Attribution difficulty and memory for attribution-relevant information

This research compared the processing and retrieval of attribution-relevant information when the attributional inference is easy or difficult to make. Subjects attributed behavioral events to the person or to the situation, based on several items of context information. Each context sentence implied either the person or the entity as causal agent. When the attributional inference was difficult to make (an equal number of context sentences implied actor and entity as the causal agent), subjects recalled more of the behavioral events, recalled more context sentences, and were less confident in their attributions than when the attributional inference was easy to make (most context sentences implied the same causal agent). Subjects also recalled context information that was implicationally incongruent with the majority of the other context sentences with a higher probability than when that same information was implicationally congruent.     

Reducing Avoidance of Social Interaction with a Physically Disabled Person by Mentioning the Disability Following a Request for Aid1

The effectiveness of strategies for reducing avoidance of social interaction with a physically disabled person was experimentally investigated. Female college students privately expressed their preference for social interaction before and after learning the other was a female in a wheelchair or nondisabled. The results provide evidence for the effectiveness of mentioning the disability following a request for aid related to the disability (the Request-mention Strategy). Change in preference for social interaction was more positive when the disabled person employed the Request-mention strategy than when she said nothing. Requesting aid without mentioning the disability was not found to be effective. A request for aid unrelated to the disability was clearly ineffective. The disabled person who said nothing was avoided, in comparison to when the same person was nondisabled. Favorability of impressions of the other, as measured by ratings of her characteristics, was not influenced by the experimental conditions.     

Biasing evaluations to appear unbiased: A self-presentational paradox

Subjects interviewed a confederate posing as a job applicant. In a 2 × 2 factorial design, half the subjects were insulted by the confederate at the end of the interview and half were not insulted. Half the subjects were observed by the experimenter during the final phase of the interview and evaluated the confederate publicly. The remaining subjects were unobserved during the interview and evaluated the confederate anonymously. As predicted, subjects who were publicly insulted were more favorable toward the confederate than were subjects who were privately insulted. Within the public/insult condition, subjects scoring high on Snyder's (1974, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 526–537) self-monitoring scale were more favorable toward the confederate than were subjects scoring low on this scale. The positivity bias occurred only on highly subjective ratings, which are most prone to the appearance of bias. The results are discussed in terms of the subjects' desire to avoid the appearance of bias by biasing their evaluations.     

Some cautionary notes regarding the use of aggregated scores as a measure of behavioral stability

The utility of the method of aggregation as a measure of behavioral consistency was examined in 26 studies involving computer-generated, repeated-measurement data. The first series of studies involved rectangular distributions in which score constant. A second series of studies used normally distributed z scores, and score consistency was manipulated by inducing a desired correlation between the scores in adjacent trials. In both sets of studies, the aggregate stability coefficient was a strictly increasing function of the number of aggregated trials, and even trivial amounts of score stability resulted in large stability coefficients. In a third series of studies, high stability coefficients occurred when computed on combined unstable subsamples which differed from each other only in central tendency. Terminal aggregate coefficients were compared with Spearman-Brown prophecy and Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficients computed on the experimental data. It was concluded that the method of aggregation produces spuriously high estimates of behavioral consistency. It was further shown that the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula and coefficient alpha accurately predict the results of the aggregation method, suggesting that aggregation is an internal consistency reliability procedure. The equating of stability with traditional notions of reliability was questioned.     

The effect of timeout on performance on a variable-interval schedule of electric-shock presentation

Responding was maintained in squirrel monkeys under variable-interval schedules of electric shock presentation when a period of timeout followed each response-dependent shock. Response rate decreased when timeout duration was decreased, and responding ceased when timeout was eliminated. These results indicate that under certain conditions, a shock-free period following each response-produced shock is necessary to maintain responding.     

Interactive effects of deprivation in the albino rat

The interactive effects of feeding and drinking schedules were investigated in three experiments. Twenty-four hour water-deprived rats consumed their entire obligatory water intake prior to feeding, whereas 24-hr food-deprived rats consumed only small quantities of food prior to drinking. This drinking was apparently due to a shift of water stores rather than an actual negative water balance. Experiment 3 investigated the effects of 24, 48, or 72 hr of water, food, or total deprivation. Water-deprived rats did not adequately suppress food intake and became thirstier than totally deprived rats. The effects of total deprivation were essentially identical to those of food deprivation. These experiments indicate the degree to which deprivation schedules impose restrictions on the reinforcement parameters of behavioral experiments.     

Multiple factors in short-term behavioral control of protein intake in rats.

The availability and concentration of dietary protein was varied in an examination of the nature of the day-to-day intake of protein solutions by 60-day-old male rats. It was found that the rats consumed a remarkably constant absolute amount of protein each day, adjusting overall caloric intake to maintain protein at a roughly constant proportion of total calories. Factors such as the time of access to a protein source or the extent of prior experience with a protein source were seen to influence the overall constancy of protein intake, whereas daily shifts in preference between two available concentrations of protein did not interfere with such short-term control. The mechanism for this behavioral control is likely to be different from mechanisms mediating the conditioned response to dietary protein, as in the response to dietary amino acid imbalance.