Reciprocity: Choice shift in a social trap

In the present study it was investigated if choice behaviour in a social trap situation was affected by feedback about the choice of others. On top of the social trap reward structure investigated by Schroeder, Jensen, Reed, Sullivan and Schwab (1983) a bonus was added. In the individual bonus condition subjects were promised an unspecified bonus if they would obtain more points than any other group member of one's group. In the group bonus condition subjects would obtain a bonus if the own group acquired more points than the other group. As expected, in the group bonus condition one took fewer points than in the individual bonus condition. As suggested by the reciprocity explanation of choice behaviour (Liebrand, Wilke, Vogel and Wolters 1986; Liebrand, Jansen and Rijken 1986) it appeared that first choice corresponded strongly with one's expectations about the choices of others. Before the second choice and also before the third choice one received purported feedback about the choices of other members of one's group. In the conserving condition one learned that all others made a conserving choice, whereas in the consuming condition one learned that all others made a consuming choice. According to the reciprocity explanation it was found that when choice behaviour was in agreement with own previous expectations and previous choice, no choice change did occur. Shifts took place in conditions in which own previous expectations about the choices of others and own choice were disconfirmed by information about choices of others.     

The Existential Sources of Phenomenology: Heidegger on Formal Indication

Abstract: This article contributes to the contemporary debate regarding the young Heidegger's method of formal indication. Theodore Kisiel argues that this method constitutes a radical break with Husserl—a rejection of phenomenological reflection that paves the way to the non‐reflective approach of the Beiträge. Against this view, Steven Crowell argues that formal indication is continuous with Husserlian phenomenology—a refinement of phenomenological reflection that reveals its existential sources. I evaluate this debate and adduce further considerations in favor of Crowell's view. To do so, I analyze the young Heidegger's account of phenomenological communication and argue that it further reflects the continuity that Crowell identifies: as he does with reflection, Heidegger refines Husserl's account of phenomenological communication and sheds light on its existential sources.     

Ingroup ambivalence and experienced affect: the moderating role of social identification

No previous work in the field of group‐related attitudes and emotions has investigated the possible affective consequences of ingroup ambivalence—that is, the consequences of having attitudes towards an ingroup that are simultaneously both positive and negative. The current study was designed to explore this issue. Ambivalent attitudes have been argued to be more psychologically salient to the individual than univalent ones. A linear increase in participants' experienced affect was therefore predicted as a function of their ambivalence toward the ingroup. However, consistent with the predictions of social identity theory, previous findings have shown that higher ingroup identifiers are more likely to be involved with the ingroup than lower identifiers. Accordingly, we predicted and found effects of ingroup ambivalence on affect for high but not low ingroup identifiers. Combining the findings of two distinct literatures, the initial evidence provided by this study exploratively traces the sources of the affective processes that are set in motion by the evaluation of one's own group in an intergroup context. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

EVALUATION OF A REINFORCEMENT PROCEDURE FOR ACCELERATING WORK RATE IN A SELF-PACED COURSE1

Students in a self-paced child development course were assigned to one of seven groups. One bonus point, which contributed toward the student's final grade, was given for each unit completed during a specified two-week period. In a combined baseline-reversal design, bonus points could be earned at different times for each group, and some groups had weeks without bonus points interspersed between bonus weeks. All seven groups and 78% of individual students completed units at a faster rate during bonus periods than during the balance of the semester. For the 58 students completing the course, mean units per week during bonus periods was 2.40 (SD = 1.60); for the balance of the semester mean units per week was 0.96 (SD = 0.37). Awarding bonus points for a limited period early in the term appears to be a useful procedure for increasing rates during this period in which rates are typically low. Although similar effects have been reported by others (e.g., Miller, Weaver, and Semb, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1974, 7 , 87–91), the advantage of the present procedure is that the increase in rate is accomplished by means of reinforcement for high rates rather than punishment (low grades or forced withdrawal) for low rates.     

Group Identification and Support for the Supreme Court: Evidence from Evangelical Protestants

Research on the determinants of the U.S. Supreme Court's institutional support among the public focuses on three factors at the level of the individual, including satisfaction with its performance, knowledge of the judiciary, and support for democratic values. Evidence from the group level has revealed that the relative importance of these factors can vary, despite the predictions of positivity theory that the effects of all factors should be similar across all subsets of the U.S. population. We seek to explain this inconsistency between theory and evidence through an analysis of evangelical Protestants, a politically powerful and theoretically compelling group. Drawing on group‐based studies, we develop a principled account of when group members will base their institutional support more strongly than others do on their satisfaction with the Court's recent performance, and identify defining features of the information environment of evangelical Protestants that satisfy the model's components. We report evidence from a national survey that the effects of all three major factors differ systematically for evangelical Protestants. We discuss implications of our analysis for an ongoing debate over positivity theory and for identifying other groups for whom institutional and specific support will be strongly linked.     

Being the same and different: A model explaining new product adoption

• The study suggests an alternative conceptualization for understanding adoption behavior over time, based on Optimal Distinctiveness Theory. This theory states that social identity derives from a fundamental tension between human needs for validation and similarity to others—the need for assimilation—and a countervailing need for uniqueness and individuation—the need for differentiation. The present study proposes that the effect of the size of the group of consumers who have already adopted a new product on an individual consumer's decision to adopt this product is contingent upon the consumer's two predispositions: the need for assimilation and the need for distinctiveness. Results of empirical research suggested that differently perceived subgroup sizes fulfill consumers' dual needs for distinctiveness and assimilation differently. The influence of the adopters' group size on a consumer's decision to adopt a new product varied among individuals with different levels of needs for distinctiveness and assimilation: when need for distinctiveness was low, the higher was the need for assimilation and the larger was the perceived group size, the higher was the probability of adopting the product. When the need for distinctiveness was high, the lower was the need for assimilation and the larger was the perceived group size, the lower was the probability of adopting the product. In addition, when the need for both distinctiveness and assimilation were high, the probability of adopting the product rose as the perceived group size increased. Implications for product variation, marketing communication, and target groups are discussed.

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The strategic value of essentialism

Social essentialism—the belief that individuals contain an underlying essence determined by the social categories they belong to—has generally been regarded as a harmful cognitive process that results in prejudice and other forms of injustice at the group level. Trait essentialism, also termed a fixed mindset—the belief that people's trait levels are determined and relatively unchangeable—has been construed as a parallel impediment to self‐improvement at the individual level. However, each of these domains contains findings that do not fit this narrative, suggesting that such essentialized thinking is not always detrimental at either the group or individual level and that its effects may instead depend on motivation and context. Incorporating advances in research on moral judgment and identity allow for a reconciliation of the variable effects of social and trait essentialism. In some instances, essentialism can be a strategy for reducing blame over uncontrollable aspects of individuals and groups and for identity formation.     

Children's social wariness toward a different-race stranger relates to individual differences in temperament

When children first meet a stranger, there is great variation in how much they will approach and engage with the stranger. While individual differences in this type of behavior—called social wariness—are well-documented in temperament research, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the social groups (such as race) of the stranger and how these characteristics might influence children's social wariness. In contrast, research on children's social bias and interracial friendships rarely examines individual differences in temperament and how temperament might influence cross-group interactions. The current study bridges the gap across these different fields of research by examining whether the racial group of an unfamiliar peer or adult moderates the association between temperament and the social wariness that children display. Utilizing a longitudinal dataset that collected multiple measurements of children's temperament and behaviors (including parent-reported shyness and social wariness toward unfamiliar adults and peers) across early childhood, we found that 2- to 7-year-old children with high parent-reported shyness showed greater social wariness toward a different-race stranger compared to a same-race stranger, whereas children with low parent-reported shyness did not. These results point to the importance of considering racial group membership in temperament research and the potential role that temperament might play in children's cross-race interactions.

Research Highlights

• Previous research on temperament has not considered how the race of strangers could influence children's social wariness.
• We find evidence that 2- to 7-year-old children with high parent-reported shyness show greater social wariness toward a different-race stranger compared to a same-race stranger.
• These results point to the importance of considering racial group membership in temperament research.
• Our findings also suggest temperament may play a role in children's cross-race interactions.

     

Evaluation of a microskills programme with field-based counsellors: Effects on core attitudes and counselling skills

Two issues relevant to the role of microtraining in counsellor training are examined. Firstly, due to the increasing use of the microcounselling framework for training counsellors, either directly or indirectly, in the Rogerian attitudes, the effects of such a programme on counsellor attitudes was investigated. Secondly, although microskills training has been generally found to improve and increase trainee's helping skills usage and effectiveness, its effects on field-based counsellors have rarely been evalulated. Thus the second objective of the study was to examine this issue. The subjects were 12 counsellors from a number of counselling agencies. Six of these counsellors participated in a microcounselling programme which taught the skills of nonverbal communication, questioning, reflecting, listening, self-disclosure, reinforcement, opening and closing. The data base for the study consisted of videorecordings of each subject's participation in two extended interactions—one involving an individual discussing a real concern, and the other involving an individual discussing a simulated concern. Various measures of counsellor attitudes, effectiveness, skills, and actual behaviours were obtained. Comparison of the experimental and control groups indicated that the microcounselling programme had little effect on any of the aspects of counsellor performance examined. It is concluded that, although aspects of the design may have influenced the results, an integrated microcounselling approach may be more effective in developing attitudes. In addition, it appears that the characteristics of a professional population, such as counsellors, may differ from those of novices, such that problems in effecting change in skilled performance will occur with the former group.     

Compensating for an Inattentive Audience

The common ground that conversational partners share is thought to form the basic context for language use. According to the classic view, inferences about common ground, or mutual knowledge, are guided by beliefs about the physical, cognitive, and attentional states of one's communicative partners. Here, we provide a first test of the attention assumption for common ground, the proposal that common ground for a co‐present entity—such as an object or an utterance—can only be formed if a person has evidence that his or her partner has also attended to it. In three experiments, a participant speaker and two partners learned names for novel monster pictures as a group. The speaker was then asked to describe the monsters to each partner separately in a referential communication task. The critical manipulation was the (in)attentiveness of one partner at different points in the study. Analysis of the speaker's referring expressions revealed that speakers assumed their partner shared common ground for the monster names only when that partner exhibited engaged attention as the names were learned. These findings provide key and novel support for the classic proposal that formation of common ground critically depends on assumptions about the attentional state of one's conversational partner.     

Early communication in dyads with visual impairment

The ability of dyads with restricted access to the visual channel of communication to establish a reliable pre‐linguistic communicative signalling system has traditionally been viewed as problematic. Such a conclusion is due in part to the emphasis that has been placed on vision as central to communication by traditional theory. The data presented in this paper question these assertions. The results of a longitudinal study exploring the nature of early dyadic interactions in dyads with visual impairment are presented. The dyads' use of three types of non‐visual behaviour—touch, vocalizations and facial orientation—were investigated in terms of their potential as alternatives to visual communication. It is argued that the results are evidence that visually impaired dyads engage in sophisticated communicative exchanges prior to infants' acquisition of language. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Motivated to confront: How experiencing anger affects anchoring bias

Prior research has asserted that emotions affect anchoring bias in decision making through the emotion's certainty appraisal or through the emotion's action tendencies, but these prior studies investigate the role of each component—appraisal or action tendency—without accounting for potential effects of the other one. The current research investigates whether anger exerts a significant effect on anchoring bias by activating a desire to confront a potential anchor. Importantly, the studies compare the effect of anger versus disgust, emotions that differ in their action tendency but are similar in their certainty appraisal. In Study 1, participants completed an emotion induction task and then a negotiation task where the first offer from the negotiation partner served as a potential anchor. Anger led to more deviation from the anchor compared with disgust or neutral feelings. Subsequent studies provide evidence that the angry participants are less anchored when the anchor value comes from a more confrontable source (someone else vs. themselves in Study 2 and an out‐group member vs. an in‐group member in Study 3).     

Social cohesion predicts COVID-19 vaccination intentions and uptake

COVID-19 vaccination is widely regarded as an individual decision, resting upon individual characteristics and demographic factors. In this research, we provide evidence that psychological group membership, and more precisely, social cohesion—a multidimensional concept that encompasses one's sense of connectedness to, and interrelations within, a group—can help us understand COVID-19 vaccination intentions (Study 1) and uptake (Study 2). Study 1 is a repeated-measures study with a representative sample of 3026 Australians. We found evidence that social cohesion can be conceptualised as a multidimensional structure; moreover, social cohesion at Wave 1 (early in the COVID-19) predicted greater vaccination intention and lower perceived risk of vaccination at Wave 2 (4 months later). In Study 2 (a cross-sectional study, N = 499), the multidimensional structure of social cohesion was associated with greater uptake of vaccine doses (in addition to willingness to receive further doses and perceived risk of the vaccine). These relations were found after controlling for a series of demographic (i.e., sex, age, income), health-related factors (i.e., subjective health; perceived risk; having been diagnosed with COVID-19), and individual differences (political orientation, social dominance orientation, individualism). These results demonstrate the need to go beyond individual factors when it comes to behaviours that protect groups, and particularly when examining COVID-19 vaccination—one of the most important ways of slowing the spread of the virus.     

The Correlations Between Parliamentary Debate Participation,Communication Competence,Communication Apprehension,Argumentativeness, and Willingness to Communicate in a Japanese Context

Studies focusing on debate as pedagogy have been gaining attention recently. However, most research has employed policy debate, which is a traditional debate style. Parliamentary debate, which is an impromptu debate style, has been recently gaining popularity worldwide. As minimal research exists on parliamentary debate as pedagogy, the present study examined the correlations between parliamentary debate participation, communication competence, communication apprehension, argumentativeness, and willingness to communicate. Moreover, this study aimed to investigate the unique characteristics of communication variables and correlations with the experience of participating in a parliamentary debate in a Japanese context, an area that interests many scholars. The results showed some differences in correlations between Japanese and United States samples, which was explained by analyzing a trait of Japanese culture that is characterized as highly contextual. Regarding the correlations between communication variables and parliamentary debate participation, significant differences were found for all variables except for communication competence, where less communication apprehension, more argument approach, less argument avoidance, and more willingness to communicate were observed compared to non-debaters. Finally, the study findings revealed that those with parliamentary debate experience obtained lower scores for communication apprehension and higher scores for argumentative approaches compared with those who did not have such experience; the effect sizes were smaller in women than men. These findings suggest that parliamentary debate participation is an effective way to foster communication variables.

     

Demonstrating and eliminating the aggregation effect in physical skill tasks

Confidence judgments can be elicited in multiple ways. One of these procedures is to provide confidence judgments regarding each of a number of cases (individual judgments). A second procedure is to provide confidence judgments about a set of items (an aggregate judgment). Much research has demonstrated an aggregation effect—that individual judgments are more confident than aggregate judgments—within the cognitive knowledge domain. However, this effect has not previously been investigated with physical performance skill tasks. In three experiments, participants gave individual and aggregate judgments regarding the number of successful tosses they would make in either a ring toss, ping‐pong toss, or basketball toss task. In keeping with the aggregation effect, individual judgments were more confident than were aggregate judgments of success. Additionally, we eliminated the aggregation effect in Experiments 2 and 3 by employing a case‐specific base rate manipulation. Consistent with previous research with cognitive tasks, these results suggest that individual confidence judgments for physical skill tasks are determined primarily by characteristics associated with the individual case to be judged, whereas aggregate confidence judgments are determined by a more general evaluation of one's ability in the domain. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Once More unto the Breach: Kant and Race

The last thirty years has seen an explosion of literature on Kant and race. Once overlooked essays and notes in which Kant expresses contempt for nonwhite people and support for slavery have been brought to light, and many scholars have wrestled with the question of how a philosopher who stressed the equal dignity of all human beings could hold such views. This article tries to reframe the debate over these issues. It begins by reviewing the racist texts in Kant's corpus and the responses to them proposed by scholars like Charles Mills (to whom the paper is dedicated), Robert Bernasconi, and Pauline Kleingeld. It then introduces elements of Kant's philosophical development that gave Kant reason to renounce his racism—whether or not he actually did so—from about the time of the Groundwork onward. Finally, it turns to the question of what Kant's racism can tell us about his moral philosophy—and perhaps about moral philosophy in general.     

From Piaget's Epistemic Subject to Pascual-Leone's Metasubject: Epistemic Transition in the Constructivist—Rationalist Theory of Cognitive Development

The explanation of the transition from one epistemic theory to another is an important part of Piaget's genetic epistemology. It is argued that this epistemic transition leads to a retrodictable orthogenetic tendency toward optimizing equilibration. The objective of this paper is to establish a relationship between Piaget's epistemic subject and Pascual-Leone's metasubject and to demonstrate that the postulation of the latter can be considered as an epistemic transition between two constructivist—rationalist theories, which leads to the development of a theory with greater explanatory power. Epistemic transition in this paper refers to a progressive problemshift (cf. Lakatos, 1970), between the theories of Piaget and Pascual-Leone. Piaget builds a “general model” by neglecting individual differences, that is, studies the epistemic subject, whereas Pascual-Leone by incorporating a framework for individual difference variables, studies the metasubject—the psychological organization of the epistemic subject. Empirical evidence is presented to demonstrate that Pascual-Leone's theory of constructive operators is a model of the psychological organism (the metasubject), which is at work inside Piaget's epistemic subject. Finally, it is concluded that the greater explanatory power of Pascual-Leone's theory can be interpreted as an epistemic transition between Piaget's epistemic subject and Pascual-Leone's metasubject.     

Action Assembly Theory and Communication Apprehension A Psycho-physiological Study

Research reported here replicates Greene and Sparks (1983a, 1983b) and their re-conceptualization of communication apprehension (CA). Noting the limited empirical evidence in support of a trait/structure link with physiological output, this study applies action assembly theory to the problem. Differential heart rate curves are predicted for high and low trait CA based on Greene's (1984) action assembly theory. The study confirms a hypothesized cubic heart rate function for low trait CA subjects and a quadratic heart rate function for high trait CA subjects. Results are interpreted as empirical support for an action assembly approach to communication anxiety.     

Depth of Transference in Groups

An ongoing controversy in the field of group psychotherapy is whether transference regression is greater in groups than in individual treatment. There appears to be a general consensus that group behavior may be understood as operating on at least three levels—the conscious–rational, the oedipally determined transference, and the preoedipal maternal transference level. The more rational levels are associated with transference dilution, whereas the more primitive levels accompany transference intensification. Dilution occurs as a result of reality demands and inputs of the group situation and because of multiple targets of displacement. Transference intensification is a product of mutual stimulation, contagion effect, frustrating inputs, and support of the group theme. Certain patients benefit most from the dilution features of a group, and others profit most from intensification. The therapist's technique and the patient's pathology are the main determinants of which aspect gets emphasized and utilized.