Men and women at promise for scientific excellence: similarity not dissimilarity

U.S. math-science graduate students possessing world-class talent (368 males, 346 females) were assessed on psychological attributes and personal experiences in order to examine how their talents emerged and developed. Comparisons were made, using similar assessments, with mathematically talented students (528 males, 228 females) identified around age 13 and tracked into adulthood by the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY). Well before college, both samples were academically distinguished; however, the graduate students could be identified during adolescence as a subset of mathematically talented youths based on their nonintellectual attributes. Their profiles corresponded to what earlier psychological studies found to characterize distinguished (and exclusively male) scientists: exceptional quantitative reasoning abilities, relatively stronger quantitative than verbal reasoning ability, salient scientific interests and values, and, finally, persistence in seeking out opportunities to study scientific topics and develop scientific skills. On these attributes, sex differences were minimal for the graduate students (but not for the SMPY comparison groups). Developing exceptional scientific expertise apparently requires special educational experiences, but these necessary experiences are similar for the two sexes.     

Interpretation of significance levels by psychological researchers: the .05 cliff effect may be overstated

Comments about previous studies indicate that the interpretation of significance levels by psychological researchers is unequivocally dictated by a binary decision-making framework. In particular, confidence in ap level would drop abruptly just beyond the fateful .05 level (cliff effect). A replication of Rosenthal and Gaito’s (1963) experiment on the degree of confidence inp levels shows that these claims should be moderated. Detailed analysis of individual curves reveals that the attitude of researchers towardp values is far from being as homogeneous as might be expected. However, most psychological researchers in our study rated graduated confidence judgments, as either exponential or linear. Only a minority ofall-or-none respondents exhibited an abrupt drop in confidence.     

Virtual mentors: mentoring on the internet

Mentoring is an increasingly important function for career success. Many special groups, however, including minorities and women, have difficulty finding a mentor. One solution is virtual mentoring—selecting and interacting with mentors on the Internet. The author discusses advantages of virtual mentoring over other forms of mentoring, describes examples of Internet mentoring for various special groups and purposes, and suggests future directions for Internet mentoring.     

Improving Decision Making by Means of Dissent1

Antidotes to problems associated with uniformity of viewpoints have generally involved dissent in one form or another (Katzenstein, 1996), one being “devil's advocate.” Research on authentic dissent has documented additional advantages in that it stimulates divergent and original thought (Nemeth, 1995). In this study, authentic disscnt was compared with devil's advocate and with no dissent. Findings indicate that authentic dissent was superior in (a) stimulating a greater proportion of original thoughts, (b) considering the opposite position, and (c) direct attitude change. Devil's advocate was found to stimulate cognitive boistcring of the initial position, thus raising concerns about the unintended consequences of techniques such as devil's advocate and the subtle task facing attempts to foster original thought and yet maintain cohesion.     

The effects of prior knowledge on the encoding of episodic contextual details

A positive relationship between prior knowledge and item memory is a consistent finding in the literature. In the present study, we sought to determine whether this relationship extends to episodic details that are present at the time of encoding, namely source memory. Using a novel experimental design, we were able to show both between- and within-subjects effects of prior knowledge on source memory. Specifically, the results revealed that the degree of prior knowledge positively predicted memory for source specifying contextual details. In addition, by including two conditions in which attention was divided either at encoding or retrieval, we were able to show that prior knowledge influences memory by affecting encoding processes. Overall, the data suggest that a priori knowledge within a specific domain allows attentional resources to be allocated toward the encoding of contextual details.