questioning what they see as an overly dominant obsession with training students to serve the economy, and that universities are increasingly focused on the private, rather than the public good. We will reflect on meanings and enactments of compassion within the ‘engaged’ university by asking a number of related questions. We will explore how universities can offer leadership on moralised compassion, both at an individual and institutional level to their students, and how teachers can offer a more culturally sustaining pedagogy to their students, which values and defends cultural pluralism and cultural equality. One way in which we might cultivate compassionate regard is to use the embodied experiences and suggestive capacities of literature to [re]imagine or [re]conceive beliefs or attitudes, to cultivate perception, discernment and responsiveness. The paper concludes by proposing some practical suggestions on how moralised compassion might inflect and inform creative interconnections and interdependency between universities at a global level.

Both parents and adolescents project their own values when perceiving each other’s values

How parents and adolescents perceive each other’s life values is a key to understanding successful value transmission. In the value socializations literature, it has been proposed that parents’ values become internalized when children correctly perceive their parents’ values and decide to adopt them as their own. In the current study, we propose that interpersonal value perception of broader life values is characterized by a perceptual bias—projection—which propels adolescents to perceive their parents’ values to be similar to their own, and propels parents to perceive their adolescents’ values to be similar to theirs. This cross-sectional study examined 518 dyads of adolescents and their parents. Adolescents rated how important different humanistic, environmental, and achievement values were to them, and how important these values were to their parents. Parents similarly rated how important these values were to them and to their adolescents. Using structural equation modeling, an interpersonal value perception model was constructed that estimated how much parents and adolescents projected their own values when perceiving each other’s values. The results supported the idea that both parents and adolescents substantially project their own values when perceiving the others’ values, and that they perceive the others’ values with low accuracy. We discuss our findings in light of value socialization in both research and practice.