Prevalent among classicists today is the notion that Greeks, Romans, and Jews enhanced their own self-perception by contrasting themselves with the so-called Other--Egyptians, Phoenicians, ...Ethiopians, Gauls, and other foreigners--frequently through hostile stereotypes, distortions, and caricature. In this provocative book, Erich Gruen demonstrates how the ancients found connections rather than contrasts, how they expressed admiration for the achievements and principles of other societies, and how they discerned--and even invented--kinship relations and shared roots with diverse peoples.
Gruen shows how the ancients incorporated the traditions of foreign nations, and imagined blood ties and associations with distant cultures through myth, legend, and fictive histories. He looks at a host of creative tales, including those describing the founding of Thebes by the Phoenician Cadmus, Rome's embrace of Trojan and Arcadian origins, and Abraham as ancestor to the Spartans. Gruen gives in-depth readings of major texts by Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and others, in addition to portions of the Hebrew Bible, revealing how they offer richly nuanced portraits of the alien that go well beyond stereotypes and caricature.
Providing extraordinary insight into the ancient world, this controversial book explores how ancient attitudes toward the Other often expressed mutuality and connection, and not simply contrast and alienation.
How the Other Half Workssolves the riddle of America's contemporary immigration puzzle: why an increasingly high-tech society has use for so many immigrants who lack the basic skills that today's ...economy seems to demand. In clear and engaging style, Waldinger and Lichter isolate the key factors that explain the presence of unskilled immigrants in our midst. Focusing on Los Angeles, the capital of today's immigrant America, this hard-hitting book elucidates the other side of the new economy, showing that hiring is finding not so much "one's own kind" but rather the "right kind" to fit the demeaning, but indispensable, jobs many American workers disdain.
Efforts to guide peoples' behavior toward environmental sustainability, good health, or new products have emphasized informational and attitude change strategies. There is evidence that changing ...attitudes leads to changes in behavior, yet this approach takes insufficient account of the nature and operation of habits, which form boundary conditions for attitude-directed interventions. Integration of research on attitudes and habits might enable investigators to identify when and how behavior change strategies will be most effective. How might attitudinally driven behavior change be consolidated into lasting habits? How do habits protect the individual against the vicissitudes of attitudes and temptations and promote goal achievement? How might attitudinal approaches aiming to change habits be improved by capitalizing on habit discontinuities and strategic planning? When and how might changing or creating habit architecture shape habits directly? A systematic approach to these questions might help move behavior change efforts from attitude change strategies to habit change strategies.
Objective: Strengthening of antivaccination movements in recent decades has coincided with unprecedented increases in the incidence of some communicable diseases. Many intervention programs work from ...a deficit model of science communication, presuming that vaccination skeptics lack the ability to access or understand evidence. However, interventions focusing on evidence and the debunking of vaccine-related myths have proven to be either nonproductive or counterproductive. Working from a motivated reasoning perspective, we examine the psychological factors that might motivate people to reject scientific consensus around vaccination. To assist with international generalizability, we examine this question in 24 countries. Methods: We sampled 5,323 participants in 24 countries, and measured their antivaccination attitudes. We also measured their belief in conspiracy theories, reactance (the tendency for people to have a low tolerance for impingements on their freedoms), disgust sensitivity toward blood and needles, and individualistic/hierarchical worldviews (i.e., people's beliefs about how much control society should have over individuals, and whether hierarchies are desirable). Results: In order of magnitude, antivaccination attitudes were highest among those who (a) were high in conspiratorial thinking, (b) were high in reactance, (c) reported high levels of disgust toward blood and needles, and (d) had strong individualistic/hierarchical worldviews. In contrast, demographic variables (including education) accounted for nonsignificant or trivial levels of variance. Conclusions: These data help identify the "attitude roots" that may motivate and sustain vaccine skepticism. In so doing, they help shed light on why repetition of evidence can be nonproductive, and suggest communication solutions to that problem.
Prejudice is one of the major threats to the cohesion of multicultural societies and adolescent years play a key role in its development. How social contexts contribute to adolescent prejudice is, ...however, not yet well-known. This 3-wave study of Swedish majority adolescents (N = 659; MageT1 = 13.41; MageT3 = 17.33) examined the effects of parents' and peers' attitudes on changes in youth attitudes toward immigrants as well as an interplay between parent, peer, and school context. The results of multilevel analyses revealed that within-person fluctuations in youth attitudes were positively related to fluctuations in peers' but not parents' attitudes. Both parents' and peers' attitudes, however, significantly predicted the differences in level and rate of change in attitudes between adolescents. In addition to these direct effects, mediation analysis showed that parents' attitudes predicted youth attitudes indirectly, via the attitudes of the peers youth associate with, suggesting an overall greater importance of parental bias. Peers' attitudes did not moderate the effects of parents but youth from ethnically diverse classrooms were less affected by their parents' prejudice than youth from less diverse classrooms. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the role of social context in the development of prejudice. They suggest that while parents set the stage, peers explain the day-to-day variation in prejudice, and that classroom diversity offsets some of the negative effects of parental bias.
Over the past 100 years, research on job attitudes has improved in the sophistication of methods and in the productive use of theory as a basis for fundamental research into questions of work ...psychology. Early research incorporated a diversity of methods for measuring potential predictors and outcomes of job attitudes. Over time, methods for statistically assessing these relationships became more rigorous, but the field also became narrower. In recent years, developments in theory and methodology have reinvigorated research, which now addresses a rich panoply of topics related to the daily flow of affect, the complexity of personal motives and dispositions, and the complex interplay of attitude objects and motivation in shaping behavior. Despite these apparent changes, a review of the concepts and substantive arguments that underpin this literature have remained remarkably consistent. We conclude by discussing how we expect that these major themes will be addressed in the future, emphasizing topics that have proven to be enduring guides for understanding the ways that people construe and react to their appraisals of their work.
On the basis of social structural theory and identity theory, the current study examined changes in gender-role attitudes and behavior across the first-time transition to parenthood and following the ...birth of a second child for experienced mothers and fathers. Data were analyzed from the ongoing longitudinal Wisconsin Study of Families and Work. Gender-role attitudes, work and family identity salience, and division of household labor were measured for 205 first-time and 198 experienced mothers and fathers across 4 time points from 5 months pregnant to 12 months postpartum. Multilevel latent growth curve analysis was used to analyze the data. In general, parents became more traditional in their gender-role attitudes and behavior following the birth of a child, women changed more than men, and first-time parents changed more than experienced parents. Findings suggest that changes in gender-role attitudes and behavior following the birth of a child may be attributed to both the process of transitioning to parenthood for the first time and that of negotiating the demands of having a new baby in the family.
Attitudes and attitude change Bohner, Gerd; Dickel, Nina
Annual review of psychology,
01/2011, Volume:
62
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Attitudes and attitude change remain core topics of contemporary social psychology. This selective review emphasizes work published from 2005 to 2009. It addresses constructionist and stable-entity ...conceptualizations of attitude, the distinction between implicit and explicit measures of attitude, and implications of the foregoing for attitude change. Associative and propositional processes in attitude change are considered at a general level and in relation to evaluative conditioning. The role of bodily states and physical perceptions in attitude change is reviewed. This is followed by an integrative perspective on processing models of persuasion and the consideration of meta-cognitions in persuasion. Finally, effects of attitudes on information processing, social memory, and behavior are highlighted. Core themes cutting across the areas reviewed are attempts at integrative theorizing bringing together formerly disparate phenomena and viewpoints.
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