The role of intent and harm in judgments of prejudice and discrimination

Four experiments examined how an actor's intent and the harm experienced by a target influence judgments of prejudice and discrimination. The presence of intent increased the likelihood that participants judged an actor as prejudiced and the actor's behavior as discriminatory. When intent was uncertain, harm influenced judgments of the behavior, which in turn influenced judgments of the actor, and participants were more cautious in their judgments about an actor than an actor's behavior. Harm also played a stronger role in targets' than observers' judgments. Understanding the role of intent and harm on perceptions of prejudice can help explain variations in targets' versus observers', and possibly targets' versus actors', judgments of discrimination and prejudice.     

Recurrent Trisomies: Chance or Inherited Predisposition?

Two patients experiencing recurring trisomic pregnancies involving a different chromosome each time are presented. Mechanisms to explain recurrent trisomies include a gene or genes predisposing to nondisjunction in general or to nondisjunction of the acrocentric chromosomes, maternal age effects, and germ-line mosaicism. Genetic counseling is complicated by the lack of a clear explanation for the recurrences, difficulty in quoting a specific recurrence risk, concern regarding the risk for uniparental disomy, and the frustration, grief and guilt reactions of the patients.     

On the Interaction of Prior Knowledge and Stimulus Structure in Category Learning

Contemporary theories of categorization propose that concepts are coherent in virtue of being embedded in a network of theories about the world. Those theories function to pick out some of the many possible features of a set of objects as most salient for purposes of classification, a process that is complex and still poorly understood (Murphy & Medin, 1985). Part of what makes this account incomplete is a lack of information as to (1) what makes a feature salient on a given occasion and (2) how feature salience interacts with category structure to determine the course of learning. We report on the results of three studies of category learning using complex schematic drawings to show that (1) the contrast set defined by one's initial encounters with category exemplars can be a source of individual differences in feature salience assignments; (2) such effects are short-lived in the face of clear evidence about actual feature diagnosticity; and (3) more robust prior hypotheses interact with category structure to either enhance learning or impede it. The enhancement occurs when the hypothesis emphasizes category-relevant features, even if the hypothesis is in fact incorrect. A hypothesis that assigns high salience to irrelevant features impedes learning. Learning does occur as feedback concerning category structure leads to enhanced salience for relevant features. Salience of irrelevant features remains high, however, suggesting that such learning as occurs involves augmentation and not total revision of the (incorrect) prior hypothesis.