The Top Ten Solutions to the World’s Biggest Problems
“…we get just nine cents of value for every dollar spent trying to stop terrorists.” Contrast with: “Correcting these mirconutrient deficits would cost $286 million per year.” The U.S. could have fixed this many times over considering that the Iraq war costs about $100,000 per minute. Just about 2 days…
A bit late on this one, but I can tell you what I think: History is not their strong suit. Fox News, I thought you were evil ideologues, but maybe you are just incompetent. Hanlon’s Razor at work, I suppose. I’m picturing an unfortunate undergraduate intern asked to Google Image search for a picture of “Douglas.” Frederick Douglas picture looked to be at about the right time. Nevertheless, this is heartening…
Fox News Lincoln-Douglas Graphic Shows Frederick Douglass
By the way, if you do a Google Image search for “Douglas” you get this. It asks you if you if you meant “Stephen Douglas” and the second picture is Stephen Douglas.
This is an interesting impression of how Chinese learn English. I know that some Americans, say in business, are beginning to learn Chinese, but it does not seem as widespread as this. Is widespread such a good thing if “Do you want to go to a movie?” = “I’d eventually like to have sex with you” and “I’m bored” = “Do you want to have sex?”?
Though, I don’t know Chinese, if I learn I hope my training is predicated on such gross cultural stereotypes.
The answer is not, “Because they are American…” This is consistent with what we know about rewarding people in the workplace. If you offer someone a vacation or a bonus to their paycheck, they will more likely pick the vacation. It’s not something they would regularly pay for on their own and “feels” more like a reward than a bonus, which would likely go toward something mundane like a paying credit card debt or getting ahead on a car/mortgage payment. Offering the choice, though makes the vacation less appealing because of guilt. This gets into the psychology of choice. Interestingly, people tend to prefer less choice to more choice. Research into consumer choice would indicate that Apple’s offering of computers is more optimal than, say, Dell’s. People look more when there is choice, but buy more when there is less choice. For more see Shah & Wolford, 2007 in Psychological Science.
I study organizational justice as part of my research. Organization justice perceptions influence a lot of important outcomes in the workplace. For instance, a worker who feels as if he or she is treated unfairly will likely not be satisfied, committed, or even a productive worker. The notion of justice (and it’s components or types) has been studied by psychologists since at least the 1960s. However, I found recently that the ideas underlying our notions of justice are much older. Aristotle wrote about distributive justice in his Nicomachean Ethics: ”Of particular justice and that which is just in the corresponding sense, (A) one kind is that which is manifested in distributions of honour or money…” (Chapter 2, Book 5). His notion of distributive justice is startlingly similar to the contemporary conceptualization used in psychological research. Essentially, people get angry when their outcomes are not equitable. Following from Adams’s Equity Theory, people want their output (e.g., pay) to be commensurate with their input (e.g., effort). If these are out of of balance, the person will perceive distributive injustice. This is a clarity of the ancient Roman notion of justice from the Justinian code: “…the constant and permanent will to render to each person what is his right.” This is vague from a legal and philosophical stand point, but cast in the light of individual perception, equity theory can be applied. A person’s due (and their right to it) stems from their idea of what they think is an appropriate outcome given what they put in. This seems troublesome given an reliance on individual perception, but psychologists study the individual and the relationships amongst their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The objective fairness is immaterial when a person feels slighted, the guy reaction of “That’s not fair!” kicks in; that impulse is precisely what leads to the outcomes that I discussed earlier.
These ideas are not new, per se, but I feel as though there is progress being made. Aristotle did not take about procedural or interactional justice; these are more contemporary discoveries.
More musings to follow on justice as I work through Rapheal’s “Concepts of Justice,” and various book chapters and articles from the psychological literature.