The effect of individual differences in act prototypicality judgments on trait-behaviour correlations and cross-situational consistency

Individuals differ in their perceptions of actprototypicality. This study examined whether incorporating such individual differences enhances trait-behaviour correlations and provides stronger evidence for cross-situational consistency. Three hundred and fifty-three subjects rated the dominance prototypicality of 100 acts, indicated how often they performed each of these acts, and provided trait ratings of how dominant they were in general. There were substantial and reliable individual differences in prototypicality judgements over a 4–5 month period. A variety of weighting schemes were used to incorporate these individual differences, but none dramatically increased the trait-behaviour correlation. Similarly, incorporating individual differences did not increase the magnitude of cross-situational consistency correlations. However, incorporating individual differences did enhance the pattern of trait-behaviour and consistency correlations from less prototypical to highly prototypical acts. Differences in perceptions of act prototypicality thus do not affect the magnitude of the correlations that can be obtained, but they are useful in revealing theoretically meaningful patterns of relationships.     

An evaluation of a brief integrity test user orientation program

The purpose of this pilot study was to assess the effectiveness of a brief test user orientation program on increasing service station managers' familiarity with a few key employment testing issues, including their familiarity with theModel Guidelines for Preemployment Integrity Testing Programs. The obtained results reveal that even a brief orientation program was able to significantly increase the managers' stated degree of familiarity with testing issues.     

Task bias and the accuracy of judgment: Setting a baseline for expected group performance

When a judgment task evokes unbiased estimates (i.e. the errors in individual judgments are distributed randomly around the true value), mathematical aggregation of individual estimates, even by a simple arithmetic mean, often will outperform all group members. However, when a task evokes biased estimates, mathematical aggregation does not perform so well. In this study, simulated data were accumulated to specify the expected' accuracy of mathematical aggregation relative to the accuracy of observed judgment of individual group members under varying conditions of task bias. Three types of judgment tasks were employed: (1) single-estimate, holistic tasks, (2) multiple-estimate, ranking tasks, and (3) multi-cue, decomposed tasks. Findings indicated across all task types that a large percentage of judgment-making group estimates formed strictly by computing the arithmetic mean of individual estimates performed better than their most capable members when a judgment task evoked little or no bias, a result particularly pronounced for ranking tasks. When the task was more greatly bias-evoking, a large percentage of parallel groups performed more poorly than average (or median) members, again a pattern more starkly evident for ranking tasks. These results suggest that the extent to which a judgment task evokes bias in a population of prospective group members is an important explanatory variable deserving much greater attention in the study of group performance. For example, an assertion about the efficacy of a particular group intervention based on a reliable demonstration of group performance as accurate as the most capable members may be unfounded when a task evokes no bias, since the baseline standard under such conditions should be much higher. By selecting tasks and populations that jointly produced highly biased estimates, researchers can lower the performance floor enough to detect (with reasonably small samples of groups) experimental effects should they occur.     

Components of phonemic processing and the beginning reader

This study primarily investigated various aspects of phonemic processing and memory in relation to reading in 74 5- and 6-year-old British children. A principal components analysis revealed a major connection between reading and aspects of phonemic processing for both age groups. For the 5-year-olds the processing of the initial phoneme was important for reading, whereas for the 6-year-olds processing of initial and final phonemes appeared to be equally related on this factor. A second factor for both groups was intelligence, which was related to reading only for the 6-year-olds; but this intelligence factor was more associated with phonemic processing for the 5-year-olds. An analysis involving clustering individual readers with similar patterns across the experimental variables showed some consistent profiles for disabled readers across the two age groups. These profiles suggested potential areas for remediation according to subgroup membership.     

The effect of gender and time-of-day on time perception and mental workload

Two experiments are reported which investigated how subject gender and time-of-day influenced the estimation of duration and the perception of task-related mental workload. In the first experiment, 24 subjects performed a filled time-estimation task in a constant blacked-out, noise-reduced environment at 0800h, 1200h, 1600h, and 2000h, respectively. In the second experiment, 12 different subjects performed an unfilled time estimation task in similar conditions at 0900h, 1400h, and 1900h. At the termination of all experimental sessions, participants completed the NASA Task Load Index workload assessment questionnaire as a measure of perceived mental workload. Results indicated that physiological response, reflected in body temperature change, followed an expected pattern of sequential increase with time-of-day. However, estimates of duration and the perception of mental workload showed no significant effects for time-of-day. In each of the experiments there were significant differences in time estimation and mental workload response contingent on the gender of the participant. These results are interpreted in light of the previous positive findings for circadian fluctuation in performance efficiency and the equivocal findings of a gender difference in time estimation. A unifying account of these collective results is given based on gender by time-of-day interactional effects. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Human Factors Society, Anaheim, CA, October, 1988.