From: "seerd...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> ..."In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not" (Yogi Berra) In theory, I love science and its methods, despite severe limits. Particularly neuroscience, broadly defined. However, in practice, I am quite leery of psychological studies using interviews with canned questions, particularly if "Yes/No" are the alternatives. Even 10 point scales can be silly responses to complex questions. "More than once it felt good when I heard on the news that someone had been killed” “I could never enjoy being cruel.”
Just as a question, why can't someone who has No Problem answering these questions with a simple "Yes" or "No" interpret the inability to do so as self-deception. For example, given that interpretation, all that follows could easily fit into that category: I would hope anyone with a sense of humor as well as some sense of the diversity and richness of life to reject such questions, and scribble in: "It depends! On definitions, on context and degree (not that morality is necessarily conditional). And if you want to talk about it great, but I am not going to give you a misleading, yet easily quantifiable and scored because it makes your study easier to do and let you draw unwarranted conclusions to an unsuspecting public." And I suspect, some that would laugh at the question “I could never enjoy being cruel.” as absurd, and check and emphatic NO!, may not be the deepest, compassionate, nuanced thinkers on the block. Ethical questions regarding an off the cuff call to "nuke the towel heads" or in another arena, for example, large-scale factory farming, may never occur to them. They may have a wide-spectrum, practiced and widely acknowledged sense of humor (particularly after an extended duration of beer pong) but does this (caricature) typically reflect much self-awareness / absence of denial? What I have seen over the years (yes, limited observations) is that some who possess great outer verve and bravado and air-tight self confidence in expressing loud, black and white positions, may actually be denying quite a bit -- that may finally begin to surface later in life.
