Helping to overcome intervention inertia in bystander’s dilemmas: Behavioral disinhibition can improve the greater good

Conventional wisdom holds that behavioral disinhibition has negative effects on what humans do. Behavioral disinhibition may indeed frequently have negative effects, but in the present paper we reveal some positive consequences as well: the disinhibition hypothesis proposed here states that people may feel inhibited to intervene in situations in which non-intervening bystanders are present and that, therefore, behavioral disinhibition may help to overcome the bystander effect. Findings presented here provide evidence supporting this prediction both inside and outside the psychology laboratory: in both real-life and controlled bystander situations, people were more likely and faster to provide help when (unrelated to the bystander situations) they had (vs. had not) been reminded about having acted with no inhibitions. These findings suggest that, in contrast with what various theories and worldviews dictate, behavioral disinhibition may have positive effects on helping behavior and hence can be conducive for the greater good.     

An affective-experiential perspective on reactions to fair and unfair events: Individual differences in affect intensity moderated by experiential mindsets

The present paper focuses on what psychological processes are driving people’s reactions to fair and unfair events. Specifically, by extending on ideas that people’s reactions to fair and unfair events consist at least partly of affect-related responses, and by adopting the assumption made in cognitive-experiential self-theory that the operation of experiential mindsets is intimately associated with affect-related experiences, we formulate the hypothesis that individual differences in affect intensity will moderate reactions to fair and unfair events. Introducing a novel manipulation of experiential and rationalistic mindsets to the research literature, the findings of two studies indeed reveal that especially for people in experiential (vs. rationalistic) mindsets negative affective reactions to fair and unfair events increase with high (vs. low) scores on affect intensity. Implications for the literature on social justice, experiential mindsets, and affect intensity are discussed.     

Procedural justice in authority relations: the strength of outcome dependence influences people's reactions to voice

In this article, we study how the strength of outcome dependence, defined as the extent to which people's outcomes depend on authority's decisions, influences their reactions to voice or no-voice procedures. We suggest that in situations where people are strongly outcome dependent they assume that the authority may not consider their views, and therefore voice procedures exert less influence on people's procedure judgments than in situations where they are not strongly outcome dependent. Findings of two experiments corroborate this line of reasoning: In strongly outcome dependent situations, recipients' procedure judgments are influenced less strongly by voice versus no-voice procedures than in moderate or weak outcome dependent situations. Furthermore, these effects were found for both pre-decision voice (Experiment 1) and for post-decision voice (Experiment 2). It is concluded that strong outcome dependence decreases the value-expressive function of voice opportunities. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Meaning-Making in Delayed-Return Cultures: The Case of Personal Uncertainty

The large majority of humans nowadays live in cultures in which there is often a delay between the efforts they exert and the feedback they receive regarding the outcome of their efforts. As a result, individuals may experience uncertainty between their efforts and outcomes, leading them to pay special attention to uncertainty information. In particular, we propose that when people feel uncertain about themselves, this may be alarming to them as it may signal that their personal contract with their delayed-return culture may be in jeopardy. Therefore, under conditions of personal uncertainty, people are looking forward to events that bolster their cultural worldviews and detest events that violate these worldviews. We review research findings that show that personal uncertainty indeed has a special role in the social psychology of meaning-making and worldview defense, sometimes even yielding a better explanation of worldview defense reactions than terror management theory.     

Shaping cooperation behavior: The role of accessibility experiences and uncertainty

The present research investigates the influence on cooperative behavior of accessibility experiences associated with the retrieval of fairness‐relevant information from memory. We argue that the decision whether to cooperate in negotiations depends not only on information about the appropriateness of the negotiation procedure, but also on the experience of how difficult or easy it is to come up with this information. Supporting this hypothesis, it is shown that in the context of a bargaining experiment, participants' experiences of ease or difficulty in retrieving unfair aspects of the respective negotiation procedure strongly influence their cooperation behavior. In addition, we hypothesize and empirically substantiate that the influence of accessibility experiences on cooperation behavior occurs particularly in situations of certainty salience. Implications for future research on cooperation and on accessibility experiences are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of perpetrator similarity in reactions toward innocent victims

Building and extending on just world theory, this paper studies people's negative reactions to innocent victims of rape or sexual assault. Specifically, we focus on an as yet unexplored variable that may help to explain these reactions, namely whether the perpetrator of the crime was similar or dissimilar to people who observed what happened to the victim. Perpetrator similarity refers to whether the perpetrator belongs to the personal world of the observer or not, and in accordance with predictions derived from just world theory, findings of three studies reveal that especially men take more physical distance from an innocent victim (Study 1) and blame (Study 2) and derogate (Study 3) an innocent victim more when the perpetrator is similar to them as opposed to when the perpetrator is different from them. Implications are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Looking to relate: teacher gaze and culture in student-rated teacher interpersonal behaviour

Mobile eye-tracking was used to investigate the link between teacher gaze and student-rated teacher interpersonal behaviour. Teacher gaze was recorded for 10 min during a teacher-centred part...     

Model-guided implementation of an instrument for program evaluation: The use of social policy and innovation models

A research program in the Netherlands is aimed at the implementation of an instrument for program evaluation in organizations for intramural treatment of juveniles with psychosocial and/or behavioral problems. The basis and guide for the implementation is a sequence of three complementary models, each model being more specific than its predecessor. The results of the research program in nine organizations suggest that the choice of an adequate guiding model depends on the policy level at which the organization is operating, the number of persons involved in the implementation, and the culture of decision-making in the organization. K. Mesman Schultz is senior investigator at the Leyden Institute for Social Policy Research (LISPOR) and director of the Research Centre for Youth-at-Risk (RCY) at the State University of Leyden, Rijnsburgerweg 100, 233 AE Leiden The Netherlands. His research mainly refers to diagnosis, decision-making and social policy in the field of youth care. W.I. Poot is investigator at LISPOR and RCY. She is in charge of the execution of utilization and implementation research projects in the field of youth care. P.H.M. van den Bogaart is senior investigator at LISPOR and RCY. He has wide experience in educational research and youth care research.