Fragile promise: The role of justification in promise-breaking

People who consider themselves moral sometimes use self-serving justifications to rationalize their selfish behaviours. Previous studies have tested the role of ambiguity in justifying wrongdoings, but it remains unclear whether ambiguity also plays a role in justifying promise-breaking behaviour and whether heterogeneity exists. To investigate justification in promise-breaking, we introduced a new experimental paradigm called the card-guessing task and used hierarchical cluster analysis to classify participants based on their promise-breaking decisions in unambiguous and ambiguous conditions. Experiment 1 revealed three clusters of solutions: Cluster 1 always kept their promises (i.e., keepers); Cluster 2 only exploited the vague promises and broke their promises in the ambiguous condition (i.e., intermediates); Cluster 3 tended to take advantage of vague promises and broke their promises irrespective of ambiguity (i.e., breakers). Experiment 2 confirmed that participants in the three clusters differed in their norm-abiding preferences and social value orientations. Keepers were more altruistic and had a stronger sense of norm compliance than intermediates and breakers. In conclusion, our study demonstrates that self-serving justifications were more likely to be employed by people who are moderately sensitive to deviation from social norms, which has implications for strategic interventions and policy formulation concerning unethical behaviour.     

Worldviews about change: Their structure and their implications for understanding responses to sustainability,technology, and political change

People hold different perspectives about how they think the world is changing or should change. We examined five of these “worldviews” about change: Progress, Golden Age, Endless Cycle, Maintenance, and Balance. In Studies 1–4 (total N = 2733) we established reliable measures of each change worldview, and showed how these help explain when people will support or oppose social change in contexts spanning sustainability, technological innovations, and political elections. In mapping out these relationships we identify how the importance of different change worldviews varies across contexts, with Balance most critical for understanding support for sustainability, Progress/Golden Age important for understanding responses to innovations, and Golden Age uniquely important for preferring Trump/Republicans in the 2016 US election. These relationships were independent of prominent individual differences (e.g., values, political orientation for elections) or context-specific factors (e.g., self-reported innovativeness for responses to innovations). Study 5 (N = 2140) examined generalizability in 10 countries/regions spanning five continents, establishing that these worldviews exhibited metric invariance, but with country/region differences in how change worldviews were related to support for sustainability. These findings show that change worldviews can act as a general “lens” people use to help determine whether to support or oppose social change.     

Inspired to donate: How donors' social class impacts charitable donations

Previous research has found that donors' social class affects their own charitable giving. This research explores the effect of donors' social class on others' donation behavior. Specifically, we propose that individuals feel more inspired to engage in prosocial behavior after learning about low-social-class donors (vs. high-social-class donors) perform the giving behavior. A series of five studies, combining online and experimental data, provide converging support for this proposition and its underlying mechanism of inspiration. Furthermore, we show that the effect of donors' social class on individuals' donation behavior is attenuated when the donation currency is goods (instead of money). The article concludes with implications for the marketing of charities and prosocial behaviors.     

驾驶员心理品质检测中的杆型人形图法

在汽车驾驶员心理品质检测研究中,我们根据数学中的多变量图分析方法,并汲取简笔画的优点,用19个人形图变量代表检测所得的17种心理品质数据,来具体、形象地再现每个驾驶员心理品质变量的整体关系。这对于检测结果的分类或进行系统化分析具有重要的实用意义。     

On becoming a leader: Effects of gender and cultural differences on power distance reduction

The present research focused on power processes in a simulated organizational structure consisting of three hierarchical levels occupied by different numbers of mules and females. Subjects were presented with a chart showing the organizational hierarchy of which they were a member placed at the lowest level, and asked to nominate any person for the leader position vacated by the current incumbent. The results of Experiment I (n = 88 Dutch male and female university students) showed that male subjects strongly overnominated themselves, whereas a majority of the female subjects nominated either self or another female. Of the others that were nominated by both males and females, almost all were occupants of positions immediately below the leader position, indicating the normative influence of a bureaucratic rule of leader succession. Experiment 2 was a replicational study carried out in a different culture (n = lOl Polish male and female university students). Polish subjects adhered to the bureaucratic rule more strongly than their Dutch counterparts, and both females and males nominated mostly males. Results are discussed with reference to gender self-stereotypes and cultural differences.     

Holes and wholes: a reply to Rubin and Kanwisher

This paper, contrary to skepticism about the human ability to perceive topological properties, addresses some commonly heard nontopological counterexplanations and provides evidence to rule out these apparent counterexamples against the topological hypothesis. Data from improved control conditions show that the reason why these counterexamples seem inconsistent with the topological hypothesis is that they fail to take due account of two factors: visibility, and organization other than physical connectedness.     

Lexical processing in a non-native language: Effects of language proficiency and learning strategy

In three experiments, native Chinese speakers were asked to use their native and non-native languages to read and translate Chinese words and to name pictures. In Experiment 1, four groups of subjects with various degrees of proficiency in their second language, English, participated. In Experiments 2 and 3, subjects were first asked to learn a list of words in a new language, French, using either Chinese words or pictures as media; then they performed the reading, naming, and translation tasks. All subjects performed better in reading words than in naming pictures, when responding in Chinese. When the response was in the non-native language (English or French), high-learning subjects were equally efficient in translation and picture-naming tasks. Low-learning subjects, however, performed better in either the translation or the picture-naming task, depending on their learning strategies. These results are consistent with the idea that both proficiency in a non-native language and the strategy for acquiring the language are main determinants for the pattern of lexical processing in that language.     

句子理解的实验研究

在三种不同的条件下,对人验证句子的过程作了比较研究。结果表明,无论在哪种条件下,验证不同类型句子的时间模式是一致的。在句子-图形验证任务中,不管这些图形是抽象的符号还是与常识有关的具体事物的图形,其加工所需的时问基本上是相同的。但是,句子-常识验证所需的时间,要比句子-图形验证的时间明显地短。实验还表明,否定词在句中的位置,对句子的理解有一定的影响。