Explaining individuals' justification of layoffs

This research addresses why organizational downsizing, given its adverse impact on both organizations and individuals, continues to be a popular management practice. Drawing on system justification theory, we argue that individuals justify downsizing to preserve the legitimacy of the prevailing social‐political system. Across two studies, we surveyed a total of 527 employees and examined whether the perceived likelihood of downsizing, past experiences of layoffs, and the anticipation of future layoffs enhance individuals' justification of downsizing. We also took into account cognitive and motivational biases for justifying the status quo. Our results indicate that individuals' motivation to defend and justify downsizing may strengthen its stability within society, even though implications are largely negative for those involved.     

Pseudocontingencies in Consumer Choice: Preference for Prevalent Product Categories Decreases with Decreasing Set Quality

Building on theorizing about contingency inferences, the present research deals with the impact of product category prevalence on consumer choice. We argue that a category's prevalence in the choice set can signal high quality, but the validity depends on the aggregate quality of the choice set. With ever more low‐quality products in the set, high prevalence should increasingly signal poor rather than high quality. When choosing from a poor‐quality set, choices should thus favor products from the rare category. In four experiments, we show that poor‐quality sets increase the proportion of consumers choosing products from a rare category. Furthermore, we show that these effects increase when base rates of a category and quality become more extreme. Finally, Experiment 4 shows that contingency inferences partly mediate the effect of set quality on choice. The results extend previous research on contingency inferences, indicating the adaptive use of base‐rate information in consumer decision making. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The importance of response type to the relationship between temporal order and numerical magnitude

Time, number, and space may be represented in the brain by a common set of cognitive/neural mechanisms. In support of this conjecture, Schwarz and Eiselt (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 35, 989-1004, 2009) found that numerically smaller digits were perceived to occur earlier than larger digits, and they concluded that this difference reflected faster processing of smaller numbers. This difference, however, could have been related to a response bias, whereby participants map responses of "which first" onto the "first" number along the mental number line. In Experiment 1, participants made temporal order judgements between digits presented to the left or to the right. The point of subjective simultaneity was shifted so that the 9 had to be presented before the 2 in order for simultaneity to be perceived. This difference could reflect either faster processing of the 2 or a response bias. Experiments 2a and 2b eliminated response biases by using simultaneity judgements, which have no logical stimulus mapping. Both of the latter experiments established that the 2 was not processed faster than the 9. Although the present results relate specifically to numerical magnitude and temporal order associations, they also have broader implications. Other studies have reported associations between dimensions such as size, duration, and number and have attributed these to parietal mechanisms. Such associations, however, may also be an artefact of response biases.     

Evidenzbasierte Psychotherapie der Depression

Depressive disorders are among the most frequent reasons for utilizing the health care system. Despite the availability of efficacious treatments and further advances throughout the last years, there is still a need for improving diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. A promising approach is the implementation of evidence- and consensus-based guidelines. The German “Nationale VersorgungsLeitlinie Unipolare Depression” are evidence- and consensus-based clinical practise guidelines for patients with unipolar depression. All relevant stakeholders have been involved in its development and have passed the final version at the end of 2009 to foster compliance throughout. The available evidence allows the derivation of differentiated treatment recommendations, also with regard to concomitant antidepressant medication or as alternative treatment options. In acute therapy watchful waiting over 14 days is recommended for mild depression and psychotherapy after persistence of symptoms. In cases of moderate depression, psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy are equally recommended, in cases of severe depression a combination of both is recommended.     

The direction of hemispheric asymmetries for object categorization at different levels of abstraction depends on the task

In this study hemispheric asymmetries for categorizing objects at the basic versus subordinate level of abstraction were investigated. As predictions derived from different theoretical approaches are contradictory and experimental evidence is inconclusive in this regard, we conducted two categorization experiments, where we contrasted two experimental paradigms. In the first experiment, subjects had to verify whether a word and a laterally presented picture matched or not. In the second experiment, subjects had to identify laterally presented pictures of animals either at the basic or subordinate level by pressing a corresponding response key. Whereas the first experiment revealed an advantage of the left hemisphere (LH) for categorizing objects at the basic level and of the right hemisphere (RH) for categorizing at the subordinate level, just the opposite brain asymmetry was found in the second experiment. As the stimuli were identical in both experiments, hemispheric asymmetries seem to be strongly task dependent.     

Asymmetrical consequences of behavioral change through reward and punishment

Previous research (Greitemeyer & Weiner, 2003 ) has demonstrated that compliance, because of an anticipated reward is attributed more to the person than compliance because of an anticipated punishment. The present research extended these findings to an educational context. Three studies revealed that parents who ask their children to change inappropriate behaviors are more likely to ascribe their children's improvement to the child, if the child was promised a reward, rather than threatened, to receive a punishment if the child did not improve. Moreover, because a child's improved behavior is more likely to be ascribed to the child given a reward as compared to a punishment, parents expect that rewards (as opposed to punishments) are more likely to sustain improved behavior, when the incentive is no longer offered. Finally, participants report to be more likely to induce behavioral change through reward rather than punishment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Associative symmetry of the memory for object-location associations as revealed by the testing effect

The nature of episodic associations has been subject to a long standing debate, where the two opposing positions postulate associations as either a holistic representation of the constituent elements or as independently modifiable pointers between them. In spite of a history of inconsistent findings, evidence in favour of the theory of symmetric associations has accumulated, yet only for verbal memory [Caplan, J. B., Glaholt, M. G., & McIntosh, A. R. (2006). Linking associative and serial list memory: Pairs versus triples. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(6), 1244-1265; Kahana, M. J. (2002). Associative symmetry and memory theory. Memory and Cognition, 30(6), 823-840]. Although object-location associations differ in several fundamental characteristics from verbal paired-associates, we recently found associative symmetry in the memory for this class of associations as well [Sommer, T., Rose, M., & Büchel, C. (2007). Associative symmetry vs. independent associations in the memory for object-location associations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(1), 90-106]. Due to the inconsistencies in the verbal literature, we felt it to be pertinent to confirm this finding using another experimental approach. Based on recent advances in understanding the effects of successive testing, we were able to make use of this knowledge and introduce this effect as an experimental manipulation in the study of associative symmetry. In particular, we investigated whether the influence of a prior memory test on a subsequent memory test differs when the same or opposite constituent element of an object-location paired-associate cues the retrieval on each test. We observed an identical testing effect for both conditions, which was exclusively driven by reminiscence, the recovery of previously inaccessible information. This finding lends strong support in favour of holistically or symmetrically represented object-location associations and suggests, given the verbal memory literature, a general principle of associative symmetry [Asch, S. E., & Ebenholtz, S. M. (1962). The principle of associative symmetry. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106, 135-163].     

Asymmetrical effects of reward and punishment on attributions of morality

The authors found that 3 experiments revealed that compliance with a pro-social request for an anticipated reward as opposed to a threatened punishment resulted in greater inferences of personal morality. In Experiment 1, participants received information about a teaching assistant (TA) who was either promised a reward or threatened with a punishment when asked for compliance. The participants perceived the TA as more moral for complying given the positive incentive as opposed to the negative incentive. Experiment 2 replicated this finding in a different culture, using different vignettes and incentives. Last, in Experiment 3, the results revealed that a perceived actor's real intentions mediated the effect of incentive valence on dispositional causation. That is, given a reward relative to a punishment, participants were more likely to assume that the agent would have helped even if no incentive had been offered.