Perceived influences on career choices of eleventh graders: Sex,SES, and ethnic group comparisons

The project Sex-Role Values and Career Decision Making was conducted to examine the responses of eleventh-grade high school students to sex-role-related values and to relate these responses to their educational and occupational aspirations. The concern of the present article is the influence of Sex, SES (socioeconomic status), and ethnicity on the reasons students give for their career choices. While students' responses were found to be generally similar across Sex, SES, and ethnic groups, the results indicated that females were significantly less likely than males to mention practical considerations, money, prestige, or status as elements in their career decisions, and more likely to mention helping others and personal achievement. The implications of these sex differences for sex equality in the career selection process are considered.The project reported on in this article was performed pursuant to a grant from the National Institute of Education, Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the National Institute of Education, and no official endorsement by the National Institute of Education should be inferred.     

Leadership Style and Leader Title

In a 2 by 4 design, leadership style (authoritarian versus democratic) was varied against form of address (Mr., Ms., Miss, Mrs.) in a simulated small group case study. Subjects (374 college and high school students) read the case study and then rated their reactions to the leaderson behavioral differential factors of "subordination" and "friendship." These ratings indicate significant effects due to leader style (i.e., greater subordination and stronger friendship attraction to democratic rather than authoritarian leaders). Leader title produced no significantmain effects although authoritarian leaders using the title Ms. evoked higher subordination (p <.001) than other authoritarian leaders.     

Name ambiguity and androgyny

Subjects with gender-ambiguous names or nicknames (i.e., names that can belong to either males or females) were compared on Bem's androgyny scale to subjects having common or uncommon first names or nicknames to determine if name ambiguity was related to sex-role identification. The results showed that for our sample of college undergraduates (N=489), both males (N=246) and females (N=243) with ambiguous nicknames (e.g., Pat, Tony, Marty) were more often classified as androgynous on the Bem inventory than were subjects with uncommon, common, or no nicknames. Ambiguous first names were unrelated to the androgyny scale. Name and nickname ambiguity were not related to liking of name, self-concept, family tradition, social class differences, or grade point average.A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association, Atlanta, March 1978.     

Motivating People to be Physically Active: Self-Persuasion vs. Balanced Decision Making1

Female members of an adult physical fitness club, who had been inactive for a period of at least one month, were assigned to one of four treatment groups. A control group received no treatment while the other three groups underwent different treatments during a telephone interview. A regular call-up group received a standard club telephone interview advocating greater participation in the club's activities; a decision-balance-sheet group completed a list of anticipated gains and losses for attending the club's activities; a positive-outcomes-only group (i.e., self-persuasion condition) completed a list of anticipated gains for attending the club's activities. Attendance rates for both the decision balance-sheet group and the self-persuasion group were better than for the control group. Also, attendance for the self-persuasion group was significantly better than for the regular club call-up group, Results are discussed in terms of self-persuasion and emotional inoculation processes with respect to behavioral change and behavioral maintenance.     

Behavioral adaptation to fixed-interval and fixed-time food delivery in golden hamsters

Food-deprived golden hamsters in a large enclosure received food every 30 sec contingent on lever pressing, or free while their behavior was continuously recorded in terms of an exhaustive classification of motor patterns. As with other species in other situations, behavior became organized into two main classes. One (terminal behaviors) increased in probability throughout interfood intervals; the other (interim behaviors) peaked earlier in interfood intervals. Which class an activity belonged to was independent of whether food was contingent on lever pressing. When food was omitted on some of the intervals (thwarting), the terminal activities began sooner in the next interval, and different interim activities changed in different ways. The interim activities did not appear to be schedule-induced in the usual sense. Rather, the hamsters left the area of the feeder when food was not due and engaged in activities they would normally perform in the experimental environment.     

Memory for information about individuals

A semantic network model is structured so that usually there is only one node in the network to represent each individual. A series of experiments were performed to determine under what circumstances subjects would show unitary memory for individuals. The experiments were principally concerned with the speed with which subjects could retrieve the facts and make inferences from them. Subjects learned facts about individuals which could be referred to by two labels. The semantic network model predicted that subjects would integrate facts learned to one label with facts learned to the other. Evidence for such integration was found, but only when considerable effort was taken to encourage the subjects to develop a unitary impression of the individual. The situation was also investigated in which the subjects did not learn of the identity between the two labels until after the facts were learned to each label individually. There was evidence that subjects set up two nodes to represent the. individual, one for each label. There was also evidence that, upon learning of the identity, subjects chose to abandon one of the two nodes and to start a process of copying information from the to-be-abandoned node to the preserved node.     

Motivation×Expectancy×Value: A functional measurement approach

Functional measurement methodology was applied to test theMotive×Expectancy×Value (MEV) model of human motivation. Subjects judged the value of hypothetical games of chance in which hunger, chance of winning a sandwich, and sandwich preference were varied along with similar information concerning a drink. Graphical tests showed excellent agreement between the data and the theoretical properties of parallelism and linear fan shape. Exact statistical tests of goodness of fit confirmed these graphical tests. Despite the complexity of the task, which required integration of six pieces of information, subjects' judgments obeyed a simple cognitive algebra. Applications of functional measurement were suggested for approach-avoidance conflict, level of aspiration, work motivation, and achievement motivation. These methods can provide exact tests of the behavior models in terms of the subjective values at the level of the individual. They thus provide a unified nomothetic-ideographic approach to motivation theory.This work was supported by National Science Foundation grants MBS 74-19124 and BNS 75-21235, and by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health to the Center for Human Information Processing, University of California, San Diego. We wish to thank Donna Rodes for her assistance in the conduct of this experiment.     

Articulatory organization in digit perception and recall

In two experiments, tape-recorded strings of seven recall digits were preceded by a redundant stimulus prefix containing either one or three digits. The prefix and recall digits (1) were articulatorily continuous, or (2)were made discontinuous by tape-splicing, or (3)were made discontinuous by deliberately spoken prosodic contour. Subjects were instructed to ignore the redundant prefixes and report only the recall digits. The main results were: (1)Compared to strings preceded by no prefix, all prefix conditions reduced recall. (2)Three-digit prefixes reduced recall less than one-digit prefixes. (3) In most cases, spliced prefixes reduced recall less than intact prefixes. Acoustic waveform measurements are presented to provide a partial account for the results.     

Effect of level of confusability on reporting letters from briefly presented visual displays

In a report paradigm, two letters are presented on a trial which are either confusable(e.g., P and R) or nonconfusable (e.g., P and M) in terms of visual features. Across trials, interletter distance, retinal location, duration, and visual field are varied. Identification accuracy on confusable trials was generally lower than on nonconfusable trials, and this effect of level of confusability increased with distance from the fixation point, decreased with duration, and was smaller on the central letter than on the more peripheral letter. A quantitative model, incorporating aspects of the interactive channels model (Estes, 1972) and feature perturbation model (Wolford, 1975), is developed and tested. One parameter of the model measures the effective similarity between two letters after lateral inhibition has occurred, and other parameters measure the probability of feature perturbation in foveal and peripheral directions.