Reexamining personal, social, and cultural influences on compliance behavior in the United States, Poland, and Hong Kong

Researchers have extended the literature on strategies of gaining compliance with a request to incorporate cultural variations into the analytic framework. In the present investigation, the authors sought to go beyond previous studies of the factors increasing compliance rates by reexamining how researchers conceptualize and measure personal, social, and cultural influences on compliance behavior in the United States, Poland, and Hong Kong. The authors found that different levels of compliance were affected by culture, principles of influence, and the individual's personal orientation of idiocentrism/allocentrism (I/A). In the present study, the authors extended previous cross-cultural work by decomposing the I/A into 2 separate individual difference variables: normative perceptions and evaluative perceptions. The interaction of person and situation on compliance showed the power of situational demands and the strength of different aspects of personal collectivism. Different patterns of compliance at the culture level revealed the importance of culture in shaping this behavioral tendency. Thus, the authors' integration of personal, social, and cultural influences provided an interactive model to help researchers explain compliance more comprehensively.     

Socially desirable responding on the web: investigating the candor hypothesis

The investigation presented here explores the hypothesis that participants are less likely to respond in a socially desirable fashion on self-report questionnaires completed on the Web relative to those completed in the laboratory--the candor hypothesis. A battery of social desirability questionnaires (i.e., Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding [Paulhaus, 1984], Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale [Crowne & Marlowe, 1964], Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised Lie Scale [Eysenck & Eysenck, 1994]) was administered to 3 groups: 2 groups consisted of undergraduate participants who were randomly assigned to complete the measures either in the laboratory (n = 60) or on the Web (n = 60), and 1 group consisted of self-selected participants who visited our experimental Web page and completed the measures online (n = 284). This design allowed us to assess the role of Web administration while controlling for differences in sample type, an oft-neglected issue in the Web literature. Results do not support the claim that administering self-report measures over the Web results in a decrease in socially desirable responding. Furthermore, these findings highlight the problems associated with confounding sample and medium. Implications for the use of Web as a research tool are discussed.     

Treatment of Hypochondriasis with Exposure

Cognitive-behavioral therapy has been shown to be an effective treatment for hypochondriasis. An important element of most of the empirically validated CBT protocols for this problem is exposure. Various approaches to exposure may be useful including in vivo exposure to health and death-related situations, interoceptive exposure to feared bodily symptoms, and imaginal exposure to symptoms and feared illnesses that are difficult to reproduce in real life. Strategies for enhancing the effectiveness of exposure, such as response prevention, cognitive reappraisal, and acceptance, are also discussed. Practical suggestions for implementation of exposure with this population are provided.     

Conflict in relational treatments

Various features of relational perspectives on conflict are outlined. Points of contact and difference between relational and modern conflict theory are discussed. Five approaches to considering conflict are examined: countertransference conflict as the site of interfaces between the social and the intrapsychic; conflict within the register of speech; conflict within a theory of multiple identifications; conflict as the site of psychic change; and conflict in the context of intersubjectivity. Clinical vignettes are introduced to illustrate the scope and function of conflict within one relational perspective.     

Ordinal judgments and summation of nonvisible sets of food items by two chimpanzees and a rhesus macaque

Two chimpanzees and a rhesus macaque rapidly learned the ordinal relations between 5 colors of containers (plastic eggs) when all containers of a given color contained a specific number of identical food items. All 3 animals also performed at high levels when comparing sets of containers with sets of visible food items. This indicates that the animals learned the approximate quantity of food items in containers of a given color. However, all animals failed in a summation task, in which a single container was compared with a set of 2 containers of a lesser individual quantity but a greater combined quantity. This difficulty was not overcome by sequential presentation of containers into opaque receptacles, but performance improved if the quantitative difference between sizes was very large.     

Self-affirmation and the biased processing of threatening health-risk information

Self-affirming before reading about the link between alcohol and breast cancer promoted increased message acceptance among young women at higher risk. Differences were maintained on variables measured up to 1 month later. Relative to their nonaffirmed counterparts, higher risk, self-affirmed participants had higher ratings of risk, imagination, intention to reduce alcohol consumption, and negative affect, such as fear, while reading the leaflet. In contrast, there were no differences between the groups on measures of broader message acceptance (belief in the link, evidence strength). Thus, self-affirmation promoted acceptance of the personal relevance of the message, a critical step in the precaution adoption process. Overall, the findings support the view that self-affirmation in an unrelated domain can offset defensive processing of a threatening health message, promoting central route persuasion and producing consequential and durable increases in message acceptance.     

Global versus local image expansion in estimating time-to-contact from complex optic flow

Previous work (Harris and Giachritsis 2000, Vision Research 40 601-611) has shown that, when global and local image expansion are placed in conflict, estimates of time-to-contact (TTC) are based almost exclusively upon global expansion. Here we extend this finding by demonstrating that global image expansion continues to predominate even under conditions that seem more favourable to a local analysis. We added a global rotation to the stimulus so that the global pattern of expansion was distorted while leaving the local expansion unaffected. Even under relatively high rotation rates (30 degrees s(-1)), local expansion continued to have little systematic effect upon estimates of TTC.     

Reasoning from unfamiliar premises: a study with unschooled adults

A long tradition of research initiated by Luria in the 1930s has established that unschooled adults perform poorly on reasoning tasks. Particularly when the premises are unfamiliar, they adopt an inappropriate empirical bias. However, recent findings show that young children with little or no schooling reason competently if prompted to think of the unfamiliar premises as pertaining to a distant planet. We tested two groups of adults: illiterate, unschooled adults and adults with limited schooling. Both groups received problems that included either a premise with unknown content or a premise contradicting their everyday experience. When given a minimal prompt, both groups manifested the customary empirical bias. By contrast, when explicitly prompted to think of the unfamiliar premises as pertaining to a distant planet, they reasoned accurately and appropriately justified their conclusions in terms of the supplied premises.