How help during pregnancy can undermine self-efficacy and increase postpartum intentions to quit

Pregnancy reflects a common experience for women in today's workforce, yet recent data suggest that some women scale back or leave the workforce following childbirth. Considering these effects on women's careers, researchers have sought to understand the underlying dynamics of these decisions. Here, we explore a paradoxical reason for weakened postpartum career attitudes: help that women receive during pregnancy. We integrate stereotype threat and benevolent sexism theories to explain how the effects of help on postpartum intentions to quit may be transmitted through reductions in work self-efficacy. In doing so, we consider the role of perceived impact—or the extent to which help interferes with versus enables women's perceived ability to continue performing their work role. Results of a weekly diary study of 105 pregnant employees suggest that work-interfering help led to decreased self-efficacy for work during the following week. Furthermore, there was an indirect effect of average help received at work during pregnancy on postpartum intentions to quit the workforce through reductions in work self-efficacy that was stronger insofar as help was work-interfering versus work-enabling. Taken together, our results highlight unintended negative consequences that occur when others provide ineffective support to women at work during pregnancy.     

Syntactic context and lexical access

Recent studies demonstrating that multiple meanings of an ambiguous word are initially accessed even when only one reading is syntactically appropriate with the preceding context can be criticized on at least two grounds. First, many of the syntactic contexts used were not truly restrictive, and, secondly, subjects may not have had time to integrate the context before processing the ambiguous word. In the present study, subjects listened to a sentence ending in an ambiguous word and then made a lexical decision to a target related to either the appropriate or inappropriate reading. Contexts were completely restrictive, and a pause was introduced between the context and the ambiguous word. Multiple access still obtained, providing further support for the claim that lexical access is not guided by syntactic context.     

Attributions of Responsibility for Obesity: Narrative Communication Reduces Reactive Counterarguing Among Liberals

Informed by theory and research on attributions and narrative persuasion, we compared the effectiveness of narrative and nonnarrative messages in changing attributions of responsibility for causes and solutions related to obesity in the United States. We randomly assigned 500 adults to view one of three messages (narrative, evidence, and a hybrid of the two) emphasizing environmental causes of obesity, or a no‐exposure control condition. The narrative condition increased the belief that societal actors (government, employers) are responsible for addressing obesity, but only among liberals. This pattern of results was partially explained by the success of the narrative condition in reducing reactive counterarguing, relative to the evidence condition, among liberals. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications.