Why do I always have the best ideas? The role of idea quality in unconscious plagiarism

Groups of individuals often work together to generate solutions to a problem. Subsequently, one member of the group can plagiarise another either by recalling that person's idea as their own (recall-own plagiarism), or by generating a novel solution that duplicates a previous idea (generate-new plagiarism). The current study examines the extent to which these forms of plagiarism are influenced by the quality of the ideas. Groups of participants initially generated ideas, prior to an elaboration phase in which idea quality was manipulated in two ways: participants received feedback on the quality of the ideas as rated by independent judges, and they generated improvements to a subset of the ideas. Unconscious plagiarism was measured in recall-own and generate-new tasks. For recall, idea improvement led to increased plagiarism, while for the generate-new task, the independent ratings influenced plagiarism. These data indicate that different source-judgement processes underlie the two forms of plagiarism, neither of which can be reduced simply to memory strength.     

Does the presence of priming hinder subsequent recognition or recall performance?

Declarative and non-declarative memories are thought be supported by two distinct memory systems that are often posited not to interact. However, Wagner, Maril, and Schacter (2000a) reported that at the time priming was assessed, greater behavioural and neural priming was associated with lower levels of subsequent recognition memory, demonstrating an interaction between declarative and non-declarative memory. We examined this finding using a similar paradigm, in which participants made the same or different semantic word judgements following a short or long lag and subsequent memory test. We found a similar overall pattern of results, with greater behavioural priming associated with a decrease in recognition and recall performance. However, neither various within-participant nor various between-participant analyses revealed significant correlations between priming and subsequent memory performance. These data suggest that both lag and task have effects on priming and declarative memory performance, but that they are largely independent and occur in parallel.     

“I'm Having a Little Struggle With This,Can You Help Me Out?”: Examining Impacts and Processes of a Social Capital Intervention for First‐Generation College Students

Social capital plays a key role in college and career success, and research indicates that a dearth of on‐campus connections contributes to challenges first‐generation college students face in effectively navigating the college environment. This study investigates a novel intervention that focuses on the development of skills and attitudes to empower first‐generation college students to cultivate social capital and on‐campus connections during the transition to college. A mixed methods, explanatory design was used to evaluate impacts and processes of the intervention among first‐generation college students (n = 164) in the context of an ethnically diverse, urban, public university in the Northeast. Results indicated that students who participated in the intervention demonstrated improved attitudes and behaviors around seeking support in college, closer relationships with instructors, and higher GPAs at the end of their first year in college. These results suggest the potential benefits of a relatively scalable approach to supporting the needs of first‐generation college students.     

Joint factor analysis of the Children's Depression Inventory and the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale.

Used a joint factor analysis with the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI; Kovacs, 1980/81, 1992) and Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS; C. R. Reynolds & Richmond, 1978, 1985) to identify items that uniquely measured depression and anxiety. Data from 750 youngsters in Grades 4 through 7 were analyzed using principal-axis factoring with an oblique rotation. Salient factors were identified using guidelines provide by Gorsuch (1997). Item overlap and the large negative affectivity component across instruments were evident. Items that overlapped or had nonsalient loadings were eliminated. The sample was randomly split into 2 groups of 375 and analyses were repeated. Results indicated that a unique 9-item depression factor composed largely of items representing a negative view of oneself existed. In addition, a unique 7-item anxiety factor emerged that consisted of items reflecting worry. The validity of these abbreviated scales was explored using a separate sample of 131 students in Grades 4 through 9. The abbreviated scales were correlated with scales of positive and negative affect consistent with predictions. Findings suggest exploring alternative scoring strategies for the CDI and RCMAS to eliminate problems associated with overlapping items.     

Doing Field Studies of Religious Movements: An Agenda

Although the social scientific study of religion has seen the accumulation of numerous case studies, comparative work involving substantial numbers of cases is rare. In the absence of an accepted agenda for field research, field studies contain information relevant to the study at hand, but do not add systematically to a cumulative database. By contrast, field studies in anthropology may contain idiosyncratic information relevant to the author's interests, but an existing research agenda defines information researchers are expected to include, which has produced an expanding cross-cultural database. In this paper, we propose elements of a research agenda for the study of religious movements, including information related to movements' organizational history and context, mobilization, organization, governance, and outcomes. While this preliminary agenda is subject to refinement by others, it provides a starting point for the accumulation of comparable cases, and a basis for the comparative study of religious movements.     

Efforts to Christianize Europe, 400‐2000

In previous work I have demonstrated that, claims by the secularization faithful to the contrary, religious participation in most of Europe did not decline in modern times, having never been very high. In this essay I attempt to explain why. Why did earlier efforts to Christianize Europe fail? In conclusion I assess present American missionary efforts to convert Europe.     

Whose idea was that? Source monitoring for idea ownership following elaboration

Unconscious plagiarism (UP) occurs when an individual claims a previously experienced idea as their own. Previous studies have explored the cognitive precursors of such errors by manipulating the ways that ideas are thought about between initial idea exposure and later test. While imagining other's ideas does not increase rates of UP relative to control on either a recall-own or generate-new task, improving others' ideas substantially increases such errors in the recall-own task. This study explored the effects of elaboration on rates of UP when a source-monitoring test replaced the recall-own test. Plagiarism was again observed following idea improvement but not idea imagery even though participants engaged explicit source evaluation. Thus the probability of plagiarising another's idea appears linked to the generative nature of the idea processing performed.     

Constructing personality scales under the assumptions of an ideal point response process: toward increasing the flexibility of personality measures

The main aim of this article is to explicate why a transition to ideal point methods of scale construction is needed to advance the field of personality assessment. The study empirically demonstrated the substantive benefits of ideal point methodology as compared with the dominance framework underlying traditional methods of scale construction. Specifically, using a large, heterogeneous pool of order items, the authors constructed scales using traditional classical test theory, dominance item response theory (IRT), and ideal point IRT methods. The merits of each method were examined in terms of item pool utilization, model-data fit, measurement precision, and construct and criterion-related validity. Results show that adoption of the ideal point approach provided a more flexible platform for creating future personality measures, and this transition did not adversely affect the validity of personality test scores.