Workload,Risks, and Goal Framing as Antecedents of Shortcut Behaviors

Purpose

Shortcut behaviors are methods of completing a task that require less time than typical or standard procedures. These behaviors carry the benefit of increasing efficiency, yet can also carry risks (e.g., of an accident). The purpose of this research is to understand the reasons individuals engage in shortcut behaviors, even when doing so is known to be risky.

Design/Methodology/Approach

We present two laboratory studies (N = 121 and N = 144) in which participants performed an air traffic control simulation. Participants could improve efficiency by taking shortcuts; that is, by sending aircraft off the prescribed flight paths. This design allowed for direct and unobtrusive observation of shortcut behaviors.

Findings

Individuals who were told that efficiency was an obligation tended to believe that shortcut behaviors had utility for managing high workloads, even when the risks associated with shortcuts were high. Downstream, utility perceptions were positively related to actual shortcut behavior.

Implications

Although communicating risks may be used to help individuals balance the “pros” and “cons” of shortcut behaviors, goal framing is also important. Subtle cues indicating that efficiency is an obligation can lead to elevated perceptions of the utility of shortcut behaviors, even when knowing that engaging in shortcut behaviors is very risky.

Originality/Value

Past research has provided limited insights into the reasons individuals sometimes engage in shortcut behaviors even when doing so is known to be risky. The current research speaks to this issue by identifying workload and obligation framing as antecedents of the decision to take shortcuts.

     

Reconciling Compensatory and Noncompensatory Strategies of Cue Weighting: A Causal Model Approach

When forming a judgment about any unknown item, people must draw inferences from information that is already known. This paper examines causal relationships between cues as a relevant factor influencing how people determine the amount of weight to place on each piece of available evidence. We propose that people draw from their beliefs about specific causal relationships between cues when determining how much weight to place on those cues, and that understanding this process can help reconcile differences between predictions of compensatory and lexicographic heuristic strategies. As causal relationships change, different cues become more or less important. Across three experiments, we find support for the use of causal models in determining cue weights, but leave open the possibility that they work in concert with other strategies as well. We conclude by discussing relative strengths and weaknesses of the causal model approach relative to existing models, and suggest areas for future research. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Close Encounters With the Midwest: Forming Identity in a Bicultural Context

This study uses semi-structured interviews to examine how 16 people of Latvian heritage negotiated their cultural identities in high school (retrospectively) and at midlife (concurrently). Participants' high school and midlife cultural identity patterns were coded as marginalized, separated, assimilated, alternating integrated, or blended integrated. Although eleven participants were found to have had marginalized, separated, or alternating integrated patterns in high school, all 16 had either assimilated or blended integrated patterns at midlife. Further, there is evidence that the contexts in which identity negotiation occurred—specifically, the rigidity of the participants' Latvian and American contexts in high school and their relative openness at midlife—influenced these changes in pattern. The findings also underscore the importance of taking into account within-group differences when studying how people negotiate their cultural identities.     

Koffka's effect is mediated by figure thickness at the joining region

Three-quarters of a century ago Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka described a remarkable effect: when a contiguous gray ring is placed on a background half one shade of gray, half another, the ring appears homogeneous. However, if the ring is divided, the two halves of the ring appear different shades of gray, the half of the ring on the darker background appearing lighter than the half of the ring on the lighter background. The Gestalt principle of continuity is used to explain this effect. But what microscopic principles might be mediating this effect? Recently we found sufficiently thin rings (annuli) appear heterogeneous even when geometrically continuous. Here, using crescent-shaped figures instead of the circular annuli used for the traditional Koffka effect, we show that this effect of thickness of the ring is mediated by the thickness at the boundary of the region where the halves of the figure are joined.     

Helping military families through the deployment process: Strategies to support parenting

Recent studies have highlighted the impact of deployment on military families and children and the corresponding need for interventions to support them. Historically, however, little emphasis has been placed on family-based interventions in general, and parenting interventions in particular, with returning service members. This paper provides an overview of research on the associations between combat deployment, parental adjustment of service members and spouses, parenting impairments, and children's adjustment problems, and provides a social interaction learning framework for research and practice to support parenting among military families affected by a parent's deployment. We then describe the Parent Management Training-Oregon model (PMTO(?)), a family of interventions that improves parenting practices and child adjustment in highly stressed families, and briefly present work on an adaptation of PMTO for use in military families (After Deployment: Adaptive Parenting Tools, or ADAPT). The article concludes with PMTO-based recommendations for clinicians providing parenting support to military families.     

Cerebellar dentate nuclei lesions reduce motivation in appetitive operant conditioning and open field exploration

Recently identified pathways from the dentate nuclei of the cerebellum to the rostral cerebral cortex via the thalamus suggest a cerebellar role in frontal and prefrontal non-motor functioning. Disturbance of cerebellar morphology and connectivity, particularly involving these cerebellothalamocortical (CTC) projections, has been implicated in motivational and cognitive deficits. The current study explored the effects of CTC disruption on motivation in male Long Evans rats. The results of two experiments demonstrate that electrolytic lesions of the cerebellar dentate nuclei lower breaking points on an operant conditioning progressive ratio schedule and decrease open field exploration compared to sham controls. Changes occurred in the absence of motor impairment, assessed via lever pressing frequency and rotarod performance. Similar elevated plus maze performances between lesioned and sham animals indicated that anxiety did not influence task performance. Our results demonstrate hedonic and purposive motivational reduction and suggest a CTC role in global motivational processes. These implications are discussed in terms of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism, in which cerebellar damage and motivational deficits often present concomitantly.     

Emotion Regulation and Attachment: Unpacking Two Constructs and Their Association

This study examined the association between the security of attachment and processes influencing the development of emotion regulation in young children. A sample of 73 4 1/2-year-olds and their mothers were observed in an emotion regulation probe involving mild frustration for children, and mothers and children were later independently interviewed about how the child had felt. Fewer than half the mothers agreed with children’s self-reports in the emotion they attributed to children (a lower rate than the concordance of observer ratings with children’s self-reports), and higher mother-child concordance was associated with secure attachment and mother’s beliefs about the importance of attending to and accepting their own emotions. Mother-child conversations about recent events evoking children’s negative emotion were also analyzed. Children were less likely to avoid conversing about negative feelings when they were in secure attachments and when mothers were more validating of the child’s perspective. Children’s greater understanding of negative emotions was also significantly associated with higher mother-child concordance and less child conversational avoidance. Taken together, these findings underscore the multiple influences of attachment on emotion regulation and the importance of children’s emotion understanding to these processes.     

Metameric intransitivity

There are two kinds of afterimages. In negative afterimages, looking at a blank field after staring at a colored figure gives a figure whose color is complementary to that of the original figure. Less well understood and studied is the phenomenon of induced positive afterimages, in which staring at a colored area surrounding a small white test patch produces an afterimage in which the hue of the surround is transferred into the previously white area. Using these differences between positive and negative afterimages and also simultaneous color contrast, which has an effect on a test patch different from either of the afterimage effects, we describe a new effect, metameric intransitivity, in which perceptually similar images can generate markedly different afterimages, whereas perceptually different images can generate indistinguishable afterimages. Supplemental figures depicting the stimuli, results, and method for generating the intransitive metamers in this study may be downloaded from http://app.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.