Effects of threat and failure on concern for others

A state measure of social interest or concern for others was developed from an existing trait measure. The state measure was significantly correlated with the trait scale and with volunteering to help others in need. Replicating previous research on the relationship between affect and altruistic behavior, social interest was significantly correlated with affective arousal in three studies comprising a total of 259 subjects. Failure on an ego-involving task and theaanticipation of a midterm examination both resulted in significant reductions in social interest. Results supported the hypothesis that negative affect resulting from personal threat typically produces increased concern for self along with decreased concern for the interests of others, thereby resulting in reductions of altruistic behavior. The potential relevance of social interest to relationships between stressful conditions and other aspects of interpersonal behavior was discussed.     

Self-esteem and cognitive consistency effects on self-other evaluation

Reactions to bogus evaluations of one's self, either positively or negatively discrepant from one's own self-evaluation, were investigated among subjects differing in self-ideal discrepancy. All subjects exhibited greater acceptance of the source of favorable information than the source of unfavorable information, and changed their self-evaluation more toward the favorable than unfavorable position. However, among low self-ideal discrepancy subjects, the change in self-evaluation was accompanied by a similar change in friend evaluation, thereby maintaining their standing in relation to this friend after receiving either positive or negative evaluations. In contrast, high discrepancy subjects downgraded the friend more and upgraded the friend less than themselves, thereby enhancing their relative standing as a result of the feedback. These findings indicated that defensive or self-enhancing effects on self-evaluation processes are determined by self-ideal discrepancy.     

Interest inventories based on Roe's classification modified for negative respondents

The Ramak and Courses interest inventories (Meir, 1974; Meir, Sohlberg, & Barak, 1973) based on Roe's 1956 occupational classification, were modified for use with subjects who answer negatively to most items in the traditional forms. One hundred thirty-six males, aged 19–21, responded to the Ramak and Courses inventories with the R ? A (Refuse, Undecided, Agree) scale. The split half reliability of the modified inventories is 0.75, and their occupational structure has the same shape and arrangement as the inventories with the Y ? N scale. Negative respondents give more positive responses (p < .05) on the modified forms than on the traditional ones.     

Generality of persistence: The role of stimulus and response factors in persistence to punishment

Previous research has shown that intermittent punishment of a response increases its persistence to continuous punishment and that intermittent punishment training in one situation produces persistence to continuous punishment in other situations. Experiment 1 showed that as long as the instrumental response and punishing stimulus were held constant from intermittent to continuous punishment marked differences between these situations had no decremental effect on persistence. Experiment 2 showed that intermittent punishment training of one response resulted in substantial persistence to continuous punishment of a different and apparently incompatible response and that such response change had no more than a marginal effect on persistence. The results were seen as requiring some revision to the traditional conditioning-model interpretation of persistence to punishment.     

Evaluation as a function of correspondence and hedonic relevance

An experiment was conducted to test and refine some of the implications of Jones and Davis' (1965) model of the attribution process in person perception. Subjects read anecdotes about actors who performed either in-role (low correspondence) or out-of-role (high correspondence) behaviors which were positive, negative, or neutral in the subject's estimation (hedonic relevance). Respect and admiration for the actor were influenced by both hedonic relevance and correspondence (did the action reflect an inner attribute?), but liking and friendship were affected by hedonic relevance only. The implications for the evaluation process in person perception were discussed.     

Cross-response mode consistency in risk taking as a function of self-reported strategy and self-perceived consistency

Earlier work (Slovic, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1972, 22, 128–134) has found that consistency in preference for the same stimuli across two response modes, selling price and choice, is only moderate. The present study followed the same procedure and also asked subjects to report the strategies they used to determine their preferences and to state how consistent they usually were in gambling tasks. Greater consistency was found for those (1) who reported strategies for both response modes, (2) whose strategy type matched across response modes, and (3) who perceived themselves as consistent. Strategy differences were also found across response modes. The results were discussed in terms of the usefulness of assessing subjective task interpretation in predicting consistency and for the general desirability of greater idiographic assessment for increased predictability.     

Coalition formation in characteristic function games: Competitive tests of three theories

Two experiments tested the bargaining, minimum resource, and minimum power theories of coalition formation in situations involving different payoffs for some of the winning coalitions (characteristic function games). In the first experiment, a triadic resource distribution was employed and payoffs for the coalitions were specified in such a way that each of the three theories predicted the formation of a different coalition. The coalition predicted by minimum power theory formed the most frequently, and the mean divisions of the payoffs among coalition members were also closest to the predictions of minimum power theory. However, the most frequent coalition was not only the one predicted by minimum power theory, it was also the one having the largest payoff per member. There-fore, a second experiment was conducted, which employed a tetradic resource distribution and specified the coalition payoffs in such a way that (a) each of the theories predicted the formation of a different coalition and (b) none of the predicted coalitions was the one with the largest payoff per member. Although the mean payoff divisions in the coalitions in this experiment were closest to those predicted by bargaining theory, the coalition that formed most frequently was not one of those predicted by any of the theories. Rather, it was the one having the largest payoff per member. None of the three theories is able to account adequately for the results of both experiments. The difficulties that the theories have in dealing with coalition formation in situations in which there are different payoffs for winning are discussed.     

Lateralization effects in lexical decision tasks

Subjects were timed as they judged whether items presented to them were English words or not. Comparisons were made between responses to nouns and to verbs, on the one hand, and between concrete and abstract nouns, on the other hand. No asymmetries were found.     

Trait attributions and defense against insult from a dissimilar other

It was hypothesized that subjects would prefer to blame a character assault on negative ability characteristics of a dissimilar attacker as opposed to negative motivational characteristics in order to escape responsibility for the attack. It was reasoned that because we generally think of ourselves as having less potential influence over the abilities as opposed to the motivations of another person, it might be possible to diminish one's responsibility for another's behavior by attributing that behavior to that person's ability characteristics. Subjects in this experiment responded either to an insulting or noninsulting stimulus person who was either similar or dissimilar by selecting from a list of both motivational and ability bipolar trait dimensions, those dimensions they would most prefer to use in rating the stimulus person. As predicted, subjects responding to an insulting and dissimilar stimulus person showed a significantly greater preference for ability trait dimensions than subjects in the other conditions combined and also disliked the stimulus person more. The significance of these results for defensive attribution processes and phenomena such as racism and sexism are discussed.     

Evidence of a detrimental effect of extrinsic incentives on breaking a mental set

College students were either rewarded ($1.50) or not for solving a series of 10 water-jar problems. The first 9 of these were designed to establish a set for a relatively complicated, three-jar solution (B ? A ? 2C). The 10th problem was a set breaker which required that subjects discover a simple (A-C) solution. The mental activities needed to produce a solution to the two types of problems (Problems 1 to 9 and Problem 10) were, therefore, different and one interest was in seeing whether reward would be detrimental for performance on both types of problems. It was not. Poorer reward group performance was obtained only on Problem 10. This result was not due to between-group differences in mathematical ability, and explanations in terms of differences in time taken to check answers or concern over quality of performance were considered and discounted. Measures of intrinsic interest (subject evaluations of the task and a measure of willingness to volunteer for future research) failed to support the belief that interest differences account for performance differences.     

Competition-cooperation as a mediator of locus of control and achievement

To test the hypothesis that internals will achieve more than externals in situations where competition is preeminent but not where cooperation is required, 300 children completed a digit-symbol task and a locus of control scale. Children were divided into internals and externals, placed in situations varying in competition and cooperation, and readministered the digit-symbol task. While the general hypothesis was supported, it was found that externals increased from their significantly low performance in the competitive situation to equal performance with internals in the cooperative situation. These findings are discussed in terms of their meaning for social learning theory and their relevance for the potential development of classroom teaching methods for increasing achievement behavior.     

Effects of timing and justification of witnessed aggression on the observers' punitiveness

Sixty university men who had been treated harshly by the experimenter's accomplice were distributed evenly among four conditions comprising a 2 × 2 factorial design and a “control” group. All of the men watched a moderately aggressive segment from a TV program but in the former case they were given a story summary which depicted the witnessed aggression as either justified or less justified and this summary was provided either immediately before or just after the scene was shown. The fifth group did not have any story synopsis. When the men had an opportunity to punish the confederate at the conclusion of the film, they were nost punitive if they had heard the justified aggression summary after the movie just before they shocked the confederate, and were least punitive if they had been given the nonjustified aggression version before they watched the aggressive incident. These results extend the generality of the findings obtained by other research in this area and also suggest that the violent scene had elicited as well as disinhibited aggression-facilitating reactions in the viewers.     

The effect of training procedures on the overlearning reversal effect in young children

The performance of 80 preschool children on a reversal problem was studied as a function of amount of training and type of training procedure used during acquisition and reversal. In the extinction phase of reversal learning, subjects given a correction procedure during the reversal problem made fewer perseverative errors than subjects given noncorrection. In the reversal midplateau phase of reversal learning, overtraining facilitated reversal learning for subjects receiving noncorrection during the acquistion problem, but not for subjects receiving correction. A shift in training procedure between acquisition and reversal increased the number of subjects who reached criterion immediately after perseveration. Since these results are difficult to explain in terms of traditional learning theories, an alternative response-switching strategy explanation was proposed.     

Memory for faces: A social learning analysis

Recognition memory for unfamiliar faces was related to locus of control and anxiety. On the basis of Rotter's social learning theory, it was predicted that memory for faces would be associated with more internal locus of control in an unstructured memory task but not when encoding was controlled. In Experiment 1, where no specific instructions about encoding were presented, the predicted relationship was found for males. In addition, better recognition was associated with low anxiety for females. In Experiment 2, where encoding was controlled by having subjects judge the faces, no significant correlations between the personality measures and memory were found. The results are interpreted as supporting predictions made on the basis of social learning theory.     

Conciliatory strategies and relative power

In an investigation of variations of a conciliatory strategy, 96 subjects, half female and half male, played a modified Prisoner's Dilemma in which their relative power, in terms of control over the other's outcomes, was less than, equal to, or greater than that of a simulated other. After 10 trials on which (s)he was 50% competitive, the other either did or did not send a handwritten note of general intent to be cooperative. In the second block of 10 trials, the other either was 100% cooperative or began with cooperation and stayed with it as long as the subject did not exploit. When the subject did exploit, the other made the competitive choice on the following trial as a form of retaliation, but followed this retaliation by a return to cooperation on the next trial so that there were never two consecutive competitive choices. During this second block, the simulated other always signaled in advance, with an explicit message, which choice (s)he was about to make. In a third block, the other was 100% cooperative in all conditions and sent no messages. As hypothesized, subjects whose power was equal to or less than that of the other were more cooperative in response to conciliation than were subjects whose power was greater than that of the other. Subjects who received the general note of intent were more cooperative than those who did not, but only in the equal and low power conditions. The subjects in the equal power condition who experienced retaliation were more cooperative than those who did not, but those in the unequal conditions tended to react negatively to retaliation. The results were discussed in terms of Osgood's (Peace Research Reviews, 1979, 8(2), 77–92) GRIT strategy and outcome control in interaction.     

A simple instrument for measuring vocational interests based on Roe's classification of occupations

A vocational interests inventory-“Ramak”-based on Roe's (1956) classification of occupations was constructed. It consisted of 72 names of occupations. Equivalent-test reliability of 0.76 was achieved. The inventory was validated on working samples and by the structure of intercorrelations. The advantages of this inventory are discussed.     

A scale for the measurement of role-playing ability

A convenient paper-and-pencil measure of acting or role-playing ability was constructed, validated, and compared to a variety of theoretically and methodologically similar and dissimilar scales, including a specially designed improvisational situations test. Results indicate that the new scale provides both a reliable and valid screening device for the study of role-playing ability.