Intergroup fairness and bias in children

In recent years in research on intergroup relationships, the assumption has increasingly been made that discrimination dominates decisions when individuals allocate resources between (members of) own and other group. Conversely, in empirical studies of interpersonal decision-making, including an extensive literature on the development of children's allocation rules within dyadic relationships, it has been repeatedly observed that in dyadic relationships choices though responsive to various changes in the environment, are more strongly governed by fairness rules. The present research extends the interpersonal fairness paradigm to the intergroup case, and examines the effects of some of those variables, namely, children's age, input and attitudes toward other, that have been observed to influence choice behaviour within interpersonal relationships. The findings indicate that as children are socialized, fairness rules also play an increasing dominant role in intergroup allocation decisions, and that both relative input and the language of the outgroup influence such decisions. At the same time, there is some preliminary evidence to indicate that the relative strength of self-interest may be somewhat stronger in intergroup than in interpersonal relationships. Finally, a number of the issues that must be confronted in comparing the two more important forms of human social choices, interpersonal and intergroup decision-making, are considered.     

Processing resources and age differences in working memory

This study investigated the performance of young and old subjects on a modified version of the working memory task developed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974). Subjects were required to verify a set of sentences of varying complexity while they repeated aloud zero, two, or four words. The older subjects took longer to verify the sentences, especially when the sentences were grammatically complex, but the effect of concurrent memory load on verification latency was the same in both groups. These results cast doubt on the notion that there is an age-related decline in one general pool of processing resources. They also suggest that older people have greater difficulty with the active processing aspects, rather than with the passive holding aspects, of working memory tasks.     

Similar as well as dissimilar contextual stimuli increase rated similarity

Contextual stimuli from one category increase the rated similarity of stimuli from a second category. In Experiment 1, associates of one of the members of pairs of target words increased the rated similarity of the members slightly more than did much less similar contextual stimuli. In Experiment 2, contextual category names and good exemplars increased the rated similarity of pairs of poor to medium target exemplars and were also rated as more similar to these targets than the targets were to each other. In both cases, the category names resulted in the stronger effect. This ability of contextually similar stimuli to increase rated similarity opposes the distance-density and averaging-judgmental theories of the effect of context on similarity. However, the theory that a positive association exists between the perceived similarity of stimuli and the strength of the category to which they belong explains how both contextually dissimilar and contextually similar stimuli can increase rated similarity.