The Specificity of Behaviors and Measurements

This essay examines the fundamental fact of specificity in behaviors both outside and inside the testing room. Two tests of the same construct typically have a moderate to low correlation between them, the level of relationship depending on whether the mode, the situation, the task, and the stimuli for one test are similar to or different from those for the other. The great majority of psychological tests have considerable specificity. Their scores tend to correlate far less than perfectly with other tests of the same variable. Even when an ability is defined within a model such as Guilford's Structure-of-Intellect, each test of that ability will usually have some specific determinants not shared by other tests of that aspect of intelligence. Moreover, such a test is likely to correlate almost as well with tests of other similar abilities as with tests of its particular one.     

Motivation to support a desired conclusion versus motivation to avoid an undesirable conclusion: The case of infra‐humanization

Social motivation has been shown to influence various cognitive processes. In the present paper, it is verified that people are motivated to view out‐groups as possessing a lesser degree of humanity than the in‐group (Leyens et al., 2000 ) and that this motivation influences logical processing in the Wason selection task. So far, studies on infra‐humanization have been shown to influence attribution of uniquely human characteristics to groups. Most of these studies focused on the attribution of secondary emotions. Results have shown that secondary emotions are preferentially attributed to in‐group members (Leyens et al., 2001 ). Also, people tend to react differently to in‐group and out‐group members displaying secondary emotions (Gaunt, Leyens, & Sindic, 2004 ; Vaes, Paladino, Castelli, Leyens, & Giovanazzi, 2003 ). In the present paper, it is argued that infra‐humanization is a two‐direction bias and that it does influence logical processing among perceivers. Specifically, infra‐humanization motivation impacts logical processing in two different directions. First, most motivation is spent to reach the desirable conclusion that the in‐group is uniquely human. Second, least motivation occurs to support the undesirable conclusion that the out‐group is uniquely human. These hypotheses are tested in four cross‐cultural studies that varied the status and the conflicting relations between groups. Results were in line with the predictions and further confirmed that infra‐humanization biases can be obtained independently of status and conflict (but see Cortes, Demoulin, Leyens, & de Renesse, 2005 ). The discussion relates these findings with in‐group favouritism and out‐group derogation (Brewer, 1999 ) and underlines the importance of infra‐humanization in counteracting system justification biases (Jost & Banaji, 1994 ).     

Institutional Review Boards: From Bane to Benefit

ABSTRACT— Institutional review boards (IRBs) are primarily prevention-focused, avoiding damage to human subjects and averting ethical infractions, thereby protecting participants, researchers, and universities. Yet, the cost of prevention focus is simply avoiding negative outcomes and is enacted through control, risk-aversion, security, detail-orientation, reactivity, anxiety, avoidance, punishment, negative possibilities, and seizing on a single dominant solution. These endanger the research enterprise. An alternative promotion focus is more advantageous as it seeks positive outcomes and thus facilitating research, which is the IRB's second duty. This alternative guides recruiting and training of staff, panel, and researchers; orienting to and reinforcing promotion norms; creating well-known, transparent, responsive, and efficient processes; and understanding the IRB's boundaries. Promotion balances prevention to make IRBs support research and protect subjects.     

Defining and Measuring Harmony Control

This study proposes a new control construct, harmony control (HC), inspired by a reanalysis of Rothbaum, Weisz, and Snyder's (1982) primary and secondary control constructs. Traditional primary control, and its supporting construct secondary control, affirm the Western cultural emphasis on an agentic self that separates positively from others. Harmony control reflects an interdependent self-concept. In HC, people are flexible and adjusting, and they recognize the agency that resides in spiritual and social forces. Guided by culturally informed views of the interdependent self and previously defined categories of secondary control, the present research develops an individual difference measure of HC framed independently of traditional primary and secondary control. Results from over 2300 community and student participants show that the scale meets traditional psychometric standards for reliability and predictive validity. As predicted, HC correlates with interdependence and collectivism and is orthogonal to two measures of traditional primary control. HC is uncorrelated with self-esteem, suggesting that harmony control may not engage self-efficacy because the social context is more in focus than the self. Women and Hispanics, two groups for whom role requirements and cultural background emphasize interdependence and harmony, score higher than men and Anglos, respectively. In a laboratory study, people higher in HC were more likely to transfer decision power to another person or to chance.     

THE AMBIVALENCE TOWARD MEN INVENTORY

We present a measure, the Ambivalence toward Men Inventory (AMI), that differentiates between women's hostile and benevolent prejudices and stereotypes about men. The Hostility toward Men (HM) and Benevolence toward Men (BM) subscales of the AMI tap conventional attitudes toward men that have opposing valences. Each subscale assesses subfactors concerning men's power, gender differentiation, and heterosexuality. Three studies with predominately White, male and female participants (two with undergraduates and one with a community sample) establish the factor structure, reliability, convergent validity, and predictive validity of the AMI. The AMI was strongly related to its sister scale, the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (Glick & Fiske, 1996) and to two established scales of attitudes toward men (Downs & Engleson, 1982; Iazzo, 1983). Only the AMI, however, successfully distinguished between subjectively positive and subjectively negative beliefs about men. A copy of the 20-item AMI is provided as a tool for further exploration of women's ambivalence toward men.     

Motivational influences on impression formation: outcome dependency, accuracy-driven attention, and individuating processes

How might being outcome dependent on another person influence the processes that one uses to form impressions of that person? We designed three experiments to investigate this question with respect to short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency. In all three experiments, subjects expected to interact with a young man formerly hospitalized as a schizophrenic, and they received information about the person's attributes in either written profiles or videotapes. In Experiment 1, short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency led subjects to use relatively individuating processes (i.e., to base their impressions of the patient on his particular attributes), even under conditions that typically lead subjects to use relatively category-based processes (i.e., to base their impressions on the patient's schizophrenic label). Moreover, in the conditions that elicited individuating processes, subjects spent more time attending to the patient's particular attribute information. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the attention effects in Experiment 1 were not merely a function of impression positivity and that outcome dependency did not influence the impression formation process when attribute information in addition to category-level information was unavailable. Finally, Experiment 3 manipulated not outcome dependency but the attentional goal of forming an accurate impression. We found that accuracy-driven attention to attribute information also led to individuating processes. The results of the three experiments indicate that there are important influences of outcome dependency on impression formation. These results are consistent with a model in which the tendency for short-term, task-oriented outcome dependency to facilitate individuating impression formation processes is mediated by an increase in accuracy-driven attention to attribute information.     

Adult recollections of earliest childhood dreams: a cross-cultural study

In two studies, Caucasian and Asian college students recalled their earliest memory of a dream, and they provided information about behaviours and beliefs associated with dreaming. Consistent with previous research on childhood amnesia, participants rarely recounted dreams that occurred before age 3. In Study 1, the mean age of the earliest dream memory was 14 months earlier for Caucasians than for Asians. In Study 2, more Asians than Caucasians were unable to remember a childhood dream. Dream-related behaviours and beliefs also differed markedly across cultures. Compared to Asians, Caucasians reported talking more frequently with parents about their dreams in childhood, receiving stronger parental encouragement to share dreams, and feeling more comfortable doing so. Caucasians also reported sharing their dreams with others more frequently in adulthood and they assigned greater value to their dreams. Most Caucasians but few Asians consented to the researchers' request to send parents a questionnaire concerning the participant's childhood dreams. The results support the social interaction explanation for autobiographical memory development, in which parent-child conversations about the personal past contribute to memory accessibility.     

A graphical test for the significance of differences between frequencies from different samples

For testing the significance of differences between frequencies from different samples, an ellipse can easily be constructed on the basis of a formula developed on the assumption that both observed samples are random samples from the same parent population and that the best estimate of the true proportion is the weighted mean proportion of the two samples. The ellipse provides a very rapid method for testing pairs of frequencies.The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and are not to be construed as those of the Navy Department.     

Using individualism and collectivism to compare cultures--a critique of the validity and measurement of the constructs: comment on Oyserman et al. (2002)

Analyzing national and ethnic differences in individualism and collectivism, D. Oyserman, H. M. Coon, and M. Kemmelmeier (2002) showed that small differences in scales or samples produce markedly divergent results, challenging the validity of these constructs. The author examines the following limitations of research on individualism and collectivism: It treats nations as cultures and culture as a continuous quantitative variable; conflates all kinds of social relations and distinct types of autonomy; ignores contextual specificity in norms and values; measures culture as the personal preferences and behavior reports of individuals; rarely establishes the external validity of the measures used; assumes cultural invariance in the meaning of self-reports and anchoring and interpretation of scales; and reduces culture to explicit, abstract verbal knowledge.