Implications of Virtual Management for Subordinate Performance Appraisals: A Pair of Simulation Studies

This article shifts the focus of prior research examining virtual work to investigate how supervisors who work virtually use subordinate performance information. Drawing insights from several research streams, in Study 1, we propose that supervisors who work virtually bias performance ratings in the direction of information that is observed directly in the office, rather than that which is received when working virtually. In Study 2, we replicate and extend these results to show that this bias is independent of the level of performance information received. Results also indicate that, for high-performing workers, performance information received virtually is evaluated more extremely than information observed directly. We did not find evidence for this extremity effect when low-performing workers were evaluated.     

Priming family values: How being a parent affects moral evaluations of harmless but offensive acts

In modern liberal societies people are generally reluctant to morally condemn acts that they find personally distasteful so long as those acts are not harmful or unfair to others. However, in providing character education for their children, parents often have to censure harmless but offensive acts. Thus, we hypothesize that the parental role broadens the scope of morality beyond narrow considerations of harm and fairness. To test this idea we asked parents and nonparents to morally evaluate harmless/offensive acts and a control harmful act. We manipulated whether the parental role was primed before they evaluated these acts. Parents and nonparents did not differ in their moral objections to the control act regardless of parental role priming. However, when the parental role was primed parents were more morally opposed to harmless but offensive acts than were nonparents. We discuss the implications of these results for understanding the dynamics of moral judgment and the recruitment of parents into moral reform movements.     

Reducing intergroup conflict through the consideration of future consequences

Basic social psychological research has suggested several interventions to reduce intergroup conflict. Most of these interventions, however, have been indirect and impractical to implement outside laboratory settings. Although past research has demonstrated that indirect manipulations of the consideration of future consequences reduce intergroup competition, no study of interindividual–intergroup discontinuity has tested this assumption with a direct manipulation. The present study found that when participants (individuals and members of groups) interacting in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game (PDG) were asked to predict how their opponent's choice on a second trial would be affected by their own choice on an initial trial, intergroup competition was reduced while interindividual competition remained low regardless of the manipulation. On a practical level, implications of this study provide a simple and easily implemented solution to reducing intergroup conflict in non‐laboratory situations. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Two are better than one: comparison influences infants' visual recognition memory

Despite a large literature on infants’ memory for visually presented stimuli, the processes underlying visual memory are not well understood. Two studies with 4-month-olds (N = 60) examined the effects of providing opportunities for comparison of items on infants’ memory for those items. Experiment 1 revealed that 4-month-olds failed to show evidence of memory for an item presented during familiarization in a standard task (i.e., when only one item was presented during familiarization). In Experiment 2, infants showed robust memory for one of two different items presented during familiarization. Thus, infants’ memory for the distinctive features of individual items was enhanced when they could compare items.     

Social Interaction During Computer-based Activities: Comparisons by Number of Sessions, Gender, School-level, Gender Composition of the Group, and Computer-child Ratio

This study assessed the quality of social interactions that occur in group-based computer learning contexts. Gender comparisons of interactions were examined across 3 sessions with 116 preschoolers (M age?=?4.9 years) and 108 fifth and sixth-grade (M age?=?11.7 years) Canadian children from southwestern Ontario, when children had access to one computer per child (parallel computer) or one computer per group (integrated computer), and when they worked with same-gender or mixed-gender peers. Preschoolers engaged in more collaborative behaviors in mixed-gender than same-gender groups, while elementary children engaged in collaborative behaviors more often in integrated than parallel computer conditions. In mixed-gender groups, boys were more likely than girls to dominate the computer in elementary school while girls were more likely than boys to dominate the computer in preschool.     

When 9 is not on the right: Implications from number-form synesthesia

Number-form synesthetes consciously experience numbers in spatially-defined locations. For non-synesthete individuals, a similar association of numbers and space appears in the form of an implicit mental number line as signified by the distance effect–reaction time decreases as the numerical distance between compared numbers increases. In the current experiment, three number-form synesthetes and two different non-synesthete control groups (Hebrew speaking and English speaking) performed a number comparison task. Synesthete participants exhibited a sizeable distance effect only when presented numbers were congruent with their number-form. In contrast, the controls exhibited a distance effect regardless of congruency or presentation type. The findings suggest that: (a) number-form synesthesia impairs the ability to represent numbers in a flexible manner according to task demands; (b) number-form synesthesia is a genuine tangible experience, triggered involuntarily; and (c) the classic mental number line can be more pliable than previously thought and appears to be independent of cultural-lingo direction.     

The influence of instructions and terminology on the accuracy of remember–know judgments

The remember–know paradigm is one of the most widely used procedures to examine the subjective experience associated with memory retrieval. We examined how the terminology and instructions used to describe the experiences of remembering and knowing affected remember–know judgments. In Experiment 1 we found that using neutral terms, i.e., Type A memory and Type B memory, to describe the experiences of remembering and knowing reduced remember false alarms for younger and older adults as compared to using the terms Remember and Know, thereby increasing overall memory accuracy in the neutral terminology condition. In Experiment 2 we found that using what we call source-specific remember–know instructions, which were intended to constrain remember judgments to recollective experiences arising only from the study context, reduced remember hits and false alarms, and increased know hits and false alarms. Based on these data and other considerations, we conclude that researchers should use neutral terminology and source-specific instructions to collect the most accurate reports of the experiences of remembering and knowing arising from the study context.