Enterprise trainees' self-construals as entrepreneurs

Although the past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the economic and political aspects of the entrepreneur, most psychological studies have tended to concentrate on the identification of the “entrepreneurial personality” or the repertoire of traits that identify successful entrepreneurs. Even in career theory, the entrepreneur has received only passing attention, usually as an aberration from a neat stage development model or in the context of a psychodynamic explanation for individual work behavior. This article starts from the premise that the social representation of the entrepreneur, reflecting the past 10 years of public promotion, does not vary significantly among various groups but that aspiring entrepreneurs with realistic levels of aspiration reveal distinct construals of themselves as self and as entrepreneur. Using a range of subjects from a variety of enterprise training courses, all of whom aspired to be entrepreneurs, I used locus-of-control and attitude scales and business performance questionnaires to determine likely business success and strength of self-concept. The first-stage repertory grids, on which this article is based, attempted to reveal each subject's construal of self and ideal self in relation to parents and business roles. The second- and third-stage grids, not reported here, will explore the construal of business problems and business motivation.     

The insistence of vision: Why do people look at a salient stimulus when it signals target absence?

Researchers and practitioners across many fields would benefit from the ability to predict human search time in complex visual displays. However, a missing element in our ability to predict search time is our ability to quantify the exogenous attraction of visual objects in terms of their impact on search time. The current work represents an initial step in this direction. We present two experiments using a quadrant search task to investigate how exogenous and endogenous factors influence human visual search. In Experiment 1, we measure the oculomotor capture—or the tendency of a stimulus to elicit a saccade—of a salient quadrant under conditions in which the salient quadrant does not predict target location. Despite the irrelevance of quadrant salience, we find that subjects persist in making saccades towards the salient quadrant at above-chance levels. We then present a Bayesian-based ideal performer model that predicts search time and oculomotor capture when the salient quadrant never contains the search target. Experiment 2 tested the predictions of the ideal performer model and revealed human performance to be in close correspondence with the model. We conclude that, in our speeded search task, the influence of an exogenous attractor on saccades can be quantified in terms of search time costs and, when these costs are considered, both search time and search behaviour reflect a boundedly optimal adaptation to the cost structure of the environment.     

Jung's Psychological Types,Including the Four Functions

(Dunlap, K. Personal Adjustment. New York: McGraw Hill, 1946. Pp. 446.). Reviewed by George K. Morlan.

(Eysenck, H. J., et al. Dimensions of Personality. London: Kegan Paul, 1947. Pp.308.). Reviewed by Raymond Cattell.     

Normal and Exceptional Children's Attitudes Toward Themselves and one Another

In this study 65 junior high school boys and girls (54 normal and 11 exceptional children) evaluated themselves most favorably, normal children as a group less favorably, and exceptional children as a group least favorably of all on the Personal Attribute Inventory for Children. This was so regardless of whether the respondents were normal or exceptional children. Since data were collected from mainstreamed classrooms, it appears that mainstreaming may not be directly deleterious to exceptional children's self-concepts, but has associated with it a negative stigma for exceptional children as a group for both exceptional and normal children. These findings, plus others reported previously, fail to demonstrate that mainstreaming in its present form may be an elixir for exceptional children's social-emotional difficulties.     

Collective Rights and Personal Freedoms: A Discursive Analysis of Participant Accounts of Authoritarianism

This article presents a discursive analysis of participant accounts of authoritarianism, with the aim of understanding how participants construct accounts about authority, when, and for what purposes. Participants completed a 30‐item Right‐Wing Authoritarianism scale and were then interviewed about how they went about this task. Analyses revealed that, despite an overall consistency when answering items on an authoritarianism scale, participants in this study did not consistently choose to produce authoritarian responses in contrast to the nonauthoritarian alternative. Instead, the construction and expression of authoritarian ideas was found to be directly related to two rhetorical features of conversing about authoritarianism: (1) the ideological dilemma of society versus individual and (2) the mobilization of arguments about social and personal threat that allowed participants to construct accounts about collective rights or personal freedoms. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for current debates about how authoritarianism should be theorized and studied.     

About the authors

Due to limitations inherent in official statistics and surveys the authors conducted a partial test of the deterrence doctrine within the carefully controlled environment of a laboratory experiment. Participants in the experiment were male volunteers enrolled in college classes. The primary variables studied were certainty, severity, and celerity of punishment, and the situations of general deterrence (threatened punishment) and specific deterrence (actual punishment).

It was found that certainty and severity of punishment had substantial effects in situations of actual punishment, but that celerity did not. For general deterrence, only certainty of punishment was effective. In addition, specific deterrence was not significantly more effective than general deterrence.     

Chlordiazepoxide and resistance to punishment

Rats were given intermittent electric foot-shock during food-rewarded alley training. In the test phase, food and shock were given on every trial. These animals persisted in running down the alley in the test phase compared to those without prior shock experience. The effects of chlordiazepoxide (CDP) on this learned resistance to punishment were examined using a long and short interval between trials. It was found that CDP abolished the effect at a long inter-trial interval, but left it unaltered if the interval was short. The results match those found previously with an analogous effect using non-reward. It is suggested that the effects of punishment and non-reward may be mediated by a common process, and that the benzodiazepines may act on this process.