Sympathy for the Devil: Evidence That Reminding Whites of Their Mortality Promotes More Favorable Reactions to White Racists

Terror management research has often shown that after reminders of mortality, people show greater investment in and support for groups to which they belong. The question for the present research was whether or not this would extend to Euro American investment in their identification as White. Although it seemed unlikely that White participants would directly exhibit increased identification as Whites, we hypothesized that mortality salience would increase sympathy for other Whites who expressed racial pride or favoritism toward Whites. In support of the hypothesis, a White person expressing pride in his race was viewed by White participants as particularly racist relative to a Black person who does so in Study 1, but was deemed less racist after White participants were reminded of their own mortality in Study 2. Similarly, in Study 3, White participants rated an explicitly racist White employer as less racist when they were reminded beforehand of their own mortality. The results were discussed in terms of implications for affiliation with racist ideologies and terror management defenses.     

On the Role of Fragmentary Knowledge in a Sequence Learning Task

There has been considerable debate about whether or not we need to distinguish between the acquisition of implicit-and, independently thereof, the acquisition of explicit-knowledge in sequence learning tasks. Proponents of the view that a unitary knowledge base is formed assume (a) that the knowledge acquired is explicitly available, and (b) that information about sequence fragments forms the core of this explicit knowledge. Both of these issues are addressed empirically in the present article. In two experiments, an adapted process dissociation procedure and a suitable measurement model were used to separate recollective (explicit) and fluency-based (implicit) memory processes in a sequence learning task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that fluency-based processes came into play much later than recollective processes. Such recollective processes have been conceptualized as being based on simple knowledge about sequence fragments or chunks. Indeed, Experiment 2 showed that recollective processes are more likely to contribute to sequence judgements if chunks are readily available at test than if they are not. Together, these results are in line with the view that the learning of an event systematicity can be conceived of as the memorization of chunks of events that support both the speedingup of reaction times to systematic events and explicit, recollective memory processes even after relatively little training.     

The Study of Religions in the Third Reich: A Report on Work in Progress

Translator's Note. Possible connections between the study of religions and European fascism, if not indeed Nazism, have sparked considerable discussion and debate in the English-speaking world. Consider the celebrated cases of Mircea Eliade and Georges Dumézil.By contrast, the work of German scholars of religion during the NS period has been relatively little studied. Still, there have been exceptions. Burkhard Gladigow of Tübingen has published ‘Naturwissenschaftliche Modellvorstellungen in der Religionswissenschaft in der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen’.¹Recently, the study of religions during the Third Reich has become the subject of an ongoing seminar at Philipps-Universität Marburg. To date, one student has declared his intentions to write a thesis on the topic. Rainer Flasche, who convenes the seminar, has also worked on the topic extensively. The following essay is a preliminary indication of his results.Flasche, born in Hannover in 1942, studied theology, philosophy, German, and the history of religions in Marburg. He has taught history of religions there since 1971, making his habilitation in 1975. His best known work isDie Religionswissenschaft Joachim Wachs(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1978).Readers may wish especially to note what emerges as the central principle of Nazi religio-historical hermeneutics: that only those who belong to a race (gender? class?) can understand it. Thus, only Germans can understand Germanic religion. The essay may also shed some light on the study of religions in Germany after the war. A reviewer of a recent book by Isaiah Berlin has noted how Berlin's lasting confidence in the liberal tradition perhaps derives from the usefulness of that tradition in Eastern Europe, where Berlin spent his formative years. In post-war Germany, the study of religions has emphasized a positivism that remains close to the sources and shuns explicit theorizing, an emphasis in which Flasche clearly concurs. The usefulness of this strategy should not be overlooked. It allowed German scholars of the NS period, but also later under communist rule in the Democratic Republic and to some extent within the confines of state-run theology programs in the Federal Republic, to work independently of and even oppose a sanctioned ideology. The strategy was not to champion competing theories but to oppose ideological claims with ‘facts’. This stance contrasts sharply with the theoretical richness that characterized German thought about religions before 1933, but—once burned, twice cautious.A note on terminology. The development of the nation-state took markedly different courses in the German and English speaking worlds. As a result, the wordVolkand the adjectivevölkischhave no entirely satisfactory English equivalents. The connotations of ‘nation’ are too limited, because the GermanVolkwas an ideal that transcended not only the principalities that dominated German political life from 1648 to 1866 but also the remnants of German glory that remained after World War I and even the extensive empire administered by Prussia from 1866 to 1918. Therefore, I have translatedVolkas ‘people’. But English ‘popular’ has quite a different sense fromVölkisch, so forvölkischI have used the adjective ‘national’ instead. Readers should keep in mind the direct verbal link between the two in the original.     

Curriculum bias in standardized tests of reading decoding

This study examined overlap between four basal reading programs and the phonetic analysis subtest of three standardized achievement measures. Raw scores, percentages of items correct, grade equivalents, and percentile scores were computed for a hypothetical student who had mastered all grapheme-phoneme correspondences taught at each grade level. The results indicated that (a) programs differed in the number and sequence of phonics skills taught; (b) percentile and grade-equivalent scores differed across programs at each grade level for a given test; and (c) the proportion of grade-equivalent scores falling at or above expected grade levels differed across tests for a given program (range of 29%–71%). The implications for selecting and interpreting standardized measures of reading decoding are discussed.     

Emeralds are no chameleons — Why “Grue” is not projectible for induction

The model function for induction of Goodmans's composite predicate Grue was examined by analysis. Two subpredicates were found, each containing two further predicates which are mutually exclusive (green and blue, observed before and after t). The rules for the inductive processing of composite predicates were studied with the more familiar predicate blellow (blue and yellow) for violets and primroses. The following rules for induction were violated by processing grue: From two subpredicates only one (blue after t) appears in the conclusion. As a statement about a future and unobserved condition this subpredicate, however, is not projectible for induction whereas the only suitable predicate (green before t) does not show up in the conclusion. In a disjunction a v b where a is true and b false the disjunction is true. When, however, the only true component is dropped, what remains is necessarily false. An analogous mistake may be observed in the processing of grue, where the only true component (green) was dropped in the conclusion. — As a potent criterion for correct inductions a check of the necessity of the conclusions is recommended.The author is indebted to Prof. Curt Christian for valuable suggestions.     

Intelligence and reaction times in the Hick, Sternberg and Posner paradigms

The relationship between psychometric intelligence and reaction times (RTs) in three well-known elementary cognitive tasks (Hick simple and choice reaction time task, Sternberg's short-term memory scanning, Posner's letter matching) was studied in a sample of 116 participants. In conformity with other studies mean RTs and intraindividual variabilities (SDs) of RT were correlated significantly with Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM). On the basis of the mental speed theory the processing measures or component scores (like slopes in the Hick and Sternberg paradigm and the NI-PI measure in the Posner task) should give the most substantial relationships with intelligence. However, as in other previous studies these measures displayed rather low, albeit significant, relationships with intelligence, which was probably due to the low reliability of these parameters. For the Posner paradigm, we proposed alternative approaches to compute an indicator for long-term memory (LTM) access that gave substantial correlations with intelligence. We conclude that LTM access is significantly associated with psychometric intelligence, whereas up to now there has been no unequivocal evidence for a substantial relationship between short-term memory access in the Sternberg task and intelligence.     

Salience of arousal as a mediator of misattribution of transferred excitation

An experiment was conducted to test Zillmann's hypothesis that misattribution of residual arousal in the excitation transfer paradigm is influenced by the salience of perceived arousal symptoms at the point of potential misattribution. Eighty subjects in a 2×2×2 design were either physiologically aroused or not aroused, and were subsequently subjected to a procedure designed to induce either positive mood (elation) or negative mood (depression). Simultaneously, they were either made self-aware or not. It was reasoned that self-focused attention would lead to heightened awareness of residual arousal and that, if the salience of arousal hypothesis is correct, this would prevent misattribution of arousal and the resultant intensification of experienced emotion from occurring. In accord with this reasoning, it was found that aroused and self-aware subjects experienced residual arousal significantly more intensely, were less prone to misattribute it, and did not show an excitation transfer effect. These results were, however, obtained only for subjects in the negative mood condition.