Economic inequality is linked to biased self-perception

People's self-perception biases often lead them to see themselves as better than the average person (a phenomenon known as self-enhancement). This bias varies across cultures, and variations are typically explained using cultural variables, such as individualism versus collectivism. We propose that socioeconomic differences among societies--specifically, relative levels of economic inequality--play an important but unrecognized role in how people evaluate themselves. Evidence for self-enhancement was found in 15 diverse nations, but the magnitude of the bias varied. Greater self-enhancement was found in societies with more income inequality, and income inequality predicted cross-cultural differences in self-enhancement better than did individualism/collectivism. These results indicate that macrosocial differences in the distribution of economic goods are linked to microsocial processes of perceiving the self.     

Group identity,ethnic separatism and multiple out‐groups: The Basque case

Within the context of the Basque Country in Spain we examined how ethnic (Basque) and national (Spanish) identification relate to the evaluation of Spaniards, Basques, Andalusians and Catalans. On a sample of adolescent participants we tested a structural equation model which considered identity content (Basque separatism) as a mediator of the relationship between group identifications and group evaluations. While Spanish and Basque identification were associated with a positive evaluation of Spanish and Basque in‐groups, respectively, the evaluation of out‐groups that are relatively similar to the in‐group were not affected by identification. In contrast, dissimilar out‐groups tended to be evaluated more negatively by higher in‐group identifiers. Basque separatism mediated the negative relationship between Basque identification and the evaluation of Spaniards and of Andalusians as a prototypically Spanish subgroup. It is concluded that identification relates differently to the evaluation of different out‐groups, and that the ideological content of identity plays an important role in determining intergroup relations. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

K-means may perform as well as mixture model clustering but may also be much worse: comment on Steinley and Brusco (2011)

Steinley and Brusco (2011) presented the results of a huge simulation study aimed at evaluating cluster recovery of mixture model clustering (MMC) both for the situation where the number of clusters is known and is unknown. They derived rather strong conclusions on the basis of this study, especially with regard to the good performance of K-means (KM) compared with MMC. I agree with the authors' conclusion that the performance of KM may be equal to MMC in certain situations, which are primarily the situations investigated by Steinley and Brusco. However, a weakness of the paper is the failure to investigate many important real-world situations where theory suggests that MMC should outperform KM. This article elaborates on the KM-MMC comparison in terms of cluster recovery and provides some additional simulation results that show that KM may be much worse than MMC. Moreover, I show that KM is equivalent to a restricted mixture model estimated by maximizing the classification likelihood and comment on Steinley and Brusco's recommendation regarding the use of mixture models for clustering.     

Priming effects from young-old to very old age on a word-stem completion task: minimizing explicit contamination

We investigated the size of repetition priming effects from young-old to very old age using a newly developed Word-Stem Completion (WSC) task. Retrospectively, we examined the role of explicit, intentional retrieval strategies in priming. We constructed our task by taking factors into account that were known to complicate the measurement of significant and valid priming effects. Within our sample of 170 cognitively healthy elderly persons of 55-94 years old, we found no effects on priming of age, gender, education, intelligence, cognitive status, memory complaints, or depressive symptoms. Participants that subsequent to task administration reported awareness of the study-test relationship obtained higher priming scores. However, analysis of stem-completion times showed that explicit contamination during the task was unlikely. The results suggest that WSC priming is age-invariant up to very old age. This task with increased validity might contribute to the differentiation with Alzheimer's disease by improving specificity of assessment.     

A search asymmetry for interocular conflict

When two different images are presented to the two eyes, the percept will alternate between the images (a phenomenon called binocular rivalry). In the present study, we investigate the degree to which such interocular conflict is conspicuous. By using a visual search task, we show that search for interocular conflict is near efficient (15 ms/item) and can lead to a search asymmetry, depending on the contrast in the display. We reconcile our findings with those of Wolfe and Franzel (1988), who reported inefficient search for interocular conflict (26 ms/item) and found no evidence for a search asymmetry. In addition, we provide evidence for the suggestion that differences in search for interocular conflict are contingent on the degree of abnormal fusion of the dissimilar images.     

Effects of texture and shape on perceived time to passage: Knowing “what” influences judging “when”

In the present study, we examined whether it is easier to judge when an object will pass one’s head if the object’s surface is textured. There are three reasons to suspect that this might be so: First, the additional (local) optic flow may help one judge the rate of expansion and the angular velocity more reliably. Second, local deformations related to the change in angle between the object and the observer could help track the object’s position along its path. Third, more reliable judgments of the object’s shape could help separate global expansion caused by changes in distance from expansion due to changes in the angle between the object and the observer. We can distinguish among these three reasons by comparing performance for textured and uniform spheres and disks. Moving objects were displayed for 0.5–0.7 sec. Subjects had to decide whether the object would pass them before or after a beep that was presented 1 sec after the object started moving. Subjects were not more precise with textured objects. When the disk rotated in order to compensate for the orientation-related contraction that its image would otherwise undergo during its motion, it appeared to arrive later, despite the fact that this strategy increases the global rate of expansion. We argue that this is because the expected deformation of the object’s image during its motion is considered when time to passage is judged. Therefore, the most important role for texture in everyday judgments of time to passage is probably that it helps one judge the object’s shape and thereby estimate how its image will deform as it moves.     

Associative priming in a masked perceptual identification task: Evidence for automatic processes

Two experiments investigated the influence of automatic and strategic processes on associative priming effects in a perceptual identification task in which prime-target pairs are briefly presented and masked. In this paradigm, priming is defined as a higher percentage of correctly identified targets for related pairs than for unrelated pairs. In Experiment 1, priming was obtained for mediated word pairs. This mediated priming effect was affected neither by the presence of direct associations nor by the presentation time of the primes, indicating that automatic priming effects play a role in perceptual identification. Experiment 2 showed that the priming effect was not affected by the proportion (.90 vs. .10) of related pairs if primes were presented briefly to prevent their identification. However, a large proportion effect was found when primes were presented for 1000 ms so that they were clearly visible. These results indicate that priming in a masked perceptual identification task is the result of automatic processes and is not affected by strategies. The present paradigm provides a valuable alternative to more commonly used tasks such as lexical decision.     

Haptic subitizing across the fingers

Numerosity judgments of small sets of items (≤ 3) are generally fast and error free, while response times and error rates increase rapidly for larger numbers of items. We investigated an efficient process used for judging small numbers of items (known as subitizing) in active touch. We hypothesized that this efficient process for numerosity judgment might be related to stimulus properties that allow for efficient (parallel) search. Our results showed that subitizing was not possible for raised lines among flat surfaces, whereas this type of stimulus could be detected in parallel over the fingers. However, subitizing was possible when the number of fingers touching a surface had to be judged while the other fingers were lowered in mid-air. In the latter case, the lack of tactile input is essential, since subitizing was not enabled by differences in proprioceptive information from the fingers. Our results show that subitizing using haptic information from the fingers is possible only when some fingers receive tactile information while other fingers do not.