Considering the opposite: a corrective strategy for social judgment

It is proposed that several biases in social judgment result from a failure--first noted by Francis Bacon--to consider possibilities at odds with beliefs and perceptions of the moment. Individuals who are induced to consider the opposite, therefore, should display less bias in social judgment. In two separate but conceptually parallel experiments, this reasoning was applied to two domains--biased assimilation of new evidence on social issues and biased hypothesis testing of personality impressions. Subjects were induced to consider the opposite in two ways: through explicit instructions to do so and through stimulus materials that made opposite possibilities more salient. In both experiments the induction of a consider-the-opposite strategy had greater corrective effect than more demand-laden alternative instructions to be as fair and unbiased as possible. The results are viewed as consistent with previous research on perseverance, hindsight, and logical problem solving, and are thought to suggest an effective method of retraining social judgment.     

Peer Attributions and Action Plans for Underachievement: Implications for Peer Counseling

Students playing the role of peer counselors blamed failing students for their poor performances by attributing them to internal, controllable factors.     

A process recording for evaluating group psychotherapy training methods

This paper discusses an exploratory investigation concerned with the long range questions: How does group psychotherapy help patients? and How can psychiatry residency programs best train residents to treat patients in therapeutic groups? Group psychotherapy has come to be accepted in its own right as a decisive contribution to the study of and relief of emotional disorders. As a component of comprehensive psychiatric services it is indispensable. However, while its clinical value has been demonstrated, its scientific validity has not. A Group Process Inventory has been developed by the author and has been utilized for the past two years by psychiatric residents in recording the process of their therapeutic groups in a teaching hospital mental hygiene clinic. The preliminary use of this recording as a clinical-teaching instrument has proven effective. This inventory is being revised to serve as a research instrument.     

Suicide and rurality in urban society

Recent findings suggest that suicide increases with rurality, but research on rural suicide leaves many questions unanswered. This study specifies problems of community organization as a reason for expecting a positive effect of rurality on the suicide rate. A multiple regression analysis of county data shows that rurality has a substantial positive effect and is, in fact, the best predictor of the suicide rate among several variables selected from the previous literature. Additional research is needed to test the interpretation that rurality contributes to an incomplete, fragmented form of community organization which influences the suicide rate by disrupting primary relationships.     

Cognitive, perceptual, and personal-social development of prematurely born preschoolers

This study was designed to determine possible differences in the cognitive, perceptual, and personal-social development of prematurely and maturely born 3-yr.-olds which might foreshadow later learning problems. The subjects were 40 prematurely born graduates of a neonatal intensive care unit (birth weight less than 2,500 gm, less than 37 wk. gestation) matched on the pair-level with full-term controls on sex, race, post-conceptual age, and socioeconomic background. All subjects were singletons and parity was matched at the group level. No differences were found between the groups on tests of higher mental processes including the General Cognitive, Verbal, Quantitative, and Memory Scales of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities, and researcher-devised measures of problem-solving competence. No differences in parental reports of personal-social development were noted. Prematures did not perform as well as controls on perceptual performance tasks, and this difference was interpreted as reflecting relatively impaired visual-motor coordination.