The Panel Study on American Religion and Ethnicity: Background, Methods, and Selected Results

Surveying 2,610 respondents, the Panel Study of American Religion and Ethnicity is a nationally representative in-home survey of the noninstitutionalized U.S. adult population. The survey is designed to (a) focus primarily on religion and spirituality (with over 200 questions on these topics), (b) include multiple other modules (such as health, family relationships, and social ties), (c) oversample African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics, and (d) follow the same respondents over time. We describe the main design features of the survey, present some characteristics of the sample, and provide basic findings. It is our hope that these data will foster more research and contribute to a better understanding of the role and meaning of religion in the contemporary United States .     

Development and validation of the General Risk Propensity Scale (GRiPS)

Despite the widespread interest in understanding and identifying risk takers by psychologists, clinicians, and economists, the risk literature currently lacks consensus regarding the nature of risk taking and its measurement. Existing measures of risk taking are predominantly domain‐specific despite emerging support for risk taking as a domain‐general disposition. In the present paper, we examine the nature of risk taking as a domain‐general personality disposition and develop a concise measure: the General Risk Propensity Scale (GRiPS). Data from 1,523 participants across five studies provided evidence for its construct validity. The GRiPS converged with other self‐report measures of risk taking and provided incremental prediction of work, academic, and life outcomes over and above the five‐factor model of personality and the Domain‐Specific Risk Taking Scale.     

Immediate source-monitoring, self-focused attention and the positive symptoms of schizophrenia

Previous research suggests that tendencies to misattribute one's own thoughts to an external source, as assessed by an immediate source-monitoring test, are associated with auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs). However, recent research suggests that such tendencies are associated instead with symptoms of thought interference. The main aim of the present study was to examine whether such tendencies are differentially associated with different types of thought interference, with AVHs, or with both. It has also been suggested that external misattributions are especially likely to occur with emotionally salient material and if the individual's focus is on the self. These suggestions were also tested. The positive psychotic symptoms of 57 individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia were assessed and they then completed the Self-Focus Sentence Completion blank. Immediately after completing each sentence they were asked to indicate to what extent the sentence was their own. The number of sentences that were not rated as completely their own served as their externalisation score. Externalisation scores correlated significantly with the severity of three symptoms: voices commenting, delusions of being controlled, and thought insertion. In a logistic regression analysis, all three of these symptoms were significantly and independently related to externalisation. Externalisation was not associated with either a negative or a neutral self-focus. Thus tendencies to misattribute one's own thoughts to an external source are associated with AVHs and some, but not all, symptoms of thought interference. The importance for externalisation of self-focused attention and of the emotional salience of the elicited thoughts was not supported.     

Where there's life,There's hope,and where there is hope,there is...

Using the Hearth Hope Index, we describe the level of hopefulness among hospital patients and compare it to that reported by community persons and family members in a surgical waiting room. We also correlate these results with depression and self-esteem scores. As measured by these selected instruments, the results suggest that the level of hopefulness is not significantly different among the three samples, that it is positively correlated with self-esteem and negatively associated with depression, and that, among the demographic variables, only the respondent's age and frequency of attendance at worship significantly influence hope scores. The results suggest that pastoral caregivers can encourage hopefulness among those under their care by bolstering self-esteem and giving attention to depressive symptoms. They also suggest that those who need the most pastoral support are younger adults with limited education. Pastoral caregivers can use these results, we think, to inform their work in giving pastoral care.     

SELF-MONITORING AND WORK PRODUCTIVITY WITH MENTALLY RETARDED ADULTS

We examined the use of self-monitoring to increase the productivity of five mentally retarded adults in a sheltered workshop. Data were collected daily during a 30-minute intervention and 30-minute generalization period. Following baseline, verbal praise, prompts, and physical encouragement were administered contingent on productive behavior on a specific task during the intervention period. In the next phase, self-monitoring was trained during the intervention period. During both phases, baseline conditions prevailed in the generalization periods. In the final phase, self-monitoring was extended across the intervention and generalization periods. Results showed that increased productivity levels, evident when praise and prompting were being administered, maintained with self-monitoring alone. Minimal generalization across time was observed until self-monitoring was begun in the generalization period.     

Gender and the relationship between perceived fairness of pay or promotion and job satisfaction.

Brockner and Adsit (1986) found that satisfaction with an exchange relationship was more strongly related to perceptions of equity among men than women. Kahn (1972) reported that men were more likely than women to distribute outcomes to individuals in direct proportion to their input. We evaluated potential gender differences among 12,979 personnel in 30 different organizational systems in (a) correlations between fairness and job satisfaction scores and (b) standardized group differences in the perceived amounts of pay and promotion fairness and expressed levels of facet and global job satisfaction. The fairness-satisfaction relationship was not higher for men, and there were no practical differences in fairness perceptions and job satisfaction between men and women.     

The effect of accountability on susceptibility to decision errors

Recent research indicates that accountability can influence both what and how people think and might reduce decision makers' susceptibility to a variety of common judgment and choice errors. It is proposed that accountability can reduce decision errors if (1) decision makers are able to anticipate which response will be evaluated as more rational, and without concerns about accountability decision makers tend to select a different response, or (2) the normatively correct response can be identified by the more thorough and complex information processing associated with accountability. Consistent with the first proposition, four experiments demonstrated that accountability can reduce the sunk cost effect. The findings suggest that this debiasing effect reflects the subjects' expectation that they would be evaluated more favorably if they ignored sunk costs. Contrary to the second proposition, the prediction that accountable decision makers, due to their more thorough and multidimensional processing, would exhibit more consistent preferences across preference elicitation procedures was not supported in two studies. Finally, as hypothesized, accountability did not reduce a variety of decision errors for which the correct response was not known and was unlikely to be identified with more thorough information processing. These results are consistent with the notion that accountability effects in decision making are driven by the desire to be favorably evaluated and avoid criticism by others.     

The effects of perceptual condition on proofreading for misspellings

In two experiments, subjects proofread text in which misspelled words were created by replacing a single letter with another one. The following perceptual conditions were included: clear-cut photocopies of typewritten text, clear-cut text presented on a CRT screen, ditto copies that varied in legibility, and text that included extraneous noise characters superimposed on some letters. In all conditions, subjects adopted a hierarchical feature test that gave first priority to resolving letter envelope and second priority to discriminating other letter features. When clear-cut text with no extraneous noise was proofread, subjects used a sophisticated-guessing decision rule that tolerated misspellings involving missing letter features (as when c replaced e) but not added ones (as when e replaced c). This asymmetrical rule was modified, however, when subjects were exposed to text that included extraneous noise that was confusable with the letter features. In those circumstances, subjects adopted a decision rule that tolerated misspellings involving missing features or any added features that resembled the noise.     

Conflict and the Stochastic-Dominance Principle of Decision Making

One of the key principles underlying rational models of decision making is the idea that the decision maker should never choose an action that is stochastically dominated by another action. In the study reported in this article, violations of stochastic dominance frequently occurred when the payoffs produced by two actions were negatively correlated (in conflict), but no violations occurred when the payoffs were positively correlated (no conflict). This finding is contrary to models which assume that choice probability depends on the utility of each action, and the utility for an action depends solely on its own payoffs and probabilities. This article also reports, for the first time ever, the distribution of response times observed in a risky decision task. Both the violations of stochastic dominance and the response time distributions are explained in terms of a dynamic theory of decision making called multiattribute decision field theory.