Cultural Chameleons: Biculturals,Conformity Motives,and Decision Making

Prior research suggests that bicultural individuals (i.e., individuals with 2 distinct sets of cultural values) shift the values they espouse depending on cues such as language. The authors examined whether the effects of language extend to a potentially less malleable domain, behavioral decisions, exploring the extent to which bilingual individuals shift the underlying strategies used to resolve choice problems. Although past research has explained language‐induced shifts in terms of knowledge accessibility principles, the motivation to conform to observers’ norms can also drive these shifts. This article focuses on shifts in the general strategy of avoiding losses rather than pursuing gains, which is more often exhibited by Chinese than by Westerners. Five studies of Hong Kong bicultural individuals found that language manipulation (Cantonese vs. English) increases tendencies to choose compromise options in a product decision task, endorse associated decision guidelines that advocate moderation as opposed to extreme paths, defer decision making in problems where it can be postponed, and endorse decision guidelines that advocate caution rather than decisive action. A motivational explanation of these effects was confirmed.     

Strategies for learning proper names: expanding retrieval practice,meaning and imagery

Name learning strategies including retrieval practice, semantic associations and imagery were compared in laboratory‐based and real‐life experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 studied expanding retrieval practice and a semantic association strategy as memory improvement techniques for learning proper names. Participants either retrieved or restudied names on the same, expanding schedule. After a short, filled interval, cued recall of names was about 250% better following retrieval than restudy and 200% better with than without semantic associations. Together, the techniques improved recall by 300–400%. In Experiment 3, retrieval practice was compared with an imagery mnemonic for name learning under real‐life social conditions: Participants sought to learn the names of people they met at a party. Retrieval practice produced 50% higher recall after 24–72 hours but the imagery mnemonic was no more effective than non‐directed instructions to learn names. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Person perception in the heat of conflict: Negative trait attributions affect procedural preferences and account for situational and cultural differences

Disputes by their nature involve contentious behavior. If one attributes such behavior to underlying personality traits, these attributions can be quite damning. The current research investigated negative trait attributions and their impact on dispute resolution decisions. We hypothesized that judging one's opponent to be low in agreeableness and high in emotionality (e.g. stubborn and volatile) shifts one's preference towards more formal procedures – formal in the sense that a third party judge controls the process and outcome. Drawing on the attribution literature, we hypothesized that two antecedents of these judgments (and consequent preferences) are the perceiver's level of prior information and the perceiver's cultural proclivity to explaining behavior in terms of personal dispositions. Results of an experiment measuring reactions to a hypothetical dispute found that prior information and culture (USA vs Hong Kong) increased trait attributions and preferences for formal procedures. Additionally, expectancy measures showed interaction effects suggesting that disputants dynamically construct expectancies in light of their personality impressions.     

Engaging with research ethics in central Francophone Africa: reflections on a workshop about ancillary care

ABSTRACT: Research ethics is predominantly taught and practiced in Anglophone countries, particularly those in North America and Western Europe. Initiatives to build research ethics capacity in developing countries must attempt to avoid imposing foreign frameworks and engage with ethical issues in research that are locally relevant. This article describes the process and outcomes of a capacity-building workshop that took place in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo in the summer of 2011. Although the workshop focused on a specific ethical theme - the responsibilities of researchers to provide health-related care to their research participants - we argue that the structure of the workshop offers a useful method for engaging with research ethics in general, and the theme of ancillary care encourages a broad perspective on research ethics that is highly pertinent in low-income countries. The workshop follows an interactive, locally driven model that could be fruitfully replicated in similar settings.     

Further evidence for temporal decay in working memory: reply to Lewandowsky and Oberauer (2009)

The sources of forgetting in working memory (WM) are a matter of intense debate: Is there a time-related decay of memory traces, or is forgetting uniquely due to representation-based interference? In a previous study, we claimed to have provided evidence supporting the temporal decay hypothesis (S. Portrat, P. Barrouillet, & V. Camos, 2008). However, reanalyzing our data, S. Lewandowsky and K. Oberauer (2009) demonstrated that they do not provide compelling evidence for temporal decay and suggested a class of alternative models favoring a representation-based interference account. In this article, we develop from the most recent proposals made by Lewandowsky and Oberauer 2 of the most plausible extensions of these alternative models. We show that neither of these extensions can account for recent findings related to between-domain WM performance and that both lead to predictions that are contradicted by new empirical evidence. Finally, we show that recent studies that have been claimed to rule out the temporal decay hypothesis do not resist close scrutiny. We conclude that the time-based resource-sharing model remains the most parsimonious way to account for forgetting and restoration of memory traces in WM.     

Forecasting good or bad behaviour: A non‐transparent test of contrastive responses to cultural cues

Bicultural individuals vary in the degree to which their two cultural identities are integrated – Bicultural Identity Integration (BII). Among Asian‐Americans, for example, some experience their Asian and American sides as integrated (high BII) whereas others experience the two as divided (low BII). Past research on social judgement found that individual differences in BII affect the way biculturals respond to cultural cues or norms in their situation. Asian‐Americans with low BII tend to contrast to the cultural norm (e.g. they exhibit typically American judgements when in Asian cultural situations) rather than assimilate to them, a response observed more among high BII individuals (e.g., they exhibit typically Asian judgements when in Asian cultural situations). Research has interpreted the contrastive response as reflecting implicit identity motives, yet past studies used measures that make cultural differences salient. Conscious awareness of the experimental hypothesis could elicit contrastive responses. The present research assessed forecasts of others' behaviour in which cultural group differences are less obvious: Asians, compared to Westerners, forecast more positive behaviours from others. In three experiments with Asian‐Americans, we found the contrastive response by low BII individuals persisted. They made more positive forecasts after exposure to American versus Asian cultural cues. This suggests that the moderating role of BII on responses to cultural cues is not a matter of demand characteristics or limited to stereotypical cultural differences. Implications for bicultural identity, implicit processes, and organizational behaviour are discussed.     

Missing data imputation and corrected statistics for large-scale behavioral databases

This article presents a new methodology for solving problems resulting from missing data in large-scale item performance behavioral databases. Useful statistics corrected for missing data are described, and a new method of imputation for missing data is proposed. This methodology is applied to the Dutch Lexicon Project database recently published by Keuleers, Diependaele, and Brysbaert (Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 174, 2010), which allows us to conclude that this database fulfills the conditions of use of the method recently proposed by Courrieu, Brand-D’Abrescia, Peereman, Spieler, and Rey (2011) for testing item performance models. Two application programs in MATLAB code are provided for the imputation of missing data in databases and for the computation of corrected statistics to test models.     

Developmental change in working memory strategies: from passive maintenance to active refreshing

Change in strategies is often mentioned as a source of memory development. However, though performance in working memory tasks steadily improves during childhood, theories differ in linking this development to strategy changes. Whereas some theories, such as the time-based resource-sharing model, invoke the age-related increase in use and efficiency of a strategy of active maintenance of memory traces, other theories, such as the task-switching model, do not mention strategy change. According to these models, either the cognitive load of the task or the duration of maintenance would account for recall performance. In the present study, we varied orthogonally these 2 factors. The results revealed that a different and unique factor affected recall performance at different ages: the duration of maintenance at age 6 and the cognitive load at age 7. As described by the task-switching model, younger children would not implement any maintenance activities while performing a concurrent task, their memory traces suffering from a time-based decay. This suggests that an increasing capacity of cognitive monitoring allows children to shift from this passive maintenance of memory traces to the active refreshing thereof at around the age of 7, reunifying the 2 current accounts of working memory development as 2 developmental stages.