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To investigate how coaching leadership styles influence athletes' moral conduct, this study explored the direct and indirect effects of democratic and autocratic leadership behaviors on prosocial and antisocial behaviors in sport. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 1,239 competitive athletes from multiple sports, measuring leadership perception, goal orientation, and moral disengagement. Democratic leadership significantly predicted higher prosocial behavior and lower antisocial tendencies, while autocratic leadership showed the opposite pattern. These effects were mediated by athletes' task and ego orientation, as well as their level of moral disengagement. The findings highlight the broader relevance of ethical, knowledge-based leadership in cultivating sustainable behavioral outcomes in sports. These results support social cognitive and moral disengagement theory by revealing how internal cognitive-motivational factors transmit leadership influence. The study contributes to both sport psychology and leadership literature by identifying key mediating mechanisms and clarifying the behavioral implications of different leadership approaches. Practically, within the context of Chinese elite sport, the findings suggest that fostering more democratic leadership styles may be associated with more ethical conduct and support athletes' longer-term development, although cross-cultural and longitudinal research is needed before drawing broader causal conclusions.

We propose a method for learning multi-agent policies to compete against multiple opponents. The method consists of recurrent neural network-based actor-critic networks and deterministic policy gradients that promote cooperation between agents by communication. The learning process does not require access to opponents' parameters or observations because the agents are trained separately from the opponents. The actor networks enable the agents to communicate using forward and backward paths while the critic network helps to train the actors by delivering them gradient signals based on their contribution to the global reward. Moreover, to address nonstationarity due to the evolving of other agents, we propose approximate model learning using auxiliary prediction networks for modeling the state transitions, reward function, and opponent behavior. In the test phase, we use competitive multi-agent environments to demonstrate by comparison the usefulness and superiority of the proposed method in terms of learning efficiency and goal achievements. The comparison results show that the proposed method outperforms the alternatives.

Competition among scientists for funding, positions and prestige, among other things, is often seen as a salutary driving force in U.S. science. Its effects on scientists, their work and their relationships are seldom considered. Focus-group discussions with 51 mid- and early-career scientists, on which this study is based, reveal a dark side of competition in science. According to these scientists, competition contributes to strategic game-playing in science, a decline in free and open sharing of information and methods, sabotage of others’ ability to use one’s work, interference with peer-review processes, deformation of relationships, and careless or questionable research conduct. When competition is pervasive, such effects may jeopardize the progress, efficiency and integrity of science.

This research presents the results of a survey regarding scientific misconduct and questionable research practices elicited from a sample of 1215 management researchers. We find that misconduct (research that was either fabricated or falsified) is not encountered often by reviewers nor editors. Yet, there is a strong prevalence of misrepresentations (method inadequacy, omission or withholding of contradictory results, dropping of unsupported hypotheses). When it comes to potential methodological improvements, those that are skeptical about the empirical body of work being published see merit in replication studies. Yet, a sizeable majority of editors and authors eschew open data policies, which points to hidden costs and limited incentives for data sharing in management research.

A claim about continuing technological progress plays an essential, if unacknowledged, role in the philosophical literature on “human enhancement.” I argue that—should it eventuate—continuous improvement in enhancement technologies may prove more bane than benefit. A rapid increase in the power of available enhancements would mean that each cohort of enhanced individuals will find itself in danger of being outcompeted by the next in competition for important social goods—a situation I characterize as an “enhanced rat race.” Rather than risk the chance of being rendered technologically and socially obsolete by the time one is in one’s early 20s, it may be rational to prefer that a wide range of enhancements that would generate positional disadvantages that outweigh their absolute advantages be prohibited altogether. The danger of an enhanced rat race therefore constitutes a novel argument in favor of abandoning the pursuit of certain sorts of enhancements.

Cheating evolves constantly. Dozens of athletes were barred from the Winter Olympics for taking banned substances. Gene doping is on the horizon. Questions have arisen about which athletes count as “female.” What does it take to keep sports fair? And what does fairness require?

Another loophole is that banned substances, for a variety of reasons, are sometimes impossible to detect: they can be designed to elude specific tests, new substances can be made for which there are no tests, and a genetic trait - missing copies of a gene called UGT2B17, which makes testosterone soluble in urine - renders testosterone doping invisible to conventional urine tests. A handful of sports federations have used die biological passport on a trial basis, but it is becoming more widespread because the World Anti-Doping Agency, which leads the international effort against banned sports enhancement, just released guidelines on its use.

The genetic modification of children is becoming a more likely possibility given our rapid progress in medical technologies. I argue, from a broadly Kantian point of view, that at least one kind of such modification—modification by a parent for the sake of a child's comparative advantage—is not rationally justified. To argue this, I first characterize a necessary condition on reasons and rational justification: what is a reason for an agent to do an action in one set of circumstances must be a reason for any in those circumstances to do the action. I then show that comparatively advantageous genetic modification violates this principle since a child's “getting ahead” through genetic modification cannot be rationally justified unless other children also could receive the modification, thus rendering the advantage useless. Finally, I consider the major objection to this conclusion: it seems to disallow all cases of a parent's helping a child get ahead, something that parents normally engage in with their children. I argue that typical practices of developing a comparative advantage in a child, as well as practices of societal competition in general, do not conflict because they involve circumstances that mitigate the universal character of reasons. Many ordinary cases of competitive advantage that we think of as unjust, in fact, can be explained by my argument.

[...] at the height of this struggle, as my women's committee's pleas for drug testing were rebuffed again and again by the male-dominated executive committee of the powerlifting federation, I went to a clinic in Atlanta right after a contest and paid to have a urinalysis done just so I could use the results of the test in my campaign to counter the self-serving men who wanted to live through the accomplishments of a particular woman in their lives. [...] we intend to continue to give the best prize package in the world at our annual contest, which would help to convince the top athletes to take part in a drug-tested competition.

Reviewers are only human, even though they wield enormous power for a moment.