Within the Limits of Civic Training: Education Moderates the Relationship Between Openness and Political Attitudes

Research demonstrates that the Big‐Five's Openness to Experience is inversely associated with political conservatism. This literature, however, implicitly assumes that the strength of this relationship is invariant across the electorate. We challenge this assumption by arguing that education—an institution designed to increase civic competence—affects the degree to which personality predicts various political attitudes. Specifically, we posit that education facilitates people's ability to identify issue positions that (theoretically) resonate with their personality. Using a national probability sample of New Zealand voters (n = 6,518), we show that education consistently moderates the relationship between personality and a host of political attitudes. Whereas Openness to Experience is inversely associated with politically conservative issue positions among the highly educated, it is often uncorrelated with the same attitudes among those with low levels of educational attainment. These results identify an important—though often neglected—moderator of the relationship between personality and political attitudes.     

Learning to fear a second-order stimulus following vicarious learning

Vicarious fear learning refers to the acquisition of fear via observation of the fearful responses of others. The present study aims to extend current knowledge by exploring whether second-order vicarious fear learning can be demonstrated in children. That is, whether vicariously learnt fear responses for one stimulus can be elicited in a second stimulus associated with that initial stimulus. Results demonstrated that children's (5–11 years) fear responses for marsupials and caterpillars increased when they were seen with fearful faces compared to no faces. Additionally, the results indicated a second-order effect in which fear-related learning occurred for other animals seen together with the fear-paired animal, even though the animals were never observed with fearful faces themselves. Overall, the findings indicate that for children in this age group vicariously learnt fear-related responses for one stimulus can subsequently be observed for a second stimulus without it being experienced in a fear-related vicarious learning event. These findings may help to explain why some individuals do not recall involvement of a traumatic learning episode in the development of their fear of a specific stimulus.     

Categorical templates are more useful when features are consistent: Evidence from eye movements during search for societally important vehicles

Unlike in laboratory visual search tasks—wherein participants are typically presented with a pictorial representation of the item they are asked to seek out—in real-world searches, the observer rarely has veridical knowledge of the visual features that define their target. During categorical search, observers look for any instance of a categorically defined target (e.g., helping a family member look for their mobile phone). In these circumstances, people may not have information about noncritical features (e.g., the phone’s color), and must instead create a broad mental representation using the features that define (or are typical of) the category of objects they are seeking out (e.g., modern phones are typically rectangular and thin). In the current investigation (Experiment 1), using a categorical visual search task, we add to the body of evidence suggesting that categorical templates are effective enough to conduct efficient visual searches. When color information was available (Experiment 1a), attentional guidance, attention restriction, and object identification were enhanced when participants looked for categories with consistent features (e.g., ambulances) relative to categories with more variable features (e.g., sedans). When color information was removed (Experiment 1b), attention benefits disappeared, but object recognition was still better for feature-consistent target categories. In Experiment 2, we empirically validated the relative homogeneity of our societally important vehicle stimuli. Taken together, our results are in line with a category-consistent view of categorical target templates (Yu, Maxfield, & Zelinsky in, Psychological Science, 2016. doi: 10.1177/0956797616640237), and suggest that when features of a category are consistent and predictable, searchers can create mental representations that allow for the efficient guidance and restriction of attention as well as swift object identification.     

Einstellung defused: Interactivity and mental set

Mental set is observed when a familiar problem-solving strategy is applied to new problems that can be solved in simpler, more efficient ways. It is most famously illustrated in the water jar problems (Luchins, 1942 ). In these volume measurement problems, participants learn a rule to obtain an exact volume of liquid involving a complex combination of liquid transfer. Participants persevere in using this rule for new problems that can be solved with a much simpler rule. In two experiments presented here, participants completed the water jar task either in interactive conditions with actual water jars at a sink or in noninteractive conditions, with the problems presented on paper, as in the original Luchins procedure. Interactivity significantly reduced the degree of perseverance. In addition, participants' visuospatial skills significantly predicted the rate of perseverance (and the latencies to solution) in interactive but not in noninteractive conditions. These results underscore the importance of designing problem-solving experiments that engineer distributed cognitive systems in which participants coordinate internal and external resources in thinking.     

Socrates in the Platonic Dialogues

If Socrates is portrayed holding one view in one of Plato's dialogues and a different view in another, should we be puzzled? If (as I suggest) Plato's Socrates is neither the historical Socrates, nor a device for delivering Platonic doctrine, but a tool for the dialectical investigation of a philosophical problem, then we should expect a new Socrates, with relevant commitments, to be devised for each setting. Such a dialectical device – the tailor‐made Socrates – fits with what we know of other contributions to the genre of the Sokratikos Logos, to which Plato was neither the first nor the only contributor.     

Protesting to challenge or defend the system? A system justification perspective on collective action

Social identity, shared grievances, and group efficacy beliefs are well-known antecedents to collective action, but existing research overlooks the fact that collective action often involves a confrontation between those who are motivated to defend the status quo and those who seek to challenge it. Using nationally representative data from New Zealand (Study 1; N = 16,147) and a large online sample from the United States (Study 2; N = 1,513), we address this oversight and demonstrate that system justification is negatively associated with system-challenging collective action, but positively associated with system-supporting collective action, for members of both low-status and high-status groups. Group identification, group-based injustice, group-based anger, and system-based dissatisfaction/anger mediated these relationships. These findings constitute the first empirical integration of system justification theory into a model of collective action that explains when people will act collectively to challenge—and, just as importantly, defend—the status quo.     

Personality disorders in the elderly compared to four younger age groups: a cross-sectional study of community residents and mental health patients

The notion is expressed in the DSM-IV that some personality disorders (PDs) tend to remit with age whereas other types do not. This notion is supported by the literature and the study reported here. Studies published between 1951 and 2000 show that (1) in old age, PDs are prevalent both in normal subjects and to a greater extent in the mentally ill; (2) the evidence for general age-relatedness of PDs is scarce and contradictory; (3) there is evidence for specific age-relatedness of PDs in old age. This empirical study focused on the prevalence of PDs in five different age groups ranging from adolescence to old age. It included both community residents (N = 623, aged 17-87), and mental health patients (N = 315, aged 18-86). Dimensional scores for PDs were assessed by means of the DSM-III-R- and ICD-10- based self-report Questionnaire of Personality Traits (VKP) (Duijsens, Eurelings-Bontekoe & Diekstra, 1996). There was consistent evidence for a specific effect of aging: community residents in the oldest age group reported more schizoid and more obsessive-compulsive characteristics compared to one or more of the younger age groups. Older mental health patients showed more schizoid disorder characteristics and fewer high-energy disorder characteristics compared to one or more of the younger patient groups.