Intergroup fairness and bias in children

In recent years in research on intergroup relationships, the assumption has increasingly been made that discrimination dominates decisions when individuals allocate resources between (members of) own and other group. Conversely, in empirical studies of interpersonal decision-making, including an extensive literature on the development of children's allocation rules within dyadic relationships, it has been repeatedly observed that in dyadic relationships choices though responsive to various changes in the environment, are more strongly governed by fairness rules. The present research extends the interpersonal fairness paradigm to the intergroup case, and examines the effects of some of those variables, namely, children's age, input and attitudes toward other, that have been observed to influence choice behaviour within interpersonal relationships. The findings indicate that as children are socialized, fairness rules also play an increasing dominant role in intergroup allocation decisions, and that both relative input and the language of the outgroup influence such decisions. At the same time, there is some preliminary evidence to indicate that the relative strength of self-interest may be somewhat stronger in intergroup than in interpersonal relationships. Finally, a number of the issues that must be confronted in comparing the two more important forms of human social choices, interpersonal and intergroup decision-making, are considered.     

Phonological priming in the lexical decision task: A failure to replicate

Some models of the lexicon predict that recognition of words should produce activation spreading to phonologically related words. Consistent with this prediction, Hillinger (1980) demonstrated priming in a visual lexical decision task for word targets preceded by graphemically similar or graphemically dissimilar primes that rhymed with the target. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether this phonological priming effect occurred automatically or because of subject strategies. Although semantically associated primes produced significant facilitation in Experiment 1, no evidence of phonological priming was obtained. Experiments 2 to 5 were conducted in an attempt to obtain the phonological priming effect. Experiment 5 was a replication of one of Hillinger’s experiments. In none of these experiments was phonological priming observed. These results indicate either that the lexicon is not organized such that spreading activation occurs on the basis of phonological similarity, or that visual lexical decisions are made without phonological mediation.     

Hindsight bias: An interaction of automatic and motivational factors?

If subjects are asked to recollect a former response after having been informed about the correct response, their recollection tends to approach the correct response. This effect has been termedhindsight bias. We studied hindsight bias in an experiment requiring numerical responses to almanac-type questions for physical quantities. We varied (1) the time at which the correct information was provided, (2) the encoding of the original responses by asking/not asking subjects to give a reason for the respective response, and (3) the motivation to recall correctly. We found that hindsight is less biased if reasons are given and if the correct information is provided at an earlier time. Motivation had only interactive effects: (1) With high motivation to recall correctly, the time the correct information was provided had no influence. (2) With reasons given, the variation of motivation showed no effect. These results rule out purely motivational and purely automatic explanations.