More organizations use AI in the hiring process than ever before, yet the perceived ethicality of such processes seems to be mixed. With such variation in our views of AI in hiring, we need to understand how these perceptions impact the organizations that use it. In two studies, we investigate how ethical perceptions of using AI in hiring are related to perceptions of organizational attractiveness and innovativeness. Our findings indicate that ethical perceptions of using AI in hiring are positively related (...) to perceptions of organizational attractiveness, both directly and indirectly via perceptions of organizational innovativeness, with variations depending on the type of hiring method used. For instance, we find that individuals who consider it ethical for organizations to use AI in ways often considered to be intrusive to privacy, such as analyzing social media content for traits and characteristics, view such organizations as both more innovative and attractive. Our findings trigger a timely discussion about the critical role of ethical perceptions of AI in hiring on organizational attractiveness and innovativeness. (shrink)

In business as elsewhere, “ugly people” are treated worse than ”pretty people.” Why is this so? This article investigates the ethics of aesthetic injustice by addressing four questions: 1. What is aesthetic injustice? 2. How does aesthetic injustice play out? 3. What are the characteristics that make people being treated unjustly? 4. Why is unattractiveness (considered to be) bad? Aesthetic injustice is defined as unfair treatment of persons due to their appearance as perceived or assessed by others. It is plays (...) out in a variety of harms, ranging from killing (genocide), torture, violence, exclusion (social or physical), discrimination, stigmatization, epistemic injustice, harassment, pay inequity, bullying, alienation, misrecognition, stereotyping, and to prejudice. The characteristics that make people treated unjustly are (lack of) attractiveness, averageness, proportion, and homogeneity. Furthermore, prejudice, psychological biases, logical fallacies, and unwarranted fear of disease are some reasons why unattractiveness is (considered to be) bad. In sum, this study synthesizes insights from a wide range of research and draws attention to aesthetic injustice as a generic term for a form of injustice that deserves more systematic attention. Having a definition, description, and explanation of the concept makes it easier to target the problems with aesthetic injustice. As the business world is an arena of ubiquitous aesthetic injustice business ethics can take the lead in identifying, explaining, and addressing the problem. (shrink)

In many institutions of higher learning, questions are being added to standardized student course evaluation forms to assess the instructor's racism, sexism, and sensitivity to multicultural issues. In this article, 1 review data from both an experimental simulation and actual course evaluation submissions to show that such information is subject to two basic psychological errors. The first is the fundamental attribution error, which reflects the students inability to separate the message from the messenger when dealing with individual difference data that (...) may contain conclusions that are politically unpopular (such as the evidence for race or sex differences). The second is the halo effect, where negative opinions about an unpopular instructor who does not teach well are likely to be generalized and result in the attribution of racist and sexist views to that individual. (shrink)

In this paper, I articulate and defend a conception of trust that solves what I call “the trickster problem.” The problem results from the fact that many accounts of trust treat it similar to, or identical with, relying on someone’s good will. But a trickster could rely on your good will to get you to go along with his scheme, without trusting you to do so. Recent philosophical accounts of trust aim to characterize what it is for one person to (...) trust another so as to avoid this problem, but no extant account successfully does so. I argue that connecting trust to important, normatively defined relationships like friendship, romantic partnerships and parenting shows us something important about trust. The clearest cases of trust are found within the confines of normatively defined relationships like these, suggesting that there is a normative element to trust. Trusting someone involves not just believing that another person’s good will covers your interactions. Trusting involves believing that, at least in a certain domain of interaction, you are entitled to rely on that person’s good will. This account solves the trickster problem, because a trickster is not entitled to his victim’s good will. (shrink)

Recent debates concerning the nature of epistemic justification primarily turn on two distinctions: the objective-subjective distinction and the internal-external distinction. John Pollock has defended a view that is both internalist and subjectivist. He has provided a novel, naturalized account of epistemic justification. In this paper, I argue that data from cognitive psychology and biology is radically at odds with Pollock's project.

The influence on the global evaluation of a person based on the perception of a single trait is a phenomenon widely investigated in social psychology. Widely regarded as Halo effect, this phenomenon has been studied for more than 100 years now, and findings such as the relationship between aesthetic perception and other personality traits—such as competence and trustworthiness—have since been uncovered. Trustworthiness plays an especially crucial role in individuals' social interactions. Despite the large body of literature published on the Halo (...) effect, and especially on the relationship between aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness, little is known about the overall generalizability of the effect, as almost all of the studies have been conducted on adult participants from Western countries. Moreover, little is known about the stability of the effect over time, in the event of major destabilization, such as the outbreak of a pandemic. In this work, the cross-cultural generalizability of the Halo effect is investigated before and during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. An analysis of the generalizability and stability over time of the Halo effect is presented. Participants have been asked to rate the aesthetic appearance and perceived trustworthiness of a set of human faces of different ages, gender, and ethnicity. Result of our analysis demonstrated that the Halo effect is influenced by the age of presented faces, but not by their gender or ethnicity. Moreover, our results show that the strength of the effect can be affected by external events and that the volatility is higher for adults' than children's faces. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility is widely established by companies that aim to contribute to society and minimize their negative impact on the environment. In CSR research, employees’ reactions to CSR have extensively been researched. Social identity theory is often used as a theoretical background to explain the relationship between CSR and employee-related outcomes, but until now, a sound empirical examination is lacking, and causality remains unclear. CSR can unfold its effect mainly because of three theoretically important aspects of CSR initiatives, which (...) increase identification, i.e., distinctiveness, prestige, and salience of the out-group. This study examines how far identification can explain the effect of CSR on employees. In an experimental vignette study, CSR was manipulated in three degrees to examine its effects on job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior. In the vignettes, information on distinctiveness, prestige, and salience of the out-group were presented. Regression analyses showed that CSR significantly predicted commitment and job satisfaction, but not OCB. We found mediation effects of CSR on commitment, job satisfaction, and OCB through identification, but the effect of CSR on identification explained only little variance which indicates additional underlying mechanisms. The applicability of social identity theory for explaining CSR is discussed. Moreover, we discuss further explaining mechanisms. (shrink)

This article gives a short presentation of reflexive imperativism, the intentionalist theory of valence I developed with Max Khan Hayward. The theory says that mental states have valence in virtue of having reflexive imperative content. More precisely, mental states have positive valence (i.e., feel good) in virtue of issuing the command "More of me!", and they have negative valence (i.e., feel bad) in virtue of issuing the command "Less of me!" The article summarises the main arguments in favour of reflexive (...) imperativism and against other intentionalist treatments of valence. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have revealed systematic errors in human reasoning. There is disagreement about what these errors indicate about human rationality, but one upshot seems clear: human reasoning does not seem to fit traditional views of human rationality. This concern about rationality has made its way through various fields and has recently caught the attention of philosophers. The concern is that if philosophers are prone to systematic errors in reasoning, then the integrity of philosophy would be threatened. In this paper, I (...) present some of the more famous work in cognitive science that has marshaled this concern. Then I present reasons to think that those with training in philosophy will be less prone to certain systematic errors in reasoning. The suggestion is that if philosophers could be shown to be less prone to such errors, then the worries about the integrity of philosophy could be constrained. Then I present evidence that, according to performance on the CRT (Frederick 2005), those who have benefited from training and selection in philosophy are indeed less prone to one kind of systematic error: irrationally arbitrating between intuitive and reflective responses. Nonetheless, philosophers are not entirely immune to this systematic error, and their proclivity for this error is statistically related to their responses to a variety of philosophical questions. So, while the evidence herein puts constraints on the worries about the integrity of philosophy, it by no means eliminates these worries. The conclusion, then, is that the present evidence offers prima facie reasons to ascribe a mitigated privilege to philosophers' ability to rationally arbitrate between intuitive and reflective responses. (shrink)

The aim of this research is to develop and validate a measurement scale for consumer’s perceptions of corporate social responsibility using the three-dimensional social, environmental and economic conceptual approach as a theoretical basis. Based on the stages of measurement scale creation and validation suggested by DeVellis and supported by Churchill Jr.’s :64–73, 1979) suggestions, five different empirical studies are developed expressly and applied to consumers of tourist services. This research involves 1147 real tourists from 24 countries in two different cultural (...) and geographical contexts. A three-dimensional 18-item scale is proposed for measuring consumer perceptions of corporate social, environmental and economic responsibilities. This paper presents the complete development of the scale, as well as the implications and limitations of the main findings and the managerial implications. (shrink)

A growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables.The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published (...) research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated. (shrink)

Studies show that people we judge to have good character we also evaluate to be more attractive. I argue that in these cases, evaluative perceptual experiences represent morally admirable people as having positive (often intrinsic) value. Learning about a person's positive moral attributes often leads us to feel positive esteem for them. These feelings of positive esteem can come to partly constitute perceptual experiences. Such perceptual experiences evaluate the subject in an aesthetic way and seem to attribute aesthetic qualities like (...) 'beauty' to the object of perception. Moreover, these aesthetic qualities like 'beauty' represent the perceived to have various kinds of value. (shrink)

Despite the moral gravity and far-reaching consequences of ethical judgment, evidence shows that such judgment is surprisingly malleable, prone to bias, informed by intuition and implicit associations, and swayed by mere circumstance. In this vein, this research examines how mere colors featured in logos can bias consumers’ ethical judgments about a retailer. Exposure to a logo featuring an eco-friendly color makes an ethically ambiguous practice seem more ethical; however, exposure to a logo featuring a non-eco-friendly color makes the same practice (...) seem less ethical. This effect is due to the embodied meaning of color, not referential meanings associated with the names of colors, and it is mediated by perceptions of a retailer’s eco-friendliness. Furthermore, although the word “green” appears to influence ethical ratings of retail practices more than the word “blue,” visual exposure to either color evokes similar perceptions of eco-friendliness and influences ethical judgments. Study 2c assesses and rules out alternative explanations for this effect. Critically, an eco-friendly color can skew judgments even when the practices judged are not ethically ambiguous. Individual differences in ethical sensitivity moderate the observed effect, such that individuals who are less ethically sensitive are less influenced by color. The article concludes with a discussion on how logo colors shape consumers’ perceptions of retailer ethicality. (shrink)

A primary dimension of our engagement with fictional works of art – paradigmatically literary, dramatic, and cinematic narratives – is figuring out what is true in such representations, what the facts are in the fictional world. These facts include not only those that ground any genuine understanding of a story – say, that it was his own father whom Oedipus killed – but also those that may be missed in even a largely competent reading, say, that Emma Bovary's desires and (...) dissatisfactions are fed by reading romance novels. (shrink)

The point of this paper is to reveal a dogma in the ordinary conception of sensory imagination, and to suggest another way forward. The dogma springs from two main sources: a too close comparison of mental imagery to perceptual experience, and a too strong division between mental imagery and the traditional propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire). The result is an unworkable conception of the correctness conditions of sensory imaginings—one lacking any link between the conditions under which an imagining (...) aids human action and inference and the conditions under which it is veridical. The proposed solution is, first, to posit a variety of imaginative attitudes—akin to the traditional propositional attitudes—which have different associated correctness (or satisfaction) conditions. The second part of the solution is to allow for imaginings with “hybrid” contents, in the sense that both mental images and representations with language-like constituent structure contribute to the content of imaginings. (shrink)

If imagination is subject to the will, in the sense that people choose the content of their own imaginings, how is it that one nevertheless can learn from what one imagines? This chapter argues for a way forward in addressing this perennial puzzle, both with respect to propositional imagination and sensory imagination. Making progress requires looking carefully at the interplay between one’s intentions and various kinds of constraints that may be operative in the generation of imaginings. Lessons are drawn from (...) the existing literature on propositional imagination and from the control theory literature concerning the prediction and comparison mechanisms (or “forward models”) involved in ordinary perception. A more general conclusion is reached that, once we have the tools to understand how some imaginings are both under willful control and helpfully guide action and inference, we will have what we need to understand the cognitive basis of imagination in general. (shrink)