How help during pregnancy can undermine self-efficacy and increase postpartum intentions to quit

Pregnancy reflects a common experience for women in today's workforce, yet recent data suggest that some women scale back or leave the workforce following childbirth. Considering these effects on women's careers, researchers have sought to understand the underlying dynamics of these decisions. Here, we explore a paradoxical reason for weakened postpartum career attitudes: help that women receive during pregnancy. We integrate stereotype threat and benevolent sexism theories to explain how the effects of help on postpartum intentions to quit may be transmitted through reductions in work self-efficacy. In doing so, we consider the role of perceived impact—or the extent to which help interferes with versus enables women's perceived ability to continue performing their work role. Results of a weekly diary study of 105 pregnant employees suggest that work-interfering help led to decreased self-efficacy for work during the following week. Furthermore, there was an indirect effect of average help received at work during pregnancy on postpartum intentions to quit the workforce through reductions in work self-efficacy that was stronger insofar as help was work-interfering versus work-enabling. Taken together, our results highlight unintended negative consequences that occur when others provide ineffective support to women at work during pregnancy.     

Gaining knowledge via other minds: Children's flexible trust in others as sources of information

In five experiments, we examined 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds’ understanding that they could gain knowledge indirectly from someone who had seen something they had not. Consistent with previous research, children judged that an informant, who had seen inside a box, knew its contents. Similarly, when an informant marked a picture to indicate her suggestion as to the content of the box, 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds trusted this more frequently when the informant had seen inside the box than when she had not. Going beyond previous research, 3‐ to 4‐year‐olds were also sensitive to informants’ relevant experience when they had to look over a barrier to see the marked picture, or ask for the barrier to be raised. Yet when children had to elicit the informant's suggestion, rather than just consult a suggestion already present, even 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds were no more likely to do so when the informant had seen the box's content than when she had not, and no more likely to trust the well‐informed suggestion than the uninformed one. We conclude that young children who can ask questions may not yet fully understand the process by which they can gain accurate information from someone who has the experience they lack.     

Adjustment in aging: the roles of life stress, hassles, and self-efficacy

This study examines the relationship of life stress, daily hassles, and perceived self-efficacy to adjustment in a community sample of 32 men and 32 women between ages 65 and 75. In a structured interview, negative life change events, daily hassles, self-efficacy, depression, psychosomatic symptoms, and negative well being were assessed. Both negative life events and daily hassles were related to psychological distress and physical symptoms for men, and hassles were associated with psychological distress and physical symptoms for women. An inverse relationship between self-efficacy and maladjustment was also found. Hassles showed the most powerful relationship to distress.     

Rivals without a cause? Relative performance feedback creates destructive competition despite aligned incentives

Whether people compete or cooperate with each other has consequences for their own performance and that of organizations. To explain why people compete or cooperate, previous research has focused on two main factors: situational outcome structures and personality types. Here, we propose that—above and beyond these two factors—situational cues, such as the format in which people receive feedback, strongly affect whether they act competitively, cooperatively, or individualistically. Results of a laboratory experiment support our theorizing: After receiving ranking feedback, both students and experienced managers treated group situations with cooperative outcome structures as competitive and were in consequence willing to forgo guaranteed financial gains to pursue a—financially irrelevant—better rank. Conversely, in dilemma situations, feedback based on the joint group outcome led to more cooperation than ranking feedback. Our study contributes to research on competition, cooperation, interdependence theory, forced ranking, and the design of information environments.     

Syntactic context and lexical access

Recent studies demonstrating that multiple meanings of an ambiguous word are initially accessed even when only one reading is syntactically appropriate with the preceding context can be criticized on at least two grounds. First, many of the syntactic contexts used were not truly restrictive, and, secondly, subjects may not have had time to integrate the context before processing the ambiguous word. In the present study, subjects listened to a sentence ending in an ambiguous word and then made a lexical decision to a target related to either the appropriate or inappropriate reading. Contexts were completely restrictive, and a pause was introduced between the context and the ambiguous word. Multiple access still obtained, providing further support for the claim that lexical access is not guided by syntactic context.