Estimating the Organizational Costs of Sexual Harassment: The Case of the U.S. Army

A general model for estimating the organizational costs of sexual harassment in the workplace is proposed along with model-specific costing formulas. A partial implementation of the model is applied to sexual harassment incidence data for the Army gathered as part of a large-scale survey of the U.S. military services. Results indicate that the total annual cost of sexual harassment in the U.S. Army in 1988 was over $250,000,000. Organizational implications are discussed.     

A methodology to facilitate occupational task grouping: Meeting the demands of training analysis and planning

Methods for grouping occupational tasks are required to support a broad range of personnel actions and organizational planning activities. Having subject matter experts sort tasks into groups is the only methodology generally recognized for these purposes. For many applications, however, and training in particular, analyses that cover large areas of an organization may be required. For such uses, manual sorting is costly and may be infeasible. A new method, based on statistical clustering using task coperformance, is described. Results indicate that this method can replicate much of the structure of the experts’ groups and so can be used to facilitate task grouping. Implications of this new approach are discussed.     

Pascal external functions for Strawberry Tree’s “Analog Connection Workbench” on the Macintosh

Strawberry Tree Incorporated is one of several manufacturers of input-output boards for the Macintosh computer. The Analog Connection Workbench program (Strawberry Tree Inc.) provides an icon-based programming system for these input-output boards that has most of the functions that are necessary to implement behavioral experiments. However, experimental psychologists may frequently encounter needs that the Workbench program cannot easily meet. Because the Workbench is programmed in C, whereas many psychologists are more expert in programming in Pascal, we describe, in tutorial fashion, how the user may define new external functions in Pascal on the Macintosh and integrate these functions into the icon-based Workbench programming system.     

Performance,attitudes, and professional socialization of women in academia

Junior faculty at two universities in the Northeast were surveyed regarding their objective job performance as well as attitudes toward work, availability of role models, self-perception and self-evaluation, and incidence and type of sexual discrimination. There were no significant sex differences in marital status; however, two-thirds of the married females reported having no children, whereas less than one-third of the married males had no children. Female junior faculty reported spending somewhat more time on work-related activities at home, generally less willingness to cancel class, somewhat higher likelihood of editing books and/or journals, but less likelihood of writing books and/or journal articles. Males generally felt they were above average in comparison to their colleagues and contemporaries; and they showed a fairly accurate appraisal of their standing vis-á-vis others on the publication dimension. In contrast, females rated themselves significantly lower than the males in comparison to others and showed little discriminative judgment of their relative standing on the publication dimension. Differences in the early socialization of men and women may result in the differential professional socialization of female faculty. Subtle areas of sexual discrimination in the academic experience are suggested. Finally, the authors caution against overgeneralizing from these results.     

Delay of stimulus presentation after the saccade in visual search

Delay of stimulus onset after each saccade in visual search decreased oculomotor and manual reaction times, with a greater effect occurring for the oculomotor response. The saccadic oculomotor reaction might have been facilitated in three ways: by the facilitation of reaction with a foreperiod warning stimulus, by the attenuation of saccadic suppression effects due to the stimulus onset delay, or by the use of a strategy of preprogramming fixation durations. The results support a model of visual search using preprogrammed control of visual fixation durations.     

Response bias associated with asking former study participants to assist in new research

To limit research costs, former parent-participants from a completed pediatric neurology study were asked to assist with new research on behavioral contributors to childhood injury. An evaluation of the response bias associated with this recontact effort showed that 224 parents who completed the survey did not differ from the 51 who failed to complete it in race, age, education, or income. Nonresponders were significantly less likely to be married than responders.     

Dynamic algebras: Examples,constructions, applications

Dynamic algebras combine the classes of Boolean (B 0) and regular (R ; *) algebras into a single finitely axiomatized variety (B R ) resembling an R-module with scalar multiplication . The basic result is that * is reflexive transitive closure, contrary to the intuition that this concept should require quantifiers for its definition. Using this result we give several examples of dynamic algebras arising naturally in connection with additive functions, binary relations, state trajectories, languages, and flowcharts. The main result is that free dynamic algebras are residually finite (i.e. factor as a subdirect product of finite dynamic algebras), important because finite separable dynamic algebras are isomorphic to Kripke structures. Applications include a new completeness proof for the Segerberg axiomatization of prepositional dynamic logic, and yet another notion of regular algebra.Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford, CA 94305 This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF grant no. MCS78-04338. Preparation of the present version was supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF grant number CCR-8814921.This paper originally appeared as Technical Memo #138, Laboratory for Computer Science, MIT, July 1979, and was subsequently revised, shortened, retitled, and published as [Pra80b]. After more than a decade of armtwisting I. Németi and H. Andréka finally persuaded the author to publish TM#138 itself on the ground that it contained a substantial body of interesting material that for the sake of brevity had been deleted from the STOC-80 version. The principal changes here to TM#138 are the addition of footnotes and the sections at the end on retrospective citations and reflections.     

Retrieval processes in perceptual recognition and cued recall: The influence of category size

The purpose of these experiments was to determine whether nonsemantic category size and other variables would influence perceptual recognition as they influence cued recall. Procedures developed by Jacoby and his associates were replicated with words belonging to either small or large nonsemantic categories and with recognition tested under bright-target/patterned-mask conditions. The results indicated that words belonging to larger nonsemantic sets were more difficult to identify. This finding and the results of other manipulations are discussed in relation to the interactive activation model and to the proposal that perceptual recognition performance is dependent on a retrieval process similar to that involved in recall prompted by nonsemantic cues.     

Aging and Inhibition of Unconsciously Processed Information: No Apparent Deficit

Young and older adults were compared on a cued recall task designed to show effects of activation and inhibition of unconsciously processed information. The number of associates related to the target words by prior experience was varied, and the targets were studied either in the absence or the presence of meaningfully related context cues. The number of associates of the target had an effect on recall when context cues were absent during study, suggesting that the associates had been activated and encoded during study. In contrast, when context cues were present during study, no effect of the number of target associates was observed, suggesting that the associates had been inhibited during study. Comparable activation and inhibition effects were obtained for younger and older subjects. The results suggested little or no age-related deficit in inhibition when the to-be-inhibited information was unconsciously processed and not brought to conscious awareness.