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Cross-cultural evidence that intergroup conflict heightens preferences for dominant leaders:A 25-country study
No full textAcross societies and across history, seemingly dominant, authoritarian leaders have emerged frequently, often rising to power based on widespread popular support. One prominent theory holds that evolved psychological mechanisms of followership regulate citizens' leadership preferences such that dominant individuals are intuitively attributed leadership qualities when followers face intergroup conflicts like war. A key hypothesis based on this theory is that followers across the world should upregulate their preferences for dominant leaders the more they perceive the present situation as conflict-ridden. From this conflict hypothesis, we generate and test four concrete predictions using a novel dataset including 5008 participants residing in 25 countries from different world regions (consisting of a mix of convenience and approximately representative country-specific samples). Specifically, we combine experimental techniques, validated psychological scales, and macro-level indicators of intergroup conflict to gauge people's preferences for dominant leadership. Across four independent tests, results broadly support the notion that the presence of intergroup conflict increases follower preferences for dominant leaders. Thus, our results provide robust cross-cultural support for the existence of an adaptive, tribal followership psychology, a finding that has various implications for understanding contemporary politics and international relations
Children and wilful ignorance
No full textWhile the drive to acquire knowledge is a hallmark of human cognition, individuals frequently choose to avoid information—a phenomenon known as wilful ignorance. While extensively studied in adults, little is known about its developmental origins. We identify from the literature two distinct developmental pathways for the emergence of wilful ignorance behaviours. We then propose a graded framework to assess children's motivations for information avoidance, accounting for epistemic, emotional, and instrumental trade-offs. Gaining a deeper understanding of the emergence and the development of wilful ignorance not only enriches the theoretical discussions but also empowers educators, policy makers, and health professionals to craft strategies and interventions that are better suited to the needs and capacities of younger populations
Bioethics and Human Rights in Medical Biotechnology
No full textBioethics is now not only applied, in the strict sense, to the doctor-patient relation, but also in extraordinary reproductive procedures performed with medical assistance, genetic tests, biobanks, stem cell research, or even gene editing. Due to the application of new technologies, the scope of bioethics extends and is intertwined with the application of artificial intelligence and robotics. Not only the huge amount of data generated during epidemics, but also the ever-expanding amount of genetic data raises bioethical questions. This book argues that the ethical aspects of individual new biotechnologies should be examined in comparison with each other and together, and basic issues such as patient information should be examined again and again and interpreted for the given situation. Human rights and bioethics mutually influence each other and this connection is analyzed in the book through numerous legal cases and examples
