Trusted strangers: social affordances for social cohesion

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - How could the paradigm shift towards enactive embodied cognitive science have implications for society and politics? Translating insights form enactive...     

Sex stereotyping of infants: A review of gender labeling studies

Studies that have addressed the question of whether adults and children respond differently to male and female infants because of actual differences in the infants or because of preconceived sex stereotypes are reviewed, and the overall conclusions from these studies are evaluated. Twenty-three studies were identified in which neutrally clothed infant stimuli were labeled male in some conditions and female in other conditions. The strength and consistency of gender labeling effects on perceptions and behaviors in these studies were appraised. The results indicate that knowledge of an infant's gender is not a consistent determinant of adults' reactions, but more strongly influences young children's reactions. The implications of these findings for research on early sex role socialization are considered.     

Differential methods of causal attributions for strangers vs acquaintances

Previous research has demonstrated that people are more likely to attribute a stranger's behavior to external causes if that behavior is common in a given population than if it is relatively unique (the consensus rule). It was proposed in the present paper that another and perhaps simpler rule is available for causal attributions for an acquaintance's behavior, such that more external attributions are made as the behavior becomes increasingly inconsistent with extant impressions of the target (the goodness-of-fit rule). It was found that the goodness-of-fitrule, but not the consensus rule, was used in the attribution of causality for acquaintances when the behavior could be made to fit with extant impressions. When the behavior was completely inconsistent with extant impressions, both consensus and goodness-of-fit rules were used, such that the most external attributions were made in the poor fit/high consensus condition.     

The closeness-communication bias: Increased egocentrism among friends versus strangers

People commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers. We propose, however, that closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate, a phenomenon we term the closeness-communication bias. In one experiment, participants who followed direction of a friend were more likely to make egocentric errors—look at and reach for an object only they could see—than were those who followed direction of a stranger. In two additional experiments, participants who attempted to convey particular meanings with ambiguous phrases overestimated their success more when communicating with a friend or spouse than with strangers. We argue that people engage in active monitoring of strangers’ divergent perspectives because they know they must, but that they “let down their guard” and rely more on their own perspective when they communicate with a friend.     

Physical stigma and the pregnancy role: Receiving help from strangers

Previous research has demonstrated several similarities in the reaction of others to pregnant and to physically stigmatized individuals. This study recorded helping behavior (assistance in picking up scattered keys) directed toward an apparently pregnant, nonpregnant, or facially disfigured woman in an elevator either alone, with a female companion, or with a male companion. A predicted interaction revealed that significantly more assistance was given to the pregnant woman than to either of the other two only when she was alone or with a female companion; she was helped less than the non-pregnant experimenter when she was accompanied by a male. Differences and similarities in the norms that govern behavior toward pregnant women and the physically stigmatized are discussed in light of their relevance to women's development during the childbearing years. The well-documented negative effect of group size on helping was replicated. Unexpected sex differences were found in rate of helping. Women virtually never helped in this situation—even in all-female groups. These findings are discussed in light of previous work on sex differences in helping.Preparation of this article was supported by a faculty development grant awarded to the first author by Rhodes College. We wish to thank Bella DePaulo, Robert Vidulich, and Chris Wetzel for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.     

Extended Sex: An Account of Sex for a More Just Society

We propose an externalist understanding of sex that builds upon extended and distributed approaches to cognition, and contributes to building a more just, diversity‐sensitive society. Current sex categorization practices according to the female/male dichotomy are not only inaccurate and incoherent (attributing nonreproductive properties to differences in vaguely defined reproductive roles), but they also ground moral and political pressures that harm and oppress people. We argue that a new understanding of sex is due, an understanding that would acknowledge the variability and, most important, the flexibility of sex properties, as well as the moral and political meaning of sex categorization. We propose an externalist account of sex, elaborating on extended and distributed approaches to cognition that capitalize on the natural capacity of organisms to couple with environmental resources. We introduce the notion of extended sex, and argue that properties relevant for sex categorization are neither exclusively internal to the individual skin, nor fixed. Finally, we spell out the potential of extended sex to support an active defense of diversity and an intervention against sex‐based discrimination.     

The kindness of strangers: organ transplantation in a capitalist age.

The topic of organ transplantation is examined from the perspective of three authors: Robert Bellah, Jeremy Rifkin, and Margaret Jane Radin. Introduced by reflections on the development of the justification of organ transplantation within the Roman Catholic community and the various themes raised by the historical study in Richard Titmuss's The Gift Relationship, the paper examines how and in what ways the possible commodification of organs will affect our society and the impacts this may have on the supply of organs.     

Sharing tips with strangers: exploiting gift culture in computer gaming.

The aim of this study was to look at motivations behind altruistic behavior in virtual communities by studying the sharing of game tips by experienced gamers. We examine several possible motivations (pure altruism, generalized reciprocity, and reputation) and qualitatively analyze tip types in terms of usefulness, visibility, and skill level. We found that in games that do not support a "performance stage" for skill demonstration, players often share game tips as a strategy to attract attention. To a certain degree, reciprocity can be used to explain small favor exchanges, but earning social reputation is often a much stronger motivating factor.     

Teaching preschoolers to avoid abduction by strangers: Evaluation of maintenance strategies

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the use of effective training procedures for teaching preschoolers to avoid abduction by strangers and to evaluate strategies to promote maintenance of the acquired skills. The study was conducted in three Head Start classrooms with a total of 46 children. A multiple probe design across groups within each class and replicated across the three classrooms was used to evaluate two strategies for promoting maintenance: (a) monthly reviews involving verbal rehearsal, modeling, and feedback; and (b) monthly reviews involving verbal rehearsal, modeling, feedback, and in-class role play. The findings of the study indicate: (a) classroom teachers implemented the training procedures with a high degree of procedural fidelity, (b) all children were taught to resist the lures of strangers, (c) children maintained the critical abduction avoidance behavior (moving away from a stranger) while the maintenance promotion strategies were used, and (d) minimal differences were noted in the effectiveness of the two maintenance promotion strategies for the critical abduction avoidance behavior.     

Infant memory for place information

The present studies were designed to examine the role of place cues in memory retrieval during early infancy. Three-month-old infants were trained to move a mobile by kicking. Two weeks later, memory retrieval was disrupted if they were reminded in a location or place different from where they had been trained, but not if they were reminded in the same place (Experiment 1A). The same result was obtained even though highly salient cues in their immediate visual surround remained unchanged during reminding (Experiments 1B and 1C). No disruption was seen, however, when retrieval was cued in a different place after only 1 day (Experiment 2). These findings unequivocally demonstrate that infants as young as 3 months encode incidental information about the place where an event occurs and suggest that early memories are buffered against retrieval in potentially inappropriate contexts over the long term.     

Infant memory for musical experiences

Recent findings suggest that infants can remember words from stories over 2 week delays (Jusczyk, P. W., & Hohne, E. A. (1997). Infants' memory for spoken words. Science, 277, 1984-1986). Because music, like language, presents infants with a massively complex auditory learning task, it is possible that infant memory for musical stimuli is equally powerful. Seven-month-old infants heard two Mozart sonata movements daily for 2 weeks. Following a 2 week retention interval, the infants were tested on passages of the familiarized music, and passages taken from similar but novel music. Results from two experiments suggest that the infants retained the familiarized music in long-term memory, and that their listening preferences were affected by the extent to which familiar passages were removed from the musical contexts within which they were originally learned.     

Infant preferences for attractive faces: a cognitive explanation.

Research on infant face perception has shown that infants' preferences for attractive faces exist well before socialization from parents, peers, and the media can affect these preferences. Four studies assessed a cognitive explanation for the development of attractiveness preferences: cognitive averaging and infant preferences for mathematically averaged faces, or prototypes. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that both adults and 6-month-old infants prefer prototypical, mathematically averaged faces. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that 6-month-olds can abstract the central tendency from a group of naturalistic faces. Taken together, the studies suggest that infants' preferences for attractive faces can be explained by general information-processing mechanisms.     

Infant categorization: memory for category-level and specific item information

In an attempt to determine whether it is necessary to postulate abstraction processes in infant categorization, three experiments assessed retention of category-level information and information specific to category members. Using a visual recognition memory procedure, 10- and 13-month-old infants were familiarized with category instances containing both shared dimensional information and idiosyncratic features. The addition of idiosyncratic features to members of the familiarization category enhanced specific item memory for 13-month-old infants. However, this was not the case for the younger infants. The results of within-category test comparisons indicated that 10-month-old infants regarded information common to all members of the category as more familiar than information specific to individual exemplars. This occurred despite evidence that specific item information was retained in memory and available for retrieval during recognition tests. The findings are discussed in relation to exemplar and abstraction models of categorization.