Individual differences in need for cognition and decision-making competence among leaders

When making decisions, people sometimes deviate from normative standards. While such deviations may appear to be alarmingly common, examining individual differences may reveal a more nuanced picture. Specifically, the personality factor of need for cognition (i.e., the extent to which people engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activities; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) may moderate decision makers’ susceptibility to bias, as could personality factors associated with being a leader. As part of a large-scale assessment of high-level leaders, participants completed a battery of decision-making competence and personality scales. Leaders who scored higher on need for cognition performed better on two of four components of a decision-making competence measure: framing and honoring sunk costs. In addition, the leader sample performed better than published controls. Thus, both individual differences in need for cognition and leadership experience moderate susceptibility to decision biases. Implications for broader theories of individual differences and bias are discussed.     

Experiments Behind the Veil: Structural Influences on Judgments of Social Justice

In two experiments, participants judged the fairness of different distributions of wealth in hypothetical societies. In the first study, the level of meritocracy in the hypothetical societies and the frame of reference from which participants judged alternative distributions of wealth interacted to influence fairness judgments. As meritocracy increased, all participants became more tolerant of economic inequality, particularly when they judged fairness from a redistribution frame of reference that made salient transfers among socioeconomic classes. Liberal participants, however, placed a greater emphasis on equality than did conservative participants across all conditions. In the second study, reactions to income transfers depended on the efficiency of the transfers and the identity of the groups receiving the benefits, but conservatives placed a greater emphasis in their fairness judgments on tying benefits to workfare requirements, whereas liberals did not distinguish between unconditional welfare transfers and workfare transfers.     

Children and adolescents as producers of their own development

Interest in the historically changing contexts of human life has been associated with the elaboration of a life-span view of human development. This view holds that all levels of the context, including the biological, psychological, and sociocultural, change in reciprocal relation to one another. As a consequence of being embedded in a context which they both influence and are influenced by, children and adolescents may promote their own development. One way this occurs is that as a consequence of their characteristics of physical and behavioral individuality people promote differential reactions in their socializing others (e.g., parents, teachers, or peers); these reactions feed back affecting further development. My colleagues and I have conducted research that describes such child and adolescent contributions to development. We have focused on characteristics of physical individuality, such as body type and physical attractiveness, and on characteristics of behavioral individuality, such as behavioral style or temperament. Findings from these studies are conceptualized in terms of a person-context “goodness-of-fit” model. Adaptive development is associated with congruence, or fit, between a person's attributes of individuality and the demands of his or her setting. Implications of this research for illustrating the use of the life-span perspective, and for theory in and practice of intervention, are discussed.     

Accounting for the effects of accountability

This article reviews the now extensive research literature addressing the impact of accountability on a wide range of social judgments and choices. It focuses on 4 issues: (a) What impact do various accountability ground rules have on thoughts, feelings, and action? (b) Under what conditions will accountability attenuate, have no effect on, or amplify cognitive biases? (c) Does accountability alter how people think or merely what people say they think? and (d) What goals do accountable decision makers seek to achieve? In addition, this review explores the broader implications of accountability research. It highlights the utility of treating thought as a process of internalized dialogue; the importance of documenting social and institutional boundary conditions on putative cognitive biases; and the potential to craft empirical answers to such applied problems as how to structure accountability relationships in organizations.     

Differentiating anxious and depressive self-statements in youth: factor structure of the Negative Affect Self-Statement Questionnaire among youth referred to an anxiety disorders clinic

Conducted a factor analysis on the items from the Negative Affect Self-Statement Questionnaire (NASSQ; Ronan, Kendall, & Rowe, 1994). This analysis yielded 4 factors (Depressive Self-Statements, Anxiety/Somatic Self-Statements, Negative Affect Self-Statements, and Positive Affect Self-Statements) broadly consistent with both the content-specificity hypothesis (Beck & Clark, 1988) and L. A. Clark and Watson's (1991b) tripartite model of anxiety and depression. The association between children's self-talk and measures of trait anxiety and depression was also examined. Self-statements with content theoretically specific to depression were the best predictors of self-reported depressive symptoms, but the results were less clear for trait anxiety. Overall, these results provide evidence for the discriminability of anxious and depressive self-talk in youth and for the utility of the NASSQ as a cognitive assessment instrument.     

The materialist mentality revisited

My thanks to Jacob Joshua Ross for his helpful advice, and to an anonymous reviewer for detailed and useful comments on an earlier version of this essay.