Differentiation Matching in School Desegregation Workshops

The effectiveness of matching the conceptual structure of participants in educational training and psychotherapy experiences has been demonstrated in previous research. This paper describes an attempt to test the effectiveness of this model in a school desegregation workshop designed to promote a mandatory bussing proposal by a local school board. Differentiation matching had little effect on participants' global judgments of satisfaction with workshop goals but was significantly and inversely related to the decision to voluntarily bus a child, especially among blacks. Abstractness of topics discussed affected participant endorsement of workshop goals but did not affect bussing decision. The findings suggest that how such workshops are organized is dependent on whether the workshop success is to be evaluated on the basis of community public relations or actual decisions to bus children.     

The Exercise of Information Influence in Legal Advocacy1

The information search and transmission behavior of information-supplying agents was studied using an experimental analog of a legal situation. An experiment was conducted to test the predictions of social psychological theories concerning the use of information influence and to test several assumptions of proponents of the American adversary system in law. In a 2 × 2 × 3 factorial design, first-year law students acted as attorneys under conditions of high correspondence of outcomes with the judge versus high correspondence of outcomes with an involved party; perception that the outcomes of another attorney in the situation were correspondent with the judge versus correspondent with an involved party; and the discovery that the information environment was favorable, ambiguous, or unfavorable. Significantly greater information search was observed for party-oriented subjects relative to judge-oriented subjects only when the information environment was unfavorable. Party-oriented subjects showed greater attempted use of information influence than did judge-oriented subjects. Analyses of the amount and distribution of the information transmitted by pairs of subjects assessed the characteristics of several legal “systems”. The theoretical and applied implications of the study were discussed.     

Temporal order psychometric functions based on confidence-rating data

Psychophysical tasks involving confidence judgments allow the simultaneous generation of a family of psychometric functions. Sternberg, Knoll, and Mallows (1975) have demonstrated the power of the multiple-function approach in evaluating models concerned with specifying the source of errors in judgments of simultaneity and temporal order. In the present paper, data from a temporal order task requiring confidence ratings are examined, and a number of models for successiveness and order judgments evaluated.

     

Mechanisms of aural encoding: VI. Consonants and vowels are remembered as subsets of distinctive features

An attempt was made to examine the manner in which consonants and vowels are coded in short-term memory. under identical recall conditions. Ss were presented with sequences of consonant-vowel digrams for serial recall. Sequences were composed of randomly presented consonants paired with/a/ or randomly presented vowels paired with /d/. Halle’s distinctive feature system was used to generate predictions concerning the frequency of intrusion errors. among phonemes. These predictions were based on the assumption that phonemes are discriminated in memory in terms of their component distinctive features, so that intrusions should most frequently occur between phonemes sharing similar distinctive features. The analysis of intrusion errors revealed that each consonant and vowel phoneme was coded m short-term memory by a particular combination of distinctive features which differed from one phoneme to another. A given phoneme was coded by the same set of distinctive features regardless of the number of syllables in the sequence. However, distinctive feature theories were not able to predict the frequency of intrusion errors for phonemes presented in the middle serial positions of a sequence with 100% accuracy. The results of the experiment support the notion that consonant and vowel phonemes are coded in a similar manner in STM and that this coding involves the retention of a specific set of distinctive features for each phoneme.     

The Effects of a Campus Building Occupation on Attitudes and Images of the Conflict1

Surveys were conducted before and after radical students occupied a campus building at Princeton University. The occupation led to reduced support for the radicals' demands and increased support for their militant action. The increased support for the militant action occurred even though no police were used. The results were interpreted in terms of a functional theory of attitudes. It was suggested that support for the demands or actions of the radicals was necessary in order to permit many students to appear radical. A second aspect of the study examined the mirror image hypothesis. Strong support for this hypothesis was obtained when it was found that the administration and the radicals appeared as direct opposites. This effect, however, was almost entirely confined to those students who strongly supported the radicals or the administration. Those who took a moderate view did not see the two parties as direct opposites.     

Association and affect as determinants of displaced aggression

Subjects were angered by an instigator and then given a choice of two targets of aggression: one was a friend of the anger instigator and the other not. In addition, subjects were given a choice of more versus less intense aggression against these two targets. Angered subjects chose to give more intense aggression—regardless of whether the target was associated with the anger instigator. Thus, release of affect (opportunity to aggress intensely) predominated over association as a determinant of displacement.     

Some aspects of perceptual coding of duration in visual duration discrimination

Data are presented which indicate two major differences between duration discrimination performance and discrimination performance usually observed in other psychophysical tasks. A decrement in duration discrimination performance with increasing temporal delays between the presentation of two successive stimuli was not found, and the usual difference in level of performance between forced-choice and single-stimulus tasks was not observed. The time-order error in duration discrimination is also discussed.