Anger in Wikipedia: Perceived intentionality and threat appraisal as mediators of anger about man‐made attacks

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has established strict guidelines for the objectivity of content. At the same time, Wikipedia includes articles on negative events, such as disasters or man‐made attacks. These events can elicit strong emotions, which in turn may spill over into Wikipedia articles. Previous research has shown that Wikipedia articles on man‐made attacks contain more anger‐related content than Wikipedia articles on disasters. Building on these findings, we aimed to investigate whether the threat that Wikipedia authors experience when they learn of an attack is relevant as a factor in explaining the anger effect. Threat is known to elicit active and engaged reactions, such as anger, which is why it is a likely explaining factor. Our research also aimed to replicate the findings from the linguistic analysis of the Wikipedia articles using controlled scenario‐based laboratory experiments. Three studies demonstrated that man‐made attacks (terrorist attack, shooting rampage) elicited more threat, more anger, and more expressions of anger‐related content in Wikipedia texts than nature‐made disasters (earthquake, flood) and man‐made disasters (train accident). Moreover, threat was relevant as a factor in explaining the effects on anger and anger‐related content in the Wikipedia texts. These mediations could be explained by the perceived intentionality of the event. This research highlights the findings that perceived intentionality and threat are relevant mediating factors for feelings and expressions of anger after man‐made attacks.     

What doesn't kill me makes me stronger: the effects of resisting persuasion on attitude certainty

The present research proposes a metacognitive framework for understanding resistance to persuasion. It is suggested that when people resist persuasion, they can become more certain of their initial attitudes. Several experiments demonstrated that when participants resisted persuasion, attitude certainty increased, but only when the attack was believed to be strong. For attacks believed to be weak, certainty was unchanged. It was also demonstrated that attitude certainty only increased when people actually perceived that persuasion had been resisted. This increased certainty was shown to have implications for resistance to subsequent attacks and the correspondence between attitudes and behavioral intentions. These findings suggest that when people perceive their own resistance, they form inferences about their attitudes that adjust for situational factors.     

Contrast effects in judgmental forecasting when assessing the implications of worst and best case scenarios

Two experiments investigated whether individuals' forecasts of the demand for products and a stock market index assuming a best or worst case scenario depend on whether they have seen a single scenario in isolation or whether they have also seen a second scenario presenting an opposing view of the future. Normatively, scenarios should be regarded as belonging to different plausible future worlds so that the judged implications of one scenario should not be affected when other scenarios are available. However, the results provided evidence of contrast effects in that the presentation of a second “opposite” scenario led to more extreme forecasts consistent with the polarity of the original scenario. In addition, people were more confident about their forecasts based on a given scenario when two opposing scenarios were available. We examine the implications of our findings for the elicitation of point forecasts and judgmental prediction intervals and the biases that are often associated with them.     

ORGANIZATIONAL RECRUITING AS MARKETING MANAGEMENT: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF ENGINEERING GRADUATES

With the intent of encouraging interdisciplinary research, this study applies principles, theories, and practices of marketing management to examine engineering recruitment as a process of "job marketing." Six hypotheses concerning campus recruiters and strategic recruiting issues were proposed and investigated through a national survey of 242 graduating engineers representing five engineering fields. Survey responses revealed that both overall satisfaction with recruiting processes and likelihood of job acceptance were significantly related to recruiter interpersonal skills and interview information provided about compensation/benefits, job/career, and security/success issues. Further, student satisfaction with recruiting processes was significantly related to recruiter/job applicant similarity in gender and educational characteristics. Contrary to conventional inferences of recruiting research, students did not respond more favorably to line management or engineering recruiters than to personnel representatives. Implications of these findings are identified and discussed in terms of both the marketing and management literatures.     

Behaviour of Young Growing Pigs in a Resident‐Intruder Test Designed to Measure Aggressiveness

A total of 125 growing pigs (47 days old) were tested for aggressive responses on two occasions using a resident‐intruder (R‐I) design. Our aims were twofold: (1) to attempt to replicate earlier work on pigs showing that resident aggression is a consistent individual characteristic, unaffected by weight or sex of the resident or intruder and (2) to develop behavioural measures to characterise the wide range of aggressive responses in the test. Resident pigs, housed since birth with littermates, were placed individually in a divided‐off portion of their home pen, and a smaller, unfamiliar intruder (approximately 66% of the resident's weight) was introduced. The test ended 5 min after the first investigation of the intruder by the resident or when one of the pigs began to attack the other (by delivering a sudden, rapid series of bites). On days 1 and 2, 33.6% and 43.2% of tests, respectively, ended in an attack by a resident. Intruder attacks were rare. Pigs were consistent in whether they attacked or not over the two tests, although attack latencies for pigs attacking in both tests were not correlated. Females were more likely to attack and attacked more quickly than males on the first test day but not in the second test or overall. Intruder sex had some effect on the test outcome (males were attacked more rapidly in the second test only). Resident and intruder weight had no effect. Aggressive pigs (meaning pigs that attacked vs. pigs that did not and fast‐attacking pigs vs. slow‐attacking pigs) showed a number of differences in behaviour during the R‐I test: (1) they took longer to make initial contact with the intruder in their first test; (2) they showed a higher frequency of aggressive acts (single head knocks, bites, and shoves); (3) they spent a greater proportion of the test engaging in social contact with the intruder rather than non‐social behaviours; (4) their social behaviour involved more postures directed toward the head as opposed to flank‐ or rear‐directed postures or re‐establishing social contact; and (5) they showed closer physical contact with intruders during social encounters, as characterised by their lower head positions. Some of these behavioural measures could be used to improve the measuring power of the test in the future. Improved behavioural measures would enable aggressiveness scoring among pigs that did not attack instead of classifying them all together as “non‐attacking.” Aggr. Behav. 28:401–415, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

The Effects of Argument Quality and Involvement Type on Attitude Formation and Attitude Change: A Test of Dual‐Process and Social Judgment Predictions

Involvement has long been theoretically specified as a crucial factor determining the persuasive impact of messages. In social judgment theory, ego‐involvement makes people more resistant to persuasion, whereas in dual‐process models, high‐involvement people are susceptible to persuasion when argument quality is high. It is argued that these disparate predictions might be reconciled by either different involvement types (i.e., value relevant vs. outcome relevant) or different attitude modification processes (i.e., attitude change vs. attitude formation). An experiment (N = 684) varying topic, position advocated, outcome relevance, and argument quality tested these moderators. The data were consistent with existence of two different types of involvement, but none of the theoretical predictions were consistent with the data. Instead, a main effect for argument quality had the largest impact on attitude change. Regardless of value‐relevant involvement, outcome‐relevant involvement, and attitude modification process, participants were more persuaded by high‐ rather than low‐quality arguments, with boomerang effects observed for low‐quality arguments. These findings highlight the importance of sound message design in persuasion.     

The Psychology of Tailoring‐Ingredients in Computer‐Tailored Persuasion

Persuasive information can be tailored to individual characteristics using computer technology. Computer technology offers three ways to persuade people: adaptation, personalization, and feedback. Adaptation refers to the match between the type or the formulation of the persuasive arguments or recommendations and an individual's psychological state. Personalization refers to the incorporation of one or more recognizable individual characteristics (e.g., one's first name) in a persuasive text. Feedback refers to providing the individual with information about him or her that relates to important individual goals. These visible elements in a persuasive message are the tailoring‐ingredients of computer‐tailored persuasion. The present article focuses on explaining how these tailoring‐ingredients influence persuasion, using existing social psychological insights in human functioning and persuasion. The persuasive effects of the tailoring‐ingredients can be explained partly by different psychological processes.     

Mindless resistance to persuasion: Low self‐control fosters the use of resistance‐promoting heuristics

In our consumer society, people are confronted on a daily basis with unsolicited persuasion attempts. The present research challenges the prevailing view that resisting persuasion is more likely to fail when consumers have low self‐control. Four experiments tested the hypothesis that impaired self‐regulation may actually facilitate resistance to persuasion when the influence context contains resistance‐promoting heuristics. Indeed, participants with low self‐control were less likely to comply with a persuasive request (Experiments 1 and 3), reported a less favourable attitude towards an advertised product (Experiment 2), and generated more negative responses towards a persuasive message (Experiment 4) than participants with high self‐control, when they could rely on resistance‐promoting heuristics: a violation of the norm of reciprocity (Experiments 1 and 3), an advertisement disclaimer (Experiment 2), or negative social proof (Experiment 4). Together, these studies demonstrate that contextual cues can bolster resistance when one does not carefully scrutinize an influence attempt.     

The Effect of Self‐Efficacy and Issue Characteristics on Threat and Opportunity Categorization1

The purpose of the current study was to examine self‐efficacy and issue characteristics as antecedents of issue categorization. A laboratory experiment using 277 participants manipulated self‐efficacy, scenario category (threat/opportunity), and scenario strength (weak/strong), and subsequently measured perceptions of threat and opportunity. Results indicate that high self‐efficacy participants categorized scenarios as more representative of opportunity and that self‐efficacy influenced the framing of opportunity scenarios, but not threat scenarios. Parallel results were found across both categorical and dimensional threat and opportunity measures.     

Behavioral and emotional responses to diet‐related support and control among same‐sex couples

Members of 63 lesbian and 72 gay couples reported how frequently their partners engaged in diet‐related social support and control (persuasion and pressure) and how they responded behaviorally and emotionally to such attempts. Although lesbian women received more frequent diet‐related social support than gay men, there were no gender differences in the receipt of diet‐related social control. Results of multilevel models that controlled for body mass index revealed that all participants responded to all types of involvement with guilt and to support and persuasion with appreciation. Responses to pressure differed for lesbian women and gay men and acted as a function of relationship quality. Findings from this study may increase awareness of the importance of same‐sex partners' involvement in eating behaviors.     

“Looking for Work But Nothing Seems to Work”: The Job Search Strategies of Internationally Trained Engineers in Canada

This exploratory mixed-method study focussed on the experiences of internationally trained engineers in looking for and finding suitable employment in Canada. An online survey was conducted with 309 internationally trained engineers. The internationally trained engineers used a range of job search strategies to look for suitable employment in the engineering field, often with little success. Those respondents who had secured jobs in the engineering profession were significantly more likely to have been referred by another employer (p?=?0.05) and less likely to have placed or responded to an advertisement in the newspaper (p?<?0.05) than those who did not hold jobs in the engineering profession. No significant differences were seen between these two groups regarding other job search strategies used. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 20 of the survey respondents, and this paper details the diverse strategies used by these participants to find suitable employment. The findings of the study emphasise the role of systemic-level barriers in the job search experience of internationally trained engineers.     

Cumulating Evidence about the Social Animal: Meta‐Analysis in Social‐Personality Psychology

Like most scientific fields, social‐personality psychology has experienced an explosion of research related to such central topics as aggression, attraction, gender, group processes, motivation, personality, and persuasion, to name a few. The proliferation of research can be a monster unless it is tamed with the scientific review strategy of meta‐analysis, literally analyses of past analyses that produce a quantitative and empirical history of research on a particular phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to outline the basic process and statistics of meta‐analysis, as they pertain to social‐personality psychology. Meta‐analysis involves: (i) defining the problem under review; (ii) gathering qualified reports and putting their findings and methods into a database, (iii) analyzing that database, and (iv) interpreting the results and reporting them. Use of meta‐analytic strategies has paralleled the knowledge explosion in social‐personality psychology, but must be used and consumed with careful discernment if the cumulated evidence about the social animal, Homo sapiens, is to have maximal value.     

Rare male aggression directed toward females in a female‐dominated society: Baiting behavior in the spotted hyena

Spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) are gregarious carnivores. The females are socially dominant to males, and adult males rarely direct aggression toward adult females. This study analyzed all cases in which adult immigrant males behaved aggressively toward adult females in a large population of free‐living hyenas in Kenya, observed for 11 years. Our goals were to describe the conditions under which male attacks on females occur, and address possible adaptive functions. Most aggression directed by adult immigrant males against females occurred when coalitions of two or more males attacked a single adult female, who typically responded by defending herself and fighting back. Male aggression against females frequently occurred at sites of ungulate kills, but males never behaved aggressively toward females over food, and all male attacks on females were unprovoked. Although no mounting or other copulatory behaviors ever occurred during or immediately after an attack, the number of male attacks on females peaked around the time of conception. Daily rates at which males attacked females did not vary with female social rank. However, daily attack rates did vary significantly with female reproductive state, and the highest rates of male attack on females were observed during the two stages of the reproductive cycle during which females were most likely to conceive litters. The adaptive significance of male aggression against females in this species remains unknown, but a tight association between male attacks on females and a female's time of conception provides strong evidence of some role for male aggression in hyena sexual behavior. In particular, our data are consistent with hypotheses suggesting that male aggression toward females in this species either serves to inform females about male fitness or represents sexual harassment. Aggr. Behav. 29:457–474, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Using Public Service Announcements to Change Behavior: No More Money and Oil Down the Drain1

Radio and television offer promising media for addressing large‐scale social problems. Unfortunately, very few mass‐media messages have utilized social psychological theories of persuasion and influence. This article summarizes 2 studies that evaluated the effectiveness of a state‐sponsored public service announcement aimed at reducing improper disposal of used motor oil among do‐it‐yourself oil changers. Study 1 was a field experiment with 120 oil changers in San Diego County. Inertial resistance and low perceived behavioral control were identified as obstacles to proper disposal. In Study 2 , we used the disrupt‐then‐reframe technique to successfully overcome these obstacles and promote proper disposal of used oil. The results underscore the usefulness of empirically validated persuasion techniques in changing behavior via mass media.     

Incorporating Global Components into Ethics Education

Ethics is central to science and engineering. Young engineers need to be grounded in how corporate social responsibility principles can be applied to engineering organizations to better serve the broader community. This is crucial in times of climate change and ecological challenges where the vulnerable can be impacted by engineering activities. Taking a global perspective in ethics education will help ensure that scientists and engineers can make a more substantial contribution to development throughout the world. This paper presents the importance of incorporating the global and cross culture components in the ethic education. The authors bring up a question to educators on ethics education in science and engineering in the globalized world, and its importance, necessity, and impendency. The paper presents several methods for discussion that can be used to identify the differences in ethics standards and practices in different countries; enhance the student’s knowledge of ethics in a global arena.     

Resisting persuasion by the skin of one's teeth: the hidden success of resisted persuasive messages

Recent research has suggested that when people resist persuasion they can perceive this resistance and, under specifiable conditions, become more certain of their initial attitudes (e.g., Z. L. Tormala & R. E. Petty, 2002). Within the same metacognitive framework, the present research provides evidence for the opposite phenomenon--that is, when people resist persuasion, they sometimes become less certain of their initial attitudes. Four experiments demonstrate that when people perceive that they have done a poor job resisting persuasion (e.g., they believe they generated weak arguments against a persuasive message), they lose attitude certainty, show reduced attitude-behavioral intention correspondence, and become more vulnerable to subsequent persuasive attacks. These findings suggest that resisted persuasive attacks can sometimes have a hidden yet important success by reducing the strength of the target attitude.     

Engineering Codes of Ethics and the Duty to Set a Moral Precedent

Each of the major engineering societies has its own code of ethics. Seven “common core” clauses and several code-specific clauses can be identified. The paper articulates objections to and rationales for two clauses that raise controversy: do engineers have a duty (a) to provide pro bono services and/or speak out on major issues, and (b) to associate only with reputable individuals and organizations? This latter “association clause” can be justified by the “proclamative principle,” an alternative to Kant’s universalizability requirement. At the heart of engineering codes of ethics, and implicit in what it is to be a moral agent, the “proclamative principle” asserts that one’s life should proclaim one’s moral stances (one’s values, principles, perceptions, etc.). More specifically, it directs engineers to strive to insure that their actions, thoughts, and relationships be fit to offer to their communities as part of the body of moral precedents for how to be an engineer. Understanding codes of ethics as reflections of this principle casts light both on how to apply the codes and on the distinction between private and professional morality.     

“In your head,zombie”: zombies,predation and memory

ABSTRACT

Imagining fictional creatures like zombies in survival situations boosts long-term memory for words encoded in these situations more than rating words for pleasantness (zombie effect). Study 1 required word-ratings in a zombie-survival scenario; participants were told they had to protect against either possible zombie attack or contamination. The zombie-survival situations yielded identical recall levels but higher recall rates than pleasantness. Study 2 matched a zombie-survival scenario on perceived fear with scenarios involving ghosts or predators. Perceived disgust in the zombie scenario was higher than in these other survival conditions. Words were remembered better when processed in survival scenarios than when rated for pleasantness, but there was no reliable difference in recall between the scenarios. In neither study did the number of death-related words produced in a word-fragment completion task fit the mortality salience account of the zombie memory effect. Overall findings suggest that this effect relates to the fear system.     

Resistance to persuasion and attitude certainty: the moderating role of elaboration

Recent research has demonstrated that when people resist persuasive attacks, they can under specifiable conditions become more certain of their initial attitudes. The present research explores the role of elaboration in determining when this effect will occur. Using both self-reported differences in situational elaboration (Study 1) and chronic individual differences in the need for cognition (Study 2), it is demonstrated that resisting persuasion increases attitude certainty primarily when elaboration is high. When elaboration is low, resisting persuasion does not appear to impact attitude certainty. These findings shed light on the role of metacognitive factors in resistance to persuasion, pinpointing the conditions under which these factors come into play.     

Embodied Attitude Change: A Self‐Validation Perspective

Our behavior can change what we like and dislike. Although it seems clear that we might like something more when we smile (versus frown), or when we nod our heads (versus shake), it is important to understand the processes responsible for these changes in evaluation. It might be that agreement behaviors such as smiling and nodding work as cue, make us think about everything in a positive light, or it might be that they encourage us not to think much about the information we receive. This review describes the basic processes underlying embodied change, highlighting the role of a recently discovered meta‐cognitive process (called self‐validation) by which bodily responses can validate or invalidate (instead of changing) our thoughts. This new mechanism can account for some already established outcomes in embodied persuasion (e.g., more persuasion with smiling than frowning), but by a different process than postulated previously (smiling increases confidence in thoughts), as well as for some new findings (e.g., more persuasion for low than high powerful postures; more self‐confidence when performing doubtful postures).