Uniformity: The effects of organizational attire on judgments and attributions

Despite their prevalence in the marketplace, little empirical attention has been paid to how employee uniforms affect consumer reactions to service experiences. We propose that employee uniforms facilitate the shared categorization of employees and their organization in the mind of the customer, which affects many of the inferences that customers draw following service encounters. Study 1 shows that uniforms lead to greater attribution of responsibility to the company for employee behavior, especially following poor service. Studies 2 and 3 show that uniforms also lead to more assimilation of judgments across employees, increasing the impact of one employee's behavior on judgments of other employees of the same organization. Study 3 shows that employee uniforms lead to more extreme judgments of the company following service encounters. It also shows that bad (good) service from a uniformed employee makes competing companies look better (worse), indicating that uniforms can elicit contrast effects across companies. In sum, the mere presence of a uniform on an unsatisfactory service or retail employee can damage judgments of the organization and its employees and improve judgments of rival organizations compared to identical service from a nonuniformed employee. Managers seem unaware of these negative consequences. These same principles are likely to apply to a wide variety of uniformed services, including police, military, firefighters, and health-care providers.     

Better in the (near) future: Group-based differences in forecasting biases

Social identities are an important component of an individual’s self-concept. In the current research, we examine how identification with a group can lead to biased intergroup judgments similar to those made when evaluating the self, relative to others. We compared evaluations of in- and outgroups in order to examine differences in temporal perspective and optimistic evaluations. Our findings suggest that compared to an outgroup, ingroup members more strongly consider the future potential of their group, are more optimistic when considering future ingroup outcomes, and hold a more uniformly positive view of an ingroup’s future. Furthermore, we find that when evaluating ingroups, shifts in temporal perspectives are related to greater optimism. We conclude by discussing theoretical implications and future research related to temporal judgments and social groups.     

Psychotherapy training via a task-based assessment of the multicultural orientation framework: A pilot study

This pilot study involved the development and initial testing of an applied Multicultural Orientation Performance Task (MCO-PT) and coding system. The MCO-PT was comprised of seven brief video simulations of cultural exchanges. Seventy-four graduate students recorded responses and then completed measures of desirable responding and multicultural competence. Research assistants coded the videos on three dimensions: cultural humility, cultural opportunities and cultural comfort (ICCs 0.61–0.97). Exploratory factor analysis yielded three factors that corresponded with the MCO constructs (alphas 0.77–0.97). Cultural opportunities were positively correlated with multicultural competence, and none of the subscales were associated with social desirability.     

Exploring the Time Preferences by Procrastinators: Night or Day,Which is the One?

In study 1, trait procrastinators compared to nonprocrastinators claimed they were ‘night persons’, individuals who are most alert and active in the late afternoon and evening hours. However, there were no significant individual differences in time preference for a set of social and individual activities considered pleasurable. In study 2, participants kept daily records for six straight days of when they had engaged in activities. Proneness toward behavioral (but not decisional) procrastination was significantly related to number of activities performed in the evening. Together, these studies suggest that procrastinators may be ‘late starters’ who prefer to engage in daily activities later in the day than early in the morning. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Possibilities of Forgiveness

Perhaps the best way to challenge anodyne popular conceptions of forgiveness is to highlight the ways in which “forgiveness,” like “justice” and “freedom,” is a rich and deeply contested term that relies for its content on divergent convictions about who we are and who we should seek to be. The essays in this focus issue articulate some of the many possibilities for practicing and thinking about forgiveness.     

Cardiovascular reactivity to and recovery from psychological challenge as predictors of 3-year change in blood pressure.

The authors examined whether cardiovascular reactivity to and recovery from psychological challenge predict 3-year change in blood pressure (BP) among 216 initially normotensive, community-dwelling adults. Clinic BP assessments were conducted at baseline and follow-up. BP and heart rate (HR) readings were obtained before, during, and after 5 psychological tasks at baseline. Following adjustment for traditional predictors of BP and lifestyle factors, poorer systolic BP recovery across the tasks was associated with greater 3-year increases in clinic systolic and diastolic BP. Both diastolic BP recovery and HR recovery were also related to 3-year change in clinic BP, though cardiovascular reactivity measures were not. These findings suggest that the duration of stress-related cardiovascular responses may be important for predicting longitudinal changes in BP.     

Atheism is only skin deep: Geertz and Markússon rely mistakenly on sociodemographic data as meaningful indicators of underlying cognition

Cognitive scientists of religion and evolutionary theorists alike have been increasingly arguing in recent years that religion is “natural” in the sense of being motivated by core, evolved psychological intuitions. Atheism, and irreligion more generally, appear to pose problems for the naturalness hypothesis, especially considering the significant proportion of people in contemporary societies who reject supernatural beliefs. Although Geertz and Markússon clarify why the naturalness hypothesis does not imply religious determinism, they fail to weigh adequately the more conservative prediction, that of religious probabilism. Furthermore, unlike cognitive scientific accounts favoring the naturalness hypothesis, the authors base their arguments for the cultural scaffolding of atheistic cognition on sociodemographic data alone—a source that is unlikely to be a meaningful reflection of “natural” underlying cognitive processes.     

Use does not wear ragged the fabric of friendship: Thinking of objects as alive makes people less willing to replace them

Anthropomorphic beliefs about objects lead people to treat them as if they were alive. Two experiments test how anthropomorphic thought affects consumers' product replacement intentions. Consumers induced to think about their car in anthropomorphic terms (i) were less willing to replace it and (ii) gave less weight to its quality when making replacement decisions. Instead, they (iii) attended to (experimentally induced connotations of) the car's “warmth,” a feature usually considered relevant in the interpersonal domain. While anthropomorphic beliefs about brands are often seen as advantageous by marketers because they increase brand loyalty, similar beliefs about products may be less desirable.     

The temporal distribution of information in audiovisual spoken-word identification

In the present study, we examined the distribution and processing of information over time in auditory and visual speech as it is used in unimodal and bimodal word recognition. English consonant-vowel-consonant words representing all possible initial consonants were presented as auditory, visual, or audiovisual speech in a gating task. The distribution of information over time varied across and within features. Visual speech information was generally fully available early during the phoneme, whereas auditory information was still accumulated. An audiovisual benefit was therefore already found early during the phoneme. The nature of the audiovisual recognition benefit changed, however, as more of the phoneme was presented. More features benefited at short gates rather than at longer ones. Visual speech information plays, therefore, a more important role early during the phoneme rather than later. The results of the study showed the complex interplay of information across modalities and time, since this is essential in determining the time course of audiovisual spoken-word recognition.     

Where to seat the applicant? How spatial distance influences the effect of self‐promotion on interviewer evaluations

In high‐stakes contexts such as job interviews, people seek to be evaluated favorably by others and they attempt to accomplish such favorable judgments particularly through self‐promotional behaviors. We sought to examine the persuasiveness of job candidates’ self‐promotion by examining job applicants’ subjective hireability from the perspective of construal‐level theory. Construal‐level theory states that perceptions occur from different levels of psychological distance (i.e., distal vs. proximal). This distance is created by other dimensions of distance (e.g., spatial or social distance) and affects how individuals construe incoming information. From a large distance, people more readily process abstract information, whereas from a close distance, people more readily process concrete information. Specifically, construal compatibility occurs when abstract versus concrete features of a stimulus match the psychological distance experienced by message‐recipients. Construal compatibility (vs. incompatibility) makes evaluations (e.g., of messages) more favorable. To apply this principle to self‐promotion, we created self‐promotional videos of a job interview, in which the applicant sat either far away from or close to the hiring manager (manipulating psychological distance); the applicant, then, used either direct or indirect self‐promotion (manipulating message construal level). The results showed participants reported stronger intention to hire the applicant when distance matched (vs. did not match) the type of self‐promotion the applicant used.