The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job Applicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study

The purpose of this study was to determine someof the factors that influence outside reviewers andsearch committee members when they are reviewingcurricula vitae, particularly with respect to the gender of the name on the vitae. The participants inthis study were 238 male and female academicpsychologists who listed a university address in the1997 Directory of the American PsychologicalAssociation. They were each sent one of four versions of acurriculum vitae (i.e., female job applicant, male jobapplicant, female tenure candidate, and male tenurecandidate), along with a questionnaire and aself-addressed stamped envelope. All the curricula vitaeactually came from a real-life scientist at twodifferent stages in her career, but the names werechanged to traditional male and female names. Althoughan exclusively between-groups design was used to avoidsparking genderconscious responding, the resultsindicate that the participants were clearly able todistinguish between the qualifications of the jobapplicants versus the tenure candidates, as evidenced bysuggesting higher starting salaries, increasedlikelihood of offering the tenure candidates a job,granting them tenure, and greater respect for theirteaching, research, and service records. Both men andwomen were more likely to vote to hire a male jobapplicant than a female job applicant with an identicalrecord. Similarly, both sexes reported that the male job applicant had done adequate teaching,research, and service experience compared to the femalejob applicant with an identical record. In contrast,when men and women examined the highly competitive curriculum vitae of the real-life scientist whohad gotten early tenure, they were equally likely totenure the male and female tenure candidates and therewas no difference in their ratings of their teaching, research, and service experience. There was nosignificant main effect for the quality of theinstitution or professional rank on selectivity inhiring and tenuring decisions. The results of this study indicate a gender bias for both men and womenin preference for male job applicants.     

The Perceptual Pathway: Tracing the Mechanisms of Political Value Transfer across Generations

The transfer of political values across generations is commonly understood as a two-step process. First, the child perceives the characteristics of the parent, thereby creating an image of what the parent is like. Second, the child is persuaded to adapt his or her own views to that image. Despite its theoretical dominance, the details of this perceptual pathway of parentalsocialization have rarely been examined empirically. A major Swedish socialization study offers unusually good opportunities to investigate how it actually operates. The results indicate that the perceptual pathway as a whole is of great but not universal significance, that perception is more important than persuasion because of its greater variability, and that the conditions regulating the former are distinct from those regulating the latter. One implication of the results is that studies of interpersonal influence based on a single source (e.g., the child alone) are likely to yield a very lopsided view of the socialization process.     

Indeterminacy and the principle of need

The principle of need—the idea that resources should be allocated according to need—is often invoked in priority setting in the health care sector. In this article, I argue that a reasonable principle of need must be indeterminate, and examine three different ways that this can be dealt with: appendicizing the principle with further principles, imposing determinacy, or empowering decision makers. I argue that need must be conceptualized as a composite property composed of at least two factors: health shortfall and capacity to benefit. When one examines how the different factors relate to each other, one discovers that this is sometimes indeterminate. I illustrate this indeterminacy in this article by applying the small improvement argument. If the relation between the factors are always determinate, the comparative relation changes by a small adjustment. Yet, if two needs are dissimilar but of seemingly equal magnitude, the comparative relation does not change by a small adjustment of one of the factors. I then outline arguments in favor of each of the three strategies for dealing with indeterminacy, but also point out that all strategies have significant shortcomings. More research is needed concerning how to deal with this indeterminacy, and the most promising path seems to be to scrutinize the position of the principle of need among a plurality of relevant principles for priority setting in the health care sector.     

Individual Moral Development and Moral Progress

At first glance, one of the most obvious places to look for moral progress is in individuals, in particular in moral development from childhood to adulthood. In fact, that moral progress is possible is a foundational assumption of moral education. Beyond the general agreement that moral progress is not only possible but even a common feature of human development things become blurry, however. For what do we mean by ‘progress’? And what constitutes moral progress? Does the idea of individual moral progress presuppose a predetermined end or goal of moral education and development, or not? In this article we analyze the concept of moral progress to shed light on the psychology of moral development and vice versa; these analyses are found to be mutually supportive. We suggest that: moral progress should be conceived of as development that is evaluated positively on the basis of relatively stable moral criteria that are the fruit and the subject of an ongoing conversation; moral progress does not imply the idea of an end-state; individual moral progress is best conceived of as the development of various components of moral functioning and their robust integration in a person’s identity; both children and adults can progress morally - even though we would probably not speak in terms of progress in the case of children - but adults’ moral progress is both more hard-won and to a greater extent a personal project rather than a collective effort.     

Out with the old? The role of selective attention in retaining targets in partial report

In the partial-report task, subjects are asked to report only a portion of the items presented. Selective attention chooses which objects to represent in short-term memory (STM) on the basis of their relevance. Because STM is limited in capacity, one must sometimes choose which objects are removed from memory in light of new relevant information. We tested the hypothesis that the choices among newly presented information and old information in STM involve the same process—that both are acts of selective attention. We tested this hypothesis using a two-display partial-report procedure. In this procedure, subjects had to select and retain relevant letters (targets) from two sequentially presented displays. If selection in perception and retention in STM are the same process, then irrelevant letters (distractors) in the second display, which demanded attention because of their similarity to the targets, should have decreased target report from the first display. This effect was not obtained in any of four experiments. Thus, choosing objects to keep in STM is not the same process as choosing new objects to bring into STM.     

Evaluation of a Swedish version of the Job Stress Survey

The present study assesses and evaluates the psychometric properties of a Swedish version of the Job Stress Survey (JSS; Spielberger, 1991; Spielberger & Vagg, 1999). This instrument is constructed to measure generic sources of occupational stress encountered by employees in a wide variety of work settings, settings that often result in psychological strain. The JSS was administered to metal assembly industry workers and medical service personnel in northern Sweden (n= 1186). The exploratory factor analysis showed that there is a high similarity between the present Swedish version and the original American version. Internal reliabilities of the scales, as well as test-retest reliabilities were shown to be high, and concurrent validity, as examined by comparisons with the Perceived Stress Questionnaire Index (Levenstein et al., 1993) was found to be satisfactory. The consistency of these findings is discussed with particular focus on groups of employees, gender, and cross-cultural evaluations.     

To challenge and to be challenged – teachers collective learning in higher education

Critical analyzing and reflective competence are essential objectives in all higher education. In academic professional education, it is a challenge for the teacher to support and develop the student´s critical reflection of both academic and placement studies. The aim of this study is to identify the characteristics of the teacher role and the challenges of the reflective seminar within higher education. Data were gathered through group interviews and analyzed with a phenomenological hermeneutic approach. The result shows four themes; the experience of control and uncertainty, building trust and challenging ideas, the alternation between closeness and distance, and the parallel processes of supervising learning and being in a learning state. One conclusion is that the seminar teaching practice stimulates a collegial learning environment. This practice promotes the teachers pedagogical and didactical competence and an open attitude to each other´s teaching practice.     

Judges', lay judges', and police officers' beliefs about factors affecting children's testimony about sexual abuse

The authors examined Swedish judges', lay judges', and police officers' beliefs about factors that may complicate or facilitate children's reports of sexual abuse. Participants (N = 562) rated potential complicating and facilitating factors and freely reported which criteria they considered important when assessing the reliability of child witnesses. The groups had similar opinions regarding which factors are complicating and facilitating. Furthermore, the groups tended to regard emotional factors as more complicating than cognitive factors. When freely reporting criteria that are important when assessing reliability, judges and police officers reported criteria pertaining mainly to the child, whereas lay judges reported mainly criteria pertaining mainly to the police interview. Results indicate that participants believe that children have the capacity to remember and report about abuse but are hindered in doing so by emotional factors. Results also suggest that police officers may underestimate their own influence on the reliability of children's reports.     

Expert performance in SCRABBLE: implications for the study of the structure and acquisition of complex skills

Applied psychologists have long been interested in examining expert performance in complex cognitive domains. In the present article, we report the results from a study of expert cognitive skill in which elements from two historically distinct research paradigms are incorporated -- the individual differences tradition and the expert-performance approach. Forty tournament-rated SCRABBLE players (20 elite, 20 average) and 40 unrated novice players completed a battery of domain-representative laboratory tasks and standardized verbal ability tests. The analyses revealed that elite- and average-level rated players only significantly differed from each other on tasks representative of SCRABBLE performance. Furthermore, domain-relevant practice mediated the effects of SCRABBLE tournament ratings on representative task performance, suggesting that SCRABBLE players can acquire some of the knowledge necessary for success at the highest levels of competition by engaging in activities deliberately designed to maximize adaptation to SCRABBLE-specific task constraints. We discuss the potential importance of our results in the context of continuing efforts to capture and explain superior performance across intellectual domains.