Mark Wilson explores our strategies for understanding the world. We frequently cannot reason about nature in the straightforward manner we anticipate, but must use alternative thought processes that reach useful answers in opaque and roundabout ways ; and philosophy must find better descriptive tools to reflect this.

Understanding tax avoidance becomes a matter of significant interest as it is not just a financial problem but also an organizational ethical and integrity issue. This paper investigates the influence of the board chair’s early-life famine experience on corporate tax avoidance in China. We find a negative association between board chairs’ famine experience and tax avoidance. Our channel tests confirm that the two perspectives of “ethical altruism” and “risk aversion” explain this negative association. Further, the effect of (...) the famine experience on tax avoidance is more pronounced in firms whose board chairs had the famine experience in their early childhood or adolescent years, suggesting that experiences in the childhood and adolescent periods have a greater ‘imprint’ on human behavior. Our study fills a critical gap in tax research by directly linking board chair life experiences to corporate tax practices, suggesting that early-life experience is an important determinant of tax behavior. (shrink)

The phenomenon of selective dispute avoidance is that there are issues we debate and issues we recoil from debating, despite the fact that they are very similar in values at stake. What accounts for this variance? That some disagreements are deep and engagements on some deep issues yields meta-argumentatively bad results is a plausible explanation. However, practical second-order rebutting reasons to these considerations are proposed, essentially that not engaging has foreseeably worse consequences than engaging. What favors engagement, then, is (...) that only when engaged can one address the negative second-order reasons one yields on either approach. What follows is a pragmatic meta-argument for engagement, even in cases of deep disagreement. (shrink)

In contrast to many aspects of the social responsibility of business, CSR scholarship has been largely silent on the issue of the payment of corporate tax. This is curious because such tax payments are often considered a fundamental and easily measured example of a company’s citizenship behavior. However, because the payment of corporate tax can often be legally avoided, this activity represents a boundary condition for CSR. If the law and CSR suggest that a company should pay its fair share (...) of tax, yet many successful companies actively avoid this social obligation, should they be considered socially irresponsible. This paper explores the issue of tax avoidance and the implications it has for any credible definition and measure of CSR. It also highlights an aspect of corporate practice that is deliberately hidden from public view. (shrink)

With the significant disconnect between the collective aim of limiting warming to well below 2°C and the current means proposed to achieve such an aim, the goal of this paper is to offer a moral assessment of prominent alternatives to current international climate policy. To do so, we’ll outline five different policy routes that could potentially bring the means and goal in line. Those five policy routes are: (1) exceed 2°C; (2) limit warming to less than 2°C by economic de-growth; (...) (3) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation only; (4) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation and widespread deployment of Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs); and (5) limit warming to less than 2°C by traditional mitigation, NETs, and Solar Radiation Management as a fallback. In assessing these five policy routes, we rely primarily upon two moral considerations: the avoidance of catastrophic climate change and the right to sustainable development. We’ll conclude that we should continue to aim at the two-degree target, and that to get there we should use aggressive mitigation, pursue the deployment of NETs, and continue to research SRM. (shrink)

Managers of multinational companies often favour an aggressive tax avoidance strategy that pushes the legal limits onto the advantage of shareholders and the disadvantage of the spirit of democratically legitimized tax laws. The public and media debate whether such aggressive behaviour is immoral. Aggressive tax avoidance is a subset of the aggressive legal interpretations potentially observable in all fields which places little weight on the will of a democratically legitimized legislation. A thorough ethical analysis based on the deontological (...) approach of Kant demonstrates that aggressive tax avoidance as a special case of operating on the edge of legal boundaries is potentially immoral. Applying the Kantian “contradiction of conception or will” test shows that this maxim might not be conceived or willed as a general law of nature. If all natural or legal persons aggressively interpret laws on all subjects and in every imaginable situation, then central principles of the system of law we all rely upon would be severely compromised. Therefore, aggressive tax avoidance by managers of multinational companies may violate the managers’ moral duty to obey not only the letter but also the intention or spirit of the law. The validity of the argumentation depends critically on the formulation and interpretation of the respective maxims and on assumptions about the legal system. Preserving central elements of Kantian philosophy, the article demonstrates the complexity of a philosophical argumentation which tries to justify the moral intuitions that underpin the common negative evaluation of aggressive legal strategies in business. (shrink)

Despite increasing pressure to deal with climate change, firms have been slow to respond with effective action. This article presents a multi-level framework for a better understanding of why many firms are failing to reduce their absolute greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change. The concepts of short-termism and uncertainty avoidance from research in psychology, sociology, and organization theory can explain the phenomenon of organizational inaction on climate change. Antecedents related to short-termism and uncertainty avoidance reinforce one (...) another at three levels—individual, organizational, and institutional—and result in organizational inaction on climate change. The article also discusses the implications of this multi-level framework for research on corporate sustainability. (shrink)

Personal name avoidance, a cultural practice rooted in norms of hierarchy, respect, and taboo, shapes communication across diverse societies. As artificial intelligence (AI) communication tools such as chatbots, translation systems, and automated messaging platforms become integral to global interactions, their limited ability to accommodate these norms raises concerns about cultural sensitivity and bias. This theoretical study synthesizes sociolinguistic and AI research to examine how name avoidance in Vietnamese and English-speaking contexts challenges the recognition and adaptation capabilities of AI (...) systems. It explores the feasibility of machine learning to enable adaptive naming behaviors and addresses ethical dilemmas in balancing global functionality with localized cultural norms. Findings highlight AI’s potential to foster culturally aware interactions while revealing persistent technical and ethical challenges, including risks of cultural homogenization. The study advocates for responsive AI design, emphasizing socio-linguistically informed datasets and user-configurable interfaces to ensure equitable communication in a globalized world. Future empirical research is recommended to validate these insights. (shrink)

This article reviews evidence suggesting that the cause of approach and avoidance behavior lies not so much in the presence (i.e., the stimulus) but, rather, in the behavior’s anticipated future consequences (i.e., the goal): Approach is motivated by the goal to produce a desired consequence or end-state, while avoidance is motivated by the goal to prevent an undesired consequence or end-state. However, even though approach and avoidance are controlled by goals rather than stimuli, affective stimuli can influence (...) action control by priming associated goals. An integrative ideomotor model of approach and avoidance is presented and discussed. (shrink)

Theory suggests that stimulus evaluations automatically evoke approach–avoidance behavior. However, the extent to which approach–avoidance behavior is triggered automatically is not yet clear. Furthermore, the nature of automatically triggered approach–avoidance behavior is controversial. We review research on two views on the type of approach–avoidance behavior that is triggered automatically (arm flexion/extension, distance change). Present evidence supports the distance-change view and corroborates the notion of an automatic pathway from evaluation to distance-change behavior. We discuss underlying mechanisms (direct (...) stimulus–response links, outcome anticipations, goals) as well as implications regarding the flexibility of the evaluation–behavior link. (shrink)

This study adopts moral reasoning strategies to investigate why consumers support companies involved in ethical transgressions. Drawing on several cases of real multinationals publicly involved in tax avoidance practices, it aims to demonstrate that moral rationalization and moral decoupling depend not only on how consumers perceive the magnitude of the transgression, but also on their individual differences, such as political ideology and brand identification. A quantitative study with a sample of 3989 consumers of five different focal brands was employed (...) to test a set of hypotheses. Findings reveal that moral decoupling directly explains purchase intentions. However, rationalization only explains behavioral intentions if it leads to a reduction in the perceived immorality of the action. Furthermore, the study reveals significant differences across personal values. Left-leaning individuals tend to rationalize less and decouple more when they perceive that the magnitude of the transgression as egregious. Interestingly, consumers who are highly identified with the brand are less affected by the transgression and tend to be more supportive toward the brand by engaging in rationalization mechanisms. (shrink)

Two core motivational systems have been conceptualized as underlying emotion and behavior. The approach system drives the organism toward stimuli or events in the environment, and the avoidance system instead deters the organism away from these stimuli or events. This approach—avoidance dichotomy has been central to theories of emotion. Advances in neuroscience complementing well-designed behavioral experiments have begun to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying approach—avoidance motivation, suggesting that these two systems exist in parallel and are lateralized in (...) the brain. This review explores the notion of approach—avoidance and the cerebral lateralization of these motivational tendencies. (shrink)

This study examines whether corporate social responsibility performance is associated with corporate tax avoidance. Employing a matched sample of 434 firm-year observations from the Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini database over the period 2003–2009, our logit regression results show that the higher the level of CSR performance of a firm, the lower the likelihood of tax avoidance. Our results indicate that more socially responsible firms are likely to display less tax avoidance. Finally, the results from our additional analysis (...) show that the CSR categories community relations and diversity represent particularly important elements of CSR performance that reduce tax avoidance. (shrink)

Recent work has shown that memory for various types of information associated with social targets (impressions based on behaviours and political ideology) influences decisions to approach or avoid those same targets. The current study was intended to better understand the extent that memory for other types of details associated with targets (beliefs and behaviours) affects subsequent approach/avoidance decisions. In this investigation, participants formed impressions of social targets represented by a picture and a sentence (a belief in Experiment 1; either (...) a belief or behaviour in Experiment 2). Later, memory for the impressions and sentences associated with each target was tested. Finally, participants decided whether they would want to approach or avoid each target. Results demonstrated that accurate memory strongly influenced approach/avoidance decisions for targets associated with different types of information (beliefs; behaviours), although there was no difference in the effect of memory between beliefs and behaviours. Overall, results suggest an important role of memory in decisions to approach or avoid others. (shrink)

A motivational system approach to avoidance behavior is presented. According to this approach, a motivational state increases the probability of relevant response patterns and establishes the appropriate or “ideal” consummatory stimuli as positive reinforcers. In the case of feeding motivation, for example, hungry rats are likely to explore and gnaw, and to learn to persist in activities correlated with the reception of consummatory stimuli produced by ingestion of palatable substances. In the case of defense motivation, fearful rats are likely (...) to flee or freeze, and to learn to persist in activities correlated with consummatory stimuli produced by flight from a dangerous place. Defense system activation is distinct from alarm reactions. The latter prepare the animal for probable noxious events, involve relatively intense negative affect and extinguish rapidly in situations where the noxious event no longer occurs. In contrast, defense system activation potentiates innate and modified defense reactions, thus preparing the animal for possible, but not necessarily probable, noxious events; it involves little or no negative affect and extinguishes very slowly when the noxious event no longer occurs. With these assumptions and the resulting model we attempt to resolve several long-standing problems in avoidance learning, including the low correlation between negative affect and avoidance performance, differential rates of extinction for avoidance performance and conditioned emotional responses, and evidence that some avoidance responses are much more easily learned than others. In addition, the model has implications for the study of parallels between appetitive and aversive motivation, sign tracking in aversive conditioning, and orientation of flight responses. Historical antecedents and alternative approaches are discussed. (shrink)

Humans tend to approach positive stimuli faster than they avoid them and faster than negative or neutral stimuli. The mechanisms underlying this “Approach Avoidance Bias” (AAB) remain contested. First, it is not clear whether the AAB can be explained in terms of a classical “cognitivist” account based on associative connections involving internal representations or whether an “embodied” account that draws on the fact that we behave the way we do because we have a specific body with which we operate (...) in a particular environment might not be equally viable. Moreover, while theoretical considerations and empirical evidence suggest that an embodied account might be preferable, it is still unclear how the meaning of approach and avoidance emerges from our bodily constitution in such a way that, ultimately, we end up tending to approach the good and avoid the bad. This paper addresses both points. It argues that the AAB is indeed embodied, but it also admits that a proper understanding of the way the AAB is embodied arguably has to incorporate central cognitivist insights. In doing so, it defends an ecumenical middle ground between positions that have historically too often been caricatured as irreconcilable rivals and, more generally, contributes to a better understanding of what embodiment does and does not mean. (shrink)

In an ordinary interaction, communicants have various, mostly unconscious goals which reflect their interactional, social and personal needs. In these interactions, people’s minds try to find a balance between reaching these goals and consuming cognitive energy. If a speaker puts too little effort into speech production, she risks not achieving her communicative goals. This is especially typical when the atmosphere is relaxed, a good example of which is family discourse. An analysis of recorded conversations shows that there are certain regular (...) manifestations of risk-taking in family discourse, such as expressing immature thoughts, raising a large variety of topics and overguessing. A substantial amount of risk-taking in family discourse is in one way or another connected with false confidence in the interlocutors’ common ground. Family members know each other well, which results in an overestimation of the similarity of their understanding of words and objects. This attitude leads them to use cryptic, hard-to-comprehend speech. Quick, everyday interactions are mostly automated, and the speakers do not recognise that their speech is full of implicitness and underdeterminacy. (shrink)

In a series of works, Jody Azzouni has defended deflationary nominalism, the view that certain sentences quantifying over mathematical objects are literally true, although such objects do not exist. One alleged attraction of this view is that it avoids various philosophical puzzles about mathematical objects. I argue that this thought is misguided. I first develop an ontologically neutral counterpart of Field’s reliability challenge and argue that deflationary nominalism offers no distinctive answer to it. I then show how this reasoning generalizes (...) to other philosophically problematic entities. The moral is that puzzle avoidance fails to motivate deflationary nominalism. (shrink)

This study examines how biodiversity conservation affects corporate tax avoidance. Exploiting China’s 2017 “Green Shield Initiative,” a nationwide campaign strengthening oversight of national nature reserves, as a quasi-natural experiment and adopting a difference-in-differences design, we find that treated firms experience a significant increase in their effective tax rates post-implementation. The results suggest that when biodiversity protection becomes more salient, firms face stronger pressure to contribute to the public revenues that support ecological governance. Channel analyses show increases in local environmental (...) expenditures and tax penalties following the policy, consistent with stronger tax base protection incentives by local governments. They also show greater biodiversity-related public attention measured through textual analysis, consistent with heightened external scrutiny of corporate conduct. Cross-sectional results indicate stronger effects in cities with greater fiscal pressure and land finance dependence, among firms receiving greater media attention and analyst following, and among firms with high ex ante tax planning capacity. Further analyses show that the policy significantly deterred new firm entry, suggesting a negative spillover on local market dynamism. Our findings suggest that biodiversity conservation influences firms’ economic incentives and the legitimacy conditions surrounding corporate tax behavior. The study contributes to the business ethics literature by showing how environmental governance can reshape firms’ responsibilities for supporting collectively financed ecological goods, while also generating distributional trade-offs that are central to ethical evaluation. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of corporate tax avoidance on board of directors and chief executive officer reputation. Our regression results show that when firms engage in tax avoidance, both directors and CEOs, on average, are rewarded by improvements in their reputations as proxied by an increased number of outside board seats. In particular, both independent directors and non-CEO executive directors undergo positive changes in reputation. We also find that CEOs of tax-aggressive firms experience enhanced reputations by gaining (...) extra board seats. Our main regression results hold based on additional analyses. Overall, this study provides important empirical evidence confirming an association between tax avoidance and the individual reputations of directors and CEOs. (shrink)

We present five studies investigating the effects of approach and avoidance behaviours when individuals do not enact them but, instead, learn that others have performed them. In Experiment 1, when participants read that a fictitious character (model) had approached a previously unknown product, they ascribed to this model a liking for the object. In contrast, they ascribed to the model a disliking for the avoided product. In Experiment 2, this result emerged, with a smaller effect size, even when it (...) was clear that the behaviours followed specific instructions from a third party. The model had been a mere executor instead of behaving autonomously. Finally, in Experiments 3, 4, and 5, we showed, with direct and indirect measures of attitudes, that reading that the model had approached vs avoided products was sufficient to create preferences in the participant for the approached one, regardless of whether it was explained that the model was a mere executor. This research highlights the largely unexplored effects of vicarious approach/avoidance behaviours. Theoretical and practical implications and possible developments of this line of research are discussed. (shrink)

Conflict handling by managers gives rise to significant emotional and cognitive experiences for affected employees and has far-reaching effects on the effectiveness of a group and an organization. In this conceptual paper, we argue that despite many claims made by managers in their self-reports that they engage in either dominant or compromising conflict-handling strategies when managing conflict within a group, they may be perceived by employees as adopting neglect or avoidance behaviors. We examine how such perceived managers' avoidance (...) styles could influence employees' perceptions with regard to justice, trust, and politics within an organization. (shrink)

Social relationships are intricately tied to health and well-being and people are motivated to form and maintain interpersonal bonds. While it is clear that social relationships can be highly rewarding, it is equally clear that social relationships or the lack thereof can be the source of much distress. In this article a conceptualization of social motivation that reflects the basic necessity for people to simultaneously manage approaching the incentives and avoiding the threats in social relationships is presented. We then review (...) evidence that the strength of approach and avoidance social motives and goals is strongly linked to social outcomes through several behavioral, cognitive, and affective processes. (shrink)

Trauma-informed pedagogy has risen to normative dominance in recent years, often justified as an ethical mandate rooted in care, inclusion, and harm prevention. In this article, I subject trauma-informed pedagogy and its classroom norms to ethical scrutiny. I critique three assumptions that often motivate trauma-informed practices: that feelings of discomfort are ethically equivalent to material harm; that avoidance is better than engagement; and that institutions should protect students from difficulty. Using an interdisciplinary ethical approach with insights from moral philosophy, (...) linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, pain science, education research, and political philosophy, I demonstrate that these assumptions lack ethical and empirical grounding. They cannot support urgent pedagogical needs like caring for students or decreasing suffering without eroding the agency, resilience, and judgment that education should enable. Ethical care in education depends on building the capacity to engage with difficulty, not on removing discomfort. (shrink)

This paper investigates the impact of different dimensions of organizational culture on corporate tax avoidance. We use textual analysis to quantify the different organizational culture dimensions of firms in conjunction with those proposed in the Competing Values Framework, including Control-, Collaborate-, Compete-, and Create-oriented cultural dimensions. We find that firms with a Control-oriented culture that values safety and predictability are less likely to be involved in tax avoidance. By contrast, firms with a Compete-oriented culture that encourages risk-taking and (...) aggressive behavior are more likely to avoid paying tax. Smaller firms primarily drive the impact of organizational culture. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity analyses. Overall, these results provide novel evidence about the real effects of different dimensions of organizational culture on corporate tax avoidance. (shrink)

How do individuals with trait anxiety perform in an approach-avoidance (ap-av) conflict situation? To answer this question, we employed computational models to explore the effect of trait anxiety on decisions in ap-av conflict situations and uncover the computational mechanism involved in resolving such conflicts. Sixty-seven participants with high or low trait anxiety completed the ap-av conflict task, which was analysed using the hierarchical drift-diffusion model (HDDM). Anxiety levels were assessed during both baseline and six-month follow-up sessions. Results showed that, (...) during ap-av conflict decision-making, the reaction time of the high trait anxiety group was slower than that of the low trait anxiety group. The slower reaction time in the high trait anxiety group was due to a longer non-decision time. However, the intercept of drift rate and the effect of reward and aversion on drift rate significantly increased in the high trait anxiety group compared to the low trait anxiety group. The high trait anxiety group had a starting point closer to avoidance decisions. This study provides evidence that individuals with high and low trait anxiety manifest distinct alterations in the underlying computational decision-making processes during ap-av conflict situations. (shrink)

Information avoidance is a prevalent communication phenomenon that is less well understood than information seeking. The present study adopts a social-normative perspective on information avoidance as social norms are powerful drivers of behaviors. We aim to separate various types of avoidance-related norms and examine how they relate to information avoidance intentions about the COVID-19 vaccination. Our online survey of a stratified sample of the German population (N = 1,508) revealed that there are personal and societal-level injunctive, (...) descriptive and subjective norms. Except for societal-level descriptive norms, all norms were related to increased avoidance intention. Personal-level norms were revealed to be more important than societal-level norms in predicting avoidance behaviors. (shrink)

China’s socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics has led more and more people and scholars to subscribe to the voluntary exchange theory which is prevalent in the West. That is to say, people pay taxes expecting the right in return to enjoy high-quality public goods. In 2005, the Company Law in China was revised and corporate social responsibility (CSR) was explicitly written in Article 5 of the law. All conducts of businesses must abide by the law and bear social responsibility. (...) In 2008, the Corporate Income Tax Law in China was also amended. The direction of the law has made the payment of corporate tax to incline more toward an obligatory nature rather than a social exchange nature. The recent ebbs and flows of China’s national affairs such as the “New Cold War” and the Belt and Road Initiative vis-à-vis the worldwide focus on sustainability and geopolitics have led us to rethink many aspects of global divergence as well as convergence. In this chapter, we attempt to look into whether paying taxes is considered a CSR activity and whether tax avoidance is a CSIR (corporate social irresponsibility) from the Chinese perspective. Selected company reports of state-owned enterprises, private enterprises, and foreign-invested enterprises’ narratives on their corporate tax and CSR matters were also analysed under China’s special social, political, and economic environments. (shrink)

This study examines the endogenous relation between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and tax avoidance by focusing on a common strategy of corporate tax avoidance, i.e., establishing entities in offshore tax havens. Using hand-collected data on a sample of U.S. firms, we find that firms’ CSR ratings increase substantially in the two years after they first open tax haven affiliates. We provide evidence by using the controlled foreign corporations (CFC) look-through rule enacted by Congress in 2006 that facilitates offshore (...) profit shifting. We find that firms that are affected by the CFC legislation increase their CSR practices in response. Overall, our results are consistent with the risk management theory, which argues that firms hedge against the potential negative consequences of aggressive tax avoidance practices through an increase in positive CSR activities. (shrink)

The article analyzes three cases through which the avoidance of stigmatization is revealed in very different modes of auto-narration. Each case suggests that the narrators intuitively use a strategy of modal shift: they find ways to resist the metaphorization or universalization of their lives by highlighting the modality of contingency. The article draws primarily...

A deep reinforcement learning-based computational guidance method is presented, which is used to identify and resolve the problem of collision avoidance for a variable number of fixed-wing UAVs in limited airspace. The cooperative guidance process is first analyzed for multiple aircraft by formulating flight scenarios using multiagent Markov game theory and solving it by machine learning algorithm. Furthermore, a self-learning framework is established by using the actor-critic model, which is proposed to train collision avoidance decision-making neural networks. To (...) achieve higher scalability, the neural network is customized to incorporate long short-term memory networks, and a coordination strategy is given. Additionally, a simulator suitable for multiagent high-density route scene is designed for validation, in which all UAVs run the proposed algorithm onboard. Simulated experiment results from several case studies show that the real-time guidance algorithm can reduce the collision probability of multiple UAVs in flight effectively even with a large number of aircraft. (shrink)

Alexithymia is a trait characterized by compromised emotion processing. It represents a key risk factor for various psychopathologies, yet its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. According to the attention-appraisal model, one mechanism is experiential avoidance, a tendency to avoid aversive emotional experiences. To investigate this proposed relationship, participants (N = 444) completed questionnaires assessing alexithymia, experiential avoidance, and various psychopathology symptoms. Results showed a strong correlation between alexithymia and experiential avoidance (r =.55, p <.001), with experiential avoidance (...) accounting for 25.4% of the variance in alexithymia. A latent profile analysis identified three distinct subgroups across participants: one with high alexithymia and high experiential avoidance, one with average levels in both, and one with low scores in both. We compared these profiles for their psychopathology levels, showing that the profile highest in both alexithymia and experiential avoidance had the highest symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress, posttraumatic stress disorder, and dissociation. These findings support the attention-appraisal model, suggesting that experiential avoidance may play an important role in alexithymia. When high alexithymia is present, people are generally also engaging in high levels of experiential avoidance. Addressing experiential avoidance may therefore be a useful target in interventions for alexithymia and associated emotional problems. (shrink)

Human nature being what it is, individuals engaging in unlawful activity will often seek to avoid having their misconduct detected by law enforcement. This article provides the first legal analysis of what are termed detection avoidance measures, and evaluates whether, and how, they should be subject to criminalization.

The hypothesis that emotions influence our behavior via emotional action tendencies is at the core of many emotion theories. According to a strong version of this hypothesis, these emotional action tendencies are immediate, automatic (unintentional), stimulus-based and directly linked with specific muscle movements. Recent evidence, however, provides little empirical support for this strong version during routine behavior, especially when the task does not require the evaluation of the stimuli. The present study tested the prediction that surprise interrupts routine behavior and (...) triggers a threat avoidance response. In the presence of a threat-related stimulus, avoidance responses are relatively rapid, and approach responses impeded, even when the interrupted routine behavior is guided by a non-evaluative task goal. In contrast, approach and avoidance responses are predicted to be unaffected in the presence of a pleasant surprising stimulus. To test these predictions, in each trial the participants had to execute an approach or withdrawal movement depending on the location of a target stimulus. In the critical trial, either a picture of a pleasant or a threat-related animal was presented as target. Supporting the predictions, the initiation times for these movements were shorter in response to a threat-relevant than a pleasant surprising stimulus. Additionally, in the presence of a threat-related surprising stimulus, withdrawal movements were made faster than approach movements even though the participants performed a non-evaluative task. Implications and limitations of the present study are discussed. (shrink)

The commitment not to engage in tax avoidance – to refrain from using aggressive tax planning techniques – has not become part of the corporate social responsibility agenda in Poland. The purpose of this paper is to examine justificatory and explanatory reasons of that significant absence. The analysis unfolds in the following way. After setting out the necessary terminological background, I present main results of the limited empirical study of selected CSR documents, in order to substantiate the claim that (...) tax avoidance is a theme absent from the CSR programs in Poland. Then I put forward the contention that this commitment should be included in such programs, as prima facie justified, and address a selection of objections that can be raised to defeat this contention. Finally, in the last section of the paper, I briefly comment on possible reasons of this absence and show how they elucidate the nature of CSR. (shrink)

Despite growing concerns that children tend to avoid the news, the reasons why have received little research attention. Therefore, the current study aims to develop and test a model conceptualizing the relations between children’s news consumption, news avoidance, emotional responses, and parent and child mitigation strategies. The model was tested using data collected during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The current, preregistered, survey study was part of a longitudinal project and used data from the second wave. Data (...) were collected in November/December 2020 among 510 children. Findings showed that children who consumed more news during the pandemic avoided pandemic news less often. Children who experienced more anxiety-related behaviors regarding pandemic news avoided pandemic news more often. The relation between news consumption and emotional responses was stronger for children who experienced restrictive parental mediation more often, indicating that this was not an effective parental mediation strategy for tempering their emotional responses. Children with higher levels of emotional responses used reactive coping strategies more often. However, this did not seem to be an effective strategy against pandemic news avoidance because none of the strategies had a negative relation with pandemic news avoidance. Distancing was even positively related to pandemic news avoidance. Although the current study was not able to fully unravel how news avoidance-related constructs relate to one another, we were able to get some important insights guiding future research. Specifically, it is of crucial importance to unravel the mechanisms that increase the chance of children’s news avoidance and those that mitigate it, to build interventions to counteract news avoidance and to protect children from the negative emotional consequences by news consumption. (shrink)

This paper presents an autonomous vision-based obstacle avoidance system. The system consists of three independent vision modules for obstacle detection, each of which is computationally simple and uses a di erent criterion for detection purposes. These criteria are based on brightness gradients, RGB Red, Green, Blue color, and HSV Hue, Saturation, Value color, respectively. Selection of which modules are used to command the robot proceeds exclusively from the outputs of the modules themselves. The system is implemented on a small (...) monocular mobile robot and uses very low resolution images. It has been tested for over 200 hours in diverse environments. Keywords: Vision-based navigation, space exploration, modular design, reactive control, unstructured terrain. (shrink)

Physical touch is central to the emotional intimacy that separates romantic relationships from other social contexts. In this study of 256 adults, we examined whether individual differences in social anxiety influenced comfort with and avoidance of physical touch. Because of prior work on sex difference in touch use, touch comfort, and social anxiety symptoms and impairment, we explored sex-specific findings. We found evidence that women with greater social anxiety were less comfortable with touch and more avoidant of touch in (...) same-sex friendships. Additionally, a woman’s social anxiety had a bigger effect on a man’s comfort with touch and avoidance of touch in the romantic relationship than a man’s social anxiety had on the woman’s endorsement of touch-related problems. These effects were uninfluenced by the length of romantic relationships. Touch is a neglected emotional experience that offers new insights into the difficulties of individuals suffering from social anxiety problems, and their romantic partners. (shrink)

Lee and Schwarz suggest grounded procedures of separation as a mechanism for embodied cleansing. We compare this process to other mechanisms in grounded cognition and suggest a broader conceptualization that allows integration into general cognitive models of social behavior. Specifically, separation will be understood as a mindset of completed avoidance resulting in high abstraction and openness to new experiences.

There is an increased interest in how excessive avoidance can diminish. Avoidance reduction is typically tested by using Extinction with Response Prevention protocols, where feared stimuli a...