This time I'm not talking about stockings. It's still raining here in New York. It's been raining since Friday and the forecast has it continuing through the weekend. I've started to dig my warm clothes out of the closet. This morning I put on some new wool socks. I couldn't resist - the light purple/white/blue argyle pattern goes so well with my short-sleeve sweater today (an old hand-me-up from my sister May).
Yesterday we had department colloquium. The presenter was a cognitive psychologist who studies "theory of mind" in children (the classic test - if Sally puts a ball in the basket, goes away, and then the ball is moved to the box, when Sally comes back, where does Sally think the ball is?). One random slide that sticks in my mind is from the section relating theory of mind to moral judgment. Apparently, it's a well-replicated finding that we accord different intentionality for "good" and "bad" side effects. For example, Mr. Black wants to build a big factory to makes lots and lots of money. He's told that this may pollute the nearby lake. He doesn't care about the lake, he just wants to make lots of money. Does Mr. Black care about the lake? No. Did he intend to pollute the lake? Adults generally say yes. If the unintended side effect is lower unemployment and town pride and he doesn't care about those, we generally say no, he didn't intend to help the town.
I found out last night that we didn't get the Supporting Healthy Marriages Grant. Eshkol and I are meeting for lunch today to look at the "pink" sheets and console ourselves. I'm not too bummed out - it was a little bit of a stretch since we hadn't done work with low-income minority populations before. But I did think it was a good proposal - to run our Skilled Support Intervention with the target group.
Book I'm currently reading: Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
No comments:
Post a Comment