Evidence for an equality heuristic in social decision making

Subjects read a story in which five business partners needed to allocate the profits and expenses of the partnership in a fair and reasonable manner. Each of the partners worked independently and produced different gross incomes between $140 and $285. The gross incomes were to be divided into expenses and profits. Subjects were asked to fill in fair allocations in an accounting ledger. Three factors were manipulated: the target of the allocation task (either the expenses or the profits), the causal attributions for the differences in gross incomes (internal, external, or both), and whether the subjects were asked to fill in both columns (expenses and profits) or just one.

The results supported the hypothesis that the subjects heuristically used equality to make their allocations. Over 70% of the subjects allocated at least one column equally (although the frequency of equality use varied as a function of both the target of the allocation and the attribution given). Subjects allocated the target columns equally more often than non-target columns, even though equality for one column implied inequality for the other. The use of equality was also sensitive to the attribution given for the performance differences. Differences due to external factors, i.e., the number of people showing up at the market, produced the most equal allocations of profits (with unequal expenses) while the internal attribution produced the highest proportion of equal expense allocations (with unequal profits).     

Additional evidence for veridicality of perceptions based on physiognomic cues.

This study was designed to determine whether veridical interpersonal perceptions can be found on the basis of physiognomic cues. 21 male and female college students attempted to identify the correct social category [honor student, active or inactive in extracurricular events, and beauty queen (for female stimulus persons) or athlete (for male stimulus persons)] of 44 photographed male and female stimulus persons. Results demonstrated considerable veridicality, especially by male judges and of stimulus persons occupying categories which imply physical attributes.     

Comments on Richard Jeffrey

In this commentary, after first summarizing the three major theses of Jeffrey's paper ‘Probability and Falsification: Critique of the Popper Program’, and sketching out what I take to be his central argument, I criticize Jeffrey on two grounds. The first is that he has failed to explain why his version of Bayesianism provides us with better theories upon which to make decisions; the second is that he has offered a theory about decision-making that by-passes the important question: How can we make more rational decisions?     

A proposal for handling missing data

A method for dealing with the problem of missing observations in multivariate data is developed and evaluated. The method uses a transformation of the principal components of the data to estimate missing entries. The properties of this method and four alternative methods are investigated by means of a Monte Carlo study of 42 computer-generated data matrices. The methods are compared with respect to their ability to predict correlation matrices as well as missing entries. The results indicate that whenever there exists modest intercorrelations among the variables (i.e., average off diagonal correlation above .2) the proposed method is at least as good as the best alternative (a regression method) while being considerably faster and simpler computationally. Models for determining the best alternative based upon easily calculated characteristics of the matrix are given. The generality of these models is demonstrated using the previously published results of Timm.     

A simple device for the preparation of exactly aligned dichotic tapes

A system is described involving three tape recorders and a control device whereby dichotic tapes can be prepared with onset alignment accurate to a few milliseconds, or to a measured asynchrony if required. No modifications of any sort are necessary for the three tape recorders. The two channels are separately recorded in the speaker’s own time, the only requirement being that the separate words be spoken with an interword interval of 350 msec or more, to provide sufficient time for starting and stopping the system. A tone burst is placed directly on tape on another channel ahead of each word, the latter being delayed by recording in tandem through two tape recorders. The first recorder is set to the delay (echo, NAB) facility, while the tone is recorded directly on the second. Subsequently, when this is done for each item on the two speech channels, the device, described below. utilizes the tone bursts to align the two input recorders. It then rerecords each pair of words on to the third (output or dichotic) machine, to the desired synchrony/asynchrony, and interitem interval. The system can be left to align the two channels automatically. A maximum repetition rate of two dichotic pairs every 1.3 sec can be achieved with Revox A77 tape recorders.     

Visual search under conditions of very rapid sequential Input rates

The purposes of the present experiment were to provide information on rate of information processing in visual perception and to determine the degree to which the “sequential blanking” effect found by Mayzner. Tresselt, and Cohen (1966) constituted a limitation on rapid sequential input rates. A 10-channel tachisto scope was employed that permitted controlled durations of each of the 10 channels and the 9 inter channel intervals. The S’s task was one of visual search or detection in which he searched for a target letter among noise letters. A temporal interval forced-choice procedure was used. In addition to varying the rate at which letters were sequentially presented, various irregular temporal spatial orders of presentation of the letter sequences were employed and the direction and orientation of the display in the visual field was varied as was also the spacing between adjacent stimuli. No evidence of “sequential blanking” was found either in terms of the detection criterion or in the Ss’ phenomenal reports. Detection performance was as good at a rate of 2 1/2 msec per letter as it was at a rate of 30 msec per letter.     

Lang,S. K. W. and Gardiner,B. D. (2014). As they like it – culture-centred counsellor education in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand: A play on bicultural pluralism. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 42 (1), 73–85. doi.org./10.1080/03069885.2013.824949

In their article, Lang and Gardiner draw support from the Treaty of Waitangi to deconstruct cultural dominance and reconstruct a framework, which promotes bicultural pluralism in the new counsellor education programme at the Massey University. However, they omit significant details of the Treaty and therefore mislead the audience to think that the Treaty has always served its purpose to protect Māori and the colonisers all the time. They develop a new counselling framework ‘ARC?=?Attend Reflect Collaborate’ which merely describes what has happened or what should have happened in counselling. It fails to address the need to raise a counsellor's awareness of his or her own cultural identity and understanding of the worldview of a culturally different client before counselling starts.     

Safety in Numbers: A Policy‐Capturing Study of the Alibi Assessment Process

A policy‐capturing analysis of alibi assessments was conducted. University students (N = 65), law enforcement students (N = 21), and police officers (N = 11) were provided with 32 statements from individuals supporting a suspect's alibi (i.e., alibi corroborators) and asked to assess the believability of the alibi, the suspect's guilt, and whether they would arrest the suspect. Each statement was composed of five binary features (i.e., relationship between corroborator and accused, age of corroborator, amount of available corroborators, alibi corroborator's confidence in their account, and memorability of the target event). Results showed that there was much parity in the type of information used to assess alibis across the samples. Specifically, we found that 90% of participants' decision policies included the amount of corroborators. Participants also relied upon, albeit to a lesser extent, the suspect–corroborator relationship and the age of the corroborator when assessing the alibi. The potential implications of these findings for understanding how people assess alibi corroborators are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Collateral Reports and Cross-Informant Agreement about Adult Psychopathology in 14 Societies

To advance international mental health assessment, instruments that have been internationally validated are needed. To this end, we analyzed ratings from 14 societies on the Adult Behavior Checklist (ABCL), a collateral-report form parallel to the Adult Self-Report (ASR; Achenbach and Rescorla 2003) for ages 18 to 59. Both the ABCL and the ASR assess problems, personal strengths, and adaptive functioning. For a sample of 8322 see note below collaterals, we found strong consistency across societies regarding which ABCL problem items tended to obtain relatively low, medium, or high ratings. Most societal effect sizes (ESs) for problem scale scores were small to medium (< 13.9 %), but the ES for the ABCL Personal Strengths scale was 25 %. For most of the same participants (N = 8,302), we analyzed cross-informant agreement between self-reports on the ASR and collateral reports on the ABCL. Cross-informant correlations for problem scale scores averaged .47, with considerable societal variation. Problem score means were higher on the ASR than the ABCL in every society, but the size of the difference varied across societies. Mean item ratings on the ABCL and ASR were highly correlated within every society (mean r = .92), but within-dyad item rating agreement varied widely in every society (mean r = .39). In all societies, non-corroboration of self-reported deviance and of collateral-reported deviance was common. Overall findings indicated considerable similarity but also some important differences in collateral-reported problems and adaptive functioning across 14 societies.