The sinister attribution error: Paranoid cognition and collective distrust in organizations

Recent social psychological research on paranoid cognition has shown that when individuals are self-conscious or feel under evaluative scrutiny, they tend to overestimate the extent to which they are the target of others' attention. As a result, they make overly personalistic attributions about others' behavior. These personalistic attributions, in turn, foster a pattern of heightened distrust and suspicion regarding others' motives and intentions. Drawing on this research, the present work investigates antecedents and consequences of paranoid cognition in groups and organizations. Results of two studies are presented. Study 1 investigates how tenure in a group or organization affects individuals' self-consciousness and susceptibility to paranoid cognition. Study 2 replicates and extends the results of the first study using a new laboratory analog for studying paranoid cognition in small groups. Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of their contribution to theory regarding the origins and dynamics of collective distrust and suspicion.The development of these ideas benefitted greatly from an interdisciplinary seminar on trust and norms organized by Jim Baron. I am also grateful to Susan Ashford, Steve Barley, Bill Barnett, Jon Bendor, Bob Bies, Joel Brockner, Bob Cialdini, Jane Dutton, Alice Isen, Roy Lewicki, Jim March, Joanne Martin, Maureen McNichols, Michael Morris, Jeff Pfeffer, Joel Podolny, Rick Price, Sim Sitkin, Phil Tetlock, Tom Tyler, Kathleen Valley, Karl Weick, and Mayer Zald for thoughtful comments and suggestions they provided at various stages of this research. Earlier versions of this research were presented at the University of Michigan School of Business Administration, the Asilomar Conference on Organizations, Academy of Management meetings, and the Fifth Conference on Research on Negotiation in Organizations.     

Managing computer integrated manufacturing (CIM): A review of themes,issues, and practices

Large scale changes from traditional to computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) make fundamental alterations in the way work gets done in an organization. The incorporation of sophisticated computerized machinery into the work flow, however, is only the catalyst for a range of human resource and organizational issues. A review of the literature suggests that the management of these issues in the transition from traditional to computerized systems is critical to success. The review is presented within a time frame that encompasses the major themes of a CIM change effort. These themes include the decision phase or automation consideration, the developmental phase, the bridging phase that spans the gap between planning and implementation, and the implementation phase. Important management issues are summarized at each step, including cost justification, management commitment, planning, vendor and union relationships, employee resistance, education and training, job redesign, and organizational restructuring. Wherever applicable, specific practices and real-world examples for effectively managing these issues are presented.     

Influence of attentional capture on oculomotor control

Previous research has shown that when searching for a color singleton, top-down control cannot prevent attentional capture by an abrupt visual onset. The present research addressed whether a task-irrelevant abrupt onset would affect eye movement behavior when searching for a color singleton. Results show that in many instances the eye moved in the direction of the task-irrelevant abrupt onset. There was evidence that top-down control could neither entirely prevent attentional capture by visual onsets nor prevent the eye from starting to move in the direction of the onset. Results suggest parallel programming of 2 saccades: 1 voluntary goal-directed eye movement toward the color singleton target and 1 stimulus-driven eye movement reflexively elicited by the abrupt onset. A neurophysiologically plausible model that can account for the current findings is discussed.     

Visible persistence and form correspondence in Ternus apparent motion.

Visual stimuli remain visible for some time after their physical offset (visible persistence). Visible persistence has been hypothesized to play an important role in determining the pattern of correspondence matching in the Ternus apparent-motion display. In this display, one or more elements reappears in overlapping locations at different times, whereas another element appears alternately to the right or the left of these elements. Usually either the elements are perceived to move coherently as a group (group motion), or one element may be perceived to hop over one or more other elements (element motion). According to the visible-persistence account of the perceptual organization of the Ternus display, element motion is seen when the temporal gap between elements in overlapping locations is small enough to be bridged by visible persistence; if it is not, group motion is seen. We conducted four experiments to test this visible-persistence account. In Experiments 1 and 2, a form correspondence cue (line length) was introduced to bias the visual system toward the element-motion interpretation, while visible persistence was either reduced or eliminated. The element-motion percept dominated despite the elimination of visible persistence. In Experiments 3 and 4, we found that Ternus elements presented without interruption, and thus presumably persisting over time, can be perceived in group motion. Together, the results indicate that visible persistence is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for the pattern of correspondence matches in the Ternus display.     

Self-defeating personality, self-reinforcement, and depression

51 men who were more self-defeating were observed to use lower frequency of self-reinforcement and to be more depressed. The results were seen as supporting Beck's early work which proposed a relationship between depression and self-defeating patterns. They also provide construct validity for the measure of Self-defeating Personality used in the study.     

Movement and focused attention: a failure to replicate.

Our original goal was to explore the nature of the grouping-by-movement phenomenon reported by Driver and Baylis (1989). In their studies, distractors that moved in common with a centrally located target had a larger influence on focused-attention performance than did more proximate but stationary distractors. These results seemed particularly important since they suggested, contrary to the predictions of space-based models of attention, that attention could be allocated to noncontiguous regions of the visual field. Their results also suggested mandatory processing of stimuli with common motion. Unfortunately, we were unable to replicate this grouping-by-movement effect. In the conditions of Experiment 1 in which we replicated Driver and Baylis's methodology, stationary distractors produced a larger response-compatibility effect than did the more distant distractors that moved in common with the target. In Experiment 2, we redundantly coded the centrally located target and the far distractors with common movement and color. However, the results were identical to those obtained in Experiment 1. The stationary near distractors that appeared in a different color from the target and the far distractors produced the largest response-compatibility effect. In a final experiment, we attempted to compensate for the reduced acuity of the moving distractors by adjusting their size by a cortical magnification factor. However, even with this manipulation, we found a larger response-compatibility effect for the stationary near distractors than for the moving distant distractors. Our results suggest that subjects are capable of selectively processing a target item that moves in common with distractors.     

Young children's free responses to anomalous commands

Twelve children, 21–34 months old, six in R. Brown's Stage I and six in Stages II and III, responded to commands varying in length, grammaticality, and meaning. All of the children responded significantly less often when the commands were situationally anomalous and/or ungrammatical. Results failed to replicate the results of E. Shipley, E. Smith, and L. Gleitman (Language, 1969, 44, 332–342) and J. Wetstone and B. Friedlander (Child Development, 1973, 44, 743–750). The results also suggest that young children rely heavily upon situational cues in their earliest comprehension of adult speech, and this supports arguments made by J. Strohner and K. Nelson (Child Development, 45, 567–576) and R. Chapman and J. Miller (Journal of Speech and Hearing, 1975, 18, 355–371). Since subjects rely upon nonlinguistic cues to respond appropriately, syntactic competence cannot be inferred from apparent comprehension.