When a Cultural Prohibition is Effective: A Field Investigation1

Three conditions have been hypothesized by Allport (1934) to be necessary for normative compliance to occur: (a) the required behavior must seem to serve a purpose; (b) the required behavior must be described in a rule or law; (c) a fairly large proportion of the population must perform the required behavior. Evidence supporting each of the three hypotheses is reviewed. The presence or strength of three variables related to each of the three conditions was varied factorially in an experimental field study of conformity to a prohibition against pedestrian traffic. The three hypotheses were strongly supported: Significantly more pedestrians corriplied the greater the strength of the factors related to the conditions. No interactions were found between variables. In addition, no differences between males and females and between a campus and a suburban sample were obtained. The results are discussed in terms of the normative elements of cultural conformity and a distinction is made between true conformity and cultural conformity.     

Independent contexts for category ratings: A range-frequency analysis

Subjects were instructed to rate with a single set of categories an intermingled series of smaller squares and larger circles, establishing a separate scale of size for each domain. The major finding was that the scale established for one domain was independent of the skewing of sizes in the other domain. However, subjects were also able to combine the two domains into a single context when instructed to do so, particularly when the smallest circle was only slightly larger than the largest square. A range-frequency analysis of the rating suggests that under certain conditions the endpoints defining the subjective range depend upon the stimulus frequencies: the subjective endpoint is more extreme when the closest stimuli are presented with greater relative frequency.     

Book reviews

SINGER, J. L. (Ed.). The Child's World of Make-Believe. New York: Academic Press. 1973. PP. 294. £5.75.

CRUE, B. L. (Ed.). Pain Research and Treatment. New York: Academic Press. 1975. Pp. 417. £12.50.

BEILIN, H. Studies in the Cognitive Basis of Language Development. New York: Academic Press. 1975. Pp. 420. £11.25.

ROLLS, E. T. The Brain and Reward. Oxford: Pergamon Press. 1975. Pp. 115. £3.00.

GAZZANIGA, M. S. and BLAKEMORE, C. Handbook of Psychobiology. New York and London: Academic Press. 1975. Pp. 639. £15.15.

KULLER, R. (Ed.). Architectural Psychology. Stroudsberg: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross. 1973. Pp. 450. S.Kr. 69.

CANTER, D. and LEE, T. (Eds). Psychology and the Built Environment. London: Architectural Press. 1974. Pp. 213. £7.50.

CLARE, A. Psychiatry in Dissent. Controversial Issues in Thought and Practice. London: Tavistock Publications. 1976. Pp. xvii +438. £7.50 (hardback); £4.00 (paperback).

RACHMAN, S. J. and PHILIPS, C. Psychology and Medicine. London: Temple Smith. 1975. PP. 223. £3.75.

VURPILLOT, ELIANE. The Visual World of the Child. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1976. Pp. 372. £9.50.

FALMAGNE, R. J. (Ed.). Reasoning: Representation and Process. London and New York: Wiley. 1975. Pp. 275. £10.15.

FANT, G. and TATHAM, M. A. (Eds). Auditory Analysis and Pevception of Speech. London: Academic Press. 1975. Pp. 564. £12.00.     

Relative aversiveness of subcutaneous shock and footshock in the rat

Relative aversiveness of subcutaneous shock and footshock was assessed by means of a spatial preference technique. Subcutaneous shock was less aversive than footshock by a factor of 10, except at near lethal shock intensities. where receptor-cell hyperpola rization. electrocauterization, and/or muscular tetanization may have occurred     

A constant-current shock source for providing direct or alternating current output

A vacuum-tube constant-current shock source. providing ac, smooth dc, and pulsating dc output is described. In addition to output flexibility. the shock source is compact, inexpensive to construct. and has undergone 4 years of testing and laboratory use. Operating instructions, theory of operation, and suggested modifications are included along with performance specifications.     

Deafness, spelling and rhyme: How spelling supports written word and picture rhyming skills in deaf subjects

Orally trained, congenitally deaf adolescents and hearing, reading-age-matched control subjects made rhyme judgements for pictures and for written words. Hearing children performed the task accurately. By contrast, the deaf group were very poor at rhyme judgement for words and for pictures. For hearing children, word rhyme judgement was more accurate when the words were congruent in their spelling pattern (e.g. bat/hat), less accurate when the spelling pattern of the rhyming words was incongruent (hair/bear). Deaf subjects showed an even more pronounced effect of spelling congruence; their ability to match for rhyme when written words did not share the same spelling pattern was extremely poor. Moreover, spelling congruence predicted deaf subjects' picture rhyming skills.

We conclude that oral training for deaf people does not always permit them to achieve a reliable phonological representation of speech from lip-reading and residual hearing alone. Instead they use the written spelling of the word. This result is not predicted from some previous results that suggest that orally trained deaf people can make direct, spontaneous use of rhyme in the processing of visually presented material.     

Agency,communion, and gender as predictors of communication style and being liked in adult male-female dyads

Agency, communion, and gender were compared as predictors of communication style in the conversations of 76 unacquainted pairs of male-female college students. Each dyad was given a popular issue to discuss for 5 min. Agency and communion were measured using Spence and Helmreich's (Masculinity and Femininity: Their Psychological Dimensions, Correlates, and Antecedents, Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1978) Personal Attributes Questionnaire. Self-perceived agency was significantly associated with verbal assertiveness: High-agency persons used fewer indirect statements and fewer passive self-references than low-agency persons. Nonsignificant trends indicated that self-perceived communication tended to be associated with interpersonal involvement: High-communion persons used fewer impersonal references and were liked more than low-communion persons.An earlier version of this paper was presented in the Symposium on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language and Gender at the 91st annual convention of the American Psychological Association, Anaheim, California, August 1983.Several people contributed to this study in various ways. Conversations with various friends and colleagues were important inspirations for the research. In particular, I would like to thank Robert de Mayo. Gina Ralke, Jorge Reyes, James Bucci, and Mark Michaels were outstanding members of a research team that led to the design and eventual implementation of this study. Ronald Gelb, Donna Brennan, and Lynda Kern also assisted. Nancy Henley is especially appreciated for her support and advice. William McCarthy and an anonymous reviewer made helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.     

Phoneme-monitoring reaction time and preceding prosody: Effects of stop closure duration and of fundamental frequency

In an earlier study, it was shown that listeners can use prosodic cues that predict where sentence stress will fall; phoneme-monitoring RTs are faster when the preceding prosody indicates that the word bearing the target will be stressed. Two experiments which further investigate this effect are described. In the first, it is shown that the duration of the closure preceding the release of the target stop consonant burst does not affect the RT advantage for stressed words. In the second, it is shown that fundamental frequency variation is not a necessary component of the prosodic variation that produces the predicted-stress effect. It is argued that sentence processing involves a very flexible use of prosodic information.