Development of social role understanding

The concepts of social roles and role intersections have been used to explain adults' social competence. However, children's social competence in terms of developing role concepts has not been systematically delineated. After a brief review of the few developmental studies that have been performed in this area, a systematic developmental sequence of role understanding in children from 1 to 13 years of age is discussed and a method for assessing such sequences is described. The sequence, which was based on K. W. Fischer's (1980, Psychological Review, 87, 477–531) construction-inclusion model of conceptual skill development, was tested in several studies using two sets of social roles and tasks and was found to be highly scalable and age related. The significance of role concept development is also discussed as it relates to the development of social competence in other domains.     

The other way around: Effects of causal attributions on estimates of consensus,distinctiveness, and consistency

It was hypothesized that the attributed cause of a given person's behavior will affect inferences about its generalizability over persons (consensus), stimuli (distinctiveness), and circumstances (consistency). Moreover, these effects were expected to parallel the effects of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency information on causal attributions. Experiment 1 provided support for these predictions but also showed that attribution affected consensus judgments less than it affected judgments of distinctiveness and consistency, particularly when consensus was not the first characteristic estimated. Using a different set of stimulus materials and a different manipulation of attribution, Experiments 2 and 3 provided further evidence for the effects of attribution on inferences of consensus information. Experiment 3 indicated that the false consensus effect—actors' tendency to assume that the majority of people share their behavior—may be due to actors' tendency to attribute their behavior to situational factors. Implications of the present studies for biased estimates of consensus and the use of consensus and attribution as mediating variables are discussed.     

Effects of salience and time pressure on ratings of social causality

A model is proposed to account for the effects of a target person's salience on judgments of that target. It is argued that salience leads to more extreme inferences in the direction implied by prior knowledge that is relevant to the judgment. This knowledge may include both specific information about the target being rated and general information about the class of stimuli to which the target belongs. Two experiments supported these hypotheses. When subjects were under time pressure to make judgments of a target person's influence in a social situation, their judgments increased with the salience of the target when they had prior knowledge that the target was generally high in social influence. However, their judgments decreased with the target's salience when subjects had prior knowledge that the target was generally low in social influence. When subjects were given ample time to make their judgments, however, the effects of target salience were attenuated. Possible implications of these findings for prior research on salience effects are discussed.     

The influence of mood on perceptions of social interactions

Interpreting our own and others' social behaviors is an important cognitive task in everyday life. Recent work in cognitive psychology suggests that temporary mood states may have a significant effect on the way information about common social events is processed. This study investigated how (a) a person's current mood, (b) the target of the judgments (self vs other), and (c) the characteristics of the social episode (formal-informal; intimate-nonintimate) influenced people's assessment of, and memory for, social behaviors. Subjects were videotaped while engaging in four different kinds of interactions with trained confederates. One day later subjects were hypnotized, and a happy, positive, or depressed, negative mood was induced. They then watched and rated their own and their partner's interactions on the videotape. Results showed strong mood influence on behavior assessments and recall memory, and significant effects due to target (self vs other) and the type of interaction episode. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for contemporary research on social cognition, and their relevance to cognitively based theories of social maladjustment and depression are considered.     

Thought about actions in social domains: Morality,social conventions,and social interactions

Judgments about actual and hypothetical events were examined. The study, conducted in elementary (first, third, and fifth grades) and junior high (seventh grades) schools, included behavioral observations and assessments of judgments. Observations were conducted of 108 events classified as moral, as conventional, and as mixed type. Participants’ reactions and communications differed by domain of the event. Judgments and justifications of 312 participants in the events showed that they discriminated between the domains on several dimensions. Judgments and justifications corresponded with ones made about comparable hypothetical situations. The study supported the proposition that judgments in the domains of morality and social convention about actual events correspond with judgments about hypothetical situations. It was also found that the domains are associated with the ways children interact socially.     

Mediation and production deficiencies in children's judgments of morality

This study investigated the influence of intentions and consequences on moral judgments. Children's and adults' production of inferences about an actor's intentions was assessed separately from their use of intentions as mediators of moral judgments. Two hundred and sixteen kindergarten, fourth grade and adult subjects viewed one of four videotaped episodes in which an actor either intentionally or accidentally produced a positive or negative result. Participants received one of two prompts to produce inferences about the actor's intentions or received no prompt. Each subject rated the actor's intent and the good-ness-badness of the actor. Results supported a mediational deficiency explanation for children's objective moral judgments. Both 6- and 10-year-old children made reliable, adult-like inferences of intentions. However, children's moral evaluations were based primarily on objective consequences while adults' evaluations were based primarily on the intentions of the actor. Young children did have intentionality information available, yet even with prompting this information did not mediate their judgments in an adult-like way; suggesting that there may be a period in development during which the child understands and produces subjective inferences but does not use this information as a basis for moral judgments.     

Children's judgments of numerical quantity: A new view of early quantification

Three experiments investigated the role of length, density, and number dimensions in children's numerosity judgments of linear arrays of beads. The number dimension is physically defined by a length × density rule. Judgments based, even in part, on the number dimension would show signs of a length × density rule. Experiment 1 examined numerosity judgments of large arrays. Results showed that judgments by 3- and 4-year-olds obeyed a length + density rule, providing cogent evidence for a general adding strategy in young children's judgments of quantity. The physical length × density rule emerged gradually with increasing age. Experiment 2 showed that numerosity judgments of small arrays by 3- and 4-year-olds obeyed a length × density rule, indicating response to the number dimension. This result was expected and thereby validated the linearity of the response scale at the youngest ages. Experiment 3 verified the integration rules for individual 3- and 4-year-olds. The integration rules were interpreted in terms of Piaget's stages of the development of quantification. No evidence for Piaget's initial stage was found. This leads to a new view of early quantification which grants young children the ability to integrate stimulus dimensions.     

Understanding strategic interactions in television commercials: A developmental study

The purpose of this study was to introduce an assessment procedure designed to explain developmental differences in understanding television advertising messages. Goffman's sociological concept of the “strategic interaction” and “recursive thinking,” the social analogue of Inhelder and Piaget's analysis of formal operational reasoning, provided the conceptual framework for our experimental paradigm. Four commercials for children's food products containing strategic interactions between two siblings were shown to 84 children, adolescents, and young adults. Participants were assessed for their understanding of the actors' behaviors and thoughts and for their understanding of the intent and persuasive strategy of the advertiser. Results indicated effects for both grade and commercial structure. The implications of these findings for social-cognitive development and for policy affecting children and television advertising are discussed.     

Children's relative number judgments: One-to-one correspondence,recognition of noncorrespondence,and the influence of cue conflict

Although one-to-one correspondence can be seen as a component of successful counting, number conservation, and relative number judgments, there is evidence of considerable discrepancies between children's competencies in these different tasks. Concerning relative number judgments there are strikingly different claims concerning the ability of young children to make one-to-one correspondence-based judgments. In part these discrepancies reflect differences in criteria. Four experiments are reported in which 5-year-olds' relative number judgments of small and large number displays with and without perceptual aids were studied. Children were found to respond to local rather than global density differences and to benefit from the provision of perceptual aids on both small and large number displays with one exception, namely, large number displays where the longer row is less numerous.     

On mediating equity,equality, and self-interest: The role of self-presentation in social exchange

Do individuals conform to various norms of reward allocation not necessarily in response to internal standards but rather, to win approval from relevant others? This study examined the role of self-presentation in mediating equity, equality, and self-interest within reward allocations. It was hypothesized that when others were aware of a subject's behavior, distributions would reflect that person's normative definition of the situation. Subjects allocated a $5.00 payment among themselves and three partners with unequal performance inputs. Informing the experimenter of one's decisions resulted in more equitable divisions, characterizing the employment-productivity relationship between experimenter and subject. When co-workers, defined as peers, were aware of allocations, an equality-based solution was favored. Allocators enhanced their own rewards beyond normative values only when their choices were completely private. Evidence was also found of postdecisional cognitive changes which maintained the belief that one acted justly in giving each partner what he deserved. These findings are consistent with the proposition that individuals maximize their own rewards, defined broadly to include social impression-formation and intrapsychic benefits. Apparently, self-presentational concerns mediate the relative salience of equity, equality, and self-interest in social exhange.     

Behavioral similarity,confederate strategy,and sex composition of dyad as determinants of interpersonal judgments and behavior in the prisoner's dilemma game

The study was designed to test three distinct theoretical models relating player's attitudes toward a confederate in the prisoner's dilemma game: a reinforcing outcome model, a cultural norm model, and a social comparison model. A secondary concern of the study was to determine if player's sex, confederate's sex, and the confederate's strategy interactively influence player's choice behavior. Forty-eight male and forty-eight female subjects played 100 trials of the prisoner's dilemma game with a confederate who played either a 74% cooperative or 74% competitive predetermined strategy and then filled out the Interpersonal Judgment Scale rating the confederate. Behaviorally similar confederates received more positive evaluations than dissimilar confederates supporting the social comparison hypothesis. Further, the strategy of the confederate did not influence choice behavior in mixed-sex dyads, suggesting that sex roles may inhibit behaviorally based male-female interaction. The generality of previous gaming research which has dealt almost exclusively with same-sex dyads is called into question.     

Polarizing effects of social comparison

Does exposure to others' judgments merely elicit conformity to what is observed? Two experiments are reported in which people who were merely exposed to others' responses tended not to conform to the average observed response but to exceed it in the socially preferred direction. These experiments complement social psychology's historic emphasis on conformity by suggesting that not only do people avoid being markedly deviant from others; they also act to differentiate themselves from others toward the extreme that reflects the group ideal.     

The effect of children's spontaneous cognitive sets on discrimination learning

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous cognitive “sets” in pictorial discrimination learning. Lists were constructed to highlight either perceptual or conceptual similarities among the stimuli. In each experiment age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of older children (sixth graders), that of younger children (kindergartners) is governed more by the perceptible than by the conceptual attributes of stimuli—data in complete accord with Bruner's view of cognitive development.     

Controlling nonverbal displays: Facial expressions and tone of voice

This study investigated the hypothesis that facial expressions are more controllable and closer to one's awareness than vocal cues. Specifically, it was suggested that nonverbal displays are a function of three factors: (a) expressiveness, or the tendency to display spontaneous nonverbal cues: (b) controllability, or the ability to voluntarily suppress or exaggerate one's spontaneous display: and (c) demeanor, or the sender's tendency to convey a particular impression regardless of his/her experienced emotion. Subjects' facial and vocal reactions to affective stimuli were recorded in a spontaneous condition or under instructions to magnify or conceal reactions to these stimuli. It was shown that information conveyed by facial expressions was best accounted for by controllability whereas information conveyed by tone of voice was best accounted for by expressiveness and demeanor.     

Attributions and other inferences: Processing information about the self versus others

This study focuses on the attributional inferences involved in the comprehension of behaviors and on possible differences between the process of comprehending one's own behaviors and those of another person. Both the content of attributional judgments and the time taken to make the judgments were measured, in a design involving the comprehension of behaviors that were high or low in desirability and distinctiveness and that were understood as the subject's own versus another person's. Results show that the inferential processes in the comprehension of one's own and another's behavior are generally similar. Exceptions are where organized knowledge about the self (a self-schema) is brought into use and where differences in “perspective” between self and other influence processing. Discussion centers on the implications of the results for theories of comprehension and inference, including extensions needed to handle the self/other distinction.     

An assessment of the accuracy of self-assessment for career decision making

During the past few years, there has been a marked increase in the number of publications which focus on advice for individuals engaged in the process of career decision making. Most of these publications rely on self-assessment as the major input to the decision making process. This study compared the accuracy of self-assessment to expert assessment based on an assessment center procedure for a sample of potential college graduates. Significant discrepancies were found between the student's and assessor's ratings on 10 of the 13 dimensions assessed. Implications of these results are discussed and suggestions for further study are made.     

A new technique for investigating the feeling of knowing

Previous investigations of the feeling of knowing (FOK) have relied on absolute FOK judgements rather than on relative FOK judgments. This has resulted in a confounding of (1) the subject's metamemorial knowledge of nonrecalled items with (2) the subject's know/don't-know threshold. The new technique replaces the absolute FOK judgments with relative FOK judgments in which the subject generates (via paired comparisons) a FOK rank order of nonrecalled items in terms of the predicted likelihood of recognition. This new technique eliminates the aforementioned confounding, provides a richer data base, and yields separate estimates of FOK validity and FOK reliability.     

Testing hypotheses about other people: The use of historical knowledge

Three experiments were conducted to examine the use of historical knowledge to test contemporary hypotheses about the personal attributes of other people. In the first and second experiments, participants read an extensive account of events in one week of the life of a woman named Jane. Two days later, they used this previously learned information to test hypotheses about Jane's suitability for one of two jobs: either the rather extraverted job of real estate salesperson, or the rather introverted job of research librarian. In their hypothesis-testing activities, participants first reported all those previously learned facts that they regarded as relevant to assessing Jane's suitability for the job under consideration, and then reported their judgments of her job suitability. Participants reported greater amounts of hypothesis-confirming than hypothesis-disconfirming factual material. Moreover, having tested hypotheses about Jane's suitability for one job, participants judged her to be better suited for that job than for the other job. In the third experiment, participants framed hypotheses for assessing job suitability and defined the task of testing these hypotheses. Participants framed hypotheses in terms of those attributes whose presence would confirm the hypotheses and defined the hypothesis-testing task as one of preferentially collecting hypothesis-confirming evidence. The nature and consequences of confirmatory hypothesis-testing strategies are discussed.     

Children's numerical skill and judgments of confidence in estimation

This study investigated how children's fluent use of a basic numerical skill is related to their perceptions of confidence on a task of quantitative estimation. One hundred four 10th graders (age 15.7 years) were categorized according to level of numerical fluency as assessed by timed tasks of counting in various nonunity increments. They then made estimates of large numbers of dots and rated how confident they were on each trial. The estimation task varied according to two within-subject factors of task difficulty. It was found that counting skill was related not only to accuracy in estimating, but also to the appropriateness of the children's confidence in their responses. Skillful children made judgments that corresponded with actual task difficulty. A derived calibration score corroborated ANOVA findings of the interaction of skill level and task difficulty on confidence ratings. It also revealed that while girls were less confident than boys, they were actually more realistic in their judgments. Findings are discussed in terms of (a) the effect of stimulus knowledge on awareness of task difficulty and (b) sex differences in achievement-related expectancies.