Consequences of customer powerlessness: Secondary control

• This research investigated the consequences of powerlessness when consumers experience service failure with a company that has high‐exit barriers. The specific consequences investigated were three types of secondary control, which are grudge‐holding, avoidance (predictive avoidance), and retaliation desire. These secondary control coping strategies highlight consumers' ability to control their personal behaviors and thoughts, even when they cannot completely control the outcomes of a situation. A qualitative study, followed by a scenario‐based survey and structural equation model, suggest that the primary direct consequences of powerlessness in commercial relationships are grudge‐holding and predictive avoidance, and that both predictive avoidance and a desire to retaliate are further consequences of grudge‐holding. The results of this research underscore the importance of understanding the role of powerlessness and its consequences in consumer–firm relationships.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The motor theory of speech perception reviewed

More than 50 years after the appearance of the motor theory of speech perception, it is timely to evaluate its three main claims that (1) speech processing is special, (2) perceiving speech is perceiving gestures, and (3) the motor system is recruited for perceiving speech. We argue that to the extent that it can be evaluated, the first claim is likely false. As for the second claim, we review findings that support it and argue that although each of these findings may be explained by alternative accounts, the claim provides a single coherent account. As for the third claim, we review findings in the literature that support it at different levels of generality and argue that the claim anticipated a theme that has become widespread in cognitive science.     

Animal innovation defined and operationalized

Innovation is a key component of most definitions of culture and intelligence. Additionally, innovations may affect a species' ecology and evolution. Nonetheless, conceptual and empirical work on innovation has only recently begun. In particular, largely because the existing operational definition (first occurrence in a population) requires long-term studies of populations, there has been no systematic study of innovation in wild animals. To facilitate such study, we have produced a new definition of innovation: Innovation is the process that generates in an individual a novel learned behavior that is not simply a consequence of social learning or environmental induction. Using this definition, we propose a new operational approach for distinguishing innovations in the field. The operational criteria employ information from the following sources: (1) the behavior's geographic and local prevalence and individual frequency; (2) properties of the behavior, such as the social role of the behavior, the context in which the behavior is exhibited, and its similarity to other behaviors; (3) changes in the occurrence of the behavior over time; and (4) knowledge of spontaneous or experimentally induced behavior in captivity. These criteria do not require long-term studies at a single site, but information from multiple populations of a species will generally be needed. These criteria are systematized into a dichotomous key that can be used to assess whether a behavior observed in the field is likely to be an innovation.     

Relevance reviewed: The case of argumentum ad hominem

This article aims tt providing some conceptual tools for dealing adequately with relevance in argumentative discourse. For this purpose, argumentative relevance is defined as a functional interactional relation between certain elements in the discourse. In addition to the distinction between interpretive and evaluative relevance that can be traced in the literature, analytic relevance is introduced as an intermediary concept. In order to classify the various problems of relevance arising in interpreting, analyzing and evaluating argumentative discourse, a taxonomy is proposed in which the concept of relevance is differentiated along three co-ordinate dimensions: object, domain and aspect. With the help of this taxonomy, it can be shown that the problems of evaluative relevance with which the standard approach to fallacies cannot satisfactory deal can be more systematically approached within a pragma-dialectical framework. This is demonstrated for the argumentum and hominem, which is erroneously treated as a homogenous type of relevance fallacy in logico-centric analyses, so that cases where this is not justified must be treated as ad hoc exceptions.     

Deontic reasoning reviewed: psychological questions,empirical findings,and current theories

Deontic reasoning is concerned with questions of whether actions are forbidden or allowed, obligatory or not obligatory. This article reviews empirical findings and psychological theories on deontic reasoning with regard to three questions that have guided psychological research during the last decades: How do people’s deontic capabilities develop? How well do people perform in deontic reasoning tasks? And how do they represent deontic rules? In conclusion, it is discussed why deontic reasoning—despite astonishing, early developing competencies—is still a complex cognitive activity.     

Searching for conjunctively defined targets

It has recently been proposed that in searching for a target defined as a conjunction of two or more separable features, attention must be paid serially to each stimulus in a display. Support for this comes from studies in which subjects searched for a target that shared a single feature with each of two different kinds of distractor items (e.g., a red O in a field of black Os and red Ns). Reaction time increased linearly with display size. We argue that this design may obscure evidence of selectivity in search. In an experiment in which the numbers of the two distractors were unconfounded, we find evidence that subjects can search through specified subsets of stimuli. For example, subjects told to search through just the Os to find the red O target do so without searching through Ns. Implications of selective search are discussed.     

Involutions defined by monadic terms

We prove that there are two involutions defined by monadic terms that characterize Monadic Algebras. We further prove that the variety of Monadic Algebras is the smallest variety of Interior Algebras where these involutions give rise to an interpretation from the variety of Bounded Distributive Lattices into it.Research funded by Fondecyt, project N 764-1987.     

Attentional capture by globally defined objects

The abrupt appearance of a new perceptual object in the visual field typically captures visual attention. However, if attention is focused in advance on a different location, onsets can fail to capture attention (Yantis & Jonides, 1990). In the present experiments, we investigated the extent to which the deployment of attention to the local level of a hierarchical scene may be affected by the abrupt appearance of a new object at the global level. Participants searched for a semi-disk target in an array of randomly oriented segmented disks (“pacmen”). On half the trials, a subset of the segmented disks induced a subjective square. On these critical trials, participants were significantly slower to respond to the presence of a local target even though the local features of the display were qualitatively identical across all conditions. This slowing was absent when outline pacmen were used (which do not induce subjective figures) and when the subjective square was perceptually old. When the participants’ task was defined at the global level of the display, a new local element failed to capture attention, suggesting an asymmetry in the ability of objects at different levels of a hierarchical scene to capture attention. In a control experiment, a new local element captured attention, however, when the participants’ task was defined at the local level, indicating that the local item was in principle capable of capturing attention. It is argued that global objects capture attention because they convey important information about the environment that is not available at the local level.     

Typicality effects in logically defined categories

Subjects learned to categorize geometric designs by some rule combining two features, x and y. When xy stimuli (stimuli with both features) are always positive, the rule (concept) is inclusive disjunctive; when xy stimuli are always negative, the rule is exclusive disjunctive. In three other experimental conditions, the probability of xy stimuli being positive during acquisition was .25, .50, and .75. In a variety of postacquisition tests, xy stimuli were chosen as prototypical despite their less than consistent occurrence in the positive category. Stimuli with one relevant feature (x or y), although consistently assigned to the positive category, were often evaluated as poorer examples of the concept. These results are interpreted in terms of a schema model in which information acquired during learning is organized according to probability density functions over feature dimensions. This theory appears to be general enough to accommodate the evidence from laboratory studies of both logical and natural concepts.     

Personality organization defined by DMT and the Structural Interview

The psychoanalytic concept of Personality Organization (PO) may be operationalized by means of a Structural Interview as well as by means of psychological tests. The present study utilized the Structural Interview and a projective test called the Defence Mechanism Test (DMT) to operationalize the PO concept on a sample of 50 psychiatric inpatients. The reliability of the PO judgements were found to be acceptable for both the Structural Interview and the DMT. The validity, which was estimated as the correlation between the two methods, was also found to be substantial. The conclusion is that the concept of PO may be reliably operationalized for psychiatric patients and seems to have concurrent validity. Both the DMT and the Structural Interview may be used for differential diagnosis of PO.     

Recognizing faces defined by texture gradients

Texture gradients can reveal surface orientation in a manner similar to shape from shading, and therefore provide an important cue for object recognition. In this study, we tested whether a complex 3-D object, such as a face, can be identified from texture gradients alone. The stimuli were laser-scanned faces for which the texture element was a fractal-noise pattern mapped onto the 3-D surface. An eight-alternative forced choice task was used in which participants matched a face defined by texture gradients to one of eight faces defined by shape from shading (Experiment 1) or by texture gradients (Experiment 2). On average, participants scored 24% and 18%, respectively, above chance in these experiments. Although this performance was much poorer than the performance based entirely on shape-from-shading stimuli (Experiment 3), the results suggest that texture gradient information may be used to recover surface geometry of complex objects.     

Latent inhibition and context change in psychometrically defined schizotypy

The disruption of latent inhibition within the schizophrenia spectrum has often been interpreted either as a result of increased attentional distractibility (attentional account) or as a result of deficient interference of past associations (associative account). The aim of the present investigation was to test competing predictions, as derived from the above theoretical accounts. In a visual search paradigm of latent inhibition, accuracy was examined as a function of prior experience with the target, and psychometrically defined schizotypy. In Experiment 1 (N=60), no context change was introduced. In accord with past evidence, latent inhibition was found to be intact in low-, but disrupted in high-schizotypy scorers, a result predicted both by attentional and associative accounts. In Experiment 2 (N=60), a context change was introduced. As predicted by past evidence, latent inhibition was disrupted in low-schizotypy scorers. However, latent inhibition was found to be intact in high-schizotypy scorers, a finding accommodated by attentional, but not associative accounts. Theoretical implications and alternative interpretations are also considered.