By Christian Perring from Metapsychology. " This excellent collection is an essential work in history of ethics and moral psychology. Editor Tobias Hoffman has brought together leading scholars in their fields to discuss weakness of will in Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Henry of Ghent,...

By Kamila E. Sip and David Carmel from Scientific American "By saying “I do”, newlyweds promise to love and cherish each other no matter what happens for the rest of their lives; hardly anybody makes this promise intending to break it. But imagine making a promise when in fact, you know you would...

by Geoff Pursinger from The Tigard Times "Holocaust survivor Alter Wiener stood before a group of more than 2,000 students at Tigard High School, Jan. 11, delivering a message of tolerance and forgiveness at the school’s annual Human Rights Assembly. Wiener, 83, spoke about his early life growing...

by Daniel Mendelsohn for The New Yorker "Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its...

By Rob Dunn in Smithsonian "Cultures differ in all sorts of ways—their greetings, clothing, expectations about how children should behave, coming-of-age rituals, expressions of sexuality, numbers of husbands or wives, beliefs in god, gods, or lack thereof. People celebrate but also wage wars about...

by Mike Barrowcliffe in Times Online "Professor Gail Heyman, of the University of California, questioned 130 students and their parents about parental lying. She was surprised to find that more than 80 per cent of parents lied at some point, even those who insisted to their children that it was...

by John Tierney in The New York Times "Does religion have a future? Who looks more like an evolutionary dead end: the religious American or the agnostic European? Or will both give way to some sort of compromise — people bound by new institutions that provide the social benefits of religion without...

In Medical News Today "Research by the University of Warwick and the University of Manchester finds that psychological therapy could be 32 times more cost effective at making you happy than simply obtaining more money. The research has obvious implications for large compensation awards in law courts...

By Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris in Spiegel Online " SPIEGEL: Still, you are famous for being able to explain your passions … Eco: … but not by talking about myself. Look, ever since the days of Aristotle, we have been trying to define things based on their essence. The definition of man? An animal...

by Nathan Heflick in Psychology Today "Feeling a little bit less in control? Research suggests you are more likely to believe in the controlling power of your government, and God. Aaron Kay (professor at The University of Waterloo) and colleagues have recently tested a model of compensatory control...

Galen V. Bodenhausen Social psychological research is increasingly coming to grips with the complexity of social identity within the individual, both from the perspective of perceivers trying to form impressions and make judgments about multiply categorizable targets, as well as from the perspective...

Joel H. K. Vuolevi, Paul A. M. Van Lange How do we interpret other's behavior when we lack important pieces of information? Do we give the other the benefit of the doubt, believing that the other behaves in a fair manner? Or do we fill in the blanks with self-interest? To address these questions...

Corrado Sinigaglia , Laura Sparaci The paper aims at highlighting how our primary understanding of others' actions is rooted in the mirror mechanism. To this end, the anatomical architecture of the mirror neuron system for action will be outlined as well as its role in grasping goals and intentions...

Janice Richardson In this article, I examine the role of the fiction of property in the person in recent feminist debate, comparing Carole Pateman's position with those who are more sympathetic to the image of contract for feminist/anti-racist political theory, such as Charles Mills, Jean Hampton...

Russell E. Johnson , Kyle W. Groff , Meng U. Taing Although organizational commitment is a multidimensional construct, researchers have tended to examine the independent effects of its different forms. However, doing so creates potential problems of model misspecification and under-prediction if interactions...

Keith R. Brown Moral boundaries are often conceptualized as an expression of an individual's identity or belief system. However, social forces greatly influence how and when consumers activate moral boundaries. Utilizing a dramaturgical perspective, this article shows that the activation of moral...

By Emma F. Thomas, Craig McGarty, Kenneth I. Mavor This article explores the synergies between recent developments in the social identity of helping, and advantaged groups’ prosocial emotion. The authors review the literature on the potential of guilt, sympathy, and outrage to transform advantaged groups...

By Harry White Coleridge realized that much of the guilt from which he suffered was largely—if not entirely—a symptom of depression; but he found the possibility that feelings of guilt might be reducible to symptoms of mental disease even more disturbing than the depression that troubled him, since it...

Kathleen R. Rodgers This paper explores the dilemmas that social movement organizations face as they seek to conform to institutional norms in order to expand their media influence. In particular, I examine the similarity of strategic decision-making of two key organizations in the Human Rights Movement...

Nancy E. Snow Abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq confront us with the question of how seemingly ordinary soldiers could have perpetrated harms against prisoners. In this essay I argue that a Stoic approach to the virtues can provide a bulwark against the social and personal forces that can lead to abusive...