Research note: implicit conservatism in liberal religion: British Quakers as an ‘uncertain sect’

This research note takes Steve Bruce's analysis of secularisation within liberal religious groups and applies it to British Quakerism, noted for its permissiveness towards theology. It contends that Bruce has failed to allow for a conservative ‘behavioural creed’ operating to maintain conformity and elements of certainty within liberal groups. It also argues that the emphasis on a shared concept of ‘towards’ or ‘perhaps’ theology within the group, while appearing liberal, makes demands on its members which are more conformist and sectarian than may have at first appeared and which may help safeguard the future of the group. It is not that Bruce's analysis of liberal groups is necessarily wrong, but that ‘liberal’ groups may be less liberal than they first appear.     

Dissociable learning processes,associative theory,and testimonial reviews: A comment on Smith and Church (2018)

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Smith and Church (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25, 1565–1584 2018) present a “testimonial” review of dissociable learning processes...     

Social network members' responses to friends' breakup false alarms

Social networks influence romantic relationships through friends' support or lack of support of the union. However, the consequences of friends repeatedly telling other friends their relationship was going to end but failing to actually terminate the relationship are unclear. Guided by the false alarm effect (FAE), and data from both student (N = 273) and noncollege (N = 226) samples, it was found that breakup false alarms were associated with increases in both positive and negative responses. In addition, when participants were friends with both partners, breakup false alarms were associated with “feeling caught” between the friends. Findings generally support the FAE and paint a complex picture of how social network members react to their close friends' tumultuous relationships.     

Compliance Dynamics Within a Simulated Friendship Network I: The Effects of Agency,Tactic, and Node Centrality

This study investigated the structural causes of perceptions of power and the way that these perceptions create expectations regarding influence attempts. It applied measures derived from dynamic social impact theory to model predictions of target compliance and agent response to an influence attempt. Sociograms provided the structure within which compliance dynamics were investigated. Results from an experiment (N = 458) showed that structural positions with greater eigenvector and betweenness centrality generated stronger perceived power, and that observers' attributions regarding responses to a compliance request follow a systematic three‐step process—agent acts, target responds, and agent reacts. The model, reflecting agency, influence tactic, and power, formalizes the attributional process that observers employ when evaluating compliance requests.     

Wholistic and analytic stimulus processing: The development of selective perceptual strategies

This experiment reports an investigation of the development of selective processing strategies as subjects become increasingly more practised at a serial self-paced RT task. It demonstrates the effect a preceding stimulus can have on the analysis of a current signal and the development of active analytic strategies in favour of passive wholistic processing, with practice. The stimuli used were letters with irrelevant visual noise dot patterns superimposed on them. The letter, or the dot pattern, or both, could be repeated on successive trials. Early in practice repetition of both stimulus components simultaneously produced short reponse latencies relative to repetition of the letter alone. The number of noise dots markedly affected RT. Late in practice, however, letter repetition RTs were small, irrespective of whether or not the noise dot pattern was repeated. Furthermore, the number of noise dots no longer had an effect on the RT to these stimulus transitions. The results suggest that subjects appear to be able to select relevant information to process as they become progressively more practised, even though there is evidence that they compare the current stimulus with an iconic representation of the immediately preceding one.