A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFERENTIATION

A cross-cultural study of psychological differentiation of Canadian and Pakistani high school students was undertaken to examine the nature of psychological differentiation in relation to differences in age/grade, gender, and academic programs. The study involved 707 Canadian students from grades 6, 8, 10, and 12; and 349 Pakistani students from grades 8, 9, 10, and 12. The Group Embedded Figures Test was employed as a measure of the field-dependence-independence cognitive style. Analyses of data included two-way and three-way analyses of variance to determine the effects of grade, gender, and academic program upon GEFT scores. Differences in psychological differentiation between high school students in the two cultures were discussed in terms of Berry's eco-cultural model.     

PERCEPTION OF PICTORIAL SPACE BY BUSHMEN*

A new test for measuring the ability to perceive pictorial depth was used with children of two remote Bushman populations (!Xu and Kxoe), as well as with a sample of adult Bushmen drawn from these populations and a sample of urban Zulu children. The results show that subjects of apparently little sophistication are capable of perceiving depth when confronted with a ‘geometric’ figure. They also show surprising inter-group differences which cannot be easily explained by differences of environmental experience.     

On-the-Job Experience and Skill at Detecting Deception1

The role of on-the-job experience in fostering skill at detecting deception was examined. A deception-detection test was administered to three samples of more than 100 subjects each: a group of undergraduates with no special experiences at detecting deceit; a group of new recruits to a federal law enforcement training program, who had some limited on-the-job experience at detecting deceit; and a group of advanced federal law enforcement officers, with years of experience working at jobs in which the detection of deception is very important. Although the officer samples were more confident about their judgments of deceptiveness than were the students, they were no more accurate than the students. None of the three groups showed a significant improvement in deception-detection success from the first half to the second half of the test; however, the advanced officers felt increasingly confident about their performance as they progressed through the test. Correlational analyses of the relationship between accuracy and confidence provided further evidence that experience does not improve people's awareness oi the accuracy or inaccuracy of their judgments. The findings from this research are compared to the results of research on other kinds of professional decision-makers (e.g., clinical psychologists), and several theoretical perspectives on the role of experience in decision making are discussed.     

Ambient Temperature and Violent Crime1

Baron and Ransberger (1978) argue that civil violence increases as temperature rises into the mid 80s, and then decreases as temperatures rise further. Two experiments test this hypothesis using data on temperature and the incidence of crime for summer months in two midwestern cities. The crime data were divided into violent and nonviolent crimes, and then correlated with the maximum, minimum, and average temperatures, and several humidity measures. Violent crime correlated significantly with temperature; nonviolent crime did not. This relationship was linear in the first study, but curvilinear in the second. Inspection of the data suggests that the incidence of aggressive behavior (i.e., violent crime) does not drop off in the mid-80s as laboratory findings and Baron and Ransberger's results would suggest, but continues to increase as temperatures rise into the 90s. The mean incidence of violent crime was higher for days in the 90s than for days in the 80s. A hypothesis for resolving this contradiction between real world and laboratory findings is discussed.     

The honeymoon effect in job performance: temporal increases in the predictive power of achievement motivation

Correlations between a job performance criterion and personality measures reflecting achievement motivation and an interpersonal orientation were examined at three points in time after completion of job training for a sample of airline reservations agents. Although correlations between the personality predictors and performance were small and nonsignificant for the 3-month period after beginning the job, by the end of 6 and 8 months a number of significant relationships had emerged. Implications for the utility of personality measures in selection and performance prediction are discussed.     

THE EFFECTS OF A CLASSROOM MANAGER ROLE ON THE SOCIAL INTERACTION PATTERNS AND SOCIAL STATUS OF WITHDRAWN KINDERGARTEN STUDENTS

We examined the effects of assigning a classroom manager's role on the frequency of social interactions and the sociometric standing of three withdrawn kindergarten students. Results showed that when the three socially withdrawn students were placed in the manager's role they substantially increased the frequency of their positive social initiations during free-play time, were the recipients of many more positive and significantly fewer negative social bids from their peers, were rated more favorably by their classmates on a sociometric rating scale, and were selected more frequently as best friends by their peers. In addition, follow-up data suggested partial maintenance of treatment effects when students no longer occupied manager positions.     

Observational learning of two visual discriminations by pigeons: a within-subjects design.

Pigeon's observational learning of successive visual discrimination was studied using within-subject comparisons of data from three experimental conditions. Two pairs of discriminative stimuli were used; each bird was exposed to two of the three experimental conditions, with different pairs of stimuli used in a given bird's two conditions. In one condition, observers were exposed to visual discriminative stimuli only. In a second condition, subjects were exposed to a randomly alternating sequence of two stimuli where the one that would subsequently be used as S+ was paired with the operation of the grain magazine. In a third experimental condition, subjects were exposed to the performance of a conspecific in the operant discrimination procedure. After exposures to conspecific performances, there was facilitation of discriminative learning, relative to that which followed exposures to stimulus and reinforcement sequences or exposures to stimulus sequences alone. Exposure to stimulus and food-delivery sequences enhanced performance relative to exposure to stimulus sequences alone. The differential effects of these three types of exposure were not attributable to order effects or to task difficulty; rather, they clearly were due to the type of exposure.     

DOES EFFORT PLAY A ROLE IN THE EFFECT OF RESPONSE REQUIREMENTS ON DELAYED MATCHING TO SAMPLE?

The possible role of "effort" in the accuracy of pigeons' performance on a delayed matching-to-sample procedure was investigated by examining the effects of response requirements that accompanied a trial-initiating stimulus and that accompanied a sample stimulus. In the first experiment, the effect of varying the size of a fixed-ratio requirement for responses during an initiating stimulus was compared to that of varying a similar requirement for responses during the sample stimulus. Accuracy increased reliably with increases in the ratio scheduled during the sample stimulus, but was not significantly affected by increases in the ratio scheduled on the key during the initiating stimulus. In another phase of Experiment 1, sample duration was held constant while the ratio requirement was varied during the initiating stimulus. Again, accuracy of matching to sample was not significantly affected by the size of the ratio scheduled during the initiating stimulus. Experiment 2 provided a systematic replication of these results in another group of pigeons and included a more detailed analysis of responding. These results support the view that increases in sample-response requirement facilitate accuracy of delayed matching by increasing the durations of exposure to the sample stimuli, and do not support a role of effort in the sample-response effect. In Experiment 3, the facilitative effect of responses on the sample but not of those on the initiating stimulus was replicated using a simultaneous matching-to-sample procedure. This finding provides further evidence against an interpretation of response-requirement effects that appeals to effort; the finding also suggests that sample exposure might affect initial discrimination of the sample rather than remembering the sample.     

Comparing the effects of two correction procedures on human acquisition of sequential behavior patterns

Thirty-one college undergraduates learned to touch abstract stimuli on a computer screen in arbitrarily designated “correct” sequential orders. Four sets of seven stimuli were used; the stimuli were arrayed horizontally on the screen in random sequences. A correct response (i.e., touching first the stimulus designated as first) resulted in that stimulus appearing near the top of the screen in its correct sequential position (left to right), and remaining there until the end of the trial. Incorrect responses (i.e., touching a stimulus out of sequence) terminated the trial. New trials displayed either the same sequence as the one on which an error had occurred (same-order correction procedure), or a new random sequence (new-order correction procedure). Whenever all responses occurred in the correct sequence, the next trial displayed a new random sequence. Each phase ended when five consecutive correct response sequences occurred. Initially, the same-order correction procedure increased control by the position as well as by the shape of the stimuli; also, it produced more errors, more total trials, more trials to mastery, and more individual patterns of reacquisition than were produced by the new-order procedure.     

Of beasties and butterflies: Evidence for the stability and domain-specificity of individual differences in categorization

Previous research has failed to demonstrate unambiguously the relative stability across time and consistency across tasks of individual differences in categorization, or categorization breadth The present study of categorizing behavior in college students assesses breadth at each of four points in time over a six-week period Results are consistent with an interpretation of breadth as a highly stable individual difference variable, but one that is constrained by the nature of the stimulus sets employed High stability coefficients were observed for each of two redundant tasks In contrast, cross-task consistency indices were generally low Personality correlates of breadth were similarly weak and inconsistent Several variables are suggested that may attenuate the generality of categorization breadth The existence of multiple styles of categorization is discussed