Culture and the distinctiveness motive: constructing identity in individualistic and collectivistic contexts

The motive to attain a distinctive identity is sometimes thought to be stronger in, or even specific to, those socialized into individualistic cultures. Using data from 4,751 participants in 21 cultural groups (18 nations and 3 regions), we tested this prediction against our alternative view that culture would moderate the ways in which people achieve feelings of distinctiveness, rather than influence the strength of their motivation to do so. We measured the distinctiveness motive using an indirect technique to avoid cultural response biases. Analyses showed that the distinctiveness motive was not weaker-and, if anything, was stronger-in more collectivistic nations. However, individualism-collectivism was found to moderate the ways in which feelings of distinctiveness were constructed: Distinctiveness was associated more closely with difference and separateness in more individualistic cultures and was associated more closely with social position in more collectivistic cultures. Multilevel analysis confirmed that it is the prevailing beliefs and values in an individual's context, rather than the individual's own beliefs and values, that account for these differences.     

A Narrower Scope or a Clearer Lens for Personality? Examining Sources of Observers’ Advantages Over Self‐Reports for Predicting Performance

Emerging studies have shown that observers' ratings of personality predict performance behaviors better than do self-ratings. However, it is unclear whether these predictive advantages stem from (a) use of observers who have a frame of reference more closely aligned with the criterion ("narrower scope") or (b) observers having greater accuracy than targets themselves ("clearer lens"). In a primary study of 291 raters of 97 targets, we found predictive advantages even when observers were personal acquaintances who knew targets only outside of the work context. Integrating these findings with previous meta-analyses showed that colleagues' unique perspectives did not predict incrementally beyond commonly held trait perceptions across all raters (except for openness) and that self-raters who overestimate their agreeableness and conscientiousness perform worse on the job. Broadly, our results suggest that observers have clearer lenses for viewing targets' personality traits, and we discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for studying and measuring personality.     

How to consistently link extraversion and intelligence to the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene: on defining and measuring psychological phenotypes in neurogenetic research

The evidence for associations between genetic polymorphisms and complex behavioral/psychological phenotypes (traits) has thus far been weak and inconsistent. Using the well-studied Val158Met polymorphism of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene as an example, we demonstrate that using theoretical models to guide phenotype definition and measuring the phenotypes of interest with a high degree of specificity reveals strong gene-behavior associations that are consistent with prior work and that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Only after statistically controlling for irrelevant portions of phenotype variance did we observe strong (Cohen's d = 0.33-0.70) and significant associations between COMT Val158Met and both cognitive and affective traits in a healthy male sample (N = 201) in Study 1: Carriers of the Met allele scored higher in fluid intelligence (reasoning) but lower in both crystallized intelligence (general knowledge) and the agency facet of extraversion. In Study 2, we conceptually replicated the association of COMT Val158Met with the agency facet of extraversion after partialing irrelevant phenotype variance in a female sample (N = 565). Finally, through reanalysis of a large published data set we showed that Met allele carriers also scored higher in indicators of fluid intelligence after partialing verbal fluency. Because the Met allele codes for a less efficient variant of the enzyme COMT, resulting in higher levels of extrasynaptic prefrontal dopamine, these observations provide further support for a role for dopamine in both intelligence and extraversion. More importantly, the present findings have important implications for the definition of psychological phenotypes in neurogenetic research.     

Prosocial consequences of imitation

Research has shown that helping behavior can be primed easily. However, helping decreases significantly in the presence of inhibition cues, signaling high costs for the executor. On the other hand, multiple studies demonstrated that helping behavior increases after being mimicked. The present study investigated whether imitation still increases helping when more substantial costs are involved. Helping behavior was operationalized as the willingness to accompany the confederate on a 15-20 minute walk to the train station. Results show that even in the face of these high costs, participants who were mimicked agreed more often to help the confederate than participants who were anti-mimicked. These findings suggest that mimicry not only makes people more helpful when it comes to small favors, but also allows them to ignore the substantial costs possibly involved in helping others.     

Talking loudly but lazing at work—Behavioral effects of stereotypes are context dependent

Recent research suggests that stereotype activation is context dependent. In the current research, we tested whether this context‐dependence also generalizes to behavioral effects of stereotypes. Extending previous findings, we could show that activation of the category “Italians” in a work context (but not in an interaction context) resulted in slow behavior (Experiment 1), whereas it increased the loudness of speech in an interaction context (but not in a work context; Experiment 2). Our results further strengthen the notion of context‐specific mental representations of stereotypes. Stereotypic attributes become activated and exert their influence on behavior in close correspondence with the current situation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Branching in the landscape of possibilities

The metaphor of a branching tree of future possibilities has a number of important philosophical and logical uses. In this paper we trace this metaphor through some of its uses and argue that the metaphor works the same way in physics as in philosophy. We then give an overview of formal systems for branching possibilities, viz., branching time and (briefly) branching space-times. In a next step we describe a number of different notions of possibility, thereby sketching a landscape of possibilities. In the final section of the paper we look at the place of branching-based possibilities in that larger landscape of possibilities. Our main message is that far from being an outlandish metaphysical extravagancy, branching-based possibilities are epistemically as well as metaphysically basic.     

On the fate of distractor representations

Research on the topic of distractor inhibition has used different empirical approaches to study how the human mind selects relevant information from the environment, and the results are controversially discussed. One key question that typically arises is how selection deals with the irrelevant information. We used a new selection task, in which participants sometimes had to respond to the distractors instead of the target. Importantly, we varied the time interval between stimuli onset and the cue that signaled participants to respond to the distractors. We analyzed RTs and error rates from responses to distractors as a function of how long the target had been processed (and the distractor ignored) before the cue required a response to the distractor (i.e., stimulus-cue SOA). The data are compatible with selection models assuming that distractor stimuli are initially activated and then deactivated. Thus, we argue for selection models assuming top down deactivation of distractor representations that work in parallel with top down activation of target representations.     

Top-down control of attention: it's gradual, practice-dependent, and hierarchically organized

When searching for a "pop-out" target, interference from a salient but irrelevant distractor can be reduced or even prevented under certain circumstances. Here, five experiments were conducted to further our understanding of three different aspects of top-down interference reduction: first, whether or not qualitatively different search modes can account for different reduction patterns; second, whether distractor practice plays a causal role in reduction; and third, how specific reduction is, that is, whether interference by intradimensional distractors can be reduced as effectively as interference by cross-dimensional distractors. The results provide evidence that interference reduction does not critically depend on the implementation of a feature search mode, but rather on practice with the distractor, that is, the acquisition of an effective suppression strategy. In addition, they suggest that interference reduction is based on hierarchically organized feature weighting ("dimension weighting"), rather than on completely independent feature weighting.     

Lexical representation of schwa words: two mackerels, but only one salami

The present study investigated the lexical representations underlying the production of English schwa words. Two types of schwa words were compared: words with a schwa in poststress position (e.g., mackerel), whose schwa and reduced variants differ in a categorical way, and words with a schwa in prestress position (e.g., salami), whose variants differ in a noncategorical way. Participants named pseudohomophones and matched pseudowords corresponding to schwa and reduced variants of these words. Results revealed an advantage for pseudohomophones over matched pseudowords for both variants of poststress schwa words but only for schwa variants of prestress schwa words. As the pseudohomophone advantage is assumed to reflect the activation of a phonologically matching stored phonological representation, these results suggest that both variants of poststress schwa words are lexically represented while only schwa variants of prestress schwa words are. This result extends the proposal that words with two categorically distinct variants are stored in the production lexicon with 2 representations to another language and demonstrates that this 2-lexeme account does not generalize to pronunciation variants differing from one another in a noncategorical fashion. This finding challenges one of the widely shared assumption of generative models of word production: that content words have only 1 phonological representation. On the other hand, it provides further evidence in favor of another fundamental assumption of these models: that lexical representations are abstract sets of segments rather than fully detailed exemplars.