Thinking through uncertainty: nonconsequential reasoning and choice.

When thinking under uncertainty, people often do not consider appropriately each of the relevant branches of a decision tree, as required by consequentialism. As a result they sometimes violate Savage's sure-thing principle. In the Prisoner's Dilemma game, for example, many subjects compete when they know that the opponent has competed and when they know that the opponent has cooperated, but cooperate when they do not know the opponent's response. Newcomb's Problem and Wason's selection task are also interpreted as manifestations of nonconsequential decision making and reasoning. The causes and implications of such behavior, and the notion of quasi-magical thinking, are discussed.     

The effect of object alignment on the representation of depth in young children's drawings.

Light and Humphreys (1981, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 31, 521-530) provided evidence that young children's drawings, despite infrequently showing view-specific occlusion, do systematically reflect spatial relations within an array. The present research tested the hypothesis that young children's preferences for canonical "best views" interact with array-faithful tendencies to increase early uses of occlusion. Forty-three children between 4 and 7 years of age drew arrays like Light and Humphreys' end-to-end alignments, with end-on views of objects in depth, and arrays aligned side-to-side, with canonical side-views of objects in depth. Significantly fewer single-object, view-specific occlusions were produced for end-to-end than for side-to-side alignments. Nevertheless, the former reveal that more children are able to use the vertical dimension to depict multiple objects in depth. Other comparisons suggest an interaction in multiple-object depictions of canonicality with spatial dimension and graphic complexity.     

The Effect of Contextual Factors on Individuals' Job Performance

The intent of this study is to apply a cross-level design to examine the influence of contextual factors upon individuals' performance. The results support the hypothesis that peer group characteristics predict individual performance beyond individual characteristics. The implications for using a cross-level approach to study the effects of contextual variables on individual-level phenomena are discussed.     

Prejudice Against a Progay Man in an Everyday Situation: A Scenario Study1

A scenario study was performed to investigate whether people in the street would be less likely to respond positively to a stranger's request for a small favor if the stranger wore a T-shirt bearing a progay slogan. One hundred and eighteen female and 112 male participants were each presented with six scenarios, all of which asked them to imagine being approached by a person requesting change for a banknote. The dependent variable in the study was the participant's judgment, on a 7-point scale, of how likely he or she would be to help. Five of the scenarios were included as distractors. In the critical scenario, the requester was described as wearing a plain T-shirt or one with either a progay or a control slogan printed on it. The male participants in the progay condition showed a significantly lower level of help than those in either of the control groups. The antigay pattern, however, was not obtained in the responses of the female participants. The results are discussed with reference to other findings in the literature, and their implications for people's responses to progay persons in everyday life are considered.     

Ratings of Orally Presented Verbal Expressions of Probability by a Heterogeneous Sample

Verbal expressions of probability are used in daily conversations, physician-physician and physician-patient communications, and questionnaire and interview responses. To assess the degree of agreement among English-speaking Australian adults in allocating numerical probabilities to these verbal expressions of probability, 966 interviewees provided estimates for 60 isolated expressions of probability and a sequence of seven items placed in a sequence. Means and median scores appeared to be consistent with common sense and with findings from other countries. Mirror-imaged terms were neither symmetrical nor equidistant, with the means and medians for the positive terms being closer to the mid-points of the scale than the means and medians of the negative terms. Items in a sequence of probability terms showed greater symmetry and less variability than isolated expressions. For most items, there was an unacceptably high level of within-subject and between-subject variability. Although subjects with higher levels of education and/ or mathematics education showed less variability, these factors accounted for very little of the variance. The greater variability in Australian results relative to those reported elsewhere was partly attributed to the use of interviews rather than questionnaires. There were no particular stems that yielded greater consistency. It was concluded that the use of these expressions leads to very imprecise communication.     

Social support, depressed mood, and adjustment to stress: a genetic epidemiologic investigation.

A survey of 821 same-sex female twin pairs from a population-based registry assessed 8 dimensions of social support and social integration. Twin analyses documented significant common environmental influences on 5 of these 8 measures and significant genetic influences on 5 of the 8. A decomposition of the multiplicative association between support and a measure of stressful life experiences in predicting depressed mood--an association typically interpreted as providing evidence for a stress-buffering effect of social support--shows clearly that it is the environmental and genetic factors that cause support, rather than support itself, that buffer the effects of stress on mood in most cases. We discuss the implications of this result for future research on the relationship between social support and psychopathology.     

Affect, personality, and social activity.

These studies examined relations between social activity and state and trait measures of Positive and Negative Affect. In Study 1 Ss completed scales relevant to 3-factor models of personality and a weekly mood and social activity questionnaire for 13 weeks. In Study 2 Ss completed measures of the 5-factor model of personality and a daily mood and social activity survey for 6-7 weeks. In within- and between-Ss analyses, socializing correlated significantly with state measures of Positive Affect and with trait measures of Extraversion/Positive Emotionality. These relations were relatively general across various types of positive affect and social events; however, specific types of social events also were differentially related to affect. In contrast, social activity had no consistent association with measures of Negative Affect or the other personality dimensions. The results support a temperamental view of Extraversion.     

Molecular contingencies in schedules of intermittent punishment

In two experiments, key pecking of pigeons was maintained by a variable-interval 180-s schedule of food presentation. Conjointly, a second schedule delivered response-dependent electric shock. In the first experiment, shocks were presented according to either a variable-interval or a nondifferential interval-percentile schedule. The variable-interval shock schedule differentially delivered shocks following long interresponse times. Although the nondifferential shock schedules delivered shocks less differentially with respect to interresponse times, the two shock schedules equally reduced the relative frequency of long interresponse times. The second experiment differentially shocked long or short interresponse times in different conditions, with resulting decreases in the relative frequency of the targeted interresponse times. These experiments highlight the importance of selecting the appropriate level of analysis for the interaction of behavior and environment. Orderly relations present at one level of analysis (e.g., interresponse times) may not be revealed at other levels of analysis (e.g., overall response rate).     

Altruism in surgery of AIDS patients

There is usually a long period of time between infection with the AIDS virus and manifestation of symptoms. Asymptomatic patients often would benefit from elective surgery for diseases such as arthritis which are unrelated to their infection. The surgeons' decisions to accept the risks to themselves, their spouses, and their operating teams in order to relieve pain and suffering appear to be based upon two covenants; one concerns their role within the doctor-patient relationship, and the other concerns their relationship to what they see as the ultimate meaning in life.     

The beliefs adults and children hold about television and video games.

In Phase 1 of this study, we asked 23 parents between the ages of 30 and 52 years and 26 children between the ages of 10 and 19 years to list effects of television and video games on children. A questionnaire was developed using the most frequently given responses (e.g., television influences children's aggressive behavior, verbal abilities, or time with friends). In Phase 2, this questionnaire was administered to different groups of parents and children and a control group of adults without offspring (N = 204) who were asked to rate the influence of each item on the questionnaire. Multivariate analyses of variance indicated that there were similarities and differences among the groups. For example, parents and other adults held similar beliefs about the influence of television, but parents held more positive beliefs about the influence of video games than the other adults. Children held more positive beliefs about the influence of television than parents, but parents and children held similar beliefs about the influence of video games.