Why and for whom does the pressure to help hurt others? Affective and cognitive mechanisms linking helping pressure to workplace deviance

Scholars are paying increasing attention to the “dark side” of citizenship behavior. One aspect of this dark side that has received relatively scant attention is “helping pressure”—an employee's perception that s/he is being encouraged to, or otherwise feels that s/he should, enact helping behavior at work. Drawing from theory associated with work stress, we examine affective and cognitive mechanisms that potentially explain why helping pressure, counterintuitively, may lead employees to engage in deviant behavior instead. Beyond examining these possible mechanisms, we also answer calls to identify a potential buffer to these effects. Drawing from self-determination theory, we examine how an employee's intrinsic motivation for citizenship may lessen the deleterious consequences of helping pressure at work. In two studies (a within-individual experience-sampling study and a two-wave between-individual study), we find consistent evidence that helping pressure has a positive indirect relationship with deviant behavior through increased negative affect. Further, we find evidence that intrinsic motivation for citizenship weakens the positive relationship of helping pressure with negative affect, buffering the indirect effect on subsequent deviant behavior. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for the study of helping pressure at work are discussed.     

Synchronicity and “Being Endowed with Meaning”

Jung developed over 50?years a paradigmatic idea of an acausal principle, which he called synchronicity. His hypothesis on synchronicity states that, complementary to causality, there exists a further explanatory principle whose effects appear as acausal but meaningful events. Therewith Jung added to the triadic principles of space, time and causality a fourth principle: synchronicity. The experience of individual synchronicities points to a general acausal and meaningful orderedness in nature which apparently exists outside man. Jung published Answer to Job and Synchronicity at the same time, for he attempted to open up a new path to the “state of spiritualization” Beseeltheit of Matter by making the assumption that “being is endowed with meaning.” According to Jung there exists a latent meaning in the cosmos, which existed long before human consciousness developed. He believed that “on the organic level it might be possible to regard biological morphogenesis in the light of the synchronistic factor.” One of many examples in the biological evolution is a Cretaceous-Palaeogene worldwide catastrophe approx. 65 million years ago that resulted in the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. It is understood as the result of a meteorite impact. This catastrophe was a most meaningful chance from the point of view of the mammals, including modern man. We modern humans finally came into existence thanks to a series of cosmic happenings, which were based on causality and synchronicity. What is true for our personal individuation is also true for biological or historical developments: an acausal but meaningful principle is secretly at work.     

Gender Attitudes and Public Opinion Towards Electoral Gender Quotas in Brazil

Research on public opinion towards affirmative action shows that citizens often support the principle of equality while simultaneously rejecting policies that promote it in a pattern described as the “principle-policy puzzle.” The scholarship also shows that ideology and prejudice towards the targeted group explain the puzzle with respect to racial affirmative action. In this article, we use unique survey questions included in the 2014 round of the AmericasBarometer in Brazil to show that citizens tend to support electoral gender quotas while rejecting gender-based egalitarianism in a reversed version of the “principle-policy puzzle.” We argue that a different type of gender attitudes, namely benevolent sexism, shapes support for gender quotas as well as for the principle of equality. While benevolent sexists tend to reject gender equality based on views about gender complementarity and stereotypes about women's purity, they also support quotas as policies to foster such values. Our findings suggest that even though the political and scholarly debates can provide sound normative reasons for the adoption of quotas across different contexts, public support for them often relies on paternalistic views and expectations about the role of women in politics.     

A combination of combat experience,early abduction,and severe traumatization fuels appetitive aggression and violence among abductees of rebel war in Northern Uganda

Individuals who perpetrate violence may likely perceive violence as appealing and infliction of violence to derive pleasure is termed as appetitive aggression. Individuals who were abducted as children into an armed group often experience a higher number of traumatic event types, that is traumatic load and are usually socialized in a violence-endorsing environment. This study aims to investigate the interaction between age at initial abduction with that of traumatic load, and their influence on appetitive aggression along with perpetration of violent acts by former members of an armed rebel group of both sexes. Semi-structured interviews were conducted among a target group of formerly abducted rebel-war survivors (including participants with and without combat experience) from Northern Uganda. Participants included 596 women and 570 men with N = 1,166 (M_age = 32.58, SD_age = 9.76, range: 18–80 years). We conducted robust linear regression models to investigate the influence of age at initial abduction, traumatic load, combat experience, and biological sex on appetitive aggression as well as their perpetrated violent acts. Our study shows, appetitive aggression and the number of perpetrated violent acts were specifically increased in individuals who were abducted young, experienced several traumatic events in their lifetime, and with previous combat experience. For perpetrated violence men showed increased levels whereas for appetitive aggression the association was independent of biological sex. Therefore, early abducted individuals with a higher traumatic load, who have combat experience, need to be given special intervention to prevent any further violence.     

COVID-19 and Religious Ethics

The editors of the JRE solicited short essays on the COVID-19 pandemic from a group of scholars of religious ethics that reflected on how the field might help them make sense of the complex religious, cultural, ethical, and political implications of the pandemic, and on how the pandemic might shape the future of religious ethics.     

‘Personality in Its Natural Habitat’ Revisited: A Pooled,Multi-sample Examination of the Relationships Between the Big Five Personality Traits and Daily Behaviour and Language Use

Past research using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), an observational ambulatory assessment method for the real-world measurement of daily behaviour, has identified several behavioural manifestations of the Big Five domains in a small college sample (N = 96). With the use of a larger and more diverse sample of pooled data from N = 462 participants from a total of four community samples who wore the EAR from 2 to 6 days, the primary purpose of the present study was to obtain more precise and generalizable effect estimates of the Big Five–behaviour relationships and to re-examine the degree to which these relationships are gender specific. In an extension of the original article, the secondary purpose of the present study was to examine if the Big Five–behaviour relationships differed across two facets of each Big Five domain. Overall, while several of the behavioural manifestations of the Big Five were generally consistent with the trait definitions (replicating some findings from the original article), we found little evidence of gender differences (not replicating a basic finding from the original article). Unique to the present study, the Big Five–behaviour relationships were not always comparable across the two facets of each Big Five domain. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Image-size disparity reduces difference detection in face matching

Face matching is the act of deciding whether two facial images depict the same person or different people. The real-world face-matching task of checking photo IDs typically occurs under conditions of image-size disparity: A small picture is compared with a life-size face. We examined the effect of image-size disparity on face-matching accuracy. In three experiments, subjects were presented with pairs of equivalently or disparately sized images that depicted the same person or different people. Subjects made same/different judgments and, in two experiments, also reported confidence. Difference detection was significantly poorer given disparate (versus equivalent) image size. Confidence was significantly higher when responses were correct versus incorrect. These findings held whether viewing and decision time was unlimited or limited. Our results raise the practical concern that image-size disparity may undermine difference detection in ID checking, while also indicating that people have some insight into the accuracy of their face-matching judgments.     

How representations of number and numeracy predict decision paradoxes: A fuzzy-trace theory approach

Higher numeracy has been associated with decision biases in some numerical judgment-and-decision problems. According to fuzzy-trace theory, understanding such paradoxes involves broadening the concept of numeracy to include processing the gist of numbers—their categorical and ordinal relations—in addition to objective (verbatim) knowledge about numbers. We assess multiple representations of gist, as well as numeracy, and use them to better understand and predict systematic paradoxes in judgment and decision-making. In two samples (Ns = 978 and 957), we assessed categorical (some vs. none) and ordinal gist representations of numbers (higher vs. lower, as in relative magnitude judgment, estimation, approximation, and simple ratio comparison), objective numeracy, and a nonverbal, nonnumeric measure of fluid intelligence in predicting: (a) decision preferences exhibiting the Allais paradox and (b) attractiveness ratings of bets with and without a small loss in which the loss bet is rated higher than the objectively superior no-loss bet. Categorical and ordinal gist tasks predicted unique variance in paradoxical decisions and judgments, beyond objective numeracy and intelligence. Whereas objective numeracy predicted choosing or rating according to literal numerical superiority, appreciating the categorical and ordinal gist of numbers was pivotal in predicting paradoxes. These results bring important paradoxes under the same explanatory umbrella, which assumes three types of representations of numbers—categorical gist, ordinal gist, and objective (verbatim)—that vary in their strength across individuals.     

Talking Points: A Modulating Circle Increases Listening Effort Without Improving Speech Recognition in Young Adults

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Speech recognition is improved when the acoustic input is accompanied by visual cues provided by a talking face (Erber in Journal of Speech and Hearing Research,...     

Post-event misinformation effects in a language-trained chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)

Animal Cognition - Errors of source monitoring are widespread human memory challenges, and our memories are subject to distortion upon the presentation of subsequent misinformation. Less is known...