Tom Farsides

University of Sussex · School of Psychology

According to the traditional medical model, “social deficits” are hallmark characteristics of autism. Some have suggested that this necessarily limits autistic people’s kindness. However, recent research suggests that those closest to autistic people often say that kindness is among their most distinctive traits. We interviewed ten autistic adults...

Six people were interviewed about the possibility of becoming posthumous body donors. Interview transcripts were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Individual-level analysis suggested a common interest in Personhood Concerns and a common commitment to Enlightenment Values. Investigations of these possible themes across partici...

Body donation is a prosocial act providing a unique learning experience to students, ultimately impacting on patient care and science. With an increasing number of training professionals, there is an increasing need for body donors, yet little is understood about donors' beliefs and preferences. A four‐center study aimed to understand donors' perce...

In the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland approximately 1,400 body donors for Anatomical Examination are needed per year for the education and training of medical and allied health care professionals. The current study aimed to explore prospective donors' motives, beliefs and desires about body donation to medical schools in England, Ireland, Scotland...

Altruism is consistently identified as the dominant motive for body donation. Over 12 months, 843 people who requested body donation information packs also completed research questionnaires that included open-ended questions about their motives. Abductive analysis suggested two distinct sets of altruistic motives: those seeking benefits for medical...

This article explores potential threats to the validity of consent in body donation and potential responses to such threats. To minimize abstract generalizations, the article draws particularly on United Kingdom regulations but each of the issues it explores is applicable in many countries. Methods used were searches of relevant (e.g., medical ethi...

The present study examined the conditions under which highlighting past pro-environmental behaviour produces a “license” to engage in less pro-environmental behaviour: a phenomenon known as moral licensing. It also examined whether highlighting a lack of past pro-environmental action would lead to moral cleansing, where people engage in moral behav...

Many investigations of moral decision-making employ hypothetical scenarios in which each participant has to choose between two options. One option is usually deemed “utilitarian” and the other either “non-utilitarian” or “deontological”. Very little has been done to establish the validity of such measures. It is unclear what they measure, let alone...

The relationship between positive emotions and implicit racial prejudice is unclear. Interventions using positive emotions to reduce racial bias have been found wanting, while other research shows that positive affect can sometimes exacerbate implicit prejudice. Nevertheless, loving-kindness meditation (LKM) has shown some promise as a method of re...

The satisfaction and frustration of the psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness and competence predict well-being and ill-being outcomes. However, research within educational and work contexts is stifled by the lack of an exhaustively validated measure. Following extensive preparatory and pilot work, the present three studies (total N = 762)...

Educators have proposed that admired behavior by media characters evokes audience emulation if subsequent personal reflection results in audience members realizing that they want to and are able to behave in a similar manner. Two experiments investigated this. In Study 1, exposure to prosocial media models increased altruistic inclinations among te...

There are many ways of being exceptionally altruistic, each of which may be considered a form of 'super-altruism'. Appreciating the characteristics of each form of super-altruism can illuminate the nature of altruism more generally.

The article focuses on the importance of including academic evidence from the world of social psychology in policymaking around some key contemporary public issues, from health and wellbeing to social cohesion and resilience. When academic advice is sought on policy development, it is usually economists who receive an especially attentive hearing f...

The notion of 'integrity' remains relatively unexplored in the social psychological literature, despite it being central to some important theoretical perspectives (notably, self-affirmation theory). It is an eminently positive - and well-used - epithet in descriptions of public figures. The two studies reported here addressed laypeople's conceptio...

Two questionnaire studies (Ns=238 and 497) were guided by the original theoretical specification of the triangle model of responsibility. These investigated the relationship between perceived responsibility to register willingness to posthumously donate one's organs and people's self-reported actual and intended registration behaviour. Exploratory...

The 23-item Meaningful Life Measure (Morgan and Farsides 2008) comprises five subscales, each designed to assess a distinct component of personal meaning: purposeful life; valued life; accomplished life; principled life; and exciting life. In addition to providing a comprehensive composite meaning measure, this instrument presents the possibility o...

The present studies addressed the need for a comprehensive, economical, and psychometrically adequate measure of existential meaning. In Study 1, principal-axis factor analysis of participants’ responses to popular meaning measures identified five latent constructs underlying them, labelled purposeful life, principled life, valued life, exciting li...

Towards the end of 2006 the owners of a small, historic public house withdrew from sale the locally produced beer that had been sold there for many years. Pub regulars instigated a boycott in an attempt to have the beer reinstated. Following a four-month widely supported boycott and considerable media coverage, the pub company owners returned the l...

Although the role of trust in group processes has been well established, less is known about the role of trust in social network processes. Trust, conceptualized to have generalized and particularistic aspects, was measured by generalized trust (people can be trusted in general) and relationism (people can be trusted if one has relationships), and...

Although the role of trust in group processes has been well established, less is known about the role of trust in social network processes. Trust, conceptualized to have generalized and particularistic aspects, was measured by generalized trust (people can be trusted in general) and relationism (people can be trusted if one has relationships), and...

This chapter presents a technique that typically uses semi-structured indepth interviews to elicit self-report data (often referred to as 'accounts') from individuals. These accounts are subjected to analysis in order to identify and then depict graphically the relationships between the concepts used in them. The way such 'cognitive mapping' can be...

Corroborating recent findings elsewhere, women within a large undergraduate sample at the University of Sussex achieved a greater proportion of 'good' (first- or upper-second-class) degrees than did their male counterparts. This female advantage disappeared when statistically controlling for the trait openness to experience and for study-related be...

Recent studies suggest that crowd conflict needs to be understood as an interaction between the crowd and out-groups such as the police. This paper describes a questionnaire survey in which 80 police officers from 2 United Kingdom forces were asked about their perceptions of crowds, appropriate “public order” policing methods, and attributions of r...

The roles of intelligence and motivation in predicting academic success are well established. Evidence is, however, mixed concerning the role of personality traits in predicting such success. The current study attempted to overcome various methodological limitations associated with many previous studies to examine the potency of the traits of the ‘...

Recent psychological research concerning determinants of and barriers to organ donation is reviewed with the intention of ascertaining acceptable and potentially effective ways of improving organ retrieval. On the basis of this review, five recommendations are made. (1) Individuals' donation wishes, where explicit, should be decisive. (2) Next of k...

Schiffmann and Wicklund (1992) argue that social identity theory (SIT) excludes psychological variables and `is superfluous as an account of systematic social-psychological phenomena' (p. 29). They also claim that the theory is dependent upon experiments which confound categorization and similarity effects, and which are susceptible to alternative...