Does a Tired Mind Help Avoid a Decision Bias? The Effect of Ego Depletion on Escalation of Commitment

In this research, we investigated the effect of ego depletion on escalation of commitment. Specifically, we conducted two laboratory experiments and obtained evidence that ego depletion decreases escalation of commitment. In Study 1, we found that individuals were less susceptible to escalation of commitment after completing an ego depletion task. In Study 2, we confirmed the effect observed in Study 1 using a different manipulation of ego depletion and a different subject pool. Contrary to the fundamental assumption of bounded rationality that people have a tendency to make decision errors when mental resources are scarce, the findings of this research show that a tired mind can help reduce escalation bias.     

Will Victims Become Aggressors or Vice Versa? A Cross-Lagged Analysis of School Aggression

Peer aggression and victimization are ubiquitous phenomena in schools which warrant the attention of educators and researchers. The high connection between aggression and victimization behooves researchers to look into how the comorbidity of them develops over time. The present study investigated the associations between aggression and victimization over 3 years in early adolescence and whether these associations are moderated by gender and teacher support. Participants were 567 Grade 7, 8 and 9 students (49.38% girls) from 3 schools in Hong Kong. Over the course of study, they were asked to fill in a set of questionnaires that consisted of items related to peer aggression, victimization, and teacher support at 5 time points. Four models of cross-lagged relations between peer aggression and victimization were tested. The results supported a reciprocal model of peer aggression and victimization for both boys and girls although girls engaged in less peer aggression and victimization than boys. Further analyses also revealed that teacher support acted as a suppressor of the reciprocal relations. The present study sheds lights on intervention strategies that may remediate peer aggression and victimization in schools.     

Situational meaninglessness and state boredom: Cross-sectional and experience-sampling findings

Theories of boredom assert that boredom is a product of situational meaninglessness. We conducted two studies to test if the perceived meaningfulness of a situation is associated with state boredom, above and beyond sadness, personality traits, and boredom proneness. In Study 1, 105 participants (72.4% female: mean age?=?33.9 years, SD?=?17.5) described situations in which they experienced boredom, no boredom, engagement, or sadness. They then rated the level of state boredom, sadness, and meaninglessness that they experienced in that situation. As hypothesized, state boredom was associated with situational meaninglessness, before and after controlling for sadness. In Study 2, 148 participants (73.0% female; mean age?=?19.2 years, SD?=?1.8) first provided baseline data on personality traits and boredom proneness. Through a smartphone app-based experience-sampling method, they then responded to a brief questionnaire multiple times a day, across 7 days. The questionnaire asked about the nature of their current activity, whether the activity was done alone or with other people, and their affective state. Results from multilevel modelling of 3022 entries suggest that perceived meaningfulness of the activity was negatively associated with state boredom, above and beyond sadness, personality, and boredom proneness. We also found that being with others during the activity acted as a moderator; activities lower in perceived meaningfulness were associated with higher ratings of state boredom when done with others than when done alone. These results demonstrate that perceptions of meaninglessness characterize state boredom.     

Benefits of team participative decision making and its potential to affect individual creativity

How does team participative decision‐making affect individual creative performance? Building on team climate theory (Anderson & West, 1998; West 1990, 2002; West & Sacramento, 2012), this study investigates the indirect effect of team participative decision making on employee creativity through individual perception of cognition team diversity and psychological safety. Results from 256 supervisor–subordinate dyads in 45 teams show that team participative decision making is positively associated with cognitive team diversity and psychological safety. For the mediating effects, team participative decision‐making climate is positively indirectly related to creative performance via psychological safety but not via cognitive team diversity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Font tuning associated with expertise in letter perception

Font tuning (FT) occurs when observers recognize a sequence of letters presented in the same font faster than in different fonts (Sanocki 1987, 1988 Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance 13 267-278; 14 472-480). Here, we test the hypothesis that FT is associated with expertise with a specific writing system. We developed a systematic search task allowing the measurement of FT over a large number of letters and generalized the finding of FT from English readers viewing Roman letters to Chinese readers viewing Chinese characters. Non-Chinese readers did not show evidence of FT for Chinese characters in this search task. We also used a simpler 3-letter identification task to directly compare novice and expert readers, and to explore FT for different aspects of font such as fill, slant, and aspect ratio. We found that experts tune to aspect ratio but not to the other font changes. These findings reveal that letters are not processed visually in the same manner as shapes, and suggest an explanation for the cortical specialization obtained in the visual system for letters.     

Understanding the emotional aspects of escalation of commitment: the role of negative affect

Despite the importance of understanding the emotional aspects of organizational decision making, prior research has paid scant attention to the role of emotion in escalation of commitment. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining the relationship between negative affect and escalation of commitment. Results showed that regardless of whether negative affect was measured as a dispositional trait (Neuroticism) in Studies 1 and 2 or as a transient mood state in Study 3, it was negatively correlated with escalation tendency when one was personally responsible for a prior decision. This pattern of results is consistent with the predictions derived from the coping perspective, suggesting that people seek to escape from the unpleasant emotions that are associated with escalation situations.     

Asymmetric cultural effects on perceptual expertise underlie an own-race bias for voices

The own-race bias in memory for faces has been a rich source of empirical work on the mechanisms of person perception. This effect is thought to arise because the face-perception system differentially encodes the relevant structural dimensions of features and their configuration based on experiences with different groups of faces. However, the effects of sociocultural experiences on person perception abilities in other identity-conveying modalities like audition have not been explored. Investigating an own-race bias in the auditory domain provides a unique opportunity for studying whether person identification is a modality-independent construct and how it is sensitive to asymmetric cultural experiences. Here we show that an own-race bias in talker identification arises from asymmetric experience with different spoken dialects. When listeners categorized voices by race (White or Black), a subset of the Black voices were categorized as sounding White, while the opposite case was unattested. Acoustic analyses indicated listeners’ perceptions about race were consistent with differences in specific phonetic and phonological features. In a subsequent person-identification experiment, the Black voices initially categorized as sounding White elicited an own-race bias from White listeners, but not from Black listeners. These effects are inconsistent with person-perception models that strictly analogize faces and voices based on recognition from only structural features. Our results demonstrate that asymmetric exposure to spoken dialect, independent from talkers’ physical characteristics, affects auditory perceptual expertise for talker identification. Person perception thus additionally relies on socioculturally-acquired dynamic information, which may be represented by different mechanisms in different sensory modalities.     

Conflict Management for Justice,Innovation, and Strategic Advantage in Organizational Relationships

This study proposed that conflict management affects organizations’ beliefs that they have an effective voice (procedural justice), have shared their benefits fairly (distributive justice), and are treated respectfully (interactional justice). Structural equation analysis results suggest that a cooperative approach to conflict facilitates justice in its 3 forms in organizational relationships, and that justice, in turn, results in partner strategic advantage and innovation. Results from a sample of 103 pairs of customer and supplier organizations in Shanghai were interpreted as providing support for the value of justice for collaborative work between organizations. The findings also suggest that a cooperative approach to managing conflict is an important antecedent to justice in organizational relationships in China.