I can see myself helping: The effect of self-awareness on prosocial behaviour

Many studies indicate that increasing self-awareness leads to individuals reflecting on their values and ideals (Silvia & Duval, 2001). This self-reflection appears to increase prosocial behaviour (Berkowitz, 1987). However, previously studies typically manipulated self-awareness in situations in which the individual may have felt pressure from the researcher to help. Thus, experimenter pressure to behave prosocially confounds the self-awareness explanation provided in past research. We used a novel experimental paradigm to manipulate self-awareness and remove the researcher's presence to decrease the likelihood that the participant would conform to experimenter demand. Participants were 36 college students (M_age = 19.52; 25 women). The results indicated a strong probability that the experimental condition participants were more prosocial than control condition participants. These findings provide additional support for the hypothesis that self-reflection increases prosocial behaviour, even without experimenter demands. These findings and the importance of studying objective self-awareness in light of the coronavirus are discussed.     

Predicting Substance Use from Religiosity/Spirituality in Individuals with Cystic Fibrosis

Journal of Religion and Health - Religiosity and spirituality predict lower alcohol and other substance use in community samples of adolescents and adults. However, the roles of religiosity and...     

Creating Creativity: A Behavior Analytic Approach

The Psychological Record - Creativity and innovation have brought about phenomenal changes throughout human history. Art, science, medicine, industry, and technology have all grown through creative...     

Socially Situated Transmission: The Bias to Transmit Negative Information is Moderated by the Social Context

Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large-scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals.     

Justice in epistemic gaps: The ‘proof paradox’ revisited

This paper defends the heretical view that sometimes we ought to assign legal liability based on statistical evidence alone. Recent literature focuses on potential unfairness to the defending party if we rely on bare statistics. Here, I show that capitulating in response to ‘epistemic gaps’—cases where there is a group of potential harmers but an absence of individuating evidence—can amount to a serious injustice against the party who has been harmed. Drawing on prominent civil law litigation involving pharmaceutical and industrial negligence, the overall aim is to illustrate moral pitfalls stemming from the popular idea that it is never appropriate to rely on bare statistics when settling a legal dispute.     

Socialization within day care: A brief review

Studies examining the effects of day care are reviewed. Little evidence was found indicating a negative impact on child development. A number of weaknesses in the day care literature were pointed out, including problems of ecological validity and failure to examine for differential effects. Suggestions for future research are made, among them a “natural history” of day care and studies of children who have experienced trauma.     

Evidence for the Big Five in analyses of familiar English personality adjectives

Studies of the natural language are a prime source of the Big-Five model, yet the factor analysis of a large, representative, and non-clustered set of English-language personality adjectives in a large sample has not yet been published. In order to test the hypothesis that finding the Big Five depends on biasing the variable selection with an investigator's preferred non-familiar terms, we present the factor analysis of 435 familiar adjectives in a combined sample (N=899) of 507 self- and 392 peer ratings. The five-factor solution reproduced the Big Five with high clarity, demonstrating generally very high correlations with Goldberg's adjective markers of the Big Five. The Intellect factor had a more moderate correlation, due to its de-emphasis of the creativity components of Factor V, a phenomenon that may occur commonly with the lexical Intellect factor.     

Cumulative consequences of stigma: Possessing multiple concealable stigmatized identities is associated with worse quality of life

Large health disparities exist between stigmatized and nonstigmatized groups. In addition to experiencing and anticipating greater discrimination, members of stigmatized groups also tend to demonstrate greater ruminative tendencies in response, which may lead to these poor health outcomes. Even among stigmatized groups, differences in the visibility of stigma lead to different mechanisms through which stigma takes its toll. Previous work has primarily focused on the impact of belonging to a single marginalized group; however, people often belong to multiple marginalized groups, and this likely affects both their health outcomes and their anticipation of stigma. In the current study, we focused on individuals with concealable stigmatized identities (CSIs)—socially stigmatized identities that are not immediately apparent to others—and created a measure of concealable marginalization that captures multiple group memberships. We predicted that those possessing a greater number of CSIs would anticipate more stigma from others, and, in turn, ruminate more about the stigma, which would negatively impact the health. Surveying N = 288 adults with CSIs, we found that possessing a greater number of marginalized concealable identities predicted worse self-reported physical quality of life. These relationships were partially mediated by greater anticipated stigma and brooding rumination in regard to their CSI. This work illuminates a more complete picture of how living with CSIs can take its toll on health.