Biased decision‐making: developing an understanding of how positive and negative relationships may skew judgments

The current experiment examines if and when children consider the possibility of relationships skewing judgments when evaluating judgments in different contexts. Eighty‐seven 6‐year‐olds, 8‐year‐olds, 10‐year‐olds, and adults heard stories about judges who made decisions matching or mismatching possible relationship biases (e.g. a judge choosing a friend or an enemy as the winner) in contests with objective or subjective criteria. While even 6‐year‐olds distinguished between subjective and objective contests, neither children nor adults focused on the objectivity of the contest criteria when evaluating a judge's claims. Instead, by age 8, if not earlier, children focused on relationships, trusting judgments that mismatched someone's relationship biases and discounting judgments that matched someone's relationship biases. The findings also suggested that children are better at recognizing that a judgment may have been biased than predicting that one will be, and that they may understand that negative relationships may skew judgments before positive ones.     

Comparison of two theories of "ratio" and "difference" judgments

This article examines the hypothesis that judges compare stimuli by ratio and subtractive operations when instructed to judge" "ratios" and "differences." Rule and Curtis hold that magnitude estimations are a power function of subjective values, with an exponent between 1.1 and 2.1. Accordingly, the two-operation model tested assumes magnitude estimations of "ratios" are a comparable power function of subjective ratios. In contrast, Birnbaum and Veit theorize that judges compare two stimuli by subraction for both "ratio" and "difference" instructions and that magnitude estimations of "ratios" are approximately an exponential function of subjective differences. Three tests were used to compare the theory of one operation with the two-operation theory for the data of nine experiments. The results strongly favor the theory that observers use the same operation for both instructions.     

Social connection enables dehumanization

Being socially connected has considerable benefits for oneself, but may have negative consequences for evaluations of others. In particular, being socially connected to close others satisfies the need for social connection, and creates disconnection from more distant others. We therefore predicted that feeling socially connected would increase the tendency to dehumanize more socially distant others. Four experiments support this prediction. Those led to feel socially connected were less likely to attribute humanlike mental states to members of various social groups (Experiments 1 and 2), particularly distant others compared to close others (Experiment 3), and were also more likely to recommend harsh treatment for dehumanized others (i.e., terrorist detainees, Experiment 4). Discussion addresses the mechanisms by which social connection enables dehumanization, and the varied behavioral implications that result.     

Évaluer le discernement : une perspective biopsychosociale

Article 388-1 of the French Civil Code states that “in any proceedings concerning him, a minor capable of discernment may be heard by the judge”. Family court judges have the task of assessing the minor's capacity of discernment by having neither a definition of discernment nor a method of evaluation and by being ordered not to use the age criterion. Following a review of the literature, we propose a sketch presenting the components of discernment and the biopsychosocial factors that can affect the discernment of an expressed choice/opinion. The objective of this research is to compare the representation of judges’ discernment in family cases with this sketch. Thirty-two family judges participated in this study. The results show a partial representation of judgment among the judges surveyed, with some factors being under-represented and others never mentioned. The theoretical and practical implications of this research will be discussed.     

Judging judges: How do children weigh the importance of capability and objectivity for being a good decision maker?

Two studies examined developmental differences in how children weigh capability and objectivity when evaluating potential judges. In Study 1, 84 6‐ to 12‐year‐olds and adults were told stories about pairs of judges that varied in capability (i.e., perceptual capacity) and objectivity (i.e., the relationship to a contestant) and were asked to predict which judge would be more accurate. Participants generally preferred capable over incapable judges. Additionally, 10‐ and 12‐year‐olds adjusted their preferences for the most capable judge based on objectivity information. Seventy 6‐ and 8‐year‐olds participated in Study 2, which was similar to Study 1 except that the judges could both seem incapable unless children understood how different decisions require different kinds of perceptual capabilities. While 8‐year‐olds chose judges based on the relevance of the perceptual capability, 6‐year‐olds struggled, seeming to be distracted by the valence of the judges’ relationships to the contestants. Overall, these results support that there are important shifts in how children evaluate decision makers from early to middle childhood.     

Reversing roles: a cognitive strategy for undoing memory deficits associated with token status

Tested whether having tokens (Ts) adopt the role of judge reduces cognitive deficits; examined several hypotheses to explain these deficits. In 3 experiments, Ss were asked to remember as many as possible of opinions exchanged in a group interaction with 3 actors. Experiment 1 demonstrated that judging majority members helped gender Ts improve their memory and ruled out self-denigration as a mediator of token deficits. Experiment 2 indicated that judging others was effective regardless of whether the others were said to know about it or not, ruling out insulation from evaluative scrutiny as a viable mediator for the judge role. Experiment 3 suggested the judge role restores completely the Ts, cognitive capacities and ruled out heightened responsibility as an explanation for the improved memory of judges. This work suggests that Ts may perform better if they can restructure cognitively their social environments.     

Artifacts and natural kinds: children's judgments about whether objects are owned

People's behavior in relation to objects depends on whether they are owned. But how do people judge whether objects are owned? We propose that people expect human-made objects (artifacts) to be more likely to be owned than naturally occurring objects (natural kinds), and we examine the development of these expectations in young children. Experiment 1 found that when shown pictures of familiar kinds of objects, 3-year-olds expected artifacts to be owned and inanimate natural kinds to be non-owned. In Experiments 2A and 2B, 3-6-year-olds likewise had different expectations about the ownership of unfamiliar artifacts and natural kinds. Children at all ages viewed unfamiliar natural kinds as non-owned, but children younger than 6 years of age only endorsed artifacts as owned at chance rates. In Experiment 3, children saw the same pictures but were also told whether objects were human-made. With this information provided, even 3-year-olds viewed unfamiliar artifacts as owned. Finally, in Experiment 4, 4- and 5-year-olds chose unfamiliar artifacts over natural kinds when judging which object in a pair belongs to a person, but not when judging which the person prefers. These experiments provide first evidence about how children judge whether objects are owned. In contrast to claims that children think about natural kinds as being similar to artifacts, the current findings reveal that children have differing expectations about whether they are owned.     

Subjective judgments of spelling-sound correspondences: Effects of word regularity and word frequency

Subjects asked to judge which of two pronunciations of a letter sequence is typical of how that sequence is pronounced in English showed a strong tendency to nominate the linguistically “regular” word in preference to the “irregular” or “exceptional” word. Experiment 1 showed that this tendency was uninfluenced by the frequencies of the words being compared. The effect of regularity was replicated in Experiment 2, which also demonstrated the importance of the method of cuing the common letter sequence; when it was printed beside the words being judged, a stronger regularity effect was obtained than when the words were presented alone. Both experiments also showed a variation in the subjective strength of spelling-sound correspondences, and it was concluded that all-or-nothing conceptualizations of “rules” and "regularity" are oversimplifications. The implications of the findings for the concept of analogies in pronunciation were also considered.     

父母物质惩罚对儿童睡眠质量的影响：主观幸福感的中介作用及友谊质量的调节作用

摘 要：为探讨父母物质惩罚与儿童睡眠质量的关系及其作用机制,采用问卷法对438名小学生进行调查。结果发现：（1）父母物质惩罚与儿童主观幸福感、睡眠质量之间呈现显著相关;（2）物质惩罚既能直接预测儿童睡眠质量,也能通过主观幸福感的中介作用预测睡眠质量;（3）友谊质量能在物质惩罚对儿童睡眠质量的中介中起到调节,对高友谊质量的儿童来说,物质惩罚对幸福感的作用不显著。研究结果揭示了作为物质型教养行为之一的物质惩罚对儿童睡眠质量的影响及其作用机制,能为提高儿童的幸福感及睡眠质量提供有效启示。     

What counts as by? Young children's use of relative distance to judge nearbyness

The authors investigated how 3- and 4-year-old children and adults use relative distance to judge nearbyness. Participants judged whether several blocks were by a landmark. The absolute and relative distance of the blocks from the landmark varied. In Experiment 1, judgments of nearbyness decreased as the distance from the landmark increased, particularly for 4-year-olds and adults. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds and adults were more likely to judge objects at an intermediate distance as by the landmark when intervening objects were absent than when intervening objects were present. In Experiment 3, participants of all ages were more likely to judge objects at a short distance as by the landmark when intervening objects were absent. Reliance on relative distance to judge nearbyness becomes more systematic and applicable to larger spatial extents across development.     

Young children's use of functional information to categorize artifacts: three factors that matter

Three experiments addressed factors that might influence whether or not young children take into account function, as opposed to overall appearance or shape, when they extend the names of novel artifacts. Experiment 1 showed that 4-year-olds more often extend a name on the basis of a demonstrated function when that function provides a plausible causal account of perceptible object structure. Experiment 2 showed that they more often extend a name by function when they respond slowly, and hence thoughtfully. Experiment 3 demonstrated that they are more likely to take function into account when they extend names than when they judge similarities. Comparisons of lexical and non-lexical conditions in younger children failed to show any differences. Overall, the findings suggest that by 4 years of age, children may learn names as labels for novel artifact kinds rather than perceptual classes, and that the processes by which they categorize may be mindful and reflective, as in adults.     

Les préjudices professionnels des jeunes victimes de dommages corporels. Partie 2 : Les difficultés liées à l’évaluation des pertes de gains professionnels

Though professional damages in respect of young personal injury victims are recognized in principle by the Dintilhac group, and confirmed by the Court of Cassation in terms of full compensation for damages suffered, the assessment of such professional damages remains difficult, and the source of myriad legal disputes. Assessment of lost future earnings requires a specific approach: As regards the benchmark salary, judges base this on the average or median salary in France, taking into account the social and family environment which may represent a loss of opportunity. The jurisprudence recognizes that the permanent incapacity of the victim entitles them to lifetime compensation, mostly in the form of an annuity. However, while the civil judge considers that the payment of an allowance for disabled adults (AAH) or an educational allowance for disabled children (AEEH) does not interfere with the calculation of lost professional earnings, the administrative judge takes the opposite stance.     

Reasoning about conditional sentences: development of understanding of cues to quantification

The previous literature has reported that when children are asked to judge the truth or falsity of universally quantified conditional sentences of the form If a thing is P then it is Q they typically give responses, e.g., responding "true" whenever there is a case of P and Q even if there are also cases of P and not-Q. Three experiments are reported that address possible sources of this error. Experiment 1 shows that the error survives on sentences that refer to particular things as well as to things of a particular kind, and further shows that articulating the necessity of the consequent (... then it has to be Q) eliminates the error for adults and reduces it for fifth graders, although it does not affect second grade performance. Experiment 2 shows that for second and fifth graders the error survives to problems that are not universally quantified and for second graders to problems that are not conditionals although are otherwise structurally similar. Experiment 3 compares various verbal formulations of such universally quantified conditionals: Second and fifth graders do not make the error when the quantification is expressed with the surface structure that makes its universality most explicit (all things ...); the error tendency is greatest when the indefinite article is used (if a thing ...); and formulations using any fall in between. We argue that such erroneous evaluations of universally quantified conditionals have more to do with the quantificational aspect than the conditional aspect of the problems; children interpret the indefinite article as existential, although they resist the error when the cue to universal quantification is completely clear. The error appears to result more from the surface-structure form of the stimuli than from an inability of children to appreciate the logic of universally quantified conditionals.     

Preschoolers' understanding of stable and changeable characteristics

Most adults can easily distinguish between stable characteristics, which affect personal identity, and changeable ones, which are free to vary within an individual. The purpose of this study was to investigate preschoolers' developing knowledge of stable (identity, gender, and race), changeable (mood, weight, and health), and changeable-but-irreversible (age and height) characteristics using pictorial and question tasks. In the first two experiments, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children and adults were asked to judge whether two pictures could represent the same person. Children in these experiments understood stable properties more clearly than changeable or irreversible ones. Children who made mistakes tended to treat changes in variable characteristics as if they altered personal identity. In Experiment 3, subjects answered questions about the stability or variability of the same characteristics. Children tested with questions in Experiment 3 showed a better understanding of stable and variable characteristics than did children tested with pictures in Experiments 1 and 2. Most of the children who erred in Experiment 3 understood stable attributes but treated changeable ones as if they were constant; however, a minority of children understood changeable properties but treated stable ones as if they were variable. These findings provide new information about how children understand and misunderstand the status of personal attributes.     

Young children’s age-of-acquisition estimates for spoken words

This study was concerned with the impact of stimulus familiarity on young children's ability to recognize spoken words and make explicit judgments about them. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds made age-of-acquisition (AOA) estimates for a set of words that were very similar to estimates made by older children and adults. In Experiment 2, young children's picture recognition, mispronunciation detection, and vocabulary monitoring performance all varied systematically with these AOA estimates and with a stimulus-type (intact-mispronounced) manipulation. Subjective AOA estimates (whether from children or from adults) proved to be a better predictor of performance than did two objective familiarity measures and subjective imageability. These results point to considerable metalexical knowledge on the part of young children or explicit sensitivity regarding their own vocabulary knowledge. In addition, the results lend some support to the notion that actual AOA contributes to subjective AOA estimates.     

Children in clinical research: a conflict of moral values

This paper examines the culture, the dynamics and the financial underpinnings that determine how medical research is being conducted on children in the United States. Children have increasingly become the subject of experiments that offer them no potential direct benefit but expose them to risks of harm and pain. A wide range of such experiments will be examined, including a lethal heartburn drug test, the experimental insertion of a pacemaker, an invasive insulin infusion experiment, and a fenfluramine "violence prediction" experiment. Emphasis, however, is given to psychoactive drug tests because of the inherent ethical and diagnostic problems involved in the absence of any objective, verifiable diagnostic tool. Effort is made to provide readers comprehensive reference sources to evidence-based reports about the serious risks these drugs pose for adults and children so that the reader may judge whether the benefits (if any) outweigh the risks for children.     

Cueing and Cognitive Conflict in Judge-Advisor Decision Making

The Judge-Advisor paradigm (Sniezek & Buckley, 1989) allows for the study of decision making by groups with differentiated roles. This paper reports a study using this approach to investigate the impact of advice vis-à-vis the judge′s own initial choice. Teams consisting of one judge and two advisors (business students randomly assigned to these roles) were given a choice task (concerning business events) composed of 70 items with two alternatives each. The judges provided final team choices and confidence assessments under one of three conditions: Dependent (judge has no basis for own choice), Cued (judge chooses only after being advised), or Independent (judges makes own tentative choice prior to being advised as well as subsequent final choice). Results showed that this manipulation affected the judge′s final choice accuracy and confidence, leading to the best performance by Independent judges and the poorest by Dependent judges. These data are discussed with respect to theory and data on the cueing effect (Sniezek, Paese, & Switzer, 1990) for individual choice. In addition, the effects on the decision making process of the judge from (a) advisors′ confidence and (b) conflict between advisors′ recommendations are examined in detail. Finally, issues concerning the potential contribution of the Judge-Advisor paradigm to the understanding of social decision making are addressed.     

Show your pride: evidence for a discrete emotion expression

Abstract— Three experiments provide converging evidence that pride has a distinct, recognizable expression. Experiment 1 showed that judges can agree in identifying a posed expression as showing pride and can reliably distinguish pride expressions from expressions of related emotions such as happiness. Experiment 2 showed that judges can identify the pride expression when the task uses an open-ended response format that does not cue them with the label "pride." Experiment 3 showed that the pride expression includes a small smile, with head tilted slightly back, visibly expanded posture, and arms raised above the head or hands on hips. Overall, these findings challenge the assumption that all positive emotions share the same expression, and suggest that pride may be added to the pantheon of basic emotions generally viewed as evolved responses.     

Semantic association effects in a mental comparison task

Two reaction time experiments explored the effect of semantic associations on the time required to make mental size comparisons. Subjects in both experiments were able to judge relative size more quickly for associated than for nonassociated pairs. This association effect was found for a variety of different types of semantic relationships. Experiment 2 used a large pool of pairs that were scaled for degree of association and subjective size of the individual items. This experiment demonstrated that a high degree of association is more facilitative for pairs with small rather than large size differences. Two different explanations of the results are presented, and it is tentatively suggested that work on mental comparison may be integrated with a broader range of semantic memory research.