The occurrence of Clostridium difficile in nine wastewater treatment plants in the Ticino Canton (southern Switzerland) was investigated. The samples were collected from raw sewage influents and from treated effluents. Forty-seven out of 55 characterized C. difficile strains belonged to 13 different reference PCR ribotypes (009, 010, 014, 015, 039, 052, 053, 066, 070, 078, 101, 106, and 117), w...

Various authors allege that the theory of group selection is inconsistent with methodological individualism, and therefore analysts must reject at least one of these principles. The present article argues for their compatibility. The meaning of methodological individualism is clarified, and the new version of group selection (articulated by Wilson and Sober (1994, 1998)) is explained. The two p...

In this paper, we explore the impact of individualism and collectivism on three basic aspects of ethical decision making – the perception of moral problems, moral reasoning, and behavior. We argue that the inclusion of business practices within the moral domain by the individual depends partly upon individualism and collectivism. We also propose a pluralistic approach to postconventional moral ...

Priming effects of cooperation vs. individualism were investigated on changeover speed within a 4 x 100-m relay race. Ten teams of four adult beginner athletes ran two relays, a pretest race and an experimental race 3 weeks later. Just before the experimental race, athletes were primed with either cooperation or individualism through a scrambled-sentence task. Comparing to the pretest performan...

Reviving community requires progressive politics The coronavirus pandemic may have forced us into isolation, but it has also highlighted our dependence on one another. Across the world, crisis led to huge increases in volunteering, and here Britain thousands of people formed mutual aid groups provide help support their neighbours. Might this signal that we are heading towards less individualist...

The current study aimed to investigate the impact of individualism, collectivism, and hopelessness on substance use. Hopelessness was hypothesized as a mediator between individualism and substance use, and between collectivism and substance use. We tested the hypothesis using a survey of 641 young rural-to-urban migrants in China. Consistent with our hypotheses, individualistic orientation pred...

Current work suggests that individualistic values are more likely to be invoked in judgments about welfare recipients when the latter are black. Nevertheless, this “racialization” hypothesis has yet to be directly tested by looking at whether generalized individualism is more strongly related to hostility toward welfare recipients among whites when the recipients are black. In this paper, I con...