Reactance, Compliance, and Anticipated Regret

The current work explored the relations among reactance, regret, and behavioral choice. A possible mechanism for reactance in opposition to persuasion attempts involves people anticipating greater regret for negative outcomes after complying with an agent of persuasion than for negative outcomes after reacting against an agent of persuasion. Some participants were asked to anticipate regret prior to making a behavioral choice in the face of an influence attempt. These participants anticipated greater regret for negative outcomes that would be experienced after reacting against rather than complying with the influence attempt. Accordingly, these participants subsequently exhibited behavioral compliance. On the other hand, participants who made choices without explicitly being asked to anticipate possible future regret showed far greater reactance. Interestingly, in all cases compliance led to significantly greater regret than did reactance once a negative outcome actually occurred. These data indicate that people do not spontaneously anticipate the regret that they may experience in an influence situation. Furthermore, when asked to anticipate such regret, they misanticipate their future feelings. The implications of complying with and reacting against the demands of others are discussed.     

Compliance, conversion, and category induction

When children hear an object referred to with a label that is moderately discrepant from its appearance, they frequently make inferences about that object consistent with the label rather than its appearance. We asked whether 3-year-olds actually believe these unexpected labels (i.e., conversion) or whether their inferences simply reflect a desire to comply with the considerable experimental demands of the induction task (i.e., compliance). Specifically, we asked how likely children would be to pass an unexpected label on to another person who had not been present during the labeling event. Results showed that children who used an unexpected label as the basis for inference passed that label on to another person about as often as they could remember it. This suggests that children’s label-based inferences do reflect conversion rather than mere compliance.     

Compliance and Satisfaction With Physician-Patient Communication An Expectancy Theory Interpretation of Gender Differences

This pair of studies sought to apply the explanatory calculus of expectancy theory to examine patient compliance and satisfaction with physicians’ instructions. Study 1 analyzed the differential expectations of patients based on gender of the physician. Results indicated that female physicians are expected to use instrumentally unaggressive strategies while male physicians are expected to use strategies that fall in the mid-range of a verbal aggression continuum. There were no differences in expectations based on the gender of patients. The second study manipulated physician communication and physician gender to predict an interaction such that when male physicians deviate from moderately aggressive, direction-giving strategies, using either more affiliative tactics or more instrumentally aggressive strategies, compliance increases. It was also predicted that affective satisfaction with male physicians would increase with increased use of affiliative, nonaggressive compliance-gaining messages. Based on expectancy theory, an inverse linear relationship between the use of instrumental verbal aggression and compliance and affective satisfaction was predicted for female physicians. Results supported the posited interaction. Implications for further refinement of expectancy theory are discussed, and practical implications for physician-patient communication in clinical situations are offered.     

Clothing choices, weight, and trait self-objectification

The present study aimed to assess the link between clothing choice and aspects of body image. Participants were 112 female undergraduate students who completed a questionnaire containing a measure of clothing functions, as well as BMI, self-classified weight, and trait self-objectification. Results indicated that BMI and self-classified weight were positively correlated with the choice of clothes for camouflage. Self-objectification was positively correlated with choice of clothes for fashion, and negatively correlated with choosing clothes for comfort. It was concluded that clothing represents an important but neglected aspect of contemporary women's management of their body's appearance.     

Relational Control and Interactive Media Choice in Technology-Mediated Communication Situations

The study develops a framework to examine the communication goals of interacting partners and how these affect media choice. The study hypothesizes that in communication situations when the relational dimension of communication goals is competitive, relational control would affect media choice. Personal interviews were conducted among a nonrandom sample of 70 persons. The respondents were presented with different communication situations and asked if and why they would select one mode of communication over another. A content analysis of the responses supported the main argument of the study that in situations of relational competitiveness relational control would be a significant factor affecting media choice.     

A Dual-Capacity Model of Communication Media Choice in Organizations

Most previous research concerning communication media choke in organizations has stressed the capacity of media to convey data. More recently, scholars have examined the capacity of media to convey and manifest meaning. Rarely have both functions been considered concurrently. In this artcle, a model is proposed that not only permits the simultaneous examination of these two functions but reflects that media use is influenced by characteristics of the task, individual and organizational capability constraints, and normative factors. By exploring the implications of this expanded dual-capacity perspective, a more encompassing theory of the determinants of communkation media use in organizations is proposed.     

Compliance,conversion and the Asch paradigm

120 subjects took part in an Asch type experiment, using a material which was suitable for the measurement of indirect influence. The subjects were given the consistent incorrect response of a source which was either a majority (the response given by 88 per cent of a parent population of college students) or a minority (12 per cent). Part of the subjects were told that the experiment was investigating perceptual illusions and an example of such illusions was given. An authority condition was also introduced: the experimenter himself gave the incorrect response. A control condition did not involve any influence or illusion. The results show that direct influence increases when there is a stronger symbolic social pressure. They also show that an indirect influence may be induced by a numerical majority (provided that the subjects believe that there is an illusion) as well as a numerical minority (provided that an illusion does not invalidate its response). These results underline how important it is to control the exact significance of experimental situations that are supposed to represent the psychological conditions of majority or minority influence.     

Choice, changeover, and travel: A quantitative model

Six pigeons were trained on concurrent variable-interval schedules in which responding on fixed-interval schedules was required to give access to the alternate schedule. Responding on the concurrent schedules was not allowed, after changing over had commenced, until the changeover schedule had been completed. In Parts 1 to 3 of the experiment, the changeover fixed-interval schedules were equal and were 0 s, 10 s, and 20 s, respectively. In each part, the relative frequency of reinforcement obtained on the concurrent schedules was varied over at least five conditions. In Part 4, the concurrent schedules were equal, and one changeover fixed-interval schedule was twice the other. Under these conditions, the absolute sizes of the changeover schedules were varied. Increasing the changeover requirement from 0 s to 10 s (Parts 1 and 2) resulted in increases in the sensitivity of behavior allocation to reinforcers obtained, but no further increase was obtained when the changeover schedules were increased to 20 s (Part 3). In Part 4, performance was biased towards the concurrent schedule that took less time to enter. These results are consistent with a subtractive punishment model of travel in which the degree of punishment is measured by the number of reinforcers apparently lost from a schedule when the subject changes to that schedule. Absolute times spent on the main keys could be accurately described by a previous model of changeover performance.     

Multipotentiality,Giftedness, and Career Choice: A Review

The giftedness and career-choice literatures have traditionally spoken in different terms about the same phenomenon, multipotentiality. Multipotentialed individuals have numerous and diverse abilities and interests. Appropriate interventions are necessary to help them cope successfully with the abundance of career choices available to them. This review links the giftedness and career-choice literatures through a discussion of the concept of multipotentiality and explores ensuing practical implications and challenges to the overall idea.     

Child Compliance and Congruity between Verbal and Nonverbal Maternal Communication — A Methodological Note

This paper is a report of a study of congruity between verbal and nonverbal maternal communication with sons during two 30-minute sessions. The instructions to the mothers varied for the two sessions by increasing the time the mother was asked to spend on a brain teaser game and by decreasing the number of play materials available for the sons in the second session. The two sessions were videotaped through a one-way mirror and rated independently for maternal verbal and nonverbal communicaiton and child compliance. Mothers differed for the two sessions in their communication with their sons. The study demonstrated that maternal nonverbal communication, as well as verbal communication, can be reliably measured through use of videotape recording.     

Personality and Politics: Values, Traits, and Political Choice

Voters' political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992 ) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the major coalitions in the Italian national election of 2001 showed that supporters of the two coalitions differed in traits and values, largely as hypothesized. Center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in the traits of friendliness and openness and lower in energy and conscientiousness. Regarding values, center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self-direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition. Logistic regressions revealed that values explained substantial variance in past and future voting and in change of political choice, trumping personality traits. We discuss explanations for the primacy of values and implications for the social cognitive view of personality.     

Multiple Deescalating Requests,Statistical Information,and Compliance: A Field Experiment1

Although prior research on influence has identified numerous techniques for increasing donation rates (see e. g., Cialdini, 1988), the problem of increasing donation sizes has been neglected. We conducted a field experiment in a telemarketing fundraising context to examine the effectiveness of three influence techniques for increasing the size of donations. The results indicate that the multiple-deescalating-requests technique was effective for increasing donation sizes. However, statistical information-based techniques were ineffective. Theoretical and applied implications of the results are discussed.     

Compliance,coercion, and compassion: Moral dimensions of the return of tuberculosis

Since 1986, we have seen a rise in the occurrence of tuberculosis in the United States. Long considered defeated in this country, the disease is returning with distressing vigor. Outbreaks of MDR-TB, tuberculosis resistant to more than one medication, have been reported around the country. This article analyzes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Action Plan to Combat Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis, with particular focus on the moral dimensions of mandatory directly observed treatment (DOT) and involuntary quarantine. It is proposed that a moral response to the control of tuberculosis must be one which is sustainable and which can effectively curtail the spread of the disease at a minimal cost to individual rights.     

Deterrence, Opportunity, and Choice

Traditional studies of deterrence have focused on punishment with less regard for the rewards of both crime and noncrime. Influenced by work in economics and behavioral psychology, more recent studies have departed from tradition by incorporating rewards for crime. To this extent, they should be regarded as advances over the more traditional approaches. Notwithstanding these advances, variations in both the probability and magnitude of reward for noncrime have not been systematically included in these more recent theories of choice. In an attempt to determine whether opportunities for noncrime are either central or trivial to the criminal decision-making process, the present study fitted two alternative models to experimental data involving risk-taking: (a) the economic utility model employed by Piliavin, Gartner, Thornton, and Matsueda (1986) in their study of criminal choice; and (b) the satisfaction balance model developed by Gray and Tallman (1984). Results showed that while both models explained significant amounts of variation in the dependent variable, the Gray-Tallman model provided a substantially better fit of the data. Despite limitations inherent in experimental studies as, for example, limitations surrounding the issue of external validity, the findings strongly suggest that opportunities for noncrime are as important as rewards and costs for crime in the process by which criminal decisions are made.     

Choice, changeover, and travel

Since foraging in nature can be viewed as instrumental behavior, choice between sources of food, known as “patches,” can be viewed as choice between instrumental response alternatives. Whereas the travel required to change alternatives deters changeover in nature, the changeover delay (COD) usually deters changeover in the laboratory. In this experiment, pigeons were exposed to laboratory choice situations, concurrent variable-interval schedules, that were standard except for the introduction of a travel requirement for changeover. As the travel requirement increased, rate of changeover decreased and preference for a favored alternative strengthened. When the travel requirement was small, the relations between choice and relative reinforcement revealed the usual tendencies toward matching and undermatching. When the travel requirement was large, strong overmatching occurred. These results, together with those from experiments in which changeover was deterred by punishment or a fixed-ratio requirement, deviate from the matching law, even when a correction is made for cost of changeover. If one accepted an argument that the COD is analogous to travel, the results suggest that the norm in choice relations would be overmatching. This overmatching, however, might only be the sign of an underlying strategy approximating optimization.     

Intentions,Permissibility, and Choice

T. M. Scanlon has argued that the intentions with which one acts, or more specifically, one’s reasons for acting, are non-derivatively irrelevant to the moral permissibility of one’s actions. According to one of his arguments in favor of that thesis, it can be permissible to act for one reason rather than another only if one can choose to act for a reason but, since that choice is impossible since believing as will is impossible, one can be permitted to act but one cannot be permitted to act for a reason. This paper aims to show that that argument is unsound. It first argues that the assumption that choosing an action is necessary for it being an object of a moral duty or permission cannot be made consistent with Scanlon’s idea that the same does not hold for an action being an object of blame. It then argues that even if direct control over forming beliefs is impossible, it is not impossible to choose one’s reason for action and, therefore, to be permitted or forbidden to act for it.