Behavioral And Personality Expectations Associated With Status Positions

Two parallel studies explore whether status-positions may be character- ized by certain general behaviors and personality traits. Fifty-two status- positions, including selected ethnic, occupational, age, sex, and familial categories, were ranked and rated on twenty-eight personality and behavioral characteristics by substantial samples of college students. Analysis of these data indicated that some behavioral characteristics and personality traits are consistently attributed to particular status-positions independently of method (rating or ranking), with little or no effects attributable to the five orders of presentation used. Factor analysis of the status-positions yielded five factors for both the ratings and the rankings, four of which were interpretable and scored: Likeability, Defiance, Responsibility, and Emotionality. The factor structure found was related to previous research on characteristics of persons. Profiles of the status-positions using mean scores based on these four factors plus assertiveness were presented.     

Characteristics of Boys' and Girls' Toys

In Study 1, 292 undergraduates rated 126 toys as to whether they were suitable for boys, girls, or both. From these ratings, we established five categories of toys: strongly masculine, moderately masculine, neutral, moderately feminine, and strongly feminine. Using these categories, we constructed four toysets; each consisted of 15 toys, three from each category. In Study 2, 706 undergraduates individually rated the toys from one of the toysets on 26 scales that measured the toys' characteristics. We found that girls' toys were associated with physical attractiveness, nurturance, and domestic skill, whereas boys' toys were rated as violent, competitive, exciting, and somewhat dangerous. The toys rated as most likely to be educational and to develop children's physical, cognitive, artistic, and other skills were typically rated as neutral or moderately masculine. We conclude that strongly gender-typed toys appear to be less supportive of optimal development than neutral or moderately gender-typed toys.     

Rating the similarity of simple perceptual stimuli: asymmetries induced by manipulating exposure frequency.

When judging the similarity of two stimuli, people's ratings often differ depending on the order in which the comparison is presented (A vs. B or B vs. A). Such directional asymmetries have typically been demonstrated using complex concepts that have a large number of semantic features and a standard explanation is that different sets of features are emphasized depending on the direction of the comparison. In this study, we show that directional asymmetries in the similarity of simple perceptual stimuli can be predictably manipulated merely by presenting each member of a pair with different frequency. Participants rated the similarity of color patches before and after performing an irrelevant training task in which a subset of colors was presented ten times more frequently than others. The similarity ratings after training were significantly more asymmetric than the ratings before training. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of similarity judgment and propose a computationally explicit explanation based on asymmetries in representational stability.     

Sex-role identity as a moderator of the polarization effect in person perception

Male and female subjects with different sex-role identities (Androgynous, Masculine, Feminine, Undifferentiated) rated likability of male and female stimulus persons in the impression formation paradigm. Under certain conditions all the female subjects and feminine males manifested a polarization effect; that is, they made more polar ratings of opposite-sexed stimulus persons in contrast to same-sexed stimulus persons. On the other hand, under certain conditions Masculinetyped males rated male stimulus persons more negatively than female stimulus persons. Results were discussed in terms of moderating effects on the polarization phenomenon and possible explanatory mechanisms.     

Confidence in own and others' knowledge

A person's confidence judgement of a statement reflects his/her degree of belief in the correctness of that statement. Deficient ability to assess the correctness of statements (or beliefs) can have serious consequences in many situations. This study compares the realism (calibration) of subjects' confidence ratings in two situations ( n = 64). The first situation was when the subjects confidence rated their own answers to general knowledge questions. The second was when the subjects gave confidence ratings of another person's answers to general knowledge questions. The results show that subjects were more poorly calibrated and were more overconfident in the second situation, i.e. when they gave confidence ratings of answers given by another person, compared with when they rated their own answers. The data further indicates that the results can not be explained in terms of the amount of cognitive processes invested when making the confidence judgements. For example, the subjects rated the other person's answers to questions they had answered themselves, and to questions they had not seen before. No differences in confidence or in calibration and other measures of judgmental realism were found between these two categories of questions. Nor did instructions to imagine the thought process of the other person improve any of these measures. The subjects disagreed with the other person's answer on 23% of all occasions. Significantly poorer calibration was shown where subjects disagreed with the other person than where they agreed. Contents of a social nature attended to by the subjects may have affected the results. The results, when related to previous research in the area, give rise to the question of how the social situation can be arranged to achieve the best calibration.     

What people say and what they do: The differential effects of informational cues and task design

Do ratings of tasks accurately reflect the influences on people's choices of tasks? Does information from others have strong effects on attitudes toward tasks, but weak effects on task choices? What effect does direct experience with tasks designed to be stimulating or dull have on task ratings and task choices? To answer these questions, we collected data from 24 male and female undergraduates who individually worked on four tasks involving the analysis of cartoons. Informational cues and task design were cross-cut so that each task was either enriched or unenriched and received either positive or negative cues. Subjects rated the tasks on scales that measured how motivating each task was perceived to be, and how interesting and enjoyable each task was. Then subjects worked on a freely chosen sequence of tasks for 10 min. Cues had significant main effects on task ratings, but not on overall choice of tasks. Task design had no main effect on ratings, but did significantly affect overall choices. These results suggest that behavioral choices are determined more by direct experience with tasks than by information provided by others.     

Nice or smart? Task relevance of self-characteristics moderates interpersonal projection

Two studies investigated the impact of trait relevance to a specific task on people's projection of their characteristics onto a cooperative partner. We either measured (Study 1) or manipulated (Study 2) the relevance of a trait to a specific cooperative task. In both studies, participants first rated themselves on a list of traits. Then they imagined completing a cooperative task with an unknown partner. Finally, they rated the partner on the same list of traits. In Study 1, we found partner ratings to be positively influenced by self ratings and the idiosyncratic measure of trait relevance. In Study 2, participants rated the self and the partner on competence and warmth traits while completing an intellectual or a social task. We found partner ratings to be positively influenced by self ratings more on competence than on warmth in the intellectual task, but more on warmth than on competence in the social task. These results suggest that people project onto others in a way that maximizes their chances to succeed in cooperation.     

The structure of self-reports of emotional responses to film segments

Subjects viewed eight short film segments and rated the strength of their responses within eight emotion categories. Principal-components analysis showed that these ratings varied along three dimensions: Amused-Warmhearted, Fearful-Anxious, and Disgusted-Scornful. Clusters of film segment centroids occupied distinct regions within this reduced space, and moderate homogeneity was found when the individual ratings were assigned to the centroids of these clusters. Further analyses concerned the reliability of the ratings over time, the effects of prior exposure, and sex differences. Ratings obtained on a subset of these film segments during a subsequent psychophysiological experiment were analyzed to test the generalizability of the results of Study 1. The factor patterns were very similar, as were tests for the homogeneity of the ratings. The structure of self-reports of elicited affect and the utility of film stimuli are discussed.This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant 77-08926 and by funds from the Lincoln Filene endowment to Dartmouth College.     

Teachers' perceptions of the frequency and seriousness of violations of ethical standards

Despite nationwide efforts to professionalize public-school teaching, little attention has been given to the matter of standards of professional conduct for teachers. The authors examined teachers' perceptions of the frequency and seriousness of different categories of teacher misconduct. They administered a 34-item questionnaire to 235 school professionals in northwestern South Carolina. For each item, respondents rated the extent to which they agreed or disagreed that the behavior occurred frequently and represented a serious violation of professional ethics. Factor analysis of the ratings of seriousness yielded 3 domains of ethical concerns: (a) student-teacher boundary violations, (b) carelessness in behavior, and (c) subjectivity in grading and instruction. Teachers rated boundary violations as the most serious but least common violations and carelessness in behavior as the most frequent but least serious violation. Problems of subjectivity in grading were rated as moderately frequent and moderately serious. The authors found no differences between male and female teachers or between elementary and secondary teachers in their ratings of the seriousness or frequency of any of the 3 groups of ethical concerns. The authors discuss implications for development of a national code of teacher conduct.     

Examining variation in working memory capacity and retrieval in cued recall

Groups of individuals often work together to generate solutions to a problem. Subsequently, one member of the group can plagiarise another either by recalling that person's idea as their own (recall-own plagiarism), or by generating a novel solution that duplicates a previous idea (generate-new plagiarism). The current study examines the extent to which these forms of plagiarism are influenced by the quality of the ideas. Groups of participants initially generated ideas, prior to an elaboration phase in which idea quality was manipulated in two ways: participants received feedback on the quality of the ideas as rated by independent judges, and they generated improvements to a subset of the ideas. Unconscious plagiarism was measured in recall-own and generate-new tasks. For recall, idea improvement led to increased plagiarism, while for the generate-new task, the independent ratings influenced plagiarism. These data indicate that different source-judgement processes underlie the two forms of plagiarism, neither of which can be reduced simply to memory strength.     

Natural anchoring at the neutral point of category rating scales

Contextual theories of judgment assume that the rating of any stimulus depends on its relationship to a context of similar stimuli. For example, any specific act of behavior would be rated less favorably when considered in the context of good behaviors then when considered in the context of bad ones. However, two experiments suggest an absolute anchoring of the natural neutral point, an exception to this generalization. In Experiment 1, morally indifferent acts remained “neutral,” regardless of context; and in Experiment 2 the break-even or zero-point in a simulated game of chance was always rated “neutral.” In both experiments, contextual manipulations had powerful effects upon ratings of other stimuli, though never shifting them across the neutral point. Furthermore, both experiments suggest that neutral-point anchoring also affects the use of the most extreme categories in a manner that is unique to this phenomena. In Experiment 2 for example, the introduction of extremely positive “wins” not only made other wins seem less favorable while leaving ratings of the zero-point unchanged, but also made the most negative losses seem more favorable. It is as if the introduction of an extremely positive “win” also introduces the possibility of an extremely negative “loss.” Taken together these findings contradict the basic adaptation-level premise that the entire scale is determined by the neutral point; they are also inconsistent with the assumption of range theories that the scale is anchored by the endpoints of the range of stimuli actually experienced.     

Why do I always have the best ideas? The role of idea quality in unconscious plagiarism

Groups of individuals often work together to generate solutions to a problem. Subsequently, one member of the group can plagiarise another either by recalling that person's idea as their own (recall-own plagiarism), or by generating a novel solution that duplicates a previous idea (generate-new plagiarism). The current study examines the extent to which these forms of plagiarism are influenced by the quality of the ideas. Groups of participants initially generated ideas, prior to an elaboration phase in which idea quality was manipulated in two ways: participants received feedback on the quality of the ideas as rated by independent judges, and they generated improvements to a subset of the ideas. Unconscious plagiarism was measured in recall-own and generate-new tasks. For recall, idea improvement led to increased plagiarism, while for the generate-new task, the independent ratings influenced plagiarism. These data indicate that different source-judgement processes underlie the two forms of plagiarism, neither of which can be reduced simply to memory strength.     

The essential process in a family of measurement models

Five members of the Rasch family of latent trait models which have appeared more or less independently in the literature are brought together and identified as one model. In addition to sharing the distinguishing characteristic of the dichotomous Rasch model—separable person and item parameters and hence sufficient statistics—all five models share a common algebraic form and have as their basic element the fundamental process defined by Rasch's simple logistic expression. In these models, the sufficient statistics for person and item parameters are counts of events constructed to be indicative of the variable being measured, and the measures they enable are ‘fundamental’.     

THE EFFECTS OF OBSERVER EXPECTATIONS,TASK AMBIGUITY,AND MEDIUM OF PRESENTATION ON LOW- AND HIGH-INFERENCE JUDGMENTS OF COMMUNICATIVE BEHAVIOR1

This study investigated the effects of observer expectations about a speaker's nonfluency level on nonfluency counts made during a taped speech and on post-performance evaluations of nonfluency, anxiety, central idea, organization, language, delivery, and general effectiveness. The influence of task ambiguity and medium of presentation on expectancy effects was also explored. Results indicate: (a) in a high-ambiguity condition, observers who expected a fluent speaker counted fewer nonfluencies in his speech than observers who expected a nonfluent speaker; (b) fluent-expectation observers rated the speaker more positively on the seven evaluative measures; (c) low task ambiguity eliminated expectancy effects on nonfluency counts and ratings of organization but not on the other six evaluative measures; and (d) auditory and auditory-visual presentations of the speech did not produce significant differences.     

Racial bias in behavioral assessment of children's social skills

The social skills of 20 second- and sixth-grade students were assessed by 20 trained raters using the Social Skills Test for Children (SST-C). Rater and child characteristics were examined to determine whether differences in social skills ratings were due to the race of the rater or the race of the children being rated or due to the interactive effects of these characteristics, which would suggest racial bias in the ratings procedure. The results showed that the race of the rater did affect some behavioral observations. Black raters gave higher scores than white raters on four behavioral categories: response latency, appropriate assertion, effective assertion, and smiling. White raters gave higher scores for head position and gestures. The results of this study replicated earlier findings of significant differences in social skills ratings due to the race and age of the child being rated. The results also showed modest racial bias effects in that black and white raters scored black and white children differentially on two behavioral categories: overall skill ratings and smiling. These results suggested that most behavioral categories of the SST-C were not systematically affected by racial bias. However, the most subjective rating, overall skill, did evidence racial bias effects. This finding is consistent with previous data showing that subjective ratings may be most affected by racial bias.     

Beyond intensity: Spectral features effectively predict music-induced subjective arousal

Emotions in music are conveyed by a variety of acoustic cues. Notably, the positive association between sound intensity and arousal has particular biological relevance. However, although amplitude normalization is a common procedure used to control for intensity in music psychology research, direct comparisons between emotional ratings of original and amplitude-normalized musical excerpts are lacking.

In this study, 30 nonmusicians retrospectively rated the subjective arousal and pleasantness induced by 84 six-second classical music excerpts, and an additional 30 nonmusicians rated the same excerpts normalized for amplitude. Following the cue-redundancy and Brunswik lens models of acoustic communication, we hypothesized that arousal and pleasantness ratings would be similar for both versions of the excerpts, and that arousal could be predicted effectively by other acoustic cues besides intensity.

Although the difference in mean arousal and pleasantness ratings between original and amplitude-normalized excerpts correlated significantly with the amplitude adjustment, ratings for both sets of excerpts were highly correlated and shared a similar range of values, thus validating the use of amplitude normalization in music emotion research. Two acoustic parameters, spectral flux and spectral entropy, accounted for 65% of the variance in arousal ratings for both sets, indicating that spectral features can effectively predict arousal. Additionally, we confirmed that amplitude-normalized excerpts were adequately matched for loudness. Overall, the results corroborate our hypotheses and support the cue-redundancy and Brunswik lens models.