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Study finds gender influences fairness attitudes in children

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Study finds gender influences fairness attitudes in children


Fairness attitudes in children
Experimental arrangement of the inequity aversion choice task. Credit: Communications Psychology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-024-00139-9

How do young children perceive what is fair and what is unfair, and how do they behave as a result? Three psychologists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU), Tilburg University in the Netherlands and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, show in the journal Communications Psychology that stereotypical gender differences do exist, but that the story is in fact more complicated than that.

The scenario is familiar: Seven-year-old Lukas complains loudly when his friend Henry is allowed one more scoop of ice cream than him. Although—or even because (?)—he feels unfairly treated, he refuses to share his ice cream with his friend Leo, who has none at all. By contrast, Lisa shares her ice cream with Leo. The next day, however, Lukas has chocolate with him, which he happily shares with Lisa.

The first example seems to fit the stereotype: Boys recognize exactly when they are being disadvantaged, yet at the same time they treat other children just as unfairly. Conversely, girls are more willing to share. But this stereotype does not apply in the case of the chocolate.

Three researchers, who originally all worked at HHU, have examined in more detail how this sense of fairness and unfairness develops in children: Professor Dr. Tobias Kalenscher, Principal Investigator of the Comparative Psychology research team in Düsseldorf, Dr. Lina Oberließen, now at the Wolf Science Center of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, and Professor Dr. Marijn van Wingerden from the Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at Tilburg University. They describe behavioral experiments they have conducted with 332 children aged between three and eight.

Professor van Wingerden says, “We did not have ice cream or chocolate though. Instead, the children were paired up and had to award each other smiley stickers. In some cases, we also added additional costs for the allocating child when they e.g. distributed the stickers equally. And then we observed how the children behaved in various gender constellations.”

Dr. Oberließen comments on the results, saying, “We indeed found gender-related effects. Girls showed more compassion than boys. Interestingly however, both genders displayed the same envy when a boy received a larger portion. This suggests that boys in general were treated with higher envy.”

Boys also tend to be more spiteful to other boys: They always selected the maximum possible number of stickers for themselves, even if it meant that their partner was left empty-handed.

So, the fairness attitudes of children are in fact dependent on gender—however, not only on their own gender, but also on the gender of the children they are interacting with.

Van Wingerden says, “We identified typical gender stereotypes—girls are more compassionate, while boys are more competitive.”

Oberließen adds, “The story is however more complicated than that. Both genders tend to treat boys with more envy than girls. And boys are significantly more compassionate when it comes to sharing resources with girls than with other boys.”

From the results, Professor Kalenscher concludes, “Gender stereotypes permeate today’s society. Our study underlines that gendered differences in social behavior can in fact be observed empirically, even in young children, possibly contributing to cultural gender typecasts in adult life.

“However, we can also see that, at least in the field of fairness preferences, gendered differences solidify over an extended period. This observation leaves room for promoting non-gender-stereotyped fairness attitudes during this critical period of childhood.”

More information:
Marijn van Wingerden et al, Egalitarian preferences in young children depend on the genders of the interacting partners, Communications Psychology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-024-00139-9

Provided by
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Citation:
Study finds gender influences fairness attitudes in children (2024, October 7)
retrieved 7 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-gender-fairness-attitudes-children.html

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People don’t like a ‘white savior,’ but does it affect how they donate to charity?

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People don’t like a ‘white savior,’ but does it affect how they donate to charity?


by Robert Hoffmann, Ananta Neelim, Simon Feeny and Swee-Hoon Chuah,

aid worker
Credit: RDNE Stock project from Pexels

Efforts to redress global inequality are facing an unexpected adversary: the white savior. It’s the idea that people of color, whether in the Global South or North, need “saving” by a white Western person or aid worker.

An eclectic mix of white activists have been publicly accused of being white saviors for trying to help different causes in the Global South. They include celebrities who adopted orphaned children, organized benefit concerts such as Live Aid, or called out rights abuses.

Others include professional and volunteer charity workers and journalists reporting on poverty in Africa. Even activism at home can earn the white savior label, like efforts to refine the proposal for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Australia.

We conducted a series of studies with 1,991 representative Australians to find out what people thought made a white savior, how charity appeal photographs create this impression, and how it affected donations.

White saviorism and charities

The concern is that white people’s overseas charity, even when well-meaning, can inadvertently hurt rather than help the cause. It could perpetuate harmful stereotypes of white superiority, disempower local people, or misdirect resources to make helpers feel good rather than alleviating genuine need.

The fear of being labeled a white savior could make people think twice about giving time or money to worthy causes. It might stop aid organizations using proven appeals to raise donations they need.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), for instance, released a video apologizing for using photos depicting white people in aid settings and which aren’t representative of the majority local staff they employ.

Therein lies the dilemma: white donors can relate to photos of white helpers, but this is easily interpreted as white savourism.

What makes someone a white savior?

Very little research exists into exactly what white saviourism means. Broadly, it seems to describe people in the Global North who support international causes for selfish reasons, to satisfy their own sentimentality and need for a positive image. We wanted to go deeper.

In the first of our studies, we showed our participants 26 photographs depicting different Global South aid settings with a white helper.

The helpers that participants thought of as highly “white savior” typically had these characteristics:

  • they appeared to be privileged and superior
  • they gave help sentimentally and tokenistically
  • they conformed to the colonial stereotype of the helpless local and powerful foreigner.

Further analysis showed these characteristics boil down to two essential features: ineffectiveness of the help and entitlement of the helpers.

These two perceptions of the white savior explain the problem for charity. Behavioral economics research has identified two main reasons for donating, and these perceptions undermine both.

Why do people donate at all?

So to see how much white saviourism affects charities, we need to know why people donate in the first place.

One reason for giving is pure altruism, the desire to help others with no direct benefit to oneself. The effective altruism movement encourages people to make every donated dollar count—getting the maximum bang for the buck in terms of measurable outcomes for those in need.

The difficulty for effective altruists is in assessing the impact of different charities vying for their donations. There are now websites that list charities by lives saved per dollar donated.

Alternatively, donors might look at a charity’s appeal images for clues of how effectively it will use their dollars.

Depicting white people as saviors can create the impression of tokenistic aid that only serves the helper’s sentimental needs. Evidence shows people resent impure motives in others (including organizations) and might try to penalize them.

Behavioral economics research also shows, as you might expect, that some people are more concerned about themselves than others when giving. This is known as “warm glow” giving.

Warm glow givers have several self-serving motivations. They include giving to gain self-respect or social status.

People also have a desire to meet their social obligations. For richer folks, this could include charitable giving. And giving can reduce guilt they might feel about their privilege.

Just like the effective altruist, the warm glow giver could be put off by any sign of white saviourism. They don’t want to be seen to be endorsing it.

Do people still donate?

All this suggests that seeing a white savior depiction in a charitable appeal will make people donate less.

We examined this in another study, in which participants were shown each of the previous photos. This time they were asked, for every photo, if they were willing to donate to a charity that uses it.

And as we thought, the photos previously rated as high in white saviourism had low intentions to donate.

But intentions do not always equal actions, as psychologists have demonstrated for many years.

To overcome this, we measured real donations in another study. Again participants saw the same photos, but this time they had the chance to donate part of their participation fee to a real charity when seeing them.

What we found surprised us: the white savior effect disappeared. How high a photo was on the white savior scale had no impact on how much participants donated when seeing it.

Does the end justify the motivation?

Our results summarize the dilemma. Donors might object to white saviorism by charities, but in the end feel that it’s the help that counts, not the motivation behind it.

We found some evidence for this when we asked participants about their general views of white saviorism.

Almost 70% agreed that white savior motives are common in Western help and that this was problematic for recipients. But interestingly, only 42% thought helpers with these motives deserved criticism.

Together, this might suggest that people feel white savior help is better than no help. There are voices in the charity community who echo this sentiment: imposing conditions on charitable giving will serve to reduce it.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Elise Westhoff, president of the Philanthropy Roundtable in the United States, said “by imposing those ‘musts’ and ‘shoulds,’ you really limit human generosity.”

But this doesn’t mean there are no legitimate concerns. There are, but it’s not hard for charities to address them.

Our results show that white savior perceptions do not affect actual donations, so read another way, suggests charities can safely replace highly white savior images without losing donations for their causes.

Provided by
The Conversation


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.The Conversation

Citation:
People don’t like a ‘white savior,’ but does it affect how they donate to charity? (2024, October 7)
retrieved 7 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-people-dont-white-savior-affect.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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Whale shark shipping collisions may increase as oceans warm, predict researchers

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Whale shark shipping collisions may increase as oceans warm, predict researchers


Whale shark shipping collisions may increase as oceans warm
Whale shark with injury to the dorsal fin, likely to be caused by collision with a vessel. Credit: Gonzalo Araujo.

Global warming could increase the threat posed to whale sharks from large ships, according to a study published in Nature Climate Change, titled “Climate-driven global redistribution of an ocean giant predicts increased threat from shipping.”

Researchers from the University of Southampton and Marine Biological Association (MBA) predict that increased ocean temperatures will see this already endangered species driven into new habitats crossed by busy shipping lanes.

The study predicts that the co-occurrence of whale sharks and large ships could be 15,000 times higher by the end of the century compared to the present day.

Lead author Dr. Freya Womersley, University of Southampton and MBA Postdoctoral Research Scientist said, “These shifts in the whale sharks’ habitat were most extreme under high emission scenarios. A global reshuffling could lead to core habitat losses in some areas as well as increased co-occurrence with shipping traffic as oceans warm and other variables change.”

Whale sharks, the world’s largest fish, are highly mobile and responsive to changes in temperature. Recent evidence suggests they are also particularly vulnerable to ship strikes—where large marine animals are struck and injured, often fatally, by large vessels in the global fleet.

Researchers used whale shark satellite-tracking data coupled with global climate models to project the distribution of whale sharks under three different future climate scenarios.

The models project core habitat losses of over 50% in some national waters by 2100 under high emissions (where we continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels), with the greatest potential losses in Asia. Under a sustainable development scenario (in line with the target of no more than 2°C of global warming), some areas showed a gain in core habitat, notably in Europe.

Whale shark shipping collisions may increase as oceans warm
A whale shark swimming. Credit: Gonzalo Araujo

“The shifts we predict are likely to be less extreme if we are able to slow warming and mitigate climate change, suggesting that even complex, multi-factor impacts of climate change can be somewhat alleviated by our actions,” says Professor David Sims, co-author and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton and MBA.

The team paired the distribution maps with information on shipping traffic density to determine if these habitat shifts would see whale sharks move into more heavily trafficked areas in future, potentially increasing the likelihood of ship strikes.

They found that some newly suitable habitats overlapped with busy shipping routes. This was the case in the US part of the North Pacific Ocean, the Japanese part of the Eastern China Seas, and the Sierra Leonian part of the North Atlantic Ocean, among many other sites globally.

Some areas, such as the Mexican part of the Gulf of Mexico, saw reductions in co-occurrence, where core habitats shifted into more coastal waters, away from the busy shipping routes in the center of the Gulf.

Professor Sims says, “Overall ship co-occurrence increased under all future climate scenarios, even if shipping remained at current levels, rather than its anticipated expansion of up to 1,200% by 2050.”

Womersley added, “We show that climate change has the potential to indirectly impact highly mobile marine species through interacting pressures of humans and the environment. This highlights the importance of factoring climate change into discussions around endangered species management.”

More information:
Freya Womersley et al, Climate-driven global redistribution of an ocean giant predicts increased threat from shipping, Nature Climate Change (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-024-02129-5. www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02129-5

Citation:
Whale shark shipping collisions may increase as oceans warm, predict researchers (2024, October 7)
retrieved 7 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-whale-shark-shipping-collisions-oceans.html

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Near-Earth asteroid data help probe possible fifth force in universe

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Near-Earth asteroid data help probe possible fifth force in universe


Asteroid data probes possible fifth force in universe
Bennu and other nearby asteroids. Credit: NASA

In 2023, the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission returned a sample of dust and rocks collected on the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. In addition to the information about the universe gleaned from the sample itself, the data generated by OSIRIS-REx might also present an opportunity to probe new physics. As described in Communications Physics, an international research team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory used the asteroid’s tracking data to study the possible existence of a fifth fundamental force of the universe.

“Interpreting the data we see from tracking Bennu has the potential to add to our understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the universe, potentially revamping our understanding of the Standard Model of physics, gravity and dark matter,” said Yu-Dai Tsai, lead author on the paper. “The trajectories of objects often feature anomalies that can be useful in discovering new physics.”

Given the implications for planetary defense, near-Earth asteroids are closely tracked. The team applied that ground-based tracking data collected before and during the OSIRIS-REx mission to a probe of extensions of the Standard Model of physics, which describes three of the four known fundamental forces of the universe.

Optical and radar astrometric data has helped constrain—or establish to a degree of precision—the trajectory of Bennu since it was discovered in 1999. The OSIRIS-REx mission contributed X-band radiometric and optical navigation tracking data.

“The tight constraints we’ve achieved translate readily to some of the tightest-ever limits on Yukawa-type fifth forces,” said Sunny Vagnozzi, assistant professor at the University of Trento in Italy, and co-author on the paper. “These results highlight the potential for asteroid tracking as a valuable tool in the search for ultralight bosons, dark matter and several well-motivated extensions of the Standard Model.”

Asteroid data probes possible fifth force in universe
Constraints on the strength and range of fifth forces. Credit: Communications Physics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42005-024-01779-3

Anomalies lead to discoveries

The trajectory of a celestial object is impacted by gravity and other factors. Understanding the physics of trajectories can reveal mysteries, especially where there are anomalies in the trajectory. Famously, long before it was actually observed, the planet Neptune was inferred by observations of irregularities in the orbit of nearby planet Uranus.

Using trajectory data and resulting modeling from the tracking of Bennu, the teams’ analysis established constraints on a possible fifth force and the role of a potential mediating particle, such as an ultralight boson, in that fifth force. The presence of a mediating particle that might act upon a fifth force would show up in the altered orbit of an asteroid like Bennu, which is why studying the tracking data is so significant for physics.

A new particle such as an ultralight boson might represent an extension of the Standard Model to include dark matter and dark energy, which are strongly suggested by cosmological and astrophysical observations but have not yet been incorporated into the general framework. While dark matter is thought to make up perhaps 85% of the total matter in the universe, science remains unsure as to what particles and forces make up dark matter.

Next stop: Apophis

Tsai and others first explored the probing of fifth-force physics with asteroids with research published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics in 2023, before tackling Bennu. The team plans to build on their Bennu work in the future with the tracking of the Apophis asteroid, which will pass within 20,000 miles of Earth in 2029.

NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft will approach the asteroid and kick up dust. That and observations of the impact of Earth’s gravity on Apophis as it sails by will provide data to continue the search for fifth-force physics.

The team is considering new space quantum technologies and dedicated space missions to improve tracking precision or directly search for dark matter.

More information:
Yu-Dai Tsai et al, Constraints on fifth forces and ultralight dark matter from OSIRIS-REx target asteroid Bennu, Communications Physics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42005-024-01779-3

Citation:
Near-Earth asteroid data help probe possible fifth force in universe (2024, October 7)
retrieved 7 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-earth-asteroid-probe-universe.html

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part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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Emphasizing the need for worker engagement

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Emphasizing the need for worker engagement


car manufacturing
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

The growing use of collaborative robots in the workplace may pose significant psychosocial risks to workers’ mental health and their job security, but there are ways for organizations to smooth the transition, according to research from the Monash University Business School.

Once confined to science fiction, collaborative robots, or cobots, are rapidly reshaping the Australian workplace, handling everything from heavy machinery to delicate surgical tasks.

Automation, including cobots, is predicted to increase annual productivity growth in Australia by 50% to 150%. These technologies have the potential to add a further $170–600 billion per year to GDP by 2030, according to the National Robotics Strategy.

While cobots are often portrayed as increasing efficiency and speed, and providing a safe and reliable means to reduce physical workplace risk, less is known about the hidden psychosocial risks employees may be facing.

Monash Business School Professor Herman Tse and his research team found psychosocial hazards, such as job insecurity and role ambiguity, are common issues that affect workers as part of the growing use of collaborative workspace technologies, such as cobots.

“Workers often perceive cobots as potential threats to their job stability, especially when collaboration between humans and machines is minimal; lower collaboration may be perceived as a strategy to automate work and replace operators with machines. This perception can lead to increased stress and decreased trust in new technologies,” Professor Tse said.

To support a smooth transition of cobots in the workplace, and reducing these risks, the study emphasizes the urgent need for organizations to consider employees’ perception of collaborative robots and the stresses that arise from their growing use. It is hoped this would lead to a broader organizational understanding about the importance of involving workers in the implementation process of cobots.

The research team found engaging employees through participatory change management and consultation can significantly reduce psychosocial hazards and improve overall acceptance of new technologies.

Recommendations for Organizations:

  • Engage workers: Involve employees from various units in the planning and implementation stages to address concerns and gather feedback.
  • Enhance consultation: Provide clear communication about how cobots will impact job roles and responsibilities, and include workers in decision-making processes.
  • Conduct risk assessments: Develop comprehensive risk assessments to identify and address potential psychosocial hazards associated with cobots.

The global cobot market is booming, reaching a staggering US $50 billion since 2018.

“This growth is being driven by increasing automation needs in sectors like manufacturing, automotive, electronics, health care, and food and beverages,” said Professor Tse.

“Cobots enhance productivity and address labor shortages, making them attractive for both large and small businesses, and advancements in cobot technology will further boost their adoption in Australian workplaces.”

The team’s findings underscore that while cobots offer significant benefits, including reducing physical strain and enhancing productivity, their introduction must be handled with care to avoid unintended psychosocial consequences.

By prioritizing worker engagement and consultation, organizations can ensure a smoother transition to collaborative robotics and safeguard employee well-being.

Provided by
Monash University


Citation:
Psychosocial risks of collaborative robots: Emphasizing the need for worker engagement (2024, October 7)
retrieved 7 October 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-psychosocial-collaborative-robots-emphasizing-worker.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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