The Measurement of Behavioral Complexity

A number of measurement techniques designed to assess cognitive and behavioral complexity are considered. While early measures limit their focus to interpersonal differentiation, later measures consider differentiation, integration, and, in one case, various other aspects of information processing structure. Objective paper-and-pencil measures, subjective response assessment, and simulation technology are briefly described.     

Serious and playful aggression in Brazilian girls and boys

We report on an observational study on sex differences in serious and playful aggression in early childhood. The sample included 14 girls and 14 boys, aged 2 to 4. The study was carried out in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Half of the subjects attended a nursery school for children from a favela (slum district); the others attended a nursery school that was run by a local university and represented the life conditions of the middle class of the Brazilian society. Each of the children was observed at school for 3 hours (divided into 12–15 minutes episodes) through a focal sampling technique. Significant sex differences are found for the frequency of playful aggression for both the actor's and the victim's part of the aggressive act, but for the actor's role the effect holds only for the middle class setting. There are also tremendous differences between the frequencies of serious aggression in girls and some of the boys, although the effect is not statistically significant. When several types of aggression are compared, it becomes evident that sex differences are restricted to bullying (dominant aggression). The rates of instrumental and reactive aggression are similar in both sexes. Girls and boys from the favela setting do not differ in the relative importance of the different types of serious aggression, but in middle class children the proportion of acts of bullying is much higher in boys than in girls.Revised and elaborated version of the contribution to the Paper Session onFemale Aggression at the90th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, 1991. We thank Claúdio Simon Hutz and Tânia Sperb who helped us to carry out the observations and Simone Schenk and Iris Seltenreich for help in data analysis. We are also grateful to the children and the staff of two nursery schools in Porto Alegre, Brazil, who participated in the study.     

A reexamination of sex differences in job preferences

Previous research has found conflicting answers to the question of whether males and females share similar preferences for various job characteristics. It is difficult to determine if the different findings are due to the different populations sampled, the various methodologies employed, or to a real change in the phenomenon itself. This study essentially replicates earlier work by having 130 male and 84 female college students rate the importance of 10 job characteristics for both themselves and members of the opposite sex. Both sexes rated motivators as important, but females also placed importance on the hygienes. Males tended to underestimate the importance of the motivators for females, while females overestimated the importance of hygienes for males. The subject's sex could be predicted by both the importance for self and importance for opposite sex ratings, contrary to the earlier study. The difference in results and interpretation was shown to be due to the type of analyses used. Additionally, it was found that females' job preferences were related to their mothers' educational achievement.     

The dimensionality of attributions of causality and responsibility for an accident

Effects of the dimensionality of responsibility and causality attributions were investigated. An accident was described. Subjects cued to respond with causality attributions increased their attributions with event severity. Subjects cued to respond with moral responsibility attributions decreased attributional levels with increasing severity. Assignments of guilt varied specifically with the cued attributional concept.     

The effects of specifying job requirements and using explicit warnings to decrease sex discrimination in employment interviews

To determine the relative effectiveness of instructions designed to reduce sex discrimination in employment interviews, 96 students rated resumes for both a male and a female applicant. In one instructional condition subjects were told the specific requirements necessary for success on the job. In a second condition subjects were warned that it was illegal to discriminate on the applicant's sex. A third condition received both instructions, and a fourth received neither. Results revealed a series of interactions suggesting that the use of legal warning alone tended to increase the ratings of male applicants in some cases and influenced how male evaluators rated all applicants in other cases. The major implications were that legal warnings may actually bias ratings in favor of male applicants and may occasionally lead male evaluators to make lenient ratings. The specification of job requirements was suggested as a viable method of reducing discrimination.This work was supported in part by funds from the Foundation of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and from the State of North Carolina. The author wishes to thank P. S. Siegfried, J. Thomas Puglisi, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and revisions of an earlier draft.     

What is agentic about the Spatial Agency Bias? How pragmatic relevance contributes to the spatial representations of actions

The mental imagination of (social) actions has been shown to follow a left‐to‐right trajectory, with the thematic agent associated with the left position (Spatial Agency Bias, Suitner & Maass in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 53, 2016, p. 245–301). For example, individuals asked to choose a picture that visualizes the sentence “Tom kicks George” tend to choose an image where the agent, Tom, is positioned on the left‐hand side rather than on the right‐hand side. However, as an alternative to the thematic role of the agent, such findings may reflect a mental representation following pragmatic relevance. Specifically, a pragmatic perspective holds that word order and syntactic functions are strategic devices to communicate that the element is important for the sentence. Thus, positioning in the described picture‐matching task may actually reflect the agent's pragmatic relevance instead of agency per se. As a test, we vary whether sentences are written in the active versus the passive voice. Results from five studies indicate that the passive voice results in the tendency to place the agent on the right‐hand side rather than on the left‐hand side of a picture. Instead, the acted‐upon person is positioned on the left‐hand side of a picture. A sixth experiment reveals that for the passive voice, the agent is still seen as more agentic than the receiver, but is considered less relevant. The findings are congruent with the proposed pragmatic relevance account. Implications for the Spatial Agency Bias as well as for building mental representations in general are discussed.     

When a grandiose self-image is threatened: narcissism and self-concept clarity as predictors of negative emotions and aggression following ego-threat

Two studies examined the relation between narcissism, self-concept clarity, negative emotions, and aggression based on theoretical assumptions proposed by Baumeister, Smart, and Boden (1996). Narcissism and self-concept clarity were examined as predictors for anger, depression, and verbal aggression following ego-threat, which was operationalized by a bogus performance feedback on an intelligence test. The second study also examined the mediating effects of participants' negative emotions to provide an additional explanation for the aggressive reactions after failure. As expected, narcissism and self-concept clarity were significant predictors of negative emotions and aggression after failure. In accordance with our hypothesis, high narcissists with low self-concept clarity reacted with anger and aggression after failure, whereas less narcissistic individuals with high self-concept clarity showed feelings of depression and no aggression. The results also indicated that aggression was always directed toward the source of the ego-threatening feedback. Additionally, anger and depression could predict the aggressive response after failure but they did not mediate the relation between narcissism, self-concept clarity, performance feedback, and aggression.     

Lower region: a new cue for figure-ground assignment

Figure-ground assignment is an important visual process; humans recognize, attend to, and act on figures, not backgrounds. There are many visual cues for figure-ground assignment. A new cue to figure-ground assignment, called lower region, is presented: Regions in the lower portion of a stimulus array appear more figurelike than regions in the upper portion of the display. This phenomenon was explored, and it was demonstrated that the lower-region preference is not influenced by contrast, eye movements, or voluntary spatial attention. It was found that the lower region is defined relative to the stimulus display, linking the lower-region preference to pictorial depth perception cues. The results are discussed in terms of the environmental regularities that this new figure-ground cue may reflect.