The actions of others as determinants of behavior in social trap situations

Three studies were conducted to determine the effects of observing the behaviors of others upon an individual's actions in a simulated social trap situation. In Experiment 1, it was found that merely having the opportunity to make comparative appraisals of the actions of others led to greater competition for a finite common resource than when subjects were physically isolated from one another. In Experiment 2, false feedback was given to subjects to determine if the actions of others alone were responsible for the deleterious effects of having the opportunity for comparative appraisal; it was found that subjects quickly conformed to the behavior pattern of the interacting others, regardless of whether the false feedback indicated that the other subjects were consuming more or less than no-treatment control subjects. Experiment 3 was conducted to determine the motivation of subjects reacting to the actions of others; differential predictions based upon a competition/relative outcome explanation and upon an information search explanation were made. The data were consistent with the information search explanation.     

Level I and level II abilities in Asian,white, and black children

All the Asian-American, white, and black children in grades 2 through 6 in a California school district were given a battery of tests including measures of IQ, scholastic achievement, and short-term memory. Factor analysis of the tests yielded two main factors identified as Level I (memory) and Level II (general intelligence) in Jensen's system. The three ethnic groups were compared with one another on uncorrelated Level I and Level II factor scores. At every grade level, bivariate means of the three groups occupy distinctly different quadrants in the factor space. Asians and whites differ on Level I (A < W) but not on Level II. Asians and blacks differ on Level II (A > B) but not on Level I. Whites and blacks differ (W > B) on both Levels I and II, but the white-black difference on Level I is less than one fourth as large as the white-black difference on Level II. A similar pattern of group differences is found for scores on tests of memory and nonverbal IQ. Scholastic achievement shows much smaller correlations with the Level I than with the Level II factor.     

Effects of precision of knowledge of results on performance of a gross motor coincidence-anticipation task

The purpose of the investigation was to determine the effects from three knowledge of results (KR) precision levels (qualitative; 0.10 sec, 0.001 sec) on the performance of a gross motor coincidence-anticipation task where subjects performed with visual and other sense modality input. Other variables included in the analysis were sex, movement distance, and practice over three blocks of trials. Absolute error (AE), constant error (CE), variable error (VE), and E scores (E) of the subjects from two experiments (N = 90; N = 54) were analyzed with 3 x 2 x 2 x 3 ANOVAs with repeated measures on the last two factors (feedback, sex, movement distance, blocks). Consistent finding from both experiments indicated that, for this gross motor coincidence-anticipation task, the subjects performed as accurately and as consistently when they received qualitative KR as when, in addition, they received more precise KR. Subjects performed with less error on the short as opposed to the long term distance pattern. Males performed with less error on the long movement pattern than females in Experiment 1; however, the only sex difference noted in Experiment 2, when the movement distances were shortened, was that males had a more on-time CE mean score.     

Native American women and agriculture: A Seneca case study

This study examines the impact of European invasion on the mode of production, household lives, and ideology of one group of Native American women, the Seneca. Seneca women had high public status, a balanced division of labor, ownership of the land, and control over the means of agricultural production. The power derived from their role in production and the social institutions which had developed from this production were difficult to destroy, despite the efforts of missionaries, government, and reformers. The effects of disease, war, and the market economy on the Seneca women are specifically examined. Also described are attempts to impose the ideology of individualism and nuclear household patterns on the Seneca by withdrawing women from production outside the home and establishing male ownership of private property.Criticism by many women helped the development of this article at different stages. Anthropologists Bea Medicine and Peggy Sanday, women historians at Arizona State University, and community women in Phoenix all made valuable contributions to its evolution.     

ON THE EINSTELLUNG EFFECT IN PROBLEM SOLVING: Some critical remarks

Objections are raised to Luchins' interpretation of the Einstellung effect and his negative evaluation of this effect. It is proposed to shift the emphasis from behavior to perception. The subject does not develop a 'bad' habit, but acts according to the specific type of problem which the experienced situation seems to present. Two types of problems are distinguished: whole problems, in which the critical problems in the Einstellung experiments are perceived as application situations, and part problems, in which the critical problems are perceived as problems in their own right.     

Race, social class and ability patterns on the WISC-R

The national standardization sample of whites and blacks on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—Revised (WISC-R) was the basis for a detailed analysis of the psychometric nature of racial and social class differences on the original 13 subscales of the WISC-R. The profiles of subtest scores of whites and blacks were compared directly and also after the racial groups were statistically equated on Full Scale IQ (FSIQ). Under the latter condition, the races differ only very slightly, although significantly, on some of the subtests, in ways generally contrary to popular expectations. The profile of white-black differences on the WISC-R subtests is markedly different, and negatively correlated with, the profiles of social class differences within each racial group, indicating that the pattern of racial differences is not explainable in terms of the difference in the average socio-economic status (SES) of blacks and whites. A Schmid-Leiman orthogonalized hierarchical factor analysis yields virtually identical factor structures and highly congruent factor loadings on the subtests for whites and blacks. Analysis of factor scores shows that by far the largest proportion of the variance between races is attributable to the general factor (g) common to all the subtests, whereas the group factors (verbal, performance and memory) contribute only minutely to the interracial variance. Hence the white-black differences on the diverse subtests of the WISC-R, and in the Full Scale IQ, are interpreted primarily as a difference in Spearman's g, rather than as differences in the more specific factors peculiar to particular content, knowledge, acquired skills or type of test. However, some slight but significant differences in patterns of ability also occur that are independent of g.     

Reaction time,evoked brain potentials,and psychometric g in the severely retarded

Measurements derived from reaction time (RT), movement time (MT), and an index of neural adaptability (NA) derived from averaged evoked potentials are significantly related to each other as well as to g factor scores extracted from a battery of 15 psychometric tests in a sample of 54 severely retarded adults. The RT-MT and NA variables show a shrunken multiple R of .64 (p < .001) with psychometric g.     

Spatial learning in the rat: impairment induced by the thiol-proteinase inhibitor, leupeptin, and an analysis of [3H]glutamate receptor binding in relation to learning

Rats were given continuous intraventricular infusion of saline or the thiol-proteinase inhibitor leupeptin, via subcutaneously implanted osmotic minipumps, while being trained on a spatial learning water task using spaced trials. Leupeptin caused overnight forgetting during training, but performance eventually reached asymptote in both groups. A retention test conducted 48 h later to assess spatial memory revealed no significant group differences, but did cause, in saline-treated rats only, a disruption of subsequent retraining back to the correct spatial location. The groups showed no differences in Cl-dependent [3H]glutamate receptor binding to hippocampal or entorhinal cortex membranes subsequent to training. In a second experiment, normal rats trained on the same task also showed no differences in Cl-dependent [3H]glutamate binding relative to rats exposed to the water task but given random spatial position training and handled controls. The results are discussed in relation to the hypothesis of Lynch and Baudry (Science (1984) 224, 1057-1063) that a calcium-dependent thiol proteinase is involved in memory formation through its ability to modify glutamate receptor distribution and dendritic spine shape.     

The Structure of Affect in a Non-Western Culture: Evidence for Cross-Cultural Comparability

We investigated the structure of affect in the Filipino culture and compared our results to those in Western studies. Four samples of students (ns = 397 to 530) rated their mood for today, the past week, or in general, using near-comprehensive sets of Filipino mood adjectives. Results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a hierarchical model of affect and the cross-cultural comparability of self-report mood dimensions (i.e., higher-order Positive and Negative Affect, plus specific affects corresponding to hypothesized universal or basic emotions). The results were more consistent with biological theories of affect than a strong social constructivist perspective.