Age-related differences in responses to thoughts of one's own death: mortality salience and judgments of moral transgressions

Two experiments explored age differences in response to reminders of death. Terror management research has shown that death reminders lead to increased adherence to and defense of one's cultural worldview. In Study 1, the effect of mortality salience (MS) on evaluations of moral transgressions made by younger and older adults was compared. Whereas younger adults showed the typical pattern of harsher judgments in response to MS, older adults did not. Study 2 compared younger and older adults' responses to both the typical MS induction and a more subtle death reminder. Whereas younger adults responded to both MS inductions with harsher evaluations, older adults made significantly less harsh evaluations after the subtle MS induction. Explanations for this developmental shift in responses to reminders of death are discussed.     

Empathy neglect: reconciling the spotlight effect and the correspondence bias

When people commit an embarrassing blunder, they typically overestimate how harshly they will be judged by others. This tendency can seem to fly in the face of research on the correspondence bias, which has established that observers are, in fact, quite likely to draw harsh dispositional inferences about others. These seemingly inconsistent literatures are reconciled by showing that actors typically neglect to consider the extent to which observers will moderate their correspondent inferences when they can easily adopt an actor's perspective or imagine being in his or her shoes. These results help to explain why actors can overestimate the strength of observers' dispositional inferences even when, as the literature on the correspondence bias attests, observers are notoriously prone to drawing those very inferences.     

The body as a source of self-esteem: the effect of mortality salience on identification with one's body, interest in sex, and appearance monitoring

The present research investigated the role of the physical body as a source of self-esteem and tested the hypothesis derived from terror management theory that reminding people of their mortality increases self-esteem striving in the form of identification with one's body, interest in sex, and appearance monitoring. The results revealed that individuals high in body esteem responded to mortality salience manipulations with increased identification with their physical bodies in Study 1 and with increased interest in sex in Study 2. Study 3 showed that reminders of death led to decreased appearance monitoring among appearance-oriented participants who were low in body esteem. These findings provide insight into why people often go to extreme lengths to meet cultural standards for the body and its appearance.     

Social comparison and optimism about one's relational future: order effects in social judgment

This research tested the hypothesis that when individuals first answer a question about relative evaluation, i.e. the degree in which they feel they are better or worse off than comparison others and next a question about general evaluation, i.e. the general judgment of one's situation or one's characteristics, the correlations between both variables will be higher than when the order of the questions is reversed. In the first case individuals will use social comparison information as a reference point for making a judgment of their situation, whereas general evaluations not preceded by relative evaluations may be based on a variety of factors. The content of the questions concerned optimism with respect to one's own prospects concerning intimate relationships, i.e. the perceived chances of having a happy intimate relationship in the future, and the perceived chance of not becoming involved in a divorce. The results of two studies—a questionnaire study among students (n=274), and a computer administered survey among single adults (n=275)—confirmed the predictions. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Treating another's actions as one's own: children's memory of and learning from joint activity

Children often overestimate their contribution to collaborative activities. Across 2 studies, the authors investigated whether this memory bias supports internalization of the actions of others in the context of joint exchanges. After taking turns with (high collaborative condition; Studies 1 and 2) or working independently of (low collaborative condition; Study 2) an adult experimenter to create a series of novel toys, children's agent memory and reconstruction ability were assessed. Children in the high collaborative condition but not the low collaborative condition systematically overclaimed the actions of their social partner, more frequently reporting having completed steps performed by the experimenter than vice versa. This "I did it" bias was related to learning performance: high collaborative children outperformed low collaborative children both during an immediate reconstruction task and 4 months later, and the strength of the bias predicted children's independent toy-building accuracy. It is argued that the "I did it" bias may emerge as part of a general process of learning from others and is supported by a common framework for representing self-actions and other actions.     

Reasoning bias for the recall of one's own beliefs in a Smarties task for adults

While many studies in the theory of mind (ToM) literature have investigated how we understand others' mental states, few have explored the mechanism by which we reflect on our own mental states. This study examined how adults reflect on their own and others' mental states within the same ToM task. To do so, we modified the Smarties task, one of the traditional ToM tasks for children. The results showed that adult participants were biased by outcome knowledge when recalling their false belief and that the participants who overestimated their false belief also overestimated the mental states of a naive other. These results were analogous to young children's failure in the Smarties task. Considering the current findings, we discuss possible cognitive processes that are common across children and adults when reflecting on their own mental states and the mental states of others.     

Mood acknowledgment and correction for the mood-congruency bias in social judgment

Past research has revealed a mood-congruency bias wherein people evaluate other individuals more positively when they are experiencing good moods than when they are experiencing bad moods. At times, however, people may attempt to prevent their transient mood states from biasing their evaluations of other people. It was proposed that the capacity to attend openly to one’s moods is an important precursor to such mood correction efforts. Two studies supported this hypothesis. People who were encouraged to attend to their feelings (Study 1), as well as people who are naturally inclined to acknowledge their feelings (Study 2), were more likely than their counterparts to prevent their positive and negative moods from biasing their judgments of a target person.     

Terror mismanagement: evidence that mortality salience exacerbates attentional bias in social anxiety

Death anxiety is a basic fear underlying a range of psychological conditions, and has been found to increase avoidance in social anxiety. Given that attentional bias is a core feature of social anxiety, the aim of the present study was to examine the impact of mortality salience (MS) on attentional bias in social anxiety. Participants were 36 socially anxious and 37 non-socially anxious individuals, randomly allocated to a MS or control condition. An eye-tracking procedure assessed initial bias towards, and late-stage avoidance of, socially threatening facial expressions. As predicted, socially anxious participants in the MS condition demonstrated significantly more initial bias to social threat than non-socially anxious participants in the MS condition and socially anxious participants in the control condition. However, this effect was not found for late-stage avoidance of social threat. These findings suggest that reminders of death may heighten initial vigilance towards social threat.     

Self-relevance increases the irrelevant sound effect: Attentional disruption by one's own name

Memory performance is severely disrupted when task-irrelevant sound is played during item presentation or in a retention interval. Working memory models make contrasting assumptions on whether the semantic content of the auditory distractors modulates the irrelevant sound effect. In the present study, participants made more errors in serial recall when they had to ignore sentences containing their own name as opposed to that of a yoked-control partner. These results are only consistent with working memory models that allow for attentional processes to play a role in the explanation of the irrelevant sound effect. With repeated presentation the disruptive effect of one's own name decreased, whereas the disruptive effect of the auditory distractors in the control condition remained constant. The latter finding is most consistent with the duplex model of auditory attention, which assumes that the irrelevant sound effect is primarily caused by automatic interference of acoustic distractor features, but at the same time allows for a disruption of encoding due to attentional capture by unexpected deviants. However, to explain the present results, the mechanism responsible for the attentional capture has to be extended to highly (self-)relevant auditory distractors.     

判断与决策中的投射偏差

投射偏差是指个体常常会高估未来偏好与当前偏好的一致性, 从而把当前偏好投射到未来的心理倾向性。本文从情感–认知加工、时间修正和心理模拟等视角对投射偏差的心理机制进行了解释, 并概括出投射偏差的内源性(含内脏感觉、情绪状态和需要)和外源性(含事件相关信息、天气状况和选择情境)影响因素, 还总结归纳出投射偏差的三种应对策略, 最后指出了投射偏差在未来研究的方向。     

Gender bias in clinical judgment: An assessment of the analogue method's transparency and social desirability

The main purpose of this research was to determine whether clinicians discern the intent of an analogue study of gender bias in clinical judgment and, if so, whether they respond in a socially desirable manner. A total of 147 psychologists responded to a national mail survey in which they were instructed to make clinical ratings of a case summary describing either a female or male client. In one condition (the Social Desirability condition), clinicians were informed of the study's intent and instructed to respond in a socially desirable fashion. In another condition (the No Social Desirability condition), the study's intent was not revealed and clinicians were asked to guess the study's hypothesis following their ratings. Results indicate that only 10 of 100 clinicians reported having deduced the purpose of the study. The small number of guessers prohibited examination of whether guessing the intent leads to socially desirable responses. Results provide no evidence that either therapist or client gender influenced clinical judgment. Implications for evaluating experimental findings which fail to support gender bias in clinical judgment are discussed.This research was supported in part by a Biomedical Research Grant awarded to the first author when he was a faculty member at the University of Southern California. Thanks are due to Bernie Weiner and Rena Repetti for their comments on early drafts.     

The truth and bias model of judgment

We present a new model for the general study of how the truth and biases affect human judgment. In the truth and bias model, judgments about the world are pulled by 2 primary forces, the truth force and the bias force, and these 2 forces are interrelated. The truth and bias model differentiates force and value, where the force is the strength of the attraction and the value is the location toward which the judgment is attracted. The model also makes a formal theoretical distinction between bias and moderator variables. Two major classes of biases are discussed: biases that are measured with variables (e.g., assumed similarity) and directional bias, which refers to the extent to which judgments are pulled toward 1 end of the judgment continuum. Moderator variables are conceptualized as variables that affect the accuracy and bias forces but that do not affect judgments directly. We illustrate the model with 4 examples. We discuss the theoretical, empirical, methodological, measurement, and design implications of the model.     

Minorities remember more: The effect of social identity salience on group-referent memory

Research on the group-reference effect has confirmed that social identities can affect memory, but few studies have explored the role of identity salience in this effect. Two experiments were designed to fill the gap. In Experiment 1 Tibetan students at one predominantly Han Chinese university showed high ethnic identity salience and better memory for trait adjectives encoded in reference to Tibetans than in reference to Han Chinese. In Experiment 2 Tibetan students at one Tibetan-majority university demonstrated low ethnic identity salience and no differences were found between memory performance under Tibetan-referential processing and Han-referential processing conditions. In comparison, Han participants did not show high ethnic awareness or an ingroup-reference effect in either experiment, due to membership of an ethnic majority (Experiment1) and lack of inter-ethnic contact (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that high salience is a prerequisite for social identities to facilitate memory.     

The egocentric bias: Seeing oneself as cause and target of others' behavior

The egocentric bias—the tendency to see oneself as both cause and target of another person's behavior—was examined in the context of a small group interaction. Pairs of subjects plus a confederate conducted a short discussion, their goal being to achieve consensus on a specific topic. The discussion was interrupted by the experimenter when the confederate summarized his/her opinion. It was found that subjects were more likely to see themselves as a cause as well as a target of the confederate's last statement compared to the way they were seen by other group members. Subjects were also more likely to exaggerate the amount of attention they received from the confederate. The overall egocentric bias scores were correlated with subjects' level of self-esteem. Cognitive and motivational processes that may account for this bias were discussed.     

Taking care of one's own: justice and family caregiving

This paper asks whether adult children have aduty of justice to act as caregivers for theirfrail, elderly parents. I begin (Sections I.and II.) by locating the historical reasons whyrelationships within families were not thoughtto raise issues of justice. I argue that thesereasons are misguided. The paper next presentsspecific examples showing the relevance ofjustice to family relationships. I point outthat in the United States today, the burden ofcaregiving for dependent parents fallsdisproportionately on women (Sections III. andIV.). The paper goes on to use Rawls'theoretical tool of the veil of ignorance toargue that caring for parents should not belinked to a person's sex and more generally,that there is no duty of justice to assume therole of caregiver for dependent parents(Sections V.). Although justice does notprovide the moral foundations for parent care,I show that it nonetheless places importantlimits on the instinct to care. I concludethat the voice of justice should be audible,and is intrinsically present, withinfamilies.     

Agency and observation in knowledge of one's own thinking

This essay addresses the question how we know our conscious thinking. Conscious thinking typically takes the form of a series of discrete episodes that constitute a complex cognitive activity. We must distinguish the discrete episodes of thinking in which a particular content is represented in phenomenal consciousness and is present “before the mind's eye” from the extended activities of which these episodes form a part. The extended activities are themselves contentful and we have first‐person access to them. But because their content is not represented in phenomenal consciousness, this access cannot be broadly observational. Instead, I argue, it is agential. Furthermore, that extended activities are intentional explains the possibility of a nonobservational form of introspective access to the discrete episodes in consciousness.