The revelation effect for autobiographical memory: A mixture-model analysis

Participants provided information about their childhood by rating their confidence about whether they had experienced various events (e.g., “broke a window playing ball”). On some trials, participants unscrambled a key word from the event phrase (e.g., wdinwo—window) or an unrelated word (e.g., gnutge—nugget) before seeing the event and giving their confidence ratings. The act of unscrambling led participants to increase their confidence that the event occurred in their childhood, but only when the confidence rating immediately followed the act of unscrambling. This increase in confidence mirrors the “revelation effect” observed in word recognition experiments. In the present article, we analyzed our data using a new signal detection mixture distribution model that does not require the researcher to know the veracity of memory judgments a priori. Our analysis reveals that unscrambling a key word or an unrelated word affects response bias and discriminability in autobiographical memory tests in ways that are very similar to those that have been previously found for word recognition tasks.     

The Reluctance to Expose Dangerous Lies1

Three studies examined a hypothesized inhibition against exposing a lie. In Experiment 1, 21 men and 27 women were placed in conditions in which their nonexposure of another's lie resulted either in the risk of an experimenter's data being contaminated (impersonal consequence), or in the risk of the subject contracting pinkeye (personal consequence). Each person was given the opportunity to expose the lie, first in a group setting, and later in a private setting. Eighty-three percent of the subjects in the impersonal condition and 77% of the subjects in the personal condition failed to expose the lie. Experiment 2 explored the phenomenon further by assessing whether subjects not in the presence of individuals other than the liar would be more likely to confront the lie. As in Experiment 1, it was found that most subjects did not reveal the lie, regardless of consequence condition of setting. In Experiment 3, it was anticipated that objective self-awareness would interact with consequence information to produce more exposing behavior in the personal-consequence condition, but not in the impersonal condition. Results generally confirmed the hypothesis; a significant interaction of Consequence x Self-Awareness Condition was found.     

Distinctive Members: The Effects of Solo Arrangements on Evaluations of Solos and Similar Others

This study investigated the effect of group composition on judgments of African Americans. White male and female college students responded to photographic slides of female work groups in which the racial composition of the group was systematically altered to represent varying degrees of distinctiveness. Each participant judged the effectiveness of individual group members, as well as the competency of the overall group. Findings suggested that work groups which contained a distinctive (or solo) group member may affect judgments about similar others encountered later who share the solo's rare characteristic. Results are discussed in terms of the effect of these types of arrangements in organizational settings, and implications of these findings for practitioners and managers are discussed.     

Commitment to work in immigrants: Its functions and peculiarities

It was assumed that in order to cope with the crisis of immigration, immigrants would have low expectations regarding their vocational future while maintaining a high commitment to work. The meaningfulness and the centrality of work (as components of the commitment to work), work values, and work attitudes were tested in samples of 74 immigrants, of 66 old-time white-collar employees, and of 35 ongoing executives, by means of the semantic differential technique and by a projective personality test. An adaption of Eysenck's neuroticism test was also administered. Immigrants evaluated career and work-related objects in a less positive manner in comparison with the other samples, but scored higher in work centrality and job involvement, and held more positive attitudes toward authority figures in the place of work. No significant differences in neuroticism were found.     

Modularity in locating Wh-gaps

In this paper we report our finding that the parsing routine responsible for locating the deep-structure position of a wh-phrase operates independently of semantic/pragmatic knowledge, suggesting a modular organization of the human sentence processor. Specifically, wh-phrases that were semantically implausible as a direct object of the matrix verb were nonetheless reactivated in that position. Further, reactivation of the wh-phrase was observed despite the fact that the matrix verbs were three-place predicates (e.g.,remind) — a class of verbs which, some experiments suggest, allow interactive effects (e.g., Tanenhaus, Boland, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1989). We argue that this disparity in findings is due to the difference between the cross-modal lexical priming (CMLP) task used in the present study, and the tasks used by Tanenhaus et al.We gratefully acknowledge Penny Prather, Catherine Stern, and David Swinney for their technical assistance, and also Brian Hickok. This work has also benefitted from helpful discussions with Michael Tanenhaus and Stephen Crain, as well as from the comments of two anonymous reviewers.     

Immigrants preparing for their second career: The behavioral strategies adopted

On the basis of the assumption that career change for immigrants is not generally anticipated and is characterized by status incongruence, this research tested the action of the dissonance model on 89 immigrants who were obliged to prepare for a new occupation. Four coping strategies were found combining high vs low level of self-image and vocational involvement with positive vs negative attitudes toward work and authority figures at the places of work. The comparative efficiency of these strategies was tested—both with regard to an objective vocational criterion and to satisfaction and optimism regarding the future.