Intergenerational occupational inheritance in the military: a reexamination

Recent problems the military services have experienced in retaining sufficient personnel to meet growing manpower requirements are unlikely to diminish in the 1980s. As a consequence, it is vital that military decision makers understand the factors that influence career commitments of service members. Based on a stratified probability sample of Air Force married enlisted personnel and officers, this study reexamines the relationship between the military service patterns of fathers and the career intentions of their sons who enlist in military service. It also expands upon past analysis to include the actual career decisions of military men as a dependent variable. In partial support of past research, the present investigation provides no support for an intergenerational linkage between military service patterns of fathers and the career intentions and decisions of their sons--either enlisted members or officers. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Text-contingent color aftereffects: A reexamination

Five experiments reexamined color aftereffects contingent on the semantic properties of text (Allan, Siegel, Collins, & MacQueen, 1989). The influence of different assessment techniques and the effect of eye movements and overlapping contour information on the induction of color aftereffects by word and nonword letter strings were determined. Experiment 1 showed that no aftereffect was found when a traditional method of assessing color aftereffects was used. Experiments 2 and 4 demonstrated color aftereffects forboth words and nonwords, but only when subjects fixated the same locus during induction and testing and only when assessed with the technique described by Allan et al. (1989). If, however, eye movements were made during induction, no color aftereffect was obtained (Experiment 3). Induction to nontext patterns with properties similar to those of text but with fewer overlapping contours resulted in a strong color aftereffect (Experiment 5). These results suggest that the color aftereffect contingent on text is very weak and is not dependent on semantic factors, but that it is a product of induction to local color and orientation information.     

Use of the extreme groups approach: a critical reexamination and new recommendations

Analysis of continuous variables sometimes proceeds by selecting individuals on the basis of extreme scores of a sample distribution and submitting only those extreme scores to further analysis. This sampling method is known as the extreme groups approach (EGA). EGA is often used to achieve greater statistical power in subsequent hypothesis tests. However, there are several largely unrecognized costs associated with EGA that must be considered. The authors illustrate the effects EGA can have on power, standardized effect size, reliability, model specification, and the interpretability of results. Finally, the authors discuss alternative procedures, as well as possible legitimate uses of EGA. The authors urge researchers, editors, reviewers, and consumers to carefully assess the extent to which EGA is an appropriate tool in their own research and in that of others.     

The psychophysics of numerical comparison: a reexamination of apparently incompatible data

Reaction-time studies of numerical comparison have used essentially two paradigms: classification, in which a target number must be labelled "larger" or "smaller" in comparison to a fixed standard, and selection, in which the larger (or smaller) number of a pair must be picked out. In previous studies, classification has yielded only a distance effect in RTs, whereas selection has also revealed magnitude (or minimum) and congruity effects. We used two experiments with two-digit number comparisons to find the reason for this discrepancy. In Experiment 1, we used a variant of the classification task with the standard changing on each trial. RTs increased along with the standard for "smaller" responses and decreased along with the standard for "larger" responses, in a manner reminiscent of magnitude and congruity effects. In Experiment 2, we again used classification, but the fixed standard 75 was not at the center of the range of target numbers (20, 21, ... 99). Close to the standard, RTs were faster for "larger" than for "smaller" responses, again a congruity effect. Our data show that magnitude and congruity effects can be obtained with two-digit numbers in classification as well as in selection tasks. A single equation, which implies that numbers are compared with respect to reference points at both ends of the continuum, describes the results from both tasks.     

The impact of social roles on trait judgments: a critical reexamination

Consistent with social role theory's assumption that the role behavior of men and women shapes gender stereotypes, earlier experiments have found that men's and women's occupancy of the same role eliminated gender-stereotypical judgments of greater agency and lower communion in men than women. The shifting standards model raises the question of whether a shift to within-sex standards in judgments of men and women in roles could have masked underlying gender stereotypes. To examine this possibility, two experiments obtained judgments of men and women using measures that do or do not restrain shifts to within-sex standards. This measure variation did not affect the social role pattern of smaller perceived sex differences in the presence of role information. These findings thus support the social role theory claim that designations of identical roles for subgroups of men and women eliminate or reduce perceived sex differences.     

Probability and certainty: A reexamination of the Lewis-Reichenbach debate

Conclusion I have shown as promised that Reichenbach did not refute either thesis (I) or thesis (II). I have also shown that an argument of Lewis's may be used to establish a weakened version of (I) that has two interesting consequences: if we are to assign probabilities with any justification at all, we must have either certainties or intrinsic probabilities; and if we are frequentists, we must have certainties.