Priming of spatial distance enhances children's creative performance

According to construal level theory, psychological distance promotes more abstract thought. Theories of creativity, in turn, suggest that abstract thought promotes creativity. Based on these lines of theorizing, we predicted that spatial distancing would enhance creative performance in elementary school children. To test this prediction, we primed spatial distance by presenting 6- to 9-year-olds with pictures of increasingly distal objects (from their own desk to the galaxy) or increasingly proximal objects (from the galaxy to their own desk) and then assessed the fluency and originality of their ideas in a creativity test. We found, consistent with the hypothesis, that after priming of spatial distance, compared with priming of spatial proximity, children were more creative, as reflected in higher scores of both fluency and originality. This result was not qualified by children's age or gender.     

Naïve realism and capturing the “wisdom of dyads”

Two studies provided evidence for the role of naïve realism in the failure of individuals to give adequate weight to peer input, and explored two strategies for reducing the impact of this inferential bias. Study 1 demonstrated that dyad members see their own estimates as more “objective” than those of their partners and that this difference in perceived objectivity predicts the degree of underweighting. Compelling participants to assess their own versus their partners' objectivity prior to revising estimates decreased underweighting, an effect that was mediated by differences in perceived objectivity. Study 2 showed that the increase in accuracy that results from requiring dyad members to offer joint estimates via discussion is largely retained in subsequent individual estimates. Both studies showed that underweighting is greater when dyad members disagree on the issue about which they are making consensus estimates—a finding that further supports a “naïve realism” interpretation of the phenomenon.     

Sophistry In and As Its Course

Although sophistry has been characterized as separable from real philosophy, formal analysis does not work without it and one cannot always identify just where philosophy leaves off and sophistry begins. Whether sophistry offers anything to thinking reason has to do with what parties in dialogue do with sophistries. Sophistries can close down or open up philosophical perspectives, depending on the local work that sophistic strategies accomplish. Such local work of philosophers is rarely available to analyses of docile texts, but they can be furthered by ethnomethodological studies of illustrative philosophical argumentation presented and analyzed in videotaped format.

Expression after suppression: a motivational explanation of postsuppressional rebound

Five studies examined the effect of expressing a construct after suppressing it on subsequent accessibility. Suppression of color terms (Studies 1, 2, and 5) and of stereotypes (Studies 3 and 4) were examined. Both expression alone and suppression alone enhanced the construct's accessibility relative to the no-suppression/no-expression condition, demonstrating activation by recent construct use and postsuppressional rebound, respectively. However, introducing expression after suppression reduced accessibility relative to both the suppression alone and the expression alone conditions. These results are explained within a motivational theory of rebound, according to which suppressing a construct induces a need to use it, and subsequent expression satisfies this need, thereby instigating an inhibition of the accessibility of need-related constructs.     

Phonetic recoding and reading difficulty in beginning readers

The results of a recent study (Liberman, Shankweiler, Liberman, Fowler, & Fischer, 1977) suggest that good beginning readers are more affected than poor readers by the phonetic characteristics of visually presented items in a recall task. The good readers made significantly more recall errors on strings of letters with rhyming letter names than on nonrhyming sequences; in contrast, the poor readers made roughly equal numbers of errors on the rhyming and nonrhyming letter strings. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether the interaction between reading ability and phonetic similarity is solely determined by different rehearsal strategies of the two groups. Accordingly, good and poor readers were tested on rhyming and nonrhyming words using a recognition memory paradigm that minimized the opportunity for rehearsal. Performance of the good readers was more affected by phonetic similarity than that of the poor readers, in agreement with the earlier study. The present findings support the hypothesis that good and poor readers do differ in their ability to access a phonetic representation.