Extra-legal factors and product liability: The influence of mock jurors' demographic characteristics and intuitions about the cause of an injury

Two experiments were performed to investigate the role of extra-legal factors in a simulated product liability trial. In cases where the factual evidence was identical, subjects' liability judgments varied as a function of the case-specific factor of the alleged source of the plaintiffs injury. In deciding cases differently depending on the alleged cause, subjects relied on intuitions about what injury sources are more or less likely to cause a certain kind of injury. Juror-specific factors also influenced subjects' verdicts. There was no difference between students and non-students, but race and SEC—factors that are often correlated with student status—did affect subjects' verdicts. Low-SES and minority subjects were more likely to find the defendant liable than high-SES and white subjects. The results are considered in terms of general decision-making processes, and the implications for jury selection and mock jury research are discussed.     

Carnapian inductive logic for Markov chains

Carnap's Inductive Logic, like most philosophical discussions of induction, is designed for the case of independent trials. To take account of periodicities, and more generally of order, the account must be extended. From both a physical and a probabilistic point of view, the first and fundamental step is to extend Carnap's inductive logic to the case of finite Markov chains. Kuipers (1988) and Martin (1967) suggest a natural way in which this can be done. The probabilistic character of Carnapian inductive logic(s) for Markov chains and their relationship to Carnap's inductive logic(s) is discussed at various levels of Bayesian analysis.     

Intuitive Perceptions of Decision-making Strategy: Naive Assessors' Concepts of Integrative Complexity

Although there are measurable differences in integrative complexity among solutions that individuals generate in dealing with problems, it is uncertain to what extent people comprehend, recognize, and have preferences among different levels of complexity. Integrative complexity is a function of differentiation (the perception of several attributes within, or perspectives about, a topic) and integration (combining the differentiated characteristics in an interactive or synthesizing solution). The current paper reports two experiments dealing with how university students perceive, interpret, and choose among solutions differing in complexity. Experiment 1 showed that subjects accurately rated the complexity of described solutions differing along the continuum, but that their assessment of their own responses differed from the results of expert scoring. Their self-estimated complexity was highly correlated with their preferences, and preferred complexity was reliably higher than either expert- or self-assessed complexity of subject-generated solutions. Subjects were able to hypothesize quite accurately about environmental and endogenous factors likely to affect complexity. Experiment 2 found that in response to problem scenarios, solutions selected as being potentially most effective were consistently more complex than solutions that participants considered themselves most likely to use. The idea of complexity seems to be intuitively recognizable and understandable by untrained subjects: They can and do distinguish among problem solutions (self-generated or presented) that vary on that dimension, and are able to assess accurately the effects of relevant variables. Such subjects also share the bias shown by experts in favour of the superiority of more complex approaches.     

Short term Memory Impairment and Arithmetical Ability

We document the dissociation of preserved calculation skills in a patient with impaired auditory short-term memory. The patient (MRF) had a memory span of three digits. Furthermore, he showed rapid decrement in performance of single digits and letters with both auditory and visual presentation in the Brown-Peterson forgetting task. Analysis of his calculation skills revealed a normal ability to solve auditorily presented multidigit addition and subtraction problems such as 173 + 68 and to execute the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (Sampson, 1956, 1958; Gronwall, 1977). In addition, his performance on other tests, including arithmetic manipulation of natural numbers, decimals and fractions, approximation, magnitude, ratio, and percentage, appeared to be normal (Hitch, 1978b). It is argued that these findings require a revision of Baddeley and Hitch's (1974) concept of the function of working memory.     

Event-related brain potentials elicited by rhyming and non-rhyming pictures differentiate subgroups of reading disabled adolescents

Event-related brain potentials were recorded while disabled adolescent subjects read and judged whether two sequentially presented pictures had names that rhymed. Subjects with relatively good phonetic skills displayed an N400 priming effect, i.e., a significant reduction in the amplitude of the negative peak, occurring approximately 400 msec post-stimulus, for pictures with names that rhymed with preceding pictures as compared with pictures that had names that did not rhyme with the prime. No such effect was evident for subjects with relatively poor phonetic skills. This lack of an N400 priming effect provides evidence for a reduction in neural capacity and/or activation during phonological processing in the subjects with poor phonological skills. Demonstrating the N400 priming effect to be stronger in one group of reading disabled subjects, compared to another, supports the position that specific subtypes of reading disability exist. In addition to the stronger N400 priming effect, the phonetically stronger group also exhibited an enhanced negativity, from 700 to 1,000 msec after target stimulus onset, compared to phonetically inferior subjects. This finding replicates earlier work and possibly reflects a higher level of confidence in the group with better phonetic skills.     

Occupational prestige: A sex-neutral concept?

This study addresses the generalizability of measures of occupational prestige to men and women. Respondents were asked to evaluate the prestige of occupations and to rate male and female incumbents in these occupations. Results suggest that the general prestige of occupations is best predicted by the sex-typical jobholder. This research demonstrates that the seemingly sex-neutral concept of occupational prestige incorporates strong sex-linked assumptions. Implications of these findings for occupational prestige and for the social sciences in general are discussed.     

Conversational skill and locus of perception

The present study attempted to identify behavioral skills associated with global perceptions of communication competence and to determine if the relationship between competence and skills varies as a function of perceptual locus. Fifteen dyadic conversations were videotaped. Each interactant rated self and partner and was rated by four observers who viewed each tape. Results indicated that subjects' perceptions of their partners' skills accounted for 87% of the variance in subjects' ratings of partners' competence and 80% of the variance in subjects'self-perceived confirmation. Observers' ratings of subjects' skills predicted 83% of the variance in observers' ratings of subjects' competence. Observers'ratings of subjects'skills were unrelated to subjects' self-rated competence.     

Depth of processing: When the principle of congruity fails

Two factors, level of processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) and congruity (Schulman, 1974), known to have large effects on the recall of experimenter-provided responses to questions, were examined in a series of five incidental learning experiments using subject-generated responses. The data show that manipulation of level of processing has the same effect on recall of subjectgenerated responses as it does on experimenter-provided responses. However, the effect of congruity is reversed for subject-generated responses. The data suggest that the difficulty of generating unrelated responses (“incongruous“ items) may account, at least in part, for the failure of the “principle of congruity“ with subject-generated responses.