Choosing an inferior alternative

We show how decision makers can be induced to choose a personally inferior alternative, a strong violation of rational decision making. First, the inferior alternative is installed as the leading option by starting with information that supports this alternative. Then, the decision maker uses the natural process of distorting new information to support whichever alternative is leading. This leader-supporting distortion overcomes the inherent advantages of the superior alternative. The end result is a tendency to choose the self-identified inferior alternative. We trace the choice process to reveal the amount of distortion and its influence on preference. Self-reported awareness of distortion to support the inferior alternative is not related to the amount of distortion. The absence of valid awareness suggests that the manipulation that produces this preference violation is unlikely to be detected and that the distortion is unlikely to be corrected by the decision maker. As expected, given the lack of awareness, final confidence is just as high when the inferior alternative is chosen as when the superior one is. The discussion considers how to prevent an adversary from manipulating one's decisions using this technique.     

After-event reviews: drawing lessons from successful and failed experience

The claim that appropriate after-event review might decrease the relative advantage of drawing lessons from failures over drawing lessons from successes was examined in a quasi-field experiment. The results show that performance of soldiers doing successive navigation exercises improved significantly when they were debriefed on their failures and successes after each training day, compared with others who reviewed their failed events only. The findings also show that, before the manipulation, in both groups, learners' mental models of failed events were richer in constructs and links than were their mental models of successful events. This gap closed gradually in subsequent measurements.     

Choosing to Suffer: Reflections on an Enigma

Most people pursue pleasure and seek to avoid pain. Some individuals, however, choose a life characterized by pain and suffering. The author describes the most common varieties of such behavior patterns: asceticism, martyrdom, penance and masochism. Critical psychodynamics are discussed and the author proposes a synthesis of the motivation underlying pain/suffering seeking behavior.     

benefits of the business college internship: a research review

The authors explore the research findings regarding the effectiveness of business internships on several issues: enhanced employment opportunities, realistic expectations of interns, satisfaction with the internship experience, internship prerequisites, and internship mentoring. Overall, the internship experience was found to be beneficial.     

Choosing normative properties: a reply to Eklund’s Choosing Normative Concepts

ABSTRACT

The literature surrounding Horgan and Timmons’s Moral Twin Earth scenarios has focused on whether such scenarios present a metasemantic problem for naturalist realists. But in Choosing Normative Concepts, Eklund uses a similar scenario to illuminate a novel, distinctly metaphysical problem for normative realists of both naturalist and non-naturalist stripes. The problem is that it is not clear what (if anything) would suffice for the sort of ardent realist view that normative realists have in mind – the view that reality itself favors certain ways of acting and valuing. Eklund then offers a metasemantic view that he thinks can provide the best solution to this problem. In this reply to Eklund, I argue that Eklund’s treatment of the problem and his solution re-entangle metaphysical and metasemantic issues that ought to be kept separate. I also argue that there is a purely metaphysical solution to the problem at hand, which Eklund’s own solution seems to implicitly rely upon. While these criticisms do not suggest that Eklund’s positive view is false, they do undermine some of the broader lessons that Eklund hopes to draw from the view.     

Therapeutic Assessment With an Adolescent: Choosing Connections Over Substances

This case study provides an in-depth example of a comprehensive therapeutic assessment with an adolescent (TA–A) and his parents. The TA–A addressed parental concerns about their son's drug experimentation as well as the adolescent's own private questions about his distinctiveness from others, all set against a backdrop of ongoing parental conflict and poor communication. The TA–A process and how it is specifically tailored to balance the needs of adolescents and their parents is discussed. Subsequently, each step of TA–A is illustrated through the case study. Research findings at the conclusion of the assessment and at follow-up indicated significant decreases in internalizing symptomology and school problems, increases in self-esteem and self-reliance, and improved family functioning as reported by the adolescent. At follow-up, the father spoke of developing a more assertive parenting approach and successful follow-through on recommendations. This case study provides a template for clinicians interested in conducting TA–A.     

Choosing and using tools: Prior experience and task difficulty influence preschoolers’ tool-use strategies

Children's acquisition of tool use abilities is an important part of development but is not yet well understood. This study compares two modes of tool-use learning, observation and individual haptic experience. Two- and 3-year-olds had haptic experience with tools, observed tool use by others, had both haptic and observational experience, or no tool exposure. Their tool choice and use were evaluated across six problem-solving tasks that varied in degree of difficulty. Children learned about tools better by observation than by individual learning through manual exploration. Performance also varied by task difficulty, with more complex tasks proving more difficult. Findings are discussed from cognitive and evolutionary perspectives.     

A process study of long-term treatment: comparing a successful and a less successful outcome

This study examined therapist technique and patient change in emotional experiencing and defense mechanisms in the successful and unsuccessful long-term psychoanalytic treatments of two male patients. Two consecutive sessions every 6 months were analyzed for each patient. Therapist interventions, patient defense mechanisms, and patient emotional experiencing were assessed using the Psychodynamic Intervention Rating Scale, Defense Mechanism Rating Scale and the Experiencing Scale, respectively. Between and within-session analyses were conducted to determine the impact of the patient’s defensive functioning and experiencing on therapist interventions, and the effect of therapist interventions on those same two patient variables. Pearson’s Coefficient was utilized for between-session analysis; within-session analysis tracking moment-to-moment changes in patient and therapist functioning was performed using lag sequential analysis. Across therapy, therapist use of Interpretive Interventions was associated with increased emotional engagement and decreased defense maturity; the use of Supportive Interventions had the opposite effect. Within-session analysis revealed that use of Supportive Interventions when emotional engagement is low, followed by interpretative interventions, occurred in the successful case. Persistent use of Supportive Interventions in the context of low emotional engagement was observed in the unsuccessful case. This study suggests that failure to stimulate emotional engagement through interpretation can negatively affect therapeutic outcome.     

BODY WORLDS: Choosing to Be Immortalized as an Educational Specimen

Research ethics education in the biosciences has not historically been a priority for research universities despite the fact that funding agencies, government regulators, and the parties involved in the research enterprise agree that it ought to be. The confluence of a number of factors, including scrutiny and regulation due to increased public awareness of the impact of basic research on society, increased public and private funding, increased diversity and collaboration among researchers, the impressive success and speed of research advances, and high-profile cases of misconduct, have made it necessary to reexamine how the bioscience research community at all levels provides ethics education to its own. We discuss the need to and reasons for making ethics integral to the education of bioscientists, approaches to achieving this goal, challenges this goal presents, and responses to those challenges.     

Learning from successful and failed experience: the moderating role of kind of after-event review

The claim that appropriate "after-event review (AER)" may increase the relative value of drawing lessons from successes, as compared with failures, was examined in the present study. The study was a laboratory experiment in which the effect of type of AER (failure-focused, success-focused, failure- and success-focused, and no AER review) on performance improvement and causal attributions was tested under conditions of earlier success and earlier failure. In general, 2 results were demonstrated: (a) Drawing lessons from successful experience is feasible, and its effectiveness is contingent upon the type of AER. More specifically, after successful events, the most effective review is that of wrong actions, whereas after failed events, any kind of event review (correct or wrong actions) is effective. (b) AERs elicit more internal (as opposed to external) and specific (as opposed to general) attributions. These 2 classifications moderate the effect of AERs on task performance.     

Generativity and successful parenting: an analysis of young adult outcomes

Generativity scores were assessed in parents and correlated with offspring outcomes. The offspring were participants in a longitudinal study spanning their first and senior years of college. Generativity of parents was positively related to offspring agreeableness and conscientiousness. Parental generativity was also related to offspring scores on future time orientation and positive affect. In addition, generative parents seemed to model their political interests to offspring, and that modeling was related to children's higher scores on generativity and greater interest in politics. Parental generativity was also related to offspring religiosity. Most of these relationships remained significant after controlling for offspring scores on generativity. Generativity of parents appears to be related to successful offspring outcomes.     

Searching hard versus searching smart: The role of search process quality in an internship context

Based on a self‐regulatory approach, we propose that students searching for an internship following a high‐quality process will show greater search success. In a sample of 191 Belgian final year students looking for an internship, the quality of students’ search process was positively related to both self‐reported and objective search outcomes, beyond the mere intensity of their search. Specifically, reflection related positively to students’ satisfaction and perceived fit with their internship, as well as to organizations’ assessment of students’ internship performance. Planning related positively to the speed of finding an internship. Furthermore, the four search process quality dimensions explained incremental variance in these outcomes beyond a unidimensional measure of metacognitive activities, supporting the added value of our multidimensional approach.     

Preschool children favor copying a successful individual over an unsuccessful group

The human aptitude for imitation and social learning underpins our advanced cultural practices. While social learning is a valuable evolutionary survival strategy, blind copying does not necessarily facilitate survival. Copying from the majority allows individuals to make rapid judgments on the value of a trait, based on its frequency. This is known as the majority bias: an individual's tendency to copy the behavior elicited by the largest number of individuals in a population. An alternative approach is to follow those who are the most proficient. While there is evidence that children do show both processes, no study has directly pitted them against each other. To do this, in the current experiment 36 children aged between 4 and 5 years watched live actors demonstrate, as a group or individually, how to open novel puzzle boxes. Children exhibited a bias to the majority when group and individual methods were successful, but favored the individual if the group method was unsuccessful. Affiliating children with the unsuccessful majority group did not impact on this pattern.     

Variations on an old theme: maternity for women with a very successful professional career

In this study, relationships of middle-class women from Rio de Janeiro with their family and work are presented. A series of events during the 20th century have changed woman's identity, previously centered on the roles of mother and wife, so that, there are now other options for women. Carioca girls are currently educated to compete, seek greater professional growth, and value their independence. However, some social discourses still reinforce women's former role the in the family. The notion that the mother-child unit is basic, universal, and, psychologically, the most appropriate, both for the child's healthy development and the mother's wholeness, is still firmly rooted. Motherhood is therefore one of the most complex and problematic matters for modern Carioca woman. Fifteen women with successful professional careers, residents of the city of Rio de Janeiro, varying in age from 30 to 40, and with children from 6 months to 3 years of age, were interviewed. The interviews had an invisible structure, were recorded and transcribed. The discourse of the resultant texts was analyzed, using the categories I established. In this project, I focus on the results of the analysis of the category "View of Maternity" of the interviewed women.