The effects of social motives on behavior in social dilemmas in two cultures

Subjects in Santa Barbara, California, and Groningen, The Netherlands, participated in a seven-person social dilemma game, presented in terms of a conservation of resources problem. Prior to their decision making in the social dilemma game, subject's social motive (altruistic, cooperative, individualistic, competitive) was assessed by means of two different classification procedures. On the basis of previous research findings American subjects were expected to display relatively more competitive social motives, and Dutch subjects relatively more cooperative ones. However, no indications of crosscultural differences were found neither with regard to the distribution of social motives nor with regard to the amount of resources taken for self in the social dilemma game. In both locations, competitive subjects took most resources for self, individualistic subjects took next most, cooperative subjects took less than individualists, and altruistic subjects took the least. In addition to predictive validity, indices of the convergent validity of two social motive assessment procedures were described.     

Development of organization in recall: A stages-of-learning analysis

An experiment is reported in which the effects of taxonomic organization on 7-year-old and 11-year-old children's free and cued recall of two- and four-category lists were examined. The data were analyzed using a stages-of-learning model that simultaneously delivers estimates of the impact of these manipulations on storage and retrieval components of recall. The results indicated that for the Grade 2 children providing a category label at the time of recall primarily enhanced storage whereas increasing the number of categories primarily enhanced retrieval. For Grade 6 children, on the other hand, the use of category labels to cue recall primarily enhanced retrieval, whereas increasing the number of categories affected both storage and retrieval in free recall, but only retrieval in cued recall. In addition, while older children were superior to younger children at both storing and retrieving information, age differences at retrieval were generally larger than those at storage.     

Delayed recognition memory for orientation by human infants

The familiarization/novelty preference paradigm was employed to study the effect of a delay (between the end of the familiarization phase and the beginning of the test phase) on discrimination of the orientation of square-wave gratings by 2- and 3-month-old human infants. Three stimulus pairs were studied: horizontal-vertical, non-mirror-image obliques, and mirror-image obliques. The data indicate that the members of the oblique-oblique stimulus pairs are confused in memory to a greater extent than the members of the horizontal-vertical stimulus pair. These findings are consistent with P.C. Bomba's (1984, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 37, 609-636) recent report that infants respond to the orientation of a visual stimulus in a categorical-like manner.     

Patients' perceptions of treatment for kidney failure: The impact of personal experience on population predictions

Estimates of the probability of various outcomes associated with treatment for kidney failure were made by chronic dialysis patients, dialysis patients awaiting transplant, successful transplant patients, and unsuccessful transplant patients back on dialysis. The latter two groups can be considered a natural experiment testing the impact of personal experience on population predictions. Consistent with the law of small numbers and the availability heuristic, successful transplant patients gave higher estimates of the population success rate for transplantation than unsuccessful transplant patients gave.     

Three-state models of memory development: A review of advances in statistical methodology

A certain family of three-state Markov processes has been widely used in experiments on children's memory. Although the statistical machinery for these models is well developed in most respects, two shortcomings have been noted in recent literature reviews. First, the parameters of the models are not identifiable. Second, goodness-of-fit tests are laborious to execute and their sampling distributions are unknown. New procedures for dealing with these difficulties are reported.     

Control of children's observing responses by information feedback during visual discrimination learning

Four experiments examined the control of observing responses by information feedback during visual discrimination learning. Second-grade children participated in Experiment 1; kindergarten, second-, and fifth-grade children were subjects in Experiments 2 and 3, and grade 5 and adult subjects were tested in Experiment 4. In order to view the stimuli, subjects in Experiments 1, 2, and 3 activated lights in viewing boxes; in Experiment 4, stimulus fixations were measured using a corneal reflection technique. Fifth graders and adults observed the discriminative stimuli for longer times on trials following negative feedback than on trials following positive feedback; in contrast, kindergartener's observing was not affected by type of feedback. Second graders showed smaller and less reliable reactions to type of feedback than did older subjects. These results support the view that visual observing is controlled by cognitive processes associated with hypothesis testing.     

Excuse inference modification in children and adults

The ability of first- and third-grade children and college adults to make excuse inferences about a speaker's use of an utterance and to modify those inferences appropriately upon receiving later information was examined in four experiments. Short stories containing an utterance by a speaker were read aloud. Utterances in the story were preceded by contextual information that suggested either that the speaker was truthful or making an excuse. Utterances were followed by information that confirmed or disconfirmed the excuse interpretation. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that even first and third graders can make excuse inferences, but these children rarely modify these interpretations upon receiving disconfirming information. In Experiments 2–4 possible reasons for the children's interpretive inflexibility were examined by varying the difficulty of relating the excuse interpretation and succeeding information. Results suggested processing difficulty, as well as an interpretive “set,” contributed to the children's inflexibility.     

The Depressive Experiences Questionnaire: revision and validation

The present study presents a new, unit-weight scoring system for the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire (DEQ). One hundred thirty-one college students completed the DEQ, the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI), and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). The revised DEQ scales were shown to have substantial levels of internal consistency. The three subscales of the revised DEQ were significantly correlated with the BSRI masculinity and femininity scales but not with gender. Significant correlations were also obtained between DEQ anaclitic, DEQ introjective scales and the BDI.     

Prejudice and neurotic symptomatology among white South Africans

Van der Spuy and Shamley (1978) have assembled evidence suggesting chronically elevated levels of neurotic symptomatology among both white and black South Africans. They have argued that these elevated levels could be attributed to the experience of racial discrimination and prejudice. New data obtained from a reasonably representative national sample of white South Africans (N = 782) did reveal symptom scores substantially and significantly higher than scores previously reported for a large community sample in the United States. On the other hand, partial correlational analyses did not indicate any consistent pattern of association between antiblack prejudice and symptom scores among white South Africans. Therefore, intergroup conflict in a sharply stratified society may affect symptomatic levels in individuals by influencing the general quality of social life.