Smiling in a Job Interview: When Less Is More

Two studies examined the effect of applicants’ smiling on hireability. In a pre-test study, participants were asked to rate the expected behavior for four types of applicants. Newspaper reporter applicants were expected to be more serious than applicants for other jobs. In Study 1, participants were randomly assigned to be an applicant or interviewer for a newspaper reporting job. Smiling was negatively related to hiring, and smiling mediated the relation between applicants’ motivation to make a good impression and hiring. Hiring was maximized when applicants smiled less in the middle of the interview relative to the start and end. In Study 2, participants watched Study 1 clips and were randomly assigned to believe the applicants were applying to one of four jobs. Participants rated more suitability when applicants smiled less, especially for jobs associated with a serious demeanor. This research shows that job type is an important moderator of the impact of smiling on hiring.     

When More Is Less: An Averaging/Summation Analysis of Social Anxiety

This research explored higher and lower socially anxious individuals' impressions of homogeneous and heterogeneous discussion groups. Based upon an averaging–summation analysis, it was expected that subjects would average their impressions and resultant anxiety in a heterogeneous group. This result was obtained; individuals anticipated experiencing less anxiety in a group composed of 1 faculty and 3 high school students than in a group composed of a single high status discussant. Furthermore, the responses of high and low socially anxious individuals to heterogeneous groups differed. These results suggest that high and low socially anxious individuals may differ in their focus of attention in small groups, resulting in a different weighting of status variables.     

When Group Influence Is More or Less Likely: The Case of Moral Judgments

We investigated whether group influence can change judgments even for high-consensus (i.e., unambiguous) moral norms. We found that participants often matched the judgment of the other current group members even when this moral judgment was normatively incorrect (nonstandard), and this occurred more for more ambiguous issues. Moreover, this social influence on public judgments was generally followed by private agreement and re-interpreting general values to be consistent with those judgements. We also found that participants who experienced a fit between their regulatory focus and their feelings of power (i.e., promotion/high power; prevention/low power) were less influenced by the group.     

Information Transmission in Young Children: When Social Information Is More Important Than Nonsocial Information

The authors’ aim was to use a highly novel open diffusion paradigm to investigate the transmission of social information (i.e., gossip) and general knowledge within 2 groups of 10- and 11-year-old children. Four children, 2 from each group, acted as a primed information source, selected on the basis of sex and dominance ranking (high or low) within the group. Each source received 1 piece of gossip and 1 piece of general knowledge from the experimenter during natural class interaction, and the information was allowed to diffuse naturally within the group. Results revealed that gossip was transmitted more frequently than knowledge, and that male sources were more likely to transmit gossip than female sources. The relationship between characteristics of the source, and characteristics of the gossip recipient, also appeared influential with the dominant male source transmitting gossip to exclusively to friends, and the nondominant male source transmitting to individuals of higher peer regard than themselves.     

Double Jeopardy Upon Resumé Screening: When Achmed Is Less Employable Than Aïsha

Applicants belong to multiple categories (e.g., male, ethnic minority) and a complex set of factors affects category activation and inhibition when making hiring decisions. Two field experiments with recruiters who regularly engage in resumé screening showed that the role of multiple categories (applicants’ ethnicity and sex) in discrimination depended on job type and prejudice. Specifically, in both low‐ and high‐demand (i.e., complex) jobs, Arab women were rated more favorably than Arab men, particularly when considering levels of client contact. Across both studies, recruiters high in explicit ethnic prejudice were discriminatory only when applicants’ job qualifications fit the job position less, lending support for the attributional‐ambiguity effect. Implicit attitudes did not play a strong role. Our study findings point to the complex nature of multiple categorization effects in the hiring process. Implications are considered as to how to avert hiring discrimination during resumé screening.     

Social Comparison and Consumer Behavior: When Feeling Richer or Poorer Than Others Is More Important Than Being So1

The present study investigates how households’ social comparisons of their economic situation affect purchase decisions. In structured telephone interviews, participants (n= 109) answered questions about purchases of durable goods and groceries. In line with the hypothesis, social comparisons had an effect on purchase decisions of durable goods when controlling for actual economic situation. Households that considered themselves to be worse off economically than others reported fewer purchases of durable goods, perceived the impact on their economy of their latest purchase to be greater, and planned purchases more carefully than did households that considered themselves better off economically than others. Also in line with the hypothesis, for purchases of groceries, households’ actual economic situation was more important than social comparisons.     

The 1.5 Criterion Model of Creativity: Where Less Is More,More or Less

We argue that the future of creativity research should focus on the dual goals of the development of individuals with great creative genius as well as the enhancement of creative activity in society in general. To achieve these goals, we need basic research that will help us better understand the fundamental nature of creativity. We describe an approach to creativity that emphasizes novelty over utility.     

Predictors of Managerial Performance: More Than Cognitive Ability

This study investigated the discriminant validity of cognitive ability, managerial potential, fear of negative evaluation, interaction anxiousness, and audience anxiousness as predictors of managerial performance. As hypothesized cognitive ability significantly predicted only thinking and knowledge criteria. However, managerial potential was significantly correlated with all the criteria. As predicted, fear of negative evaluation predicted thinking and knowledge criteria, interaction anxiousness, and audience anxiousness. In turn, as predicted, interaction anxiousness significantly predicted interpersonal behavior and audience anxiousness significantly predicted communication behavior. Managerial potential and fear of negative evaluation were the only two predictors that were significantly correlated with overall performance.     

Cognitive Sciences Research: More Than Thinking About Drug Abuse

On May 23, 1997, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the American Psychological Society co-sponsored a conference titled "Cognitive Sciences Research: More Than Thinking About Drug Abuse." The conference highlighted important lines of research, both within and outside of drug abuse, that may elucidate the relationships between substance abuse and cognitive processes. This Special Section of Psychological Science presents a compilation of articles from that conference by scientists who are working in the forefront of this exciting new research area. The research questions posed by these articles take the following forms: What are the cognitive and developmental effects (i.e., the consequences) of substance abuse? What are the antecedents or precursors of drug use that render persons vulnerable to taking drugs? How do the effects of drugs, in turn, become antecedents for changes in perception, behavior, and cognition that further enhance vulnerability to drugs?     

Instrumental Bias in Motivated Reasoning: More When More Is Needed

Decision makers must often make judgments in an environment in which they have a strong motivation to reach a particular conclusion. While normative theory would indicate that they should use available information to make their most accurate judgment without being influenced by the conclusion or outcome it may imply, evidence from the social judgment literature suggests that motivation does bias the judgment process. Specifically, decision makers motivated to support a particular conclusion tend to adopt information processing strategies most likely to yield the desired conclusion. We propose and empirically demonstrate two extensions to the motivation literature. First, we argue that motivated reasoning isinstrumental,meaning motivated decision makers bias their judgments more or less as needed to support the desired conclusion, subject to “reasonableness” constraints. Second, we propose that motivated decision makers exhibitconfidence bolsteringand thereby remain at least as confident as non-motivated decision makers in their biased estimates. We illustrate that motivated subjects even report confidence in utilizing these estimates outside the original motivating context. We investigate motivational effects within a business context involving forecasting, strategic decision making, and new product introductions. We explore the impact of motivation on quantitative forecasts and estimates, rather than on social judgments and perceptions. In addition, we go a step beyond the judgment phase to demonstrate that motivation influences choice.     

A Multi-Cultural Study of Salespeople's Behavior In Individual Pay-For-Performance Compensation Systems: When Managers Are More Equal And Less Fair Than Others

In this research, we examine salespeople's behavior in individual pay-for-performance compensation systems and show how perceived management fairness seems to energize sales employees in some environments but not in others. We use a large multicountry database of individual-level remuneration for more than 2,500 salespeople across four B2B industry sectors to demonstrate cultural adaptations of the effect of perceived management fairness. The results indicate that top management should be concerned with employees' perceptions of fairness in addition to the more typical concerns of control and motivation widely acknowledged in the microeconomics-based sales-force compensation literature. In particular, we show that perceptions of management fairness are key to salespeople's proportion of total pay generated by pay-for-performance formulas.     

Sometimes One is More Than Two: When Collaboration Inhibits Knowledge Construction

In this paper I suggest that to better understand knowledge construction in science, and the role of social processes and collaboration in it, it is useful to distinguish between “elaborative knowledge” and “emergent knowledge.” Elaborative knowledge is constructed for solving clearly defined problems in established theoretical frameworks, and emergent knowledge refers to the knowledge constructed to reach a hierarchically higher and more complex level of scientific understanding. There are also two types of collaboration. On the one hand there is “dialogical collaboration” in which team members contribute to reaching the common clearly defined objective so that a team as a whole becomes qualitatively more complex than its members alone. On the other hand there is “unidirectional collaboration” where the result of collaboration is determined by one person, should be distinguished. There is evidence from multiple perspectives indicating that “elaborative knowledge” can be developed in both kinds of collaboration and sometimes ‘dialogical collaboration” is necessary for knowledge construction. However, for building “emergent knowledge,” it is argued, only individual or “unidirectional collaboration” is productive, and “dialogical collaboration” can hinder or even prevent the construction of this kind of knowledge.

The Time Course of Attention: It Is Better Than We Thought

ABSTRACT— What is the time course of attention? Research using rapid-stimulus streams has suggested that it is rather slow: Attention takes half a second to recover from processing one thing before it can process the next. This period is referred to as the attentional blink , and it is thought to reflect a fundamental bottleneck in conscious processing. If this period does exist, such a limitation would have severe consequences in real-life situations in which multiple events may rapidly succeed each other (e.g., in traffic). However, findings that support the attentional blink are at odds with other findings indicating that attention is not reduced, but enhanced, following potentially important occurrences. The article reviews evidence that these opposite effects are actually closely related. The attentional blink is a consequence of selection mechanisms that are not severely limited, but have an adaptive function: They enhance perception in response to relevant information but suppress perception in response to irrelevant information. It means that humans are better geared for real life than was previously thought.     

Self-Enhancement and Social Responsibility: On Caring More, but Doing Less, Than Others

Self-enhancement biases have been found in a variety of self-rated skills, traits, and abilities, yet past research has not examined whether people show such biases in ratings of their social concern and activism. In the present paper, we report the results of two surveys on this question. In the first survey, 549 adults rated their level of concern and activism on one of six different issues (e.g., homelessness). The results showed a general pattern of self-enhancement in professed concern but self-deprecation in activism. In the second survey, a random-digit dialing method was used to contact a representative sample of the general public. A total of 817 respondents rated their level of concern and activism on the issues of environmental protection, animal welfare, and world hunger. The second survey also explored two techniques for debiasing self-enhancement in concern: one based on a cognitive consistency model, and one based on the salience of others' actions. Findings from the second survey replicated those of the first, and both debiasing techniques failed to reduce self-ratings of concern. Moreover, a sizable number of respondents said that they would do more if others showed more concern. These results are consistent with a social dilemma in which citizens feel a personal sense of concern, but are reluctant to act until others show greater concern.     

Knowing When Help Is Needed: A Developing Sense of Causal Complexity

Research on the division of cognitive labor has found that adults and children as young as age 5 are able to find appropriate experts for different causal systems. However, little work has explored how children and adults decide when to seek out expert knowledge in the first place. We propose that children and adults rely (in part) on “mechanism metadata,” information about mechanism information. We argue that mechanism metadata is relatively consistent across individuals exposed to similar amounts of mechanism information, and it is applicable to a wide range of causal systems. In three experiments, we show that adults and children as young as 5 years of age have a consistent sense of the causal complexity of different causal systems, and that this sense of complexity is related to decisions about when to seek expert knowledge, but over development there is a shift in focus from procedural information to internal mechanism information.