Another look at confirmatory strategies during a real interview

In two experiments, it is shown that interviewers bias to a larger extent their questions towards their hypothesis when they interact with an interviewee than when they only prepare questions for a future interview. Also more biased questions are asked at the beginning of the interview than at the end. This does not seem to be due to the certainty entertained by the interviewers about their hypothesis. More likely, it appears that biased questions have an adaptative value and that they smooth the interview. All in all, our subjects were not especially concerned with diagnosticity.     

干扰任务对说谎影响的研究

摘要:本文将干扰任务对记忆的影响同测谎结合起来,试图运用这一方法来对求职者的真实学历和虚假学历进行区分。实验采用模拟面试的方式,对被试在有或无干扰任务条件下进行两次提问,结果发现,四种任务条件对被试真实经历和虚假经历都具有区分度,其中双双条件的区分度是最高的。并且,被试在双双任务条件下虚假经历的得分显著低于其他三种任务条件。     

The Effects of Commitment to Performance Goals on Effort1

The laboratory experiments were designed to examine the effects of commitment to a performance goal on the level of effort exerted to achieve the goal. In both experiments, college students worked on two memorization tasks and, after receiving performance feedback on the first task, commitment to either an easy or a more difficult goal for the second task was varied. In the first experiment, goal commitment was manipulated either by giving the students perceived choice over setting their goal or by assigning them to one of the two goal levels. In the second experiment, goal commitment was manipulated by publicly identifying students' goals or by keeping the goals private. To assess effort, participants were allowed to spend as little or as much time as they desired studying for the second task. In both experiments, the commitment manipulations (high choice or public identification) led to significantly greater persistence in studying, regardless of the goal level. In addition, high-commitment subjects tended to be more successful in reaching their goals than low-commitment subjects. These experiments suggest that commitment to a goal has motivational properties that prompt an increase in effort.     

A probabilistic account of exemplar and category generation

People are capable of imagining and generating new category exemplars and categories. This ability has not been addressed by previous models of categorization, most of which focus on classifying category exemplars rather than generating them. We develop a formal account of exemplar and category generation which proposes that category knowledge is represented by probability distributions over exemplars and categories, and that new exemplars and categories are generated by sampling from these distributions. This sampling account of generation is evaluated in two pairs of behavioral experiments. In the first pair of experiments, participants were asked to generate novel exemplars of a category. In the second pair of experiments, participants were asked to generate a novel category after observing exemplars from several related categories. The results suggest that generation is influenced by both structural and distributional properties of the observed categories, and we argue that our data are better explained by the sampling account than by several alternative approaches.     

Memory aids people use: Two interview studies

In two interview studies subjects were asked what memory aids they used and how often. In particular, the reported frequencies of use of external aids such as shopping lists and memos were compared with those of internal aids that have been investigated by psychologists, such as the method of loci. Subjects in the first study were 15 male and 15 female university students, and in the second, a group of 30 adult women, most of whom were housewives. In both studies the aids reported to be used most were external ones. However, it is pointed out that the most commonly used methods of remembering must be internal, although these are not usually considered to be aids. Some difficulties that arise in the assessment of memory in interview and questionnaire studies are discussed.     

Small Wins: Perceptual Focus,Efficacy, and Cooperation in a Stage-Conjunctive Social Dilemma1

A multi-stage social dilemma was used to explore the notion that focusing on part rather than all of a complex problem would affect self-efficacy and action. In two experiments subjects considered a multi-stage game asking them to invest an initial sum of money in hopes of earning a larger bonus to be paid if provision points were met at all stages (a “stage-conjunctive” task). Results indicated that under most conditions considered, presentation of the whole problem encouraged cooperation. The opposite pattern occurred when group members were asked to complete very demanding stages first. We suggest that these results depend strongly on the stage-conjunctive nature of our task.     

An experimental investigation of thought suppression

An experiment investigating the hypothesis that trying to suppress a thought will lead to an immediate and/or delayed increase in its occurrence is reported. Normal subjects listened to a taped story and then verbalized their stream of consciousness during two consecutive time periods. During the first period, one group (suppression) were asked not to think about the tape while two other groups (controls) were asked to think about anything or think about anything including the tape. During the second period, all three groups were instructed to think about anything. Results from the first period failed to support the immediate enhancement hypothesis as the suppression group reported less thoughts about the tape than the controls. However, results from the second period supported the delayed (rebound) hypothesis as subjects who had previously suppressed reported more thoughts about the tape than subjects who had not. The theoretical, methodological, and clinical implications of these results are discussed.     

Lying about flying: The efficacy of the information protocol and model statement for detecting deceit

Due to time constraints, interviews aimed to detect deception in airport settings should be brief and veracity assessments should be made in real time. In two experiments carried out in the departure hall of an international airport, truth tellers were asked to report truthfully their forthcoming trip, whereas liars were asked to lie about the purpose of their trip. In Experiment 1, we examined five verbal cues that we thought had potential to discriminate truth tellers from liars in short airport interviews: elaboration in disclosing information, checkable details, how many people are aware of the trip, complications, and plausibility. In Experiment 2, we attempted to improve the interview protocol by adding a second interview phase in which we introduced an information protocol and model statement. All five cues differentiated truth tellers from liars in both experiments, but the information protocol and model statement did not enhance these differences.     

Recognition memory performance and residential burglary

This paper reports two studies of recognition memory performance in groups of juvenile residential burglars. Memory performance of the burglars was compared in Experiment 1 with police officers and a group of adult householders. In Experiment 2 a second group of juvenile burglars was compared with a group of juvenile offenders who had no experience of housebreaking. All groups were asked first to identify houses in photographs that would be attractive or otherwise to burglars. Subsequently, subjects were given a surprise recognition test where, in some photographs, physical features had been changed. Recognition memory for information about physical features of houses was significantly better for the burglary group than for the police officers, who in turn were better than members of the law-abiding public. In Experiment 2 the juvenile burglars' recognition memory performance was significantly better than the other offenders. These results are interpreted in terms of the burglary subjects possessing a level of expertise associated with their experience of offending. This is a finding with implications for criminology and for the application of cognitive psychology to crime prevention, an area of considerable practical importance.     

Instrumental judgment and performance under variations in action-outcome contingency and contiguity

The intentional theory of instrumental performance proposes that performance of an action is determined in part by a belief about its causal effectiveness in producing a desired outcome. At variance with this notion, previous implicit learning experiments appear to have yielded dissociations between subjects' performance and beliefs. In two experiments, subjects were given an opportunity to perform an action--pressing a key on a computer keyboard--which was associated with an outcome on the computer screen according to a free-operant contingency. The subjects in one group were asked to judge the effectiveness of the action in causing the outcome, while those in a second group were asked to maximize their points score under a payoff schedule. In the first study, the effect of varying the contingency between the action and outcome was examined by keeping the probability of an outcome contiguous with an action constant and varying the probability of an outcome in the absence of an action. Performance and judgments showed a comparable sensitivity to variations of the instrumental contingency. In the second study, the delay between the action and the resultant outcome was varied. Increasing the action-outcome delay from 0 sec up to 4 sec produced a systematic decline in both causal judgments and performance relative to noncontingent, control conditions. These results are in accord with the intentional theory of performance, but they present difficulties for the notion of implicit learning.     

The Social Power of a Uniform1

The degree and basis of social power of uniformed figures was investigated in two field experiments. In the first experiment, subjects were stopped in the street by an experimenter dressed in one of three ways: a civilian, a milkman, or a guard. They were asked to pick up a paper bag, or to give a dime to a stranger, or to move away from a bus stop. The results indicated that the subjects complied more with the guard than with the civilian or milkman. In the second field experiment, designed to examine the basis of the guard's power, subjects were asked to give a dime to a stranger under conditions of either surveillance or nonsurveillance. The guard's power was not affected by the surveillance manipulation. A logical analysis of social power indicated that the guard's power was most likely based on legitimacy. Two questionnaire studies indicated, however, that college students did not perceive the guard as having either more. power or more legitimacy than the milkman or civilian. The nature and importance of understanding legitimacy was discussed.     

Two experiments with artificial languages

Two experiments are reported where subjects learnt simple artificial languages which contained synonyms: i.e. there were two equally correct verbal responses paired with each “referent” in the language: “referents” were simple visual patterns. In the first experiment (a memory task) subjects performed better with material of low auditory discriminability than with material of high auditory discriminability when they were asked to use one synonym of each pair more often than the other; the reverse was the case when they were asked to use each synonym equally often. In the second experiment (a two-person communication task with a noisy channel) the degree to which pairs of subjects tended to use the same synonym for the same meaning was found to be non-monotonic with the noise level in the communication channel: subjects tended to use the same synonyms for moderately high noise and very low noise more often than they did for very high noise and moderately low noise.

The concept of decision cost (Smith, 1968) is used to explain these results. Decision cost is a complex function both of discriminability and of response bias, and it is proposed that changes in decision cost in response to changes in response bias are responsible for the results observed in these experiments.     

Phonemic deficits in developmental dyslexia

Summary The present study explored a possible relationship between reading difficulties and speech difficulties. Dyslexic and normal readers, matched for Reading Age, were compared first on a reading task and secondly on a speaking task.In the first experiment, the two groups were asked to read nonsense words aloud. Both groups were able to read one-syllable nonwords equally well but the dyslexics had more difficulty than the normal readers when asked to read two-syllable nonwords. Moreover, they found two-syllable nonwords containing consonant clusters particularly difficult. The probability of their making an error increased with the number of consonant clusters.In the second experiment, the subjects were required to repeat real words and nonsense words of two, three, or four syllables. Both groups found nonsense words more difficult to repeat than real words. However, the relative difficulty of nonsense words over real words was greater for the dyslexic group. Their difficulty was especially marked when they had to repeat four-syllable nonsense words.Thus, in both experiments the dyslexic readers were more affected by the phonological complexity of the stimuli than the normal readers were. Hence, it was suggested that the dyslexic readers tested were subject to a general phonemic deficit which affected their ability to process both written and spoken words.     

Acoustic confusions and order forgetting

This paper reports two experiments employing a PETERSON and PETERSON (1959) paradigm, aimed at showing order as opposed to item forgetting in acoustic confusion experiments. In the first experiment two subsets from the acoustically similar vocabulary C V B D G T P E, i.e. D V B and C G T, were selected. One group of Ss were presented with the items from subset D V B in different orders for 4 trials, another group with the subset C G T. Interpolated activity lasted twenty seconds and presentation was auditory. The second experiment was similar to the first, but presentation was visual and interpolated activity lasted only 5 sec. In both experiments the incidence of order errors significantly and considerably exceeded the incidence of intrusion errors. This leaves open the possibility that in acoustic confusion experiments, confusions can be accounted for by assuming order rather than item forgetting, contrary to CONRAD's (1965) hypothesis.     

Do you know where your fingers have been? Explicit knowledge of the spatial layout of the keyboard in skilled typists

Two experiments evaluated skilled typists’ ability to report knowledge about the layout of keys on a standard keyboard. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the relative direction of letters on the computer keyboard. One group of subjects was asked to imagine the keyboard, one group was allowed to look at the keyboard, and one group was asked to type the letter pair before judging relative direction. The imagine group had larger angular error and longer response time than both the look and touch groups. In Experiment 2, subjects placed one key relative to another. Again, the imagine group had larger angular error, larger distance error, and longer response time than the other groups. The two experiments suggest that skilled typists have poor explicit knowledge of key locations. The results are interpreted in terms of a model with two hierarchical parts in the system controlling typewriting.     

The impact of misleading questions on eyewitness memory in children and adults

The study examined developmental patterns of the negative effect of misleading post‐event information in two different kinds of eyewitness interviews. A total of 284 subjects aged between five and 64 years were shown a short video about a theft and three weeks as well as four weeks later questioned about it. The social pressure in the interview after three weeks was manipulated by asking half of the subjects suggestive and misleading questions. The other half was asked open‐ended and unbiased questions. In the neutral interview four weeks later, all subjects were asked the same set of recognition questions about the event. The results revealed that preschoolers in particular had problems with the interplay between cognitive and social factors (social pressure induced through the wording of the misleading questions) in the interview setting after three weeks. In the neutral recognition test, all age groups were shown to suffer from prior misinformation to about the same extent. However, with an exception in the group of 6‐year‐old children the negative effect of prior misinformation on the accuracy of recognition proved to be due to items that were peripheral to the observed event. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Age-of-acquisition effects in semantic processing tasks

In two experiments, we examined whether word age-of-acquisition (AoA) is a reliable predictor of processing times in semantic tasks. In the first task, participants were asked to say the first associate that came to mind when they saw a stimulus word; the second task involved a semantic categorisation between words with a definable meaning and first names. In both tasks, there were significantly faster responses to earlier-acquired than to later-acquired words. On the basis of these results, we argue that age-of-acquisition effects do not originate solely from the speech output system, but from the semantic system as well.     

Discounting in causality and covariation judgements

In two experiments, humans were asked to judge the strength of a moderate contingency between a cue and an outcome in the presence of a second strong contingency between another cue and the outcome. The first experiment replicated the discounting effect whereby a strong contingency causes subjects to reduce or discount judgements of a moderate contingency. This experiment used a video-game procedure in which subjects camouflaged a tank to make it safe from mines. The second causal cue was the presence or absence of a spotter plane. Experiment 1 also ruled out the possibility that judgements might be determined by the number of co-occurrences of the cue and outcome as opposed to the level of contingency. The second experiment used an abstract scenario in which discounting was demonstrated when subjects were asked to judge the relationship between the occurrence of geometric objects. The instructions were neutral to discourage causal hypotheses. These results support the notion that judgements result from associative or connectionist processes and not from a two-step cognitive retrospective process in which an estimate of covariation is calculated between cue and outcome and then in a second step this information is used in a normative manner when a decision is made.     

特质感恩与状态感恩对初中生合作水平的影响

为探究感恩对初中生合作水平的影响,本研究采用追踪调查与实验相结合的方法,通过两个研究分别探究了特质感恩与内在的合作倾向,状态感恩与外在的合作行为之间的关系。结果发现：（1）初中女生的特质感恩、人物取向感恩显著高于男生;初一下的合作倾向显著低于初一上、初二上时期;（2）初中生的特质感恩水平能显著正向预测合作倾向,状态感恩的唤起会增加公共物品困境中的合作行为。