Telling what they want to know: participants tailor causal attributions to researchers' interests

Based on a conversational analysis of experimental procedures and consistent with the principle of relevance, we predicted that participants' verbal responses will be influenced by their tacit inferences about the researcher's epistemic goals, derived from their knowledge of the researcher's academic affiliation. We tested this prediction in a core area of social‐personality and cultural psychology, causal attribution. University students provided causal attributions about mass murder cases, while the questionnaire identified the researcher either as a social scientist or a personality psychologist. The results indicated that attributions were overall more situational than dispositional, and as predicted, this main effect was qualified by an interaction between conversational cue and type of attribution. Thus, participants gave relatively more situational explanations when the letterhead of the questionnaire identified the researcher as a social scientist compared to when the researcher was identified as a personality psychologist. The reverse pattern emerged for dispositional attributions. Methodological and conceptual implications are discussed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Elephant psychology: What we know and what we would like to know

Although elephants are well-known and one of the most popular species among people, their behavior and cognitive abilities have not been studied very extensively. But recently, more and more researchers are becoming interested in studying their cognition, particularly their general intelligence, including causal reasoning and mirror self recognition, memory, and numerical cognition. Although genetically elephants are more closely related to the small-brained aardvarks and manatees than to primates, they hold enormous potential in their cognitive skills. Also, studying their cognition is important from the point of view of animal welfare in captivity.     

What we know and what to do

This paper discusses an important puzzle about the semantics of indicative conditionals and deontic necessity modals (should, ought, etc.): the Miner Puzzle (Parfit, ms; Kolodny and MacFarlane, J Philos 107:115–143, 2010). Rejecting modus ponens for the indicative conditional, as others have proposed, seems to solve a version of the puzzle, but is actually orthogonal to the puzzle itself. In fact, I prove that the puzzle arises for a variety of sophisticated analyses of the truth-conditions of indicative conditionals. A comprehensive solution requires rethinking the relationship between relevant information (what we know) and practical rankings of possibilities and actions (what to do). I argue that (i) relevant information determines whether considerations of value may be treated as reasons for actions that realize them and against actions that don’t, (ii) incorporating this normative fact requires a revision of the standard ordering semantics for weak (but not for strong) deontic necessity modals, and (iii) an off-the-shelf semantics for weak deontic necessity modals, due to von Fintel and Iatridou, which distinguishes “basic” and “higher-order” ordering sources, and interprets weak deontic necessity modals relative to both, is well-suited to this task. The prominence of normative considerations in our proposal suggests a more general methodological lesson: formal semantic analysis of natural language modals expressing normative concepts demands that close attention be paid to the nature of the underlying normative phenomena.     

Acquiescing to intuition: Believing what we know isn't so

When people identify an error in their initial judgment, they typically try to correct it. But, in some cases, they choose not to—even when they know, in the moment, that they are being irrational or making a mistake. A baseball fan may know that he cannot affect the pitcher from his living room but still be reluctant to say “no‐hitter.” A person may learn that flying in an airplane is statistically safer than driving a car and still refuse to fly. Dual‐process models of judgment and decision making often implicitly assume that if an error is detected, it will be corrected. Recent work suggests, however, that models should decouple error detection and correction. Indeed, people can explicitly recognize that their intuitive judgment is wrong but, nevertheless, stick with it, a phenomenon known as acquiescence. My goals are to offer criteria for identifying acquiescence, consider why people acquiesce even when it incurs a cost, discuss how lessons that are learned in cases when acquiescence is clearly identified can be exported to cases when acquiescence may be harder to establish, and, more broadly, describe the implications of a model that decouples error detection and error correction.     

family responsibilities discrimination: what employment counselors need to know

Family responsibilities discrimination—bias against workers based on their responsibilities to care for family members—is rapidly becoming a 21st‐century workplace concern. Employers who harass, pass over for promotion, or terminate workers because such workers care for children, spouses, elderly parents, or family members with disabilities have been sued with more frequency and have been incurring increasing litigation costs. Recently, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission took an important step toward ending this discrimination by issuing enforcement guidance that addresses family responsibilities discrimination and caregivers' rights and responsibilities. This article addresses the guidance and its importance for employment counselors.     

Nonconscious goals can shape what people want to feel

Goals can determine what people want to feel (e.g., Tamir et al., 2008), but can they do so even when they are primed outside of conscious awareness? In two studies, participants wanted to feel significantly less angry after they were implicitly primed with a collaboration goal, compared to a neutral prime. These effects were found with different implicit priming manipulations, direct and indirect measures of emotional preferences, and when controlling for concurrent emotional experiences. The effects were obtained in social contexts in which the potential for collaboration was relatively higher (Study 1) and lower (Study 2). Also, similar effects were found when collaboration was activated nonconsciously (Studies 1–2) and consciously (Study 2). By showing that nonconscious goals can shape emotional preferences, we demonstrate that what people want to feel can be determined by factors they are unaware of.     

Rational emotive behavior therapy research: What we know and what we need to know

Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) has achieved positive results in quantitative reviews of treatment outcome studies. In part because of methodological limitations of these studies, however, the generalizability of their favorable results to routine clinical practice is unknown. Also unknown are the clinical significance of outcomes achieved by REBT, the contribution made by its distinctive and specialized procedures, and the types of patients for whom REBT is particularly useful. Recommendations are provided for refining our knowledge of the effectiveness of REBT.     

Syntactic processing in the human brain: what we know, what we don't know, and a suggestion for how to proceed

For every claim in the neuroimaging literature about a particular brain region supporting syntactic processing, there exist other claims implicating the target region in different linguistic processes, and, in many cases, in non-linguistic cognitive processes (e.g., Blumstein, 2009). We argue that traditional group analysis methods in neuroimaging may obscure functional specificity because of inter-subject anatomical variability (Fedorenko & Kanwisher, 2009). In Fedorenko, Hsieh, Nieto-Castanon, Whitfield-Gabrieli, and Kanwisher (2010) we presented a functional localizer that allows quick and reliable identification of key language-sensitive regions in each individual brain. This approach enables pooling data from corresponding functional regions across subjects rather than from the same locations in stereotaxic space that may differ functionally due to inter-subject anatomical variability. In the current paper we demonstrate that the individual-subjects functional localization approach is superior to the traditional methods in its ability to distinguish among conditions in a brain region’s response. This ability is at the core of all neuroimaging research and is critical for answering questions of functional specialization (e.g., does a brain region specialize for processing syntactic aspects of the linguistic signal), which is in turn essential for making inferences about the precise computations conducted in each brain region. Based on our results, we argue that supplementing existing methods with an individual-subjects functional localization approach may lead to a clearer picture of the neural basis of syntactic processing, as it has in some other domains, such as high-level vision (e.g., Kanwisher, 2010) and social cognition (e.g., Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003).     

See what you want to see: motivational influences on visual perception

People's motivational states--their wishes and preferences--influence their processing of visual stimuli. In 5 studies, participants shown an ambiguous figure (e.g., one that could be seen either as the letter B or the number 13) tended to report seeing the interpretation that assigned them to outcomes they favored. This finding was affirmed by unobtrusive and implicit measures of perception (e.g., eye tracking, lexical decision tasks) and by experimental procedures demonstrating that participants were aware only of the single (usually favored) interpretation they saw at the time they viewed the stimulus. These studies suggest that the impact of motivation on information processing extends down into preconscious processing of stimuli in the visual environment and thus guides what the visual system presents to conscious awareness.     

Helping contacts between nonprofessional child aides and young children experiencing school adjustment problems

The present studies examine several within-session measures of helping interactions involving nonprofessional child aides and young maladapting school children referred to a preventively oriented school mental health program. The studies' three main criterion measures were: (1) estimates of children's predominant mood state at the beginning, during, and end of a session; (2) judgments about a child's predominant within-session moded of expression; and (3) aides' ratings of session satisfaction. Both predominant mood and mode of expression differed for children with different initial referral problems. Both also related to differential aide judgements about session satisfaction. Aide satisfaction related to structural aspects of the session, including its length and whether it was thought to deal with significant problems.     

Using what children know to improve their learning

Eighty children from three to seven years of age were tested on two forms of a matrix task, one of which was designed to take into account children's limited problem solving skills. The tasks involved seriating nine items (geometric shapes or birds) across two dimensions in a 3 × 3 matrix. The children were required to replace items that had been removed from a matrix board, to reproduce the entire matrix when all items had been removed from the board, and to transpose the matrix, that is, to reproduce the same spatial relations between the items, rotated ninety degrees. Results showed that children performed better when tested using common materials than when they were given standard materials. Furthermore, a greater percentage of children were able to complete the tasks and were able to respond correctly on the first trial of the tasks when using common materials (bird families) than when using the standard geometric shapes. The results were discussed in terms of task variables that influence children's performance and the problems resulting from generating theories of children's cognitive competence based on their performance in specific situations.     

Chimpanzees help others with what they want; children help them with what they need

Humans, including young children, are strongly motivated to help others, even paying a cost to do so. Humans’ nearest primate relatives, great apes, are likewise motivated to help others, raising the question of whether the motivations of humans and apes are the same. Here we compared the underlying motivation to help in human children and chimpanzees. Both species understood the situation and helped a conspecific in a straightforward situation. However, when helpers knew that what the other was requesting would not actually help her, only children gave her what she needed instead of giving her what she requested. These results suggest that both chimpanzees and human children help others but the underlying motivation for why they help differs. In comparison to chimpanzees, young children help in a paternalistic manner. The evolutionary hypothesis is that uniquely human socio‐ecologies based on interdependent cooperation gave rise to uniquely human prosocial motivations to help others paternalistically.     

Family demographics of clinically referred children: What we know and what we need to know

Published empirical studies were reviewed to establish family demographics of clinically referred children and adolescents. Data on parental marital status were collected from studies of referred and nonreferred children and adolescents in six empirical journals. Data on family socioeconomic status (SES) and child race or ethnicity were also collected. Based on 86 studies that presented parental marital status, 56.4% of clinically referred children and adolescents live with both their biological mother and biological father. Family SES data were difficult to summarize because of the different methods of presenting this information. When considering race and ethnicity, 86% of the children and adolescents in the clinical samples were Caucasian American. Of the studies that were originally reviewed, 80.4% did not include parental marital status and 36. 7% did not include SES, race, or ethnicity of the participants. There were no significant differences between journals in the rates of inclusion of family demographic data. In addition to revealing family demographic information about children and adolescents who participate in clinical research, these data highlight the lack of consistency in the presentation of family demographic data in published research. Suggestions are provided to help researchers colled and present meaningful family demographic data in clinical and nonclinical research with children and adolescents.This study was completed with support from the Division of Sponsored Research at the University of South Florida and preparation of this article was supported in part by National Institute of Mental Health Grant R29 49601-02 to the first author. We express our gratitude to Georgetta Bosco and Tracy Burbine for their diligent data collection in the library.     

Educational needs of school personnel regarding child abuse and/or neglect

From a review of literature a questionnaire was developed to identify problems related to child abuse/neglect in a rural school district. School administrators, regular and special education teachers, and counselors completed the survey to help establish more effective training programs. Analysis indicated that (1) school personnel need further assistance in dealing with problems pertaining to the maltreatment of students. (2) Formal, coordinated, workshop training for child abuse/neglect is needed. (3) Colleges and universities should offer instruction on abuse/neglect for persons preparing to work in schools. (4) School personnel need to be aware of and abide by the laws regarding reporting cases of abuse/neglect. (5) Improved communication among school, community, courts, and social service agencies is required for dealing wtih abuse cases. (6) School personnel should become more aware of what happens after abuse/neglect has been reported. Information from such analysis even for one school district can increase insight into problems.     

Putting off tomorrow to do what you want today: planning for retirement

In this article we note that in the coming years, a larger number of people will be experiencing retirement for a longer period of time than ever before and that despite this fact, many will find themselves unprepared for this stage of their lives. We review the literature on retirement preparation, structuring our review around the key questions that need to be addressed when planning for retirement: (a) What will I do? (b) How will I afford it? (c) Where will I live? and (d) Who will I share it with? We make a number of suggestions for research and practice. We conclude that although psychology has begun to play a role in understanding and addressing retirement preparation, there are considerable opportunities for psychologists to engage with this issue in their research and applied work.