The effect of receipt personalization on tipping behavior

Research has shown that personalizing receipts, such as drawing “smiley faces” and writing “thank you” notes on customer bills to express gratitude, can result in larger tips for restaurant wait staff. Although the practice of receipt personalization has been supported using field experiments, limited research has examined the effectiveness of this technique based on the level of service quality provided by restaurant wait staff. Using a scenario‐based approach, we found from this study that adding a personalized message significantly lowers tip percentages. Moreover, the negative effect is magnified when service quality fails to exceed customer expectations. Implications related to the findings are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Context and Prior Impression Effects on Attention, Judgment Standards, and Ratings: Contrast Effects Revisited

The present study extended research on contrast effects by (a) examining the effect of context performances on ratings of a target performance when a prior impression of the target performer already exists, and (b) clarifying the issue of whether contrast is caused by attention to context-discrepant behavior or shifts in judgment standards. The results demonstrated that the existence of a prior impression mitigates the influence of context performances on ratings. Judgment standards were found to be unstable and dependent on information provided to raters by the experimental manipulations. Regression analyses showed that both attention and standards of judgment mediate the relationship between context and ratings. Implications of these findings for contrast effects, performance ratings, and the importance of reliable judgment standards for real-world performance appraisals are discussed.     

Quest Religion and the Problem of Limited Compassion

Is the religious questing orientation an unprejudiced orientation that shows tolerance for people to a degree that suggests universal, rather than circumscribed, compassion? To answer this question, 90 undergraduates were given the opportunity to help either of two peers win a monetary prize. The identity of one of the peers was manipulated across two conditions: he or she was presented as holding a religious fundamentalist belief style or belief style unspecified. The purpose of the monetary prize was also varied across two conditions: an activity that either would or would not promote religious fundamentalist behavior. Participants scoring high in religious questing helped the discloser who held a religious fundamentalist belief style less than the discloser who did not, irrespective of whether they promoted religious fundamentalist behavior or not. These results suggest that the questing orientation is associated with prejudice toward the value‐violating person when the salient person value violates the open‐minded belief style of the questing orientation.     

African Americans' Educational Expectations: Longitudinal Causal Models for Women and Men

The long‐term educational development of African American adolescents was investigated using a national longitudinal sample. The dependent variable was the highest level of education that participants ever expected to achieve. These expectations were assessed when participants were 2 years beyond high school. Background variables and family variables were assessed when students were in the 8th grade. High school behavior variables were assessed when students were high school seniors. Path models revealed differing processes for women and men. Overall, effects of early academic performance variables were strongest, followed by effects of family variables and high school behavior variables. Implications for theory and practice are included.     

Coherence and coreference

Coherence in conversations and in texts can be partially characterized by a set of coherence relations, motivated ultimately by the speaker's or writer's need to be understood. In this paper, formal definitions are given for several coherence relations, based on the operations of an inference system; that is, the relations between successive portions of a discourse are characterized in terms of the inferences that can be drawn from each. In analyzing a discourse, it is frequently the case that we would recognize it as coherent, in that it would satisfy the formal definition of some coherence relation, if only we could assume certain noun phrases to be coreferential. In such cases, we will simply assume the identity of the entities referred to, in what might be called a “petty conversational implicature,” thereby solving the coherence and coreference problems simultaneously. Three examples of different kinds of reference problems are presented. In each, it is shown how the coherence of the discourse can be recognized, and how the reference problems are solved, almost as a by-product, by means of these petty conversational implicatures.