Thinking styles in relation to personality traits: an investigation of the Thinking Styles Inventory and NEO-PI-R

This study is an investigation of the Sternberg-Wagner Thinking Style Inventory (TSI), with regard to cross-cultural replication and relation to the five-factor personality model (FFM). TSI and NEO-PI-R were administered to 107 participants from USA and 114 participants from Norway. Inter-correlations between NEO-PI-R dimensions and TSI-scales and factors were not very strong, few exceeding 0.40, and the correlations were in predicted directions. Joint factor analyses of TSI and NEO-PI-R showed that TSI covers variance that NEO-PI-R does not explain. Thus, it is argued that the thinking styles give an independent contribution beyond FFM dimensions. However, TSI did not relate to FFM in the same manner in the two samples. Finally, the TSI-scales and factors were replicable across samples by Procrustes rotation. The question whether thinking style may be regarded as a valid and reliable construct is discussed.     

Work values among the unemployed: changes over time and some gender differences

Work involvement (psychological identification with work in general) has generally been considered as a stable, dispositional characteristic, although some studies of unemployment have contradicted this view. Using longitudinal data from a Swedish representative sample (n= 888), this study examines employment status change (e.g. from work to unemployment) and work values development in a 15-month time period. Furthermore, the relationship between employment status change and well-being is explored, with a special focus on the roles played by work values and gender differences. Results indicated that work values are fairly stable over 15 months. As expected, the long-term unemployed (mostly active job seekers) had higher measures of work involvement after 15 months. Further, no gender difference was found with regard to work involvement but females were more likely to agree that there is an entitlement to work. Becoming unemployed was associated with negative health effects, but only among unemployed men.     

Physical attractiveness and health: comment on Weeden and Sabini (2005)

Evolutionary behavioral biology suggests that certain characteristics of the human face and body are important for mate preferences and are therefore subject to sexual selection. J. Weeden and J. Sabini identify a number of weaknesses in the association between traits' attractiveness and health. In contrast, the authors argue that (a) studies on preferences for physical characteristics that rely on 1 trait permit only limited interpretation, (b) limitations placed on J. Weeden and J. Sabini's review exclude important associations, (c) there are misconceptions in their treatment of some traits, and (d) their selected literature provides an inaccurate picture regarding effect size. The authors suggest that future research in this field should seek conceptual and methodological constancy in trait selection and in the evaluation of attractiveness- and health-related traits.     

Children’s Toy Collections in Sweden—A Less Gender-Typed Country?

The aim of this study was to describe and analyze differences between girls and boys toy collections in a country that strongly emphasizes gender equality (Sweden). The study was based on the assumptions that toy collections reflect social values in the society where they are found and that Sweden has less gendered values than do many other countries. The toy collections of 152 3- and 5-year old Swedish children were inventoried, and the results were analyzed and discussed in relation to previous research on childrens toy collections and toy preferences in North America and Western Europe. The Swedish toy collections were found to be gender-typed in ways similar to those reported in previous research in other countries.     

Immediate and sustained effects of planning in a problem-solving task

In 4 experiments, instructions to plan a task (water jugs) that normally produces little planning altered how participants solved the problems and resulted in enhanced learning and memory. Experiment 1 identified planning strategies that allowed participants to plan full solutions to water jugs problems. Experiment 2 showed that experience with planning led to better solutions even after planning was no longer required, whereas control participants showed little improvement. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that although the most recent planned solution could be recalled following a long filled retention interval, retroactive interference (RI) between successive problems resulted in much lower recall of earlier solutions. RI during plan generation could also explain participants' choice of depth-first planning strategies.     

Repeated Interrogations –Stretching the Deception Detection Paradigm

In real life, suspects are often subjected to repeatedinterrogations. Psycho-legal research on deception has neglectedthis fact. To remedy this mismatch a series of studies wasconducted mapping how repeated interrogations affectlie-catchers' judgemental processes, deception detectionperformance, and meta-assessments. In two experiments we foundthat lie-catchers given access to consecutive statements from onesuspect did not perform better than lie-catchers given access toone statement only. In addition, access to repeatedinterrogations inflated the lie-catchers' confidence in thecorrectness of their veracity judgement, which had a detrimentaleffect on the accuracy-confidence relation. As the basis forassessing veracity was changed from one to several statements thelie-catchers, to a large extent, seemed to trust the `consistencyheuristic'. The assumption underlying this heuristic is thatinconsistency implies deception and consistency implies truth.The data show that (a) people tend to disagree as to whether aparticular set of consecutive statements is consistent or not,and (b) deceptive statements are at least equally consistent astruthful statements. In order to explain the latter finding a`repeat vs. reconstruct' hypothesis was suggested, assuming thatliars try to repeat their initial statement, whereastruth-tellers try to reconstruct a previously experienced event.The low predictive accuracy found for the `consistency heuristic'strongly questions beliefs held by professional lie-catchers,opinions expressed in the psycho-legal literature andrecommendations found in applied interrogation manuals.     

Improving the encoding of verbal reports by using MPAS: A computer-aided encoding system

The dramatically increased use of verbal report methodologies in psychological research has created a need for new tools to improve the efficiency and reliability of encoding these data. A computer-aided protocol encoding system called MPAS (Multiple Protocol Analysis System) presents individual protocol segments in a randomised order to one or more coders and then stores computer keyboard-entered codes for later output to an SPSS formatted data file. In the present paper, MPAS is described, and a brief example is provided of how MPAS can be used in a con-trolled laboratory study to rigorously analyze verbal protocol data.     

Realism of confidence in sensory discrimination: The underconfidence phenomenon

This paper documents a very pervasive underconfidence bias in the area of sensory discrimination. In order to account for this phenomenon, a subjective distance theory of confidence in sensory discrimination is proposed. This theory, based on the law of comparative judgment and the assumption of confidence as an increasing function of the perceived distance between stimuli, predicts underconfidence—that is, that people should perform better than they express in their confidence assessments. Due to the fixed sensitivity of the sensory system, this underconfidence bias is practically impossible to avoid. The results of Experiment 1 confirmed the prediction of underconfidence with the help of present-day calibration methods and indkated-a-good quantitative fit of the theory. The results of Experiment 2 showed that prolonged experience of outcome feedback (160 trials) had no effect on underconfidence. It is concluded that the subjective distance theory provides a better explanation of the underconfidence phenomenon than-do previous accounts in terms of subconscious processes.     

Effects of reiteration,hindsight bias,and memory on realism in eyewitness confidence

This study investigated the effects of repetition, memory, feedback, and hindsight bias on the realism in confidence in answers to questions on a filmed kidnapping. In Experiment 1 the participants showed overconfidence in all conditions. In the Repeat condition (‘how confident are you now that your previous answers are correct’) overconfidence was reduced as a consequence of the decrease in confidence in both correct and incorrect answers compared with the Repeat condition when the participants received feedback on their answers and were asked to remember their initial confidence, the confidence level was higher for correct and lower for incorrect answers. In Experiment 2, recalled confidence (the Memory condition) increased compared with the original confidence both for correct and incorrect answers; the effect of this was increased overconfidence. The Hindsight condition showed a decrease in confidence in incorrect answers. The results suggest that a unique hindsight effect may be more clearly present for incorrect than for correct answers. Our study gives further evidence for the malleability of the realism in eyewitness confidence and we discuss both the theoretical and forensic implications of our findings. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Individual variable pay for performance,controlling effects,and intrinsic motivation

Motivation and Emotion - A core question in research on compensation and motivation is whether individual variable pay for performance (IVPFP) can undermine intrinsic motivation in the workplace....