Remembering or knowing others? Person recognition and recollective experience

Using Tulving's (1985) remember/know procedure, the present research investigated the experiential concomitants of person recognition. Noting basic differences in the manner in which the mind processes expectancy-related material, it was anticipated that facial typicality would be a critical determinant of people's recollective experiences (i.e., remembering vs knowing). In particular, it was expected that whereas remember responses would be more prevalent for distinctive than typical faces, know responses would reflect the opposite pattern. The results of two experiments provided general support for these predictions. In addition, the recollective advantage for distinctive faces was traced to the availability of attentional resources at encoding. These results are considered in the context of contemporary issues in person recognition and social cognition.     

Multinational data show that conspiracy beliefs are associated with the perception (and reality) of poor national economic performance

While a great deal is known about the individual difference factors associated with conspiracy beliefs, much less is known about the country-level factors that shape people's willingness to believe conspiracy theories. In the current article we discuss the possibility that willingness to believe conspiracy theories might be shaped by the perception (and reality) of poor economic performance at the national level. To test this notion, we surveyed 6723 participants from 36 countries. In line with predictions, propensity to believe conspiracy theories was negatively associated with perceptions of current and future national economic vitality. Furthermore, countries with higher GDP per capita tended to have lower belief in conspiracy theories. The data suggest that conspiracy beliefs are not just caused by intrapsychic factors but are also shaped by difficult economic circumstances for which distrust might have a rational basis.     

The Effects of Monitoring Individual and Group Performance on the Distribution of Effort Across Tasks1

This study was concerned with the mechanism(s) via which performance monitoring affects task performance. To investigate whether an individual's concerns over the evaluation of his or her performance underlie the effects of performance monitoring (independent of contingent consequences) on the distribution of effort across tasks, the study examined whether the way in which individuals performed two tasks was differentially affected by the way in which supervisors monitored performance on those tasks. Subjects working in a group setting performed two different tasks for 90 minutes, their instructions being to perform as well as possible on each task. When supervisors periodically monitored the work output of each individual within the group on one of the two tasks, subjects perceived that the supervisor was evaluating and comparing individual performance, and produced more on the monitored task at the expense of the unmonitored task. When, however, the supervisor's monitoring focused on group rather than individual products, subjects perceived that the supervisor was less likely to be able to evaluate and to compare individual performance, and their performance on the two tasks was the same, regardless of which task was monitored. Path analysis supported the interpretation that the effects of monitoring on performance were mediated by evaluation concerns associated with performance on each task.     

On disregarding deviants: Exemplar typicality and person perception

A pervasive problem in mental life is that of exemplar selectivity or how one isolates specific category members from other instances of a class. This problem is particupared pronounced in person perception, where perceivers may routinely want to personalize selected individuals while continuing to respond towards other members of the category in a stereotype-based manner. To realize these flexible effects, we hypothesized that, when perceivers encounter a group member, they inevitably encode an exemplar-based representation of the individual in mind. Part of this representation, moreover, is information signaling the person's goodness-of-Fit with respect to his or her salient group memberships. When the representation is activated on a subsequent occasion, these inferences of category fit moderate the extent of stereotypical thinking. The results of two studies provided converging evidence for this analysis of stereotype function. Exemplar typicality moderated both the accessibility of Stereotypic knowledge (Study 1) anxd the extent to which perceivers used a stereotype to organize information about a target (Study 2). We consider the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for our understanding of the role of stereotypes in person perception.     

Ethical questions in the age of the new eugenics

As a result of the publicly funded Human Genome Project (HGP), and an increasing number of private enterprises, a new form of eugenic theory and practice has emerged, differing from previous manifestations. Genetic testing has become a consumer service that may now be purchased at greatly reduced cost. While the old eugenics was pseudoscientific, the new eugenics is firmly based on DNA research. While the old eugenics focused on societal measures against the individual, the new eugenics emphasizes the family as a control agent. Eugenics is now voluntary, with the promise of abortion for those afraid of producing genetically damaged children. The ethical concepts of beneficence, avoidance of maleficence, autonomy, and equity are discussed in terms of aspects of the HGP. One major issue is the need for an ethical system available to health consumers that will empower them and assist in their biogenic decisions. “The concentration on the genes implicated in cancer is only a special case of a general genomania (emphasis added) that surfaces in ... the weekly announcements in The New York Times of the location of yet another gene for another disease. The revealing rhetoric of this publicity is always the same; only the blanks need to be filled in: ‘It was announced today by scientists at [Harvard, Vanderbilt, Stanford] Medical School that a gene responsible for [some, many, a common form of] [schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, arteriosclerosis, prostate cancer] has been located and its DNA sequence determined. This exciting research, say scientists, is the first step in what may eventually turn out to be a possible cure for this disease.’” Lewontin ¹ Portions of this paper were presented at the Eighth National Conference on Applied Ethics, Long Beach, CA, February 27, 28 and March 1, 1997.