Gender and the ritual of the door

A field experiment was conducted on a large university campus to determine whether the gender roles traditionally associated with door-opening are still in force, despite students' consciousness of their patriarchal implications. A total of 396 observations, made by 22 student—observers, indicated that the traditional roles are still viable. Men were twice as likely as women to hold the door open for a stranger, but both male and female subjects were more likely to ignore than to hold the door open for a man. Women were four times as likely as men to have the door held open for them, and six times as likely if they were wearing feminine clothing. Men and women handicapped by a load of books or papers were about twice as likely as others to have the door held open, provided the subject was of the opposite sex, but subjects' behavior was affected much more by the gender of both parties than by whatever humanitarian values may have been evoked in an encounter with someone too encumbered to open the door for herself or himself.     

Rattling the cage and opening the door

I share with Poulin‐Dubois and with Sabbagh, Koenig and Kuhlmeier the conviction that more research is needed on the mechanisms supporting selective social learning in infants and children. However, my plea is more specific: for research that tests domain‐specific hypotheses about mechanism against domain‐general hypotheses derived from other fields of cognitive science. Many, but not all, of these alternative hypotheses relate to domain‐general mechanisms of attention.     

Taking the practicum beyond the public school door

A unique teacher preparation component is operated by the Albany State College Graduate Program in Special Education at the nearby Turner Job Corps Center. Student teachers learn a foundation of remedial interventions appropriate to most mildly handicapped young adult learners in a comprehensive, residential teaching environment.     

Effects of initial request size and timing of a second request on compliance: the foot in the door and the door in the face.

A field experiment tested four separate procedures for influencing compliance to the second of two requests. Two factors--size of initial request and timing of the second request--were included in a 2 X 2 factorial design. Subjects were induced either to comply with a small initial request or to refuse a large initial request. They then received a moderate request either immediately (no delay) or 7--10 days later (delay). Compliance to the second request was the dependent measure. The results in the two delay conditions and the small-request--no delay condition supported a self-perception position in that the induction of one kind of behavior (compliance or noncompliance) carried over to affect subsequent behavior similarly. The large-request--no dealy condition supported a bargaining explanation, as initial refusal to comply led to an increase in subsequent compliance. Possible processes that could account for these results are discussed.     

An application of the foot in the door technique to organ donation

The extent to which the size of an initial request related to organ donation could be reduced when using the foot-in-the-door technique was investigated. After being asked to comply with an initial request to complete a questionnaire related to organ donation having either 5, 10, 15, or 20 items or not being asked to complete the questionnaire, subjects indicated their willingness to become an organ donor. In addition to replicating earlier research, the results indicated that the original 20-item questionnaire could be reduced to five items without losing its effectiveness to increase willingness to become an organ donor when compared to the no-request condition. The implications of the foot-in-the-door technique for medical volunteering in general and suggestions for future research are also discussed.     

A reliable fast-operating door for small animal research

Described is a reliable and fast-operating door suitable for research with small animals. The primary operating control is a 60-rpm Hurst motor.     

Changing likes and dislikes through the back door: The US-revaluation effect

US-revaluation refers to the observation that subsequent changes in the valence of an unconditioned stimulus (US) after pairing it with a neutral, conditioned stimulus (CS) also changes the valence of the associated CS. Experiment 1 found evidence for the US-revaluation effect using an unobtrusive measure of evaluation. However, US-revaluation effects were more pronounced for positive-to-negative compared to negative-to-positive revaluations. Experiment 2 replicated this finding for self-reported evaluations, further showing that US-revaluation effects are stable over time and independent of explicit memory for the revaluating information. Using a modified paradigm, Experiment 3 ruled out method-related explanations for these findings and showed that changes in CS evaluations are correlated with parallel changes in US evaluations. These findings encourage the view of evaluative conditioning as an instance of stimulus–stimulus (S–S) rather than stimulus-response (S–R) learning. Implications for basic and applied research are discussed.     

Sneaking in through the back door: How category-based stereotype suppression leads to rebound in feature-based effects

Given the dramatic shifts in societal norms to curb overt stereotyping and prejudice, these biases may leak out in more subtle ways than were apparent in the past. Accordingly, we examined how the suppression of stereotypes might affect post-suppression category-based stereotyping and the more subtle feature-based stereotyping. In support of our proposition, participants in the suppression condition used more feature-based, but less category-based stereotypes in their post-suppression task than participants in the control condition. Furthermore, a relation between post-suppression category-based and feature-based stereotyping existed in the suppression condition such that decreases in category-based stereotyping were associated with increases in feature-based stereotyping. Findings as a whole suggest that norms against the expression of stereotypic biases may ironically lead people to be more vulnerable to biases as a function of within-category features.     

Understanding the foot‐in‐the‐door effect as a pseudo‐effect from the perspective of the Campbell paradigm

Compliance with a small request (a metaphorical foot‐in‐the‐door) promotes compliance with a subsequent big request. Whereas some explanations expect a drop in the behavioural costs of the big request, others suspect that the effect comes from boosting the underlying attitude. However, evidence for both explanations is equivocal and circumstantial, at best. Drawing on what Kaiser et al. (2010) call the Campbell paradigm, we present an integrative account: Compliance with any request demands a corresponding attitude to counterbalance the costs of the request. In our research, 229 participants were randomly assigned to either a foot‐in‐the‐door (i.e., initially asked to sign a pro‐environmental petition) or a control condition. Small‐request‐compliant participants were more likely than control participants to also comply with the big request and to continue filling out environmental‐issues‐related questionnaires. However, this foot‐in‐the‐door effect occurred without diminishing behavioural costs or increasing attitude levels. Accordingly, the greater likelihood of small‐request‐compliant participants to also comply with the big request can be parsimoniously explained by baseline variability in people's attitude levels that manifests in their compliance with the initial request. We conclude that several of the foot‐in‐the‐door effects reported in the literature carry the risk of representing mere pseudo‐effects.     

Why opening a door is as easy as eating an apple: A reply to Thompson-Schill and Botvinick (2006)

Martin and Cheng (2006) present evidence suggesting that difficulty in verb generation is related to the strength of associative links between nouns and verbs and not to competition from alternative verb responses. Specifically, they show that latencies for verb generation are related to the associative strength of the most frequently produced verb and not to the ratio of the strength of the first to the second most frequently produced verb. Thompson-Schill and Botvinick (2006) have provided modeling results indicating how the findings of Martin and Cheng might be accommodated in a competitive model. Here we discuss how two noncompetitive models account for the findings and why such models should be preferred.     

Double foot‐in‐the‐door,social representations,and environment: application for energy savings

This study aims to determine the most effective procedure to bring individuals to adopt pro‐environmental behaviors, specifically to make energy savings for several weeks. A link was established between two fields of research traditionally separated in social psychology literature: free will compliance and social representations theories. An experiment was carried out to test the effectiveness of several simple and double foot‐in‐the‐door procedures, activating central or peripheral cognitions of the social representation of energy savings. Basically, the results indicate that the most effective procedure is the double foot‐in‐the‐door, which activates central cognitions. Twice as many participants accepted the target request and three times as many actually performed the expected behavior with this procedure.     

Omnipotence in the transference and in the countertransference

The concept of omnipotence refers to a primitive fantasy, a mechanism of defense, and a pathological psychic structure. Omnipotence and its derivative defensive operation, omnipotent control, are highly prevalent in borderline personality organization. Three clinical vignettes illustrate these mechanisms in the treatment of patients with borderline, narcissistic, and obsessive personality disorders, respectively. These vignettes illustrate the transference developments when omnipotence and omnipotence control are dominant, and the therapeutic approach to these conditions.     

The patient in the family and the family in the patient

The notion that the family is “the unit of care” for family doctors has been enigmatic and controversial. Yet systems theory and the biopsychosocial model that results when it is imported into medicine make the family system an indispensable and important component of family medicine. The challenge, therefore, is to provide a coherent, plausible account of the role of the family in family practice. Through an extended case presentation and commentary, we elaborate two views of the family in family medicine — treating the patient in the family and treating the family in the patient — and defend both as appropriate foci for care by family doctors. The practical problem that arises when the family is introduced into health care is deciding when to concentrate on the family system. The moral problems that arise concern how extensively doctors may become involved in the personal lives of their patients and families. The patient-centered clinical method provides a strategy for handling both problems. Thus, making the family a focus of care in family medicine can be justified on theoretical, practical, and moral grounds.     

Information in the Universe and in the Organism

There is a branch of modern medicine that relies on information rather than on biochemical substances to maintain health and cure disease. Known as information medicine, it offers an important complement to the dominant biochemical approach of mainstream medicine. This note offers a few reflections on the potentials of information medicine in reference to what is currently known regarding the role of information in the universe, and in the living organism.     

Disequilibrium in the mind, disharmony in the body

Although it is generally acknowledged that experiences of frustration, confusion, and anxiety are embodied phenomena, very little is known about how these processes modulate presumably unconscious, but constantly present, subtle bodily movement. We addressed this problem by tracking the low-level dynamics of body movement, using 1/f noise, pink noise, or "fractal scaling", during naturalistic experiences of affect in two studies involving deep learning and effortful problem-solving. Our results indicate that body movement fluctuations of individuals experiencing cognitive equilibrium was characteristic of correlated pink noise, but there was a whitening of the signal when participants experienced states that are diagnostic of cognitive distress such as anxiety, confusion, and frustration. We orient our findings within theories that emphasise the embodied nature of cognition and affect and with perspectives that view affective and cognitive processes as emergent products of a self-organising dynamical system (the brain) that is inextricably coupled to the body.