Why Improvement Can Trump Consistent Strong Performance: The Role of Effort Perceptions

How do evaluators form comparative judgments of improved versus consistently strong performance records with equivalent recent performance? We propose that evaluators judge those with improved records to be more deserving of future opportunities (e.g., a promotion) and that this can be explained – at least in part – by perceptions of effort investments. Specifically, evaluators rely on improvement to judge effort and hence devalue consistent strong performance. Five studies supported these propositions. Evaluators perceived greater effort investment and trait effort in individuals with improved profiles than those with consistent profiles and consequently thought that those with improved profiles were more deserving of future opportunities. We discuss implications of these results across various decision contexts. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Opacity,Transparency, and the Paradox of the Accessibility Requirement

Key issues in epistemology for the most part have to do with epistemic values such as justification, truth, and knowledge—that is, values related to the epistemic status of our propositional attitudes, mental events, and states. However, another important issue that is worth examining is the extent to which a subject is in a position to evaluate the strength of her epistemic position. In this paper, I wish to emphasize two properties of our mental states that play a decisive part in that respect: their opacity and transparency. In the following, I will assume that a mental state is opaque whenever it presents itself with no underlying reason, whereas states that are supported by apparent reasons are transparent. One main argument that I will defend is that even when the opacity and transparency of our mental states are not reliable cues, still they remain highly informative. Notably, I draw some implications relative to the externalist/internalist debate in epistemology. I examine the claim that only mental states that are justified are well grounded or justification conferring and the idea that often stands behind, that is, that only states whose reasons are accessible are justified—namely, the Accessibility Requirement. I also examine the source of a recent debate in epistemology: the epistemic status of our intuitive states, as these are perfect instances of opaque mental states. I conclude that intuitive states in some respect are less misleading than states that are supported by apparent reasons.     

Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis and the Sociocultural Turn: From Cultural Contexts to Hermeneutic Understanding

This article addresses the tension between the defining impact of culture on human experience and the role of the person as agent. Focusing on the sociocultural turn in psychoanalysis, it examines the evolution of the notions of culture and the person, first in the culturalist psychoanalysis of Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, and then in the hermeneutic turn of recent psychoanalysis. The article maintains that persons are inescapably shaped by the culture in which they live. At the same time, the manner in which individual psychology is organized and experienced within culture points to the role of agency as an emergent human potential. The article suggests that culture and personal agency are mutually reinforcing and that psychoanalysis must account for both. It develops a hermeneutic perspective as an alternative to postmodernism and concludes by outlining a post-Cartesian approach in psychoanalysis that addresses culture and the person in a non-dualistic fashion.     

Aging and individual differences in rapid two-choice decisions

The effects of aging on performance were examined in signal detection, letter discrimination, brightness discrimination, and recognition memory, with each subject tested on all four tasks. Ratcliff’s (1978) diffusion model was fit to the data for each subject for each task, and it provided a good account of accuracy and the distributions of correct and error response times. The model’s analysis of the components of processing showed that aging had three main effects: The nondecision components of processing were slower and the decision criteria were more conservative for 60- to 74-year-old and 75- to 85-year-old subjects than for college students, but the quality of the evidence on which decisions were based was as good for the older subjects as for college students on some of the tasks. Individual differences among subjects in components of processing tended to be preserved across the tasks, as was shown by strong correlations across the tasks in the parameters of the model that represent the components of processing. For example, if the evidence on which a subject’s decisions were based was good in one task, it tended to be good in all four tasks.     

Culture, ethnicity, and children's facial expressions: a study of European American, Mainland Chinese, Chinese American, and adopted Chinese girls

This investigation extends previous research documenting differences in Chinese and European American infants' facial expressivity. Chinese girls adopted by European American families, nonadopted Mainland Chinese girls, nonadopted Chinese American girls, and nonadopted European American girls responded to emotionally evocative slides and an odor stimulus. European American girls smiled more than Mainland Chinese and Chinese American girls and scored higher than Mainland Chinese girls for disgust-related expressions and overall expressivity. Adopted Chinese girls produced more disgust-related expressions than Mainland Chinese girls. Self-reported maternal strictness, aggravation, positive expressiveness, and cultural identification correlated with children's facial responses, as did number of siblings and adults in the home. Results suggest that culture and family environment influences facial expressivity, creating differences among children of the same ethnicity.     

Modeling response signal and response time data

The diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) and the leaky competing accumulator model (LCA, Usher & McClelland, 2001) were tested against two-choice data collected from the same subjects with the standard response time procedure and the response signal procedure. In the response signal procedure, a stimulus is presented and then, at one of a number of experimenter-determined times, a signal to respond is presented. The models were fit to the data from the two procedures simultaneously under the assumption that responses in the response signal procedure were based on a mixture of decision processes that had already terminated at response boundaries before the signal and decision processes that had not yet terminated. In the latter case, decisions were based on partial information in one variant of each model or on guessing in a second variant. Both variants of the diffusion model fit the data well and both fit better than either variant of the LCA model, although the differences in numerical goodness-of-fit measures were not large enough to allow decisive selection between the models.