Greasing the palm: can collectivism promote bribery?

Why are there national differences in the propensity to bribe? To investigate this question, we conducted a correlational study with cross-national data and a laboratory experiment. We found a significant effect of the degree of collectivism versus individualism present in a national culture on the propensity to offer bribes to international business partners. Furthermore, the effect was mediated by individuals' sense of responsibility for their actions. Together, these results suggest that collectivism promotes bribery through lower perceived responsibility for one's actions.     

Exploring Well-Being among Mental Health Professionals in India

An exploratory mixed methods study was designed to understand the construction and experience of happiness and well-being among Mental Health Professionals (MHPs) in India. Through non-probabilistic sampling techniques, 17 MHPs were selected from three government hospitals in a city in North India. Qualitative interview data were triangulated with scores from the Mental Health Continuum-Long Form (MHC-LF). Analysis showed that despite happiness being a desirable and pleasurable state, participants rarely devoted time thinking about it. Happiness was a multidimensional phenomenon which affected personal, interpersonal, social and environmental realms. Happiness was synonymous with contentment and satisfaction and was understood as the opposite of unhappiness. Although recognised as a universal phenomenon, happiness had a subjective and individual-specific understanding, experience and manifestation. Data from the MHC-LF provided scores on overall well-being, and emotional, psychological and social well-being, and indicated that 14 participants had flourishing mental health, and three were moderately mentally healthy. The personal and professional lives of the MHPs were closely intertwined and impacted well-being in multiple ways. Certain temperamental qualities, personal insight from the field, supportive interpersonal relations and management of time, work, thought, behaviour and affect were protective factors of well-being. Additional responsibilities at work, negativities in client narratives, stigma and myths associated with the profession, biases from other professionals, lack of opportunities for personal development and growth, insufficient infrastructural and human resources were threats to well-being. The findings of the study have implications for policy, education and training, and practice for mental health practitioners.     

Happiness at Work Scale: Construction and Psychometric Validation of a Measure Using Mixed Method Approach

Using a mixed method approach we conducted three studies to construct a multidimensional measure of happiness at work. In Study 1, a qualitative content analysis using Atlas.ti 7 offered support for the proposed, a priori deductive model which also discriminated between the construct of happiness at work and happiness in personal life. Further, a principal axis factoring of the responses consisting of 539 working people (Study 2) yielded four factors reflecting the equal role of organizational and human aspects of the workplace happiness, i.e. supportive work experiences, unsupportive work experiences, flow and intrinsic motivation and work repulsive feelings. In Study 3, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis testing the reflective versus formative structure of the proposed scale supported a four-factor reflective model over a series of 13 competing models. Moreover, the scale showed statistically significant convergent and discriminant validity. Possible applications of the scale in predicting happiness styles and enhancing the experience of happiness at work has been presented at the end.     

Evidence of rapid recovery from perceptual odor adaptation using a new stimulus paradigm

By attenuating neural and perceptual responses to sustained stimulation, adaptation enhances the detection of new, transient stimuli. Disadaptation serves a similarly important role as a temporal filter for chemoreceptor cells, producing rapid recovery of sensitivity upon termination of the adapting odorant. Previous research from our laboratory indicated that a rapid form of odor adaptation can be measured using a novel, simultaneous-odorant paradigm. In the present study, we extended the earlier method by measuring recovery from adaptation. Perceptual odor adaptation was measured by estimating psychophysical detection thresholds in a group of college-aged student volunteers (N = 20; 12 females, eight males) for a self-adapting odorant, vanilla extract. To induce adaptation, the time between the onset of the adapting odorant and the onset of the target odorant was systematically varied. By first quantifying adaptation, recovery of sensitivity could therefore be investigated by using different time points following the termination of the adapting odorant. Consistent with our previous work, thresholds estimated in the presence of the simultaneous adapting odorant were significantly increased, reflecting a decrease in sensitivity due to adaptation. Conversely, approximately 100 ms following termination of the adapting stimulus (the briefest delay tested), sensitivity began to rapidly recover. Nevertheless, some residual adaptation was evident at the longest offset delay of 500 ms. These findings suggest that the recovery from adaptation proceeds at least as rapidly as the onset of adaptation, a finding that is consistent with physiological evidence from olfactory receptors. These data also suggest the effectiveness of this new odorant paradigm in characterizing the temporal characteristics underlying these critical olfactory mechanisms.     

A Cognitive Model of Dynamic Cooperation With Varied Interdependency Information

We analyze the dynamics of repeated interaction of two players in the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) under various levels of interdependency information and propose an instance‐based learning cognitive model (IBL‐PD) to explain how cooperation emerges over time. Six hypotheses are tested regarding how a player accounts for an opponent's outcomes: the selfish hypothesis suggests ignoring information about the opponent and utilizing only the player's own outcomes; the extreme fairness hypothesis weighs the player's own and the opponent's outcomes equally; the moderate fairness hypothesis weighs the opponent's outcomes less than the player's own outcomes to various extents; the linear increasing hypothesis increasingly weighs the opponent's outcomes at a constant rate with repeated interactions; the hyperbolic discounting hypothesis increasingly and nonlinearly weighs the opponent's outcomes over time; and the dynamic expectations hypothesis dynamically adjusts the weight a player gives to the opponent's outcomes, according to the gap between the expected and the actual outcomes in each interaction. When players lack explicit feedback about their opponent's choices and outcomes, results are consistent with the selfish hypothesis; however, when this information is made explicit, the best predictions result from the dynamic expectations hypothesis.     

Reducing the Linear Perception of Nonlinearity: Use of a Physical Representation

Research shows that while judging accumulations of quantities over time (e.g., money in a bank account or CO₂ in Earth's atmosphere), people assume that the shape of the accumulation is similar to the shape of the inflow (i.e., people rely on a correlation heuristic). Relying on the correlation heuristic is particularly worrisome for Earth's climate, as judging the CO₂ accumulation according to its emissions (inflow) would underestimate the actual (nonlinear) increase. This misperception undermines the seriousness of climate problem and results in wait‐and‐see behavior. We report two experiments where the effectiveness of a physical representation is compared with graphical and text representations in reducing people's underestimation of nonlinear accumulation in different contexts and problems. A physical representation presents an accumulation using a picture that works as a metaphor. In the first experiment, participants drew the shape of an accumulation over time relying on physical or graphical representations in one of two contexts: carbon dioxide and marbles. Although the participants underestimated the accumulation in both contexts, underestimations were reduced in the physical representation compared with the graphical representation. In the second experiment, we extended the evaluation of physical representations against both text and graphical representations in two different climate problems (with linearly increasing or decreasing inflow). Again, underestimations of the accumulation were reduced in the physical representation compared with the other two representations, regardless of the nature of the problem. We discuss implications of using the physical representation for improving people's estimates of nonlinear CO₂ accumulation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Use it or lose it: purchase acceleration effects of time‐limited promotions

While researchers have examined the impact of retail promotions on purchase acceleration in the past, the distinction between time‐limited and time‐independent promotions has not been made in this context. In this paper, the authors report findings from two studies. In Study 1, it was found that promotions of short duration (time‐limited), such as store coupons, accelerate purchases, whereas promotions of longer duration (time‐independent), such as manufacturer's coupons, have no such impact. In Study 2, the impact of semantic cues was examined highlighting the time‐limited nature of promotions (such as ‘10 Hours Only Sale’), impact on purchase willingness, intent to search further for deals and attitudes towards the deal. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Towards a Cognitive Theory of Cyber Deception

This work is an initial step toward developing a cognitive theory of cyber deception. While widely studied, the psychology of deception has largely focused on physical cues of deception. Given that present-day communication among humans is largely electronic, we focus on the cyber domain where physical cues are unavailable and for which there is less psychological research. To improve cyber defense, researchers have used signaling theory to extended algorithms developed for the optimal allocation of limited defense resources by using deceptive signals to trick the human mind. However, the algorithms are designed to protect against adversaries that make perfectly rational decisions. In behavioral experiments using an abstract cybersecurity game (i.e., Insider Attack Game), we examined human decision-making when paired against the defense algorithm. We developed an instance-based learning (IBL) model of an attacker using the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) cognitive architecture to investigate how humans make decisions under deception in cyber-attack scenarios. Our results show that the defense algorithm is more effective at reducing the probability of attack and protecting assets when using deceptive signaling, compared to no signaling, but is less effective than predicted against a perfectly rational adversary. Also, the IBL model replicates human attack decisions accurately. The IBL model shows how human decisions arise from experience, and how memory retrieval dynamics can give rise to cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias. The implications of these findings are discussed in the perspective of informing theories of deception and designing more effective signaling schemes that consider human bounded rationality.     

Selective attention as a protagonist in contemporary workplace stress: implications for the interruption age

Background and Objectives: The ubiquity of instant messages and email notifications in contemporary work environments has opened a Pandora's Box. This box is filled with countless interruptions coming from laptops, smartphones, and other devices, all of which constantly call for employees’ attention. In this interruption era, workplace stress is a pervasive problem. To examine this problem, the present study hypothesizes that the three-way interaction among the frequency with which interrupting stimuli appear, their salience, and employees’ deficits in inhibiting attentional responses to them impacts mental workload perceptions, ultimately leading to stress. The study, further, probes a related form of self-efficacy as a potential suppressor of interruption-based stress. Design: The study used a 2 (low vs. high frequency) × 2 (low vs. high salience) mixed model design. Methods: The 128 subjects completed a test of their inhibitory deficits and rated their mental workload perceptions and experiences of stress following a computer-based task. Results: Inhibitory deficits and increased interruption salience can alter the perception of mental workload in contemporary work environments for the worse, but interruption self-efficacy can help offset any resulting interruption-based stress. Conclusions: This study extends the literatures on work interruptions as well as on stress and coping in the workplace.     

When consumers care about being treated fairly: The interaction of relationship norms and fairness norms

Prior research suggests that people assess overall fairness of an event by focusing on the distribution of the final outcome (distributive fairness) and on how they are treated by others during the conflict resolution process (interactional fairness). The primary goal of this work is to use a social relationship framework to study differences in consumers' responses to interactional fairness as revealed by their evaluations of a brand. Two types of relationships are examined—exchange relationships in which benefits are given to get something back in return; and communal relationships in which benefits are given to take care of others' needs. Results of two studies suggest that the type of consumers' relationship with the brand moderates the effect of interactional fairness such that consumers who have a communal relationship are more responsive to interactional fairness under conditions of low distributive fairness while those who have an exchange relationship are more responsive under conditions of high distributive fairness.