So Why Do You Think That Way?: Examining the Role Implicit Attitudes and Motivation Play in Audience’s Perception of a Racially Charged Issue

Events in Ferguson (MO), the Eric Garner incident, and most recently Chicago (IL), have again brought perceptions of race to the forefront of the public’s conscience. Often perceptions of racially charged events are split along racial lines with Whites often siding with law enforcement and Blacks seeing a miscarriage of justice. Bifurcated perceptions along racial lines are nothing new, dating back to the early 1900s. Despite this schism, few analyses have examined the genesis of this difference in perceptions on racial issues. This analysis looks to fill that gap. Specifically, we examine the role media frames and people’s preexisting attitudes and motivations play in determining what they think of contentious race issues and the people involved in them. Using the Jena Six incident as a case study, we find that people with less egalitarian racial attitudes—and low motivation to hide those attitudes—are less likely to blame race-related problems on mitigating cultural factors. They are also more likely judge news stories about a racial issue as being low quality. However, thematically framed stories that include discussion of the cultural aspects of the event may help to reduce this process.     

Internet-Based Radicalization as Enculturation to Violent Deviant Subcultures

This work examines the intersections of subcultural theories and radicalization theories from terrorism studies to identify how they may be improved through integration. To date there have been almost no efforts to merge these frameworks, though terrorism shares common characteristics of deviant subcultures. Both are driven by ideologies that are in opposition to that of their targets. We focus particularly on the process of online radicalization to assess how subcultural research in online environments may inform the process of enculturation into a terrorist belief system. We conclude by discussing the implications of this expansion for research on terrorism and subcultures.     

Speech perception as categorization

Speech perception (SP) most commonly refers to the perceptual mapping from the highly variable acoustic speech signal to a linguistic representation, whether it be phonemes, diphones, syllables, or words. This is an example of categorization, in that potentially discriminable speech sounds are assigned to functionally equivalent classes. In this tutorial, we present some of the main challenges to our understanding of the categorization of speech sounds and the conceptualization of SP that has resulted from these challenges. We focus here on issues and experiments that define open research questions relevant to phoneme categorization, arguing that SP is best understood as perceptual categorization, a position that places SP in direct contact with research from other areas of perception and cognition.     

Effects of Attention on the Strength of Lexical Influences on Speech Perception: Behavioral Experiments and Computational Mechanisms

The effects of lexical context on phonological processing are pervasive and there have been indications that such effects may be modulated by attention. However, attentional modulation in speech processing is neither well documented nor well understood. Experiment 1 demonstrated attentional modulation of lexical facilitation of speech sound recognition when task and critical stimuli were identical across attention conditions. We propose modulation of lexical activation as a neurophysiologically plausible computational mechanism that can account for this type of modulation. Contrary to the claims of critics, this mechanism can account for attentional modulation without violating the principle of interactive processing. Simulations of the interactive TRACE model extended to include two different ways of modulating lexical activation showed that each can account for attentional modulation of lexical feedback effects. Experiment 2 tested conflicting predictions from the two implementations and provided evidence that is consistent with bias input as the mechanism of attentional control of lexical activation.     

Setting limits on children's behavior: The differential effects of controlling vs. informational styles on intrinsic motivation and creativity

The imposition of external constraints on an activity has frequently been shown to undermine intrinsic motivation. Given that limits must often be set upon peoples' activities, especially in parenting and education, the present study addressed the question of whether limits can be set without undermining intrinsic motivation for the activity being limited. Using cognitive evaluation theory, contrasting limit setting styles of either a controlling or informational nature, or no limits, were placed upon forty-four first- and second-grade children engaged in a painting activity. The intrinsic motivation, enjoyment, creativity, and quality of artistic production were expected to be decreased by controlling limits relative to informational and no-limits, which were not expected to differ from each other. The results provided substantial support for these predictions, suggesting that limits can be set without undermining intrinsic motivation if they are informational in nature. Support was also found for the consensual assessment of creativity method recently developed by Amabile (1982a). Results of the study are discussed along with the general relation between creativity and intrinsic motivation.     

Teaching gender-related material: The effect of group sex composition on perceptions of a female instructor

This study investigated how group sex composition affects female and male students' perceptions of female instructors who teach in the area of counseling women. Three components of person perception were assessed: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. The cognitive domain included evaluations of the instructor and the subject matter presented; the affective domain included emotional responses to the instructor and the subject matter; and the behavioral domain included actions in response to the instructor, operationalized as the number of questions asked by students. Students with some interest in a career in the helping professions viewed one of two videotapes either with a group of same-sex peers or in a group in which they were the only male or female. One tape described a gender-neutral topic (psychology and the law) and the other described a female gender-related topic (sex bias in counseling women). The same female instructor made both presentations. Students then completed the measures. As predicted, the sex composition of the student group affected person perception, especially in the affective and behavior domains. Recommendations are made for future research.This study was supported by a small grant from the University Research Institute, University of Texas at Austin. Appreciation is expressed to Sherry Fowler, Bob Haverstick, and Kathy Thomas for help with data collection and to Carolyn Bates and Ken Wilgus for coding the open-ended responses. A paper based on this research was presented at the meetings of the American Psychological Association, August 1987.