Effects of Attribute Scales on Process and Performance in Multiattribute Choice

The type of scale used to represent the attributes of decision alternatives has received little attention in previous research, despite the pervasive presence of this issue in decision making. In two process tracing experiments we investigated how the type of scale used affects choices and choice processes. We hypothesized that scales affect the ease of accomplishing various component processes in choice. Experiment 1 used scales that differed in two ways: (1) whether all attributes were on the same scale (i.e., commonality) and (2) whether the scales were in units that were meaningful in the problem domain (i.e., context-relevance). We also manipulated economic incentives to favor speed over accuracy or the converse. Participants made more accurate decisions with common, context-independent scales but faster decisions with context-relevant scales. In addition, choice processes mediated the effects of scaling on both speed and accuracy. Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1 with decision contexts that differed in familiarity. Both experiments demonstrate that the scales used to present attributes can influence both the speed and accuracy of decision making, despite the presence of explicit economic incentives. Designers of choice studies and information displays are therefore advised to exercise care in choosing attribute scales.     

Locus of Control and the Effects of Incentives on Children

We studied the performance on a number cancellation task given to 40 children from Grades 4 to 6. An equal number of boys and girls with internal or external locus-of-control orientation responded to a social or material incentive to test a hypothetical relationship between incentive and locus of control. Although the incentive conditions did not affect the overall results, significant differences were obtained between locus-of-control groups, in addition to complex trial-dependent sex interactions.     

Performance Self-Predictions: The Impact of Expectancy Strength and Incentives1

Performance self-predictions represent an individual's anticipated level performance on an upcoming task. This study focused on the accuracy of these predictions, as well as subjective reactions to making them under varying expectancy and incentive conditions. Results indicate that performance-contingent incentives had a positive effect on task performance, but a negative effect on preferences for making performance predictions. Expectancy strength also influenced these predictions, their subjective interpretations, and task performance. Additional results address the role of other task-relevant judgments (e.g., self-assessed ability and intended effort) when predicting one's performance on a task. Implications of these findings for work motivation and judgment accuracy are discussed.     

The Influence of Affect on Goal Choice and Task Performance

The present study investigated the influence of mood on self-set goals and task performance. Results from 2 studies suggest a restricted view of mood effects in which affective state influences the level of self-set goals or task performance, but not both. Study 2 reveals asymmetrical mood effects on task performance, with positive- and negative-mood participants exceeding the baseline performance of neutral mood participants. Evidence indicates that goal-setting instructions may alter how individuals interpret motivational implications of mood. Although theory implies an inclusive view in which mood has both direct and indirect (through goal-setting) performance effects, the conflicting influences of affect infusion at different points of the goal-striving process may diminish the likelihood of observing inclusive effects.     

Effects of Goal Choice,Strategy Choice,and Feedback Source on Goal Acceptance,Performance and Subsequent Goals1

This study examined the effects of goal choice, strategy choice, and feedback source on goal acceptance, performance, and future self-set goals. The results were partially consistent with earlier work by Earley and Kanfer (1985) in that goal and strategy choice interacted to affect initial performance and goal acceptance. However, the nature of the performance interaction was not as expected. Results pertaining to future goals and subsequent performance suggested that goal choice was an important determinant of future goals and that feedback, goal choice, and strategy choice interacted to influence subsequent performance. Contrary to expectations, feedback source did not exert a main effect on subsequent performance, goal setting, or perceptions of feedback acceptance and usefulness. Discussion centered on the differential impact of choice on perceptual and behavioral variables and the failure of self-feedback to significantly affect subsequent goals and performance.     

The Role of Expectations of Future Performance

The present study examined the relationships among gender, causal attributions for success, and the distribution of organizational rewards. In this study, which attempted to control for methodological deficiencies of previous research, male and female undergraduates reviewed the performance of four stimulus managers: three men and one woman. Participants were asked to make causal attributions for the stimulus manager's success, and to rate how effectively they believed the manager would perform in the future. They were then asked to nominate a manager for an organizational reward. Bias against the female manager was exhibited by females only. Results indicated that lower expectations of future performance for the female manager significantly predicted the bias against her in reward allocation.     

Effects of Gender,Socioeconomic Status,and Early Academic Performance on Postsecondary Educational Choice

National data were used to study the effects of gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and 4 types of eighth‐grade academic performance on postsecondary educational choices at late adolescence. Educational choices were classified by predominant Holland type (R, I, A, S, E, C). Gender had strongest independent influences on educational choice. Gender also interacted with SES and academic performance. Relationships between SES and educational choice were stronger for women than for men. For women, eighth‐grade reading scores were the strongest predictor of educational choice, whereas for men, mathematics scores were the strongest predictor. Implications for theory and counseling practice are discussed.     

Influence of Future Choice Importance and Arousal upon the Halo Effect

Two determinants of the magnitude of the influence of anticipated choice on the halo effect are investigated: importance of future choice and arousal. Male subjects ranked photographs on positive personality traits. Half of the photographs were of persons about which they anticipated making a choice. In confirmation of the hypotheses, (a) the intercorrelation of the rankings was greater for the choice photographs than for the nonchoice photographs when the subjects anticipated an important choice, but not when they anticipated an unimportant choice; and (b) the intercorrelation was greater for the choice photographs than for the nonchoice photographs when the subjects were aroused by caffeine and uninformed as to the source of their arousal, but not when they were informed as to the source of their arousal or not aroused.     

Predicting Hunger: The Effects of Appetite and Delay on Choice

Preferences often fluctuate as a result of transient changes in hunger and other visceral states. When current decisions have delayed consequences, the preferences that should be relevant are those that will prevail when the consequences occur. However, consistent with the notion of an intrapersonal empathy gap (Loewenstein, 1996) we find that an individual's current state of appetite has a significant effect on choices that apply to the future. Participants in our study made advance choices between healthy and unhealthy snacks (i.e., fruit and junk food) that they would receive in 1 week when they were either hungry (late in the afternoon) or satisfied (immediately after lunch). In 1 week, at the appointed time, they made an immediate choice, an opportunity to change their advance choice. Our main predictions were strongly confirmed. First, advance choices were influenced by current hunger as well as future hunger: hungry participants chose more unhealthy snacks than did satisfied ones. Second, participants were dynamically inconsistent: they chose far more unhealthy snacks for immediate choice than for advance choice. An additional hypothesis related to gender differences was also confirmed.     

内隐绩效模型对绩效评估一致性的效应分析

本文在以往研究基础上,对评估者的内隐绩效模型进行了理论分析和实证研究。通过对上级、一级评估者的内隐绩效模型和对下级绩效评估的比较研究发现,上下级主估者的内隐绩效模型存在差异,并对绩效评估的一致性有重要的影响作用。本文还对内隐绩效模型的形成进行了探讨。     

Exposition Effects on Decision Making: Choice and Confidence in Choice

Many of us believe that, after writing about a subject, we understand it more deeply. Studies in education indicate that writing does indeed enhance comprehension. Three experiments examined whether similar “exposition effects” exist for decision making. In these experiments, subjects were confronted with standard framing problems. Positive exposition effects would require that the influence of alternative frames on subjects' choices be diminished by exposition demands. Control subjects made choices under customary, non-exposition instructions. Others chose after writing rationales for their selections (exposition), after explicitly planning to write such rationales, or merely in anticipation of writing the rationales. Exposition reduced framing effects in each of the experiments. The magnitudes of the effects were greatest for subjects who wrote before choosing. Also, exposition markedly increased subjects' confidence that their choices were appropriate. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

The Effects of Performance Extremities on Ratings of Dynamic Performance

The impact of performance extremities (peaks and troughs) on performance ratings was unexamined. Based on judgment and decision-making theories, we hypothesized that performance extremities would exert an incremental (beyond performance mean and trend) impact on ratings and that the impact of troughs would exceed that of peaks. We also hypothesized that extremities would exert a greater impact when performance trends were in the opposite direction and when performance information was presented in a graphical rather than tabular display format. We tested these hypotheses via a policy-capturing study in which participants rated employee performance profiles across which extremities, trends, and mean levels were manipulated. The results consistently indicated that performance troughs, but not performance peaks, influenced performance ratings in expected ways.     

四参数Logistic加权模型下被试能力稳健估计

设计项目参数、被试得分已知的测验情境,在两、三、四参数Logistic加权模型下进行能力估计,发现被试得分等级之间的能力步长存在着均匀的步长间距,被试得分能较好的反映多级记分的分数加权作用。两参数Logistic加权模型下会出现被试参数估计扰动现象,猜测现象会导致能力高估现象,失误现象会导致能力低估现象;三参数Logistic加权模型c型下能力高估现象未出现或不明显;三参数Logistic加权模型γ型下能力低估现象未出现或不明显;四参数Logistic加权模型下被试能力高估现象和低估现象都未出现或不明显,四参数Logistic加权模型是被试能力稳健性估计较好的方法。     

Choice vs. Preference: The Effects of Choice and No Choice of Preferred and Non Preferred Spelling Tasks on the Academic Behavior of Students with Disabilities

The effects of choice and no choice of preferred and non preferred instructional activities on the academic behavior of 3 students with disabilities were investigated. Participant preferences for spelling tasks were assessed and an ABCDEF design was used to examine choice and preference within 6 experimental conditions: a) choice of preferred tasks, b) choice of non preferred tasks, c) no choice of preferred tasks, d) no choice of non preferred tasks, e) no choice of preferred tasks (yoked-control), and f) no choice of non preferred tasks (yoked-control). Results indicate that all 3 participants had higher levels of task engagement when working with preferred tasks, regardless of a choice or no choice format. The findings from this investigation contribute to the growing body of research that focuses on developing interventions that are responsive to individual student preferences.     

反馈干预对绩效的影响研究

反馈干预是由外部动因提供的关于个体任务操作或过去行为的信息活动,它有反馈对象、反馈效价和反馈提供方式三个维度。研究结果表明反馈效价、反馈提供方式对绩效的影响具有主效应,且两者的之间交互作用对绩效也存在主效应。积极反馈效价、信息型提供方式有助于提高个体的绩效水平。     

Effects of Gender and Dominance on Leadership Emergence: Incentives Make a Difference

Several decades of laboratory research have shown that high-dominant women, when paired with low-dominant men, are less likely than expected to emerge as leaders on gender-neutral tasks. The current study was designed to investigate the impact of an incentive on leadership emergence in mixed-gender pairs in which one member was high in personality dominance and one was low. Across incentive conditions, men high in personality dominance were more likely than women to emerge as leaders. Under the no-incentive condition, personality dominance relative to men did not significantly improve women’s leadership likelihood; men were more likely to emerge as leaders regardless of personality dominance. However, under the incentive condition, high-dominant women were significantly more likely to emerge as leaders than were their low-dominant male counterparts, and high-dominant men were also more likely than low-dominant women to emerge as leaders.     

Overestimation of the projected size of objects on the surface of mirrors and windows

Four experiments investigated judgments of the size of projections of objects on the glass surface of mirrors and windows. The authors tested different ways of explaining the task to overcome the difficulty that people had in understanding what the projection was, and they varied the distance of the observer and the object to the mirror or window and varied the size of the mirror. The authors compared estimations of projected size with estimations of the physical size of the object that produced the projection. For both mirrors and windows, observers accurately judged the physical size of objects but greatly overestimated the projected size of the same objects. Indeed, judgments of projected size were more similar to physical than to projected size. People were also questioned verbally about their knowledge of projected size relative to physical size. The errors produced for these conceptual questions were similar to those found in the perceptual estimation tasks. Together, these results suggest that projections of objects on mirrors and windows are treated in the same way and that observers cannot perceive such projections as distal objects.     

The Effects of Self-Set Goals on Task Performance

Locke & Latham (1990a) report that specific, difficult goals lead to better performance than "do-your-best" instructions, whether the goals are self-set or are set by an external source. However, in Experiment I, as well as in previous research (White, Kjelgaard, & Harkins, 1995), we did not find self-set goal effects. A meta-analysis showed that self-set goal effects can be produced if two conditions are met: Prior to setting their goals, participants take part in a pretest that is equal in duration to the experimental task; and the experimenter has access to the participants' goals and the performances. Experiment 2 confirmed these meta-analytic findings by showing that when these two conditions were met, goals stringent enough to produce the effects were set, and goal-setting effects were obtained.     

The Effects of Flavor-Aversion Learning on Instrumental Performance

Two experiments investigated the role of lithium-mediated environmental conditioning on instrumental performance. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a novel taste consumed in one arm of a T maze prior to lithium-induced toxicosis reduced performance in this environment whereas similar aversions conditioned in the home cage failed to alter maze performance. Experiment 2 showed that maze performance in a straight alleyway was decremented during extinction only in a group that actually traversed the alley prior to drinking saccharin and receiving lithium injections. This demonstrated that the instrumental decrement observed in Experiment 1 was due not only to the presence of an unpalatable flavor in the goalbox during the test.

     

The Effects of Noise and Speech on Cognitive Task Performance

In the present study, which is based on Loeb's 1986 analysis, we used five levels of noise that varied in intermittency and meaningfulness, crossed with sex of subject and time of day. Memory tasks that differed in their reliance upon long-term, short-term free recall, and sequential short-term memory were used as dependent variables. A total of 160 subjects, 20 per block, participated in the 2 × 2 × 5 (Sexes X Time of Day X Noise Conditions) experimental design. Results support the prediction that white noise enhances performance on tasks with sequential short-term memory demands (anagrams: p < .05; random letter generation: p < .002). We found complex interactions by sex of subject, time of day, and type of noise for those tasks that placed a heavy demand on short-term working memory, i.e., complex sorting (Noise X Sex, p < .05) and random letter generation (Sex X Noise X Time of Day, p < .05). The predicted effects for anagrams were not supported. These results call into question previous generalizations about the effects of noise on performance (Broadbent, 1978; Dornic, Sarnelid, Larson, Svensson, & Fernaeus, 1982; Poulton, 1977), alternative interpretations are presented.