Universal Principles of Human Communication: Preliminary Evidence From a Cross‐cultural Communication Game

The present study points to several potentially universal principles of human communication. Pairs of participants, sampled from culturally and linguistically distinct societies (Western and Japanese, N = 108: 16 Western–Western, 15 Japanese–Japanese and 23 Western–Japanese dyads), played a dyadic communication game in which they tried to communicate a range of experimenter‐specified items to a partner by drawing, but without speaking or using letters or numbers. This paradigm forced participants to create a novel communication system. A range of similar communication behaviors were observed among the within‐culture groups (Western–Western and Japanese–Japanese) and the across‐culture group (Western–Japanese): They (a) used iconic signs to bootstrap successful communication, (b) addressed breakdowns in communication using other‐initiated repairs, (c) simplified their communication behavior over repeated social interactions, and (d) aligned their communication behavior over repeated social interactions. While the across‐culture Western–Japanese dyads found the task more challenging, and cultural differences in communication behavior were observed, the same basic findings applied across all groups. Our findings, which rely on two distinct cultural and linguistic groups, offer preliminary evidence for several universal principles of human communication.     

Effects of task interdependence and communication technologies synchrony on performance in virtual teams

Effects of task interdependence and communication technologies synchrony on performance in virtual teams. Survey results of 197 employees from 41 work groups in a large multinational software firm were used to investigate the effects of within-group task interdependence and the degree of communication synchrony on performance in virtual teams (VTs). The analyses revealed a moderating effect of task interdependence on the relationship between the degree of communications synchrony and performance in VT. We found that superior VTs performance is contingent on the fit between the nature of the task (i.e., task interdependence) and the choice of communications modality. This study complements previous research providing additional evidence of how task-technology interaction affects VTs performance, and extends previous findings obtained with ad-hoc groups in laboratory settings to natural, organizational teams.     

Can Culture Influence Body‐Specific Associations Between Space and Valence?

People implicitly associate positive ideas with their dominant side of space and negative ideas with their non‐dominant side. Right‐handers tend to associate “good” with “right” and “bad” with “left,” but left‐handers associate “bad” with “right” and “good” with “left.” Whereas right‐handers' implicit associations align with idioms in language and culture that link “good” with “right,” left‐handers' implicit associations go against them. Can cultural conventions modulate the body‐specific association between valence and left‐right space? Here, we compared people from Spanish and Moroccan cultures, which differ in the strength of taboos against the use of the left hand, and therefore in their preference for the right. Results showed stronger explicit associations between space and valence in Moroccan participants than in Spaniards, but they did not show any increased tendency for right‐handed Moroccans to associate “good” with “right” implicitly. Despite differences in cultural conventions between Spaniards and Moroccans, we find no evidence for a cross‐cultural difference in the implicit association between space and valence, which appears to depend on patterns of bodily experience.     

Individual and group advice taking in judgmental forecasting: Is group forecasting superior to individual forecasting?

We examined how individuals and groups behave in making judgmental forecasts when they are given external forecast advice. We compare individual and group advice-taking behavior under different conditions: (a) when advice quality is fixed, (b) when advice quality is randomly varied, and (c) when there is feedback on advice quality or not. Participants in Study 1 received fixed advice of either reasonable or unreasonable quality while making their decisions. Participants in Study 2 randomly received both reasonable and unreasonable advice. We found in both studies that groups feel more confident than individuals. This greater confidence decreased the groups' reliance on advice. We also found that groups are better than individuals at discerning the quality of advice. In the group treatment, the group's reliance on advice increased according to the degree of disagreement with the initial decisions of the group members. In Study 3, participants randomly received both reasonable and unreasonable advice, and in addition, they received feedback on actual realizations that enabled them to learn about the quality of advice. In the presence of feedback on random advice quality, groups are no longer less receptive to advice than individuals; with feedback, both individuals and groups discount advice more than they do without feedback. Nevertheless, groups are still better than individuals at discerning the quality of advice. We conclude that group forecasting is better than individual forecasting across various conditions that we investigate except when advice quality is known to be consistently reliable.     

Allocation of attention in familiar and unfamiliar traffic scenarios

Increased travel worldwide has led to an escalation of road traffic accidents, particularly among tourists driving in unfamiliar, opposite traffic flow driving scenarios. Ability to allocate attention to driving-relevant information and regions is predicted to be the main cause of tourist accidents, with a lack of attention directed to areas of space that are inhibited in familiar traffic conventions but relevant in overseas driving. This study investigated the influence of habit and expectancy on driver behaviour and allocation of attention in familiar (left-hand traffic; LHT) and unfamiliar (right-hand traffic; RHT) contexts. Twenty-eight drivers from the UK were presented with video clips of driving taken in the UK and in Poland and asked to judge whether it was safe to enter a roundabout in each clip. Half were given information about differences in LHT and RHT situations prior to the task. Judgement performance was not influenced by this information, however accuracy was higher for LHT and the RHT task was rated more difficult, supporting the notion that driving in unfamiliar surroundings is more effortful. In LHT both groups made more fixations to the right side of each roundabout, however in RHT, whilst the control group allocated attention in the same way, the intervention group made significantly more fixations to the left. Pre-drive preparatory information can therefore increase attention to the most relevant areas of space in unfamiliar driving contexts. This has implications for drive tourism and it is suggested that such information is made more explicit to drivers.     

Computer-Mediated Communication and Group Decision Making: A Meta-Analysis

A meta-analysis of research comparing decision making in face-to-face versus computer-mediated communication groups was conducted. Results suggest that computer-mediated communication leads to decreases in group effectiveness, increases in time required to complete tasks and decreases in member satisfaction compared to face-to-face groups. All of the moderators tested (anonymity in the group process, limited versus unlimited time to reach decisions, group size, and task type) were significant for at least one of the dependent variables. The article concludes with cautions about the unbridled rush by organizations to adopt computer-mediated communication as a medium for group decision making and implications of the present findings for theory and research on computer-mediated communication and group decision making.     

The effects of alphabetic-reading competence on language representation in bilingual Chinese subjects

Summary The metaphonological abilities of two groups of bilingual Chinese adults residing in the Netherlands were examined. All subjects were able to read Chinese logograms, but those in the alphabetic group had, unlike those in the non-alphabetic group, also acquired some competence in reading Dutch. In Experiment 1, strong, significant differences between the two groups were obtained in the task of deleting the initial consonant of a Dutch spoken pseudo-word and also in a task consisting of segmenting a sentence into progressively smaller fragments, but there was no difference in a rhyme-nonrhyme classification task with pairs of Dutch words. In the latter task, the subjects in the two groups performed at a near-ceiling level. In Experiment 2, a significant difference was obtained again for the consonant-deletion task and no difference with an initial syllabic-vowel-deletion task, but the non-alphabetic subjects performed at a significantly lower level than the alphabetic subjects in the rhyme-judgement task. Taken together, these results are consistent with the earlier evidence that learning a non-alphabetic orthography does not promote awareness of the segmental structure of utterances. On the other hand, they confirm, for a population of Chinese readers, the conclusion drawn earlier from work with illiterate subjects that explicit instruction is more critical for the development of segmental representations of language than of representations of higher levels such as those of rhymes and syllables.     

Universals and cultural differences in recognizing emotions

Moving beyond the earlier nature-versus-nurture debate, modern work on the communication of emotion has incorporated both universals and cultural differences. Classic research demonstrated that the intended emotions in posed expressions were recognized by members of many different cultural groups at rates better than predicted by random guessing. However, recent research has also documented evidence for an in-group advantage, meaning that people are generally more accurate at judging emotions when the emotions are expressed by members of their own cultural group rather than by members of a different cultural group. These new findings provide initial support for a dialect theory of emotion that has the potential to integrate both classic and recent findings. Further research in this area has the potential to improve cross-cultural communication.     

Standards,Harmonization and Cultural Differences: Examining the Implementation of a European Stem Cell Clinical Trial

ABSTRACT

A complex set of European regulations aims to facilitate regenerative medicine, harmonizing good clinical and manufacturing standards and streamlining ethical approval procedures. The sociology of standardization has elaborated some of the effects of regulation but little is known about how such implementation works in practice across institutions and countries in regenerative medicine. The effects of transnational harmonization of clinical trial conduct are complex. A long-term ethnographic study alongside a multinational clinical trial finds a range of obstacles. Harmonization standardizes at one level, but implementing the standards brings to the fore new layers of difference between countries. Europe-wide harmonization of regulations currently disadvantages low-cost clinician-lead research in comparison to industry-sponsored clinical trials. Moreover, harmonized standards must be aligned with the cultural variations in everyday practice across European countries. Each clinical team must find its own way of bridging harmonized compulsory practice with how things are done where they are, respecting expectations from both patients and the local hospital ethics committee. Established ways of working must further be adapted to a range of institutional and cultural conventions that affect the clinical trial such as insurance practices and understandings of patient autonomy. An additional finding is that the specific practical roles of team members in the trial affect their evaluation of the importance of these challenges. Our findings lead to conclusions of wider significance for the sociology of standards concerning how regulation works and for medical sociology about how trial funding and research directions in stem cell medicine intersect.     

The Adaptive Use of Recognition in Group Decision Making

Applying the framework of ecological rationality, the authors studied the adaptivity of group decision making. In detail, they investigated whether groups apply decision strategies conditional on their composition in terms of task‐relevant features. The authors focused on the recognition heuristic, so the task‐relevant features were the validity of the group members' recognition and knowledge, which influenced the potential performance of group strategies. Forty‐three three‐member groups performed an inference task in which they had to infer which of two German companies had the higher market capitalization. Results based on the choice data support the hypothesis that groups adaptively apply the strategy that leads to the highest theoretically achievable performance. Time constraints had no effect on strategy use but did have an effect on the proportions of different types of arguments. Possible mechanisms underlying the adaptive use of recognition in group decision making are discussed.     

Group Ethical Decision Making Process in Chinese Business: Analysis From Social Decision Scheme and Cultural Perspectives

Literature concerning group ethical decision making in a business setting has traditionally focused on directly comparing group versus individual decisions and then investigating differences. Analysis of the interactive process of group ethical decision making appears sparse. This study addresses the gap by investigating group decision making from a social decision scheme (SDS) perspective in a Chinese cultural setting. A cohort of Chinese accountancy students evaluated ethical business scenarios individually and then in a group context. Group responses could be explained in terms of both the SDS and the Chinese cultural perspective (zhongyong). Specifically, groups did not select the most ethical choice but rather the most moderate of all choices advocated by the majority (zhongyong). These results show the application of SDS theory in a culturally specific (Chinese) environment and note the impact of culturally specific factors (zhongyong) on business decision making. The implications are significant for business. If ethical decisions are entrusted to groups, the impact of culturally specific factors must be fully appreciated in evaluating the final decision.     

Speak your mind and I will make it right: the case of “selection task”

ABSTRACT

The “Wason selection task” is still one of the most studied tasks in cognitive psychology. We argue that the low performance originally obtained seems to be caused by how the information of the task is presented. By systematically manipulating the task instructions, making explicit the information that participants are required to infer in accordance with the logical interpretation of the material implication “if, then”, we found an improvement in performance. In Experiment 1, the conditional rule has been formulated within a relevant context and in accordance with the conversational rules of communication, hence transmitting the actual meaning of the material implication. In Experiment 2, a similar improvement has been obtained even without the realistic scenario, only by making explicit the unidirectionality of the material implication. We conclude that task instructions are often formulate neglecting the conversational rules of communication, and this greatly reduces the possibility to succeed in the task.     

Workplace diversity in South Africa: Its qualities and management

This qualitative study explored diversity management strategies used by South African financial institutions. The sample included 72 employees (33.33% females; 39.08% Indigenous African language speakers). Of the participants, 44.45% were white, 28.57% were black, 22.22% were Indian, and 4.78% were from the Coloured population group. The participants completed focus-group interviews or individual interviews on their workplace diversity experiences and its management. Themes emerging from Atlas.ti and Tesch’s data analyses included the consensus view that effective diversity management proactively addressed cultural differences, stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, misunderstandings, communication gaps, and conflict due to organisational hierarchical levels. Organisational competitiveness is enhanced through client focused services and an employee valuing work environment. However, some of the employees also viewed diversity initiatives as costly, time-consuming, and forced on employees.     

Examining differences in minority versus majority preschoolers on social categorization and perceived intergroup distance

We examined the differences between majority and minority children (i.e., group membership) on racial categorization and perceived cultural distance, among 4‐ to 6‐year‐old children, in low diversified schools. We used a spontaneous social categorization task using pictures of children from three different racial groups broadly represented in France (Europeans, Black‐, and North‐Africans), and an evaluation of the perceived cultural distance between participants' in‐group and the racial group represented in the picture, adapted to children and based on three factors (language, eating habits, and music). Results revealed an effect of age on racial categorization: the older the children, the more successful they are in this task. They showed a significant effect of the racial group represented in the photos on perceived cultural distance: members of minority groups (i.e., Black‐ and North‐Africans) were evaluated as more different compared to those of the majority group on each of the factors. Finally, we got an interaction between participants' in‐group and the racial group represented in the pictures, for the language factor: members of the majority group perceived as more different photographs representing minorities peers than those representing majority peers, while participants belonging to minority groups perceived no differences between photographs, according to the racial criteria.     

Metacognition and mindreading in young children: A cross-cultural study

Prior studies document cross cultural variation in the developmental onset of mindreading. In particular, Japanese children are reported to pass a standard false belief task later than children from Western countries. By contrast, we know little about cross-cultural variation in young children’s metacognitive abilities. Moreover, one prominent theoretical discussion in developmental psychology focuses on the relation between metacognition and mindreading. Here we investigated the relation between mindreading and metacognition (both implicit and explicit) by testing 4-year-old Japanese and German children. We found no difference in metacognition between the two cultural groups. By contrast, Japanese children showed lower performance than German children replicating cultural differences in mindreading. Finally, metacognition and mindreading were not related in either group. We discuss the findings in light of the existing theoretical accounts of the relation between metacognition and mindreading.     

Can tutoring improve performance on a reasoning task under deadline conditions?

The present study examined the effectiveness of a tutoring technique that has been used to identify and address participants' misunderstandings in Wason's selection task. In particular, the study investigated whether the technique would lead to improvements in performance when the task was presented in a deadline format (a condition in which time restrictions are imposed). In Experiment 1, the effects of tutoring on performance were compared in free time (conditions in which no time restrictions are imposed) and deadline task formats. In Experiment 2, improvements in performance were studied in deadline task formats, in which the tutoring and test phases were separated by an interval of 1 day. The results suggested that tutoring improved performance on the selection task under deadline and in free time conditions. Additionally, the study showed that participants made errors because they had misinterpreted the task. With tutoring, they were able to modify their initial misunderstandings.     

Culture,Perception, and Artistic Visualization: A Comparative Study of Children's Drawings in Three Siberian Cultural Groups

In a study of three indigenous and non‐indigenous cultural groups in northwestern and northeastern Siberia, framed line tests and a landscape drawing task were used to examine the hypotheses that test‐based assessments of context sensitivity and independence are correlated with the amount of contextual information contained in drawings, and with the order in which the focal and background objects are drawn. The results supported these hypotheses, and inspection of the regression relationships suggested that the intergroup variations in test performance were likely to result from differences in the attention accorded to contextual information, as revealed by the drawings. Social and environmental explanations for the group differences in context sensitivity are also discussed. The conclusions support the argument that cultural differences in artistic styles and perceptual tests reflect the same underlying perceptual tendencies, and they are consistent with the argument that these tendencies reflect corresponding differences in patterns of social and environmental interaction.     

Can children resist making interpretations when uncertain?

In two experiments, we examined young children's ability to delay a response to ambiguous input. In Experiment 1, 5- and 6-year-olds performed as poorly when they needed to choose between basing an interpretation on ambiguous input and delaying an interpretation as when making explicit evaluations of knowledge, whereas 7- and 8-year-olds found the former task easy. In Experiment 2, 5- and 6-year-olds performed well on a task that required delaying a response but removed the need to decide between strategies. We discuss children's difficulty with ambiguity in terms of the decision-making demands made by different procedures. These demands appear to cause particular problems for young children.     

Conventions and Rules in Literature

Views of what role convention plays in the creation and appreciation of art works gravitate towards two extremes. One view holds that works of art can be apprehended and appreciated as well as created with no reference to convention. The other claims that conventions fully determine how works of art are apprehended and are therefore necessary conditions for the creation of works of art as well as constitutive of appreciation. The former is a version of the Romantic view of art as something that appeals spontaneously to man's most profound emotions, to man's sentient nature, without making use of or needing mediating conventions. The conventionalist view denies that it is possible to respond spontaneously to art. All apprehension and appreciation of art are structured by conventions, and the reader/audience cannot go beyond these conventions because they constitute , the experience of the work of art. This paper explains the sense in which the constitutive view may be best understood.     

The Influence of Shared Visual Context on the Successful Emergence of Conventions in a Referential Communication Task

Human communication is thoroughly context bound. We present two experiments investigating the importance of the shared context, that is, the amount of knowledge two interlocutors have in common, for the successful emergence and use of novel conventions. Using a referential communication task where black‐and‐white pictorial symbols are used to convey colors, pairs of participants build shared conventions peculiar to their dyad without experimenter feedback, relying purely on ostensive‐inferential communication. Both experiments demonstrate that access to the visual context promotes more successful communication. Importantly, success improves cumulatively, supporting the view that pairs establish conventional ways of using the symbols to communicate. Furthermore, Experiment 2 suggests that dyads with access to the visual context successfully adapt the conventions built for one color space to another color space, unlike dyads lacking it. In linking experimental pragmatics with language evolution, the study illustrates the benefits of exploring the emergence of linguistic conventions using an ostensive‐inferential model of communication.