Utilizing a Social‐Ecological Framework to Promote Water and Energy Conservation: A Field Experiment1

The present study utilized a social‐ecological framework to design an intervention to reduce residential water and energy use in a local community. An experimental design was used to study the influence of information leaflets, attunement labels, and socially comparative feedback on the actual levels of energy and water consumption in 166 households over a 6‐month period. The results suggest that the labels, designed to attune residents to the environmental‐impact affordances of various appliances around their homes, led to a 23% reduction in water consumption. Neither information leaflets nor socially comparative feedback produced significant reductions in water use, compared to controls. No significant reductions in energy consumption were observed for any of the intervention conditions. The results are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications and their application to public policy promoting environmentally sustainable behavior.     

The Biobehavioral Model of Persuasion: Generating Challenge Appraisals to Promote Health1

By borrowing from the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat, we may understand when health communications adequately motivate behavior change or when they are overly distressing and inhibit behavior change. The present studies were guided by the biobehavioral model of persuasion, which predicts that different health appeals should evoke different appraisals, as well as psychological and physiological responses that motivate the adoption or rejection of health behaviors. Challenging messages should be associated with approach motivational tendencies, whereas threatening messages should be linked to avoidance. Findings from 2 experiments support the biobehavioral model of persuasion and offer mechanisms that confer message effectiveness. By understanding the psychological and physiological processes that drive message effectiveness, message designers can create more effective health appeals.     

Attitudes Toward Energy Conservation: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis1

This study reports a large-scale survey of citizens' attitudes and beliefs toward energy use and conservation in the southwestern United States. A probability sample of 1,000 Texas residents responded to a 10-item telephone survey. Questions concerned issues such as thermal comfort and health, economic benefits of conservation, efficacy of individual efforts, and perceived causes of the current U.S. energy situation. Confirmatory factor analysis replicated previous work by Seligman et al. (1979) and Becker et al. (1981) by identifying the same four principal dimensions underlying energy use attitudes and beliefs: 1) comfort and health, 2) high effort-low payoff, 3) role of individual consumer, and 4) legitimacy of energy problem. In addition, several demographic characteristics were found to moderate consumers' responses to the survey items. The results of this study reinforce the conclusion that future energy conservation campaigns should be sensitive to consumers' concerns about comfort and health. New directions for future research on energy attitudes and conservation behavior are discussed.     

Neuroethical and Social Implications of Using Transcranial Electrical Stimulation to Augment Creative Cognition

Recent research indicates that transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) of specific brain regions can successfully improve various forms of creative cognition. Although the endeavor to increase human creative capacity is intriguing from a neuroscientific perspective, and of interest to the general public, it raises numerous neuroethico-legal and social issues (NELSI). This review explores these issues by considering (a) whether using brain stimulation to improve creative cognition qualifies as a ‘treatment’ or an ‘enhancement,’ (b) how direct-to-consumer (DTC) and do-it-yourself (DIY) use of tES should be regarded and regulated, and (c) what the developing landscape of creativity-related neurostimulation could (and should) become.     

Energy Conservation: Two Easy Ways Out1

This study investigated attitude-behavior relationships in the context of energy conservation. Results indicated that general environmental concern is a poor predictor of energy-conservation behaviors. Direct evaluative comparisions of various non-conservationist behaviors with a more conservationist alternative showed a clear relationship with behavioral preference. Non-conservationists, however, evaluated their own behavior only marginally favorably and in some cases clearly unfavorably. This was accompanied by an overestimation of the common occurrence of these behaviors among the general population and by an unwillingness to relate these behaviors to personality characteristics. It is argued that these biases (i.e., considering one's behavior as a habit that is shared by many others) could hinder behavioral change. These findings are discussed in terms of effective public policy on the issue of energy consumption.     

Cognition and Citizen Participation in Social Action1

Citizen participation in social action may depend, in part, on certain beliefs about the world and one's power to initiate change. Existing tests of internality and belief in a just world were modified, creating independent measures of belief in personal power and belief in possible injustices in society. The paper reports data on the reliability and the convergent and discriminant validity of the new Personal Power and Injustice scales. In Studies 1 and 2 the scales predicted outcomes in theoretically relevant experiments. In Study 3 they discriminated among community groups who did, or did not, engage in social action.     

Using Cognitive Dissonance to Encourage Water Conservation1

In a field experiment on water conservation, we aroused dissonance in patrons of the campus recreation facility by making them feel hypocritical about their showering habits. Using a 2 × 2 factorial design, we manipulated subjects “‘mindfulness” that they had sometimes wasted water while showering, and then varied whether they made a “public commitment” urging other people to take shorter showers. The “hypocrisy” condition-in which subjects made the public commitment after being reminded of their past behavior-was expected to be dissonance-arousing, thereby motivating subjects to increase their efforts to conserve water. The results were consistent with this reasoning. Compared to controls, subjects in the hypocrisy condition took significantly shorter showers. Subjects who were merely reminded that they had wasted water, or who only made the public commitment, did not take shorter showers than control subjects. The findings have implications for using cognitive dissonance as means of changing behavior in applied settings, especially those in which people already support the desired goal, but their behavior is not consistent with those beliefs.     

Matching Messages to Motives in Persuasion: A Functional Approach to Promoting Volunteerism1

This study examined a functional strategy for investigating audience responses to motivationally-based persuasive appeals. It was predicted that people exposed to advertisements informing them how they could satisfy personally relevant motivations through volunteering (i.e., functionally matched messages) would judge these ads to be more persuasive, more emotionally positive, and would report being more likely to volunteer than people exposed to advertisements unrelated to their personally relevant motivations (i.e., functionally mismatched messages). These predictions were confirmed in an experiment wherein participants whose attitudes toward volunteerism served a Social Adjustive, Value Expressive, Utilitarian, Knowledge, or Ego Defensive function viewed advertisements promoting volunteerism that either matched or mismatched their personally relevant motivations. Results confirmed predictions as participants responded more favorably to the functionally matched than mismatched messages. The implications of this research for understanding the mechanisms by which functionally matched messages exert persuasive influence and the ramifications of the research for the practice of volunteerism are discussed.     

Social Constraint and Self‐Doubt: Mechanisms of Social Network influence on Resistance to Persuasion

Those around us have a profound influence on our political attitudes and attitude strength, such that people whose social networks include a variety of perspectives have weaker, less deeply entrenched attitudes than those who are surrounded by like‐minded others. In particular, those embedded in attitudinally heterogeneous networks are more open to changing their views. The nature and mechanisms of this network influence on openness to attitude change remain unclear. A survey experiment examines two mechanisms proposed by prior literature: (1) social doubt triggered by network members' dissent and (2) social constraint to maintain similar attitudes. It also provides some data on the more commonly assumed mechanism, (3) information exchange. Results strongly support social constraint and are mixed on social doubt. This contrasts with the theoretical emphasis of much previous interdisciplinary social network research, which has focused primarily on information exchange, to the detriment of other mechanisms. Findings also indicate that like‐minded social network members solidify attitudes at least as much as dissent erodes them, suggesting that prior emphasis on the influence of heterogeneous rather than attitudinally congruent networks is overstated. Implications for political movements are discussed.     

Using Message Framing to Promote Social Support in Depression: When Misery Makes Better Company

A depressed person may have particular difficulty obtaining social support unless, as previous research indicates, members of the person’s support network believe that their interactions with the depressed person will be rewarding. Continuing this line of research, two studies investigated how message framing influences perceptions of providing social support to someone diagnosed with depression. In Study 1, participants first evaluated a website created by the research team, which emphasized either the rewards of volunteering to help individuals suffering from depression (gain-framed) or the drawbacks of not volunteering (loss-framed). One week later, participants read a vignette about a friend suffering from depression. Participants initially exposed to the gain-framed website indicated that the friend was in greater need of help, and they expressed stronger intentions to help and maintain supportive contact with the friend. The first phase of Study 2 was identical to the first phase of Study 1. However, a week after evaluating the framed website, participants interacted via instant messaging with a confederate posing as a prospective undergraduate student, who disclosed during the conversation that she had been diagnosed with depression. Participants initially exposed to the gain-framed website indicated greater comfort interacting with the prospective student and greater willingness to engage in follow-up interactions with the student (e.g., exchange emails, talk on the phone) compared to participants initially exposed to the loss-framed website. The implications of these findings for increasing the provision of social support to individuals with depression are discussed.     

Logic and Social Cognition

This article takes off from Johan van Benthem’s ruminations on the interface between logic and cognitive science in his position paper “Logic and reasoning: Do the facts matter?”. When trying to answer Van Benthem’s question whether logic can be fruitfully combined with psychological experiments, this article focuses on a specific domain of reasoning, namely higher-order social cognition, including attributions such as “Bob knows that Alice knows that he wrote a novel under pseudonym”. For intelligent interaction, it is important that the participants recursively model the mental states of other agents. Otherwise, an international negotiation may fail, even when it has potential for a win-win solution, and in a time-critical rescue mission, a software agent may depend on a teammate’s action that never materializes. First a survey is presented of past and current research on higher-order social cognition, from the various viewpoints of logic, artificial intelligence, and psychology. Do people actually reason about each other’s knowledge in the way proscribed by epistemic logic? And if not, how can logic and cognitive science productively work together to construct more realistic models of human reasoning about other minds? The paper ends with a delineation of possible avenues for future research, aiming to provide a better understanding of higher-order social reasoning. The methodology is based on a combination of experimental research, logic, computational cognitive models, and agent-based evolutionary models.     

Socialization: Insights from Social Cognition

Socialization is the process by which individuals are assisted to become members of their social groups. Findings from social cognition and cross-cultural psychology offer two major insights into the socialization process. First, basic social cognitive principles imply that the immediate environment functions as a socialization agent by activating and inhibiting knowledge structures and thereby shaping cognition and behavior. Second, because the immediate environment factors into cognition and behavior, socialization efforts should involve the modification of the environment for optimal effect. We discuss various examples of socialization through the configuration of the immediate environment, such as rituals and use of physical artifacts. Our review links basic social cognitive mechanisms to socialization processes, which are customarily treated at higher levels of analysis.     

The PMS Illusion: Social Cognition Maintains Social Construction

This article reports the results of a preliminary study of ways that self-serving biases contribute to the maintenance of the cultural stereotype of the premenstrual woman. Self-serving biases such as illusory optimism and the false uniqueness effect lead individuals to believe that they are better than average and less likely to have negative experiences. Thus, even though individual women’s premenstrual symptoms are mild to moderate, they accept the stereotype because they believe that other women’s symptoms are worse than their own. Participants were 92 undergraduate women from two small colleges in southern New England. They completed measures of optimism, locus of control, and premenstrual symptoms and answered a series of questions about the incidence of PMS. Participants showed a significant tendency to believe that other women’s premenstrual symptoms are worse than their own. In addition, women who were high in optimism were significantly less likely to believe that they could be diagnosed with PMS, and they had significantly lower scores on the pain and behavior change subscales of the Menstrual Distress Questionnaire than did those low in optimism.     

Using a Computer as an Environmental Facilitator to Promote Post-Head Injury Social Role Resumption

Abstract

The purpose of this case study was to determine if an adult man with traumatic brain injury could use a computer as an environmental facilitator to assume adult social roles post-injury. The participant received four months of intervention in which (a) modifications to the computer's internal system, monitor, and keyboard were made, (b) the participant received instruction in adapted word processing and e-mail packages, and (c) the participant was provided with computer-related activities that were designed to enhance his participation in desired social roles. Participant observation and qualitative interview methods were used as data collection and analysis processes. As a result of his participation in the intervention, the participant was able to (a) re-establish his roles as a brother and an adult son, (b) develop and maintain an extended family of others beyond his family of origin, and (c) create a more satisfying adult work role that has brought greater meaning to his post-injury life.     

Role Theory and Social Cognition: Learning to Think like a Recycler

While the interactionist tradition of sociological role theory has been recognized as a promising conceptual framework for linking theories of social structure and social cognition, there remains little empirical research that examines the link between cognitive structure and role behavior. Our study tests the fundamental assumption that commitment to role behavior is associated with the development of a corresponding cognitive structure, through an analysis of a six-week field experiment designed to produce commitment to the role of “recycler.” We propose that intervention program participation resulted in recycler role-identity development, as well as corresponding changes in cognitive structure—i.e., the development of cognitive schemata—linked to the emergence of a new role-based view of self.     

Social Cognition in Paediatric Traumatic Brain Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Neuropsychology Review - Recent evidence suggests social cognitive deficits may be among the most profound and disabling consequences of childhood traumatic brain injury (TBI); however, it is only...     

内隐社会认知视野中的攻击性

本文从内隐社会认知的角度对人类的攻击性进行了探讨,认为人类的攻击性更具内隐性,对人们的影响是以一种自动化的方式进行的,而且认为欲求对攻击性进行量化研究最佳方式是间接测量。本文还对研究攻击性的内隐社会认知方法进行了简单介绍,并指出了从内隐社会认知角度研究攻击性的重要意义。