Critical ingredients of career choice interventions: More analyses and new hypotheses

Recent meta-analyses of the career choice intervention literature (Brown & Ryan Krane, 2000; Ryan, 1999) identified five intervention ingredients that were individually associated with career choice outcome, and collectively were linearly related to increases in career choice effect sizes. In this article, we summarize these meta-analytic findings, present analyses that further confirm these ingredients’ importance, and present some hypotheses to define each of the critical ingredients and suggest how they might be implemented to maximize their effectiveness.     

The Effect of Reducing Opportunities for Downward Comparison on Comparative Optimism

Comparative optimism is a pervasive tendency for people to rate personal future prospects more favorably than those of comparable others. This may be caused by deliberately choosing targets on the basis of vulnerability. Restricting the range of comparison targets reduces the opportunity to make downward comparisons and should reduce comparative optimism. We asked 100 undergraduates to assemble a list of other students known to them. Participants estimated their personal risk of being victim of a road crash and skin cancer, and estimated the risk of 2 targets from the list. The participant selected one target, while the experimenter randomly chose the other target. Comparative optimism was greater in the participant-selected target condition, and this effect was almost exclusive to participants who reported making downward comparisons. We concluded that downward comparison processes could affect comparative optimism when targets are individual people.     

Teammates On and Off the Field? Contact With Black Teammates and the Racial Attitudes of White Student Athletes1

The intergroup contact hypothesis holds that proximate, cooperative interactions on an equalized basis between Blacks and Whites can minimize Whites’ prejudice (Allport, 1954). This experiment investigated the effect of contact between White and Black high school teammates on White student athletes’ racial attitudes. Using the 1996 Social and Group Experiences (SAGE) survey (created by the authors and administered in the Fall of 1996) commissioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the results indicated a significant relationship between amount of contact with Black teammates in high school and racial policy support and affect, depending on the type of sport played. White student athletes playing team sports who had higher percentages of Blacks as high school teammates expressed more policy support for and greater positive affect toward Blacks as a group than did their counterparts playing individual sports. The role of athletic experiences in changing racial attitudes is discussed.     

Stigma on my mind: Individual differences in the experience of stereotype threat

Stereotyped individuals vary in how chronically self-conscious they are of their stigmatized status, which Pinel (1999) has dubbed stigma consciousness. The current study investigated whether individual differences in stigma consciousness moderate the impact of gender stereotypes on the math performance of women. Results indicated that, under conditions designed to evoke stereotype threat (Steele, 1997), women high in stigma consciousness scored worse than women low in stigma consciousness on a math test. In the control (low threat) condition, stigma consciousness was unrelated to test performance. Possible mechanisms underlying this moderation are discussed.     

Book Reviews

Book Reviewed
The Politics of Cultural Differences. By David C. Leege, Kenneth D. Wald, Brian S. Krueger, and Paul D. Mueller. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2002. 304 pp. $21.95 paper, $60 cloth.
The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders. Edited by Jerrold M. Post, M.D. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 2003. 412 pp.
FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability. By Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. 2003. 141 + xii pp.
The Power of Legitimacy: Assessing the Role of Norms in Crisis Bargaining. By Christopher Gelpi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2003. 232 pp. $39.50.     

Esteem maintenance among groups: Laboratory and field studies of group performance cognitions

Across 48 experimental groups, those that scored higher on group self-esteem attributed perceived positive outcomes to internal factors and negative outcomes to external factors. Groups provided more elaborate rationalizations about perceived negative outcomes and less elaborate rationalizations about perceived positive outcomes. They also espoused greater confidence in improved performance after negative outcomes and less confidence following positive outcomes. Similar findings were observed among 252 intact work groups in an employment setting. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding how group self-esteem influences how groups evaluate and respond to performance feedback.     

Predicting burnout and job satisfaction in workplace counselors: the influence of role stressors,job challenge,and organizational knowledge

The present study examines the antecedents of burnout and job satisfaction among counselors employed in workplace settings. Workplace counselors face the unique demands of managing dual client relationships (individual and organization) within the counseling setting. Antecedents of the job‐related outcomes of burnout and satisfaction are likely to vary from other counseling settings as a function of these unique demands. Survey results from 82 workplace counselors indicated that role conflict was a significant predictor of the experience of burnout and that intrinsic job satisfaction was significantly predicted by the counselors' perceptions of job challenge, as well as by the level of organizational knowledge.     

Estimating national populations: cross‐cultural differences and availability effects

Estimates of national population were studied in two experiments. In Experiment 1, Canadian and Chinese undergraduates rated their knowledge of 112 countries and then estimated the population of each. In Experiment 2, Canadians rated their knowledge of 52 countries and then provided population estimates for these primed countries and for a comparable set of 52 unprimed countries. In Experiment 1, participants from both nations produced estimates that resembled those obtained from Americans in prior studies (Brown and Siegler, 1992 , 1993 , 1996 , 2001 ). However, there were several reliable cross‐national differences in performance which appear to reflect cross‐cultural differences in task‐relevant naive domain knowledge. In addition, both experiments produced findings consistent with the claim that availability‐based intuitions play an important role in this task. In Experiment 1, cross‐national differences in rated knowledge predicted cross‐national differences in estimated population; in Experiment 2, primed country names elicited larger population estimates than unprimed country names. We conclude by arguing for the general utility of this hybrid approach to real‐world estimation. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.