A field study of frame-of-reference effects on personality test validity

As part of a test validation study at a major U.S.-based airline, the authors tested the effects of providing an "at work" frame-of-reference on the validity of the NEO Five-Factor Inventory among a sample of customer service supervisors (N = 206). Frame-of-reference moderated the validity of the Extraversion and Openness to Experience subscales after controlling for cognitive ability. In addition, the frame-of-reference personality test showed incremental validity over cognitive ability (deltaR2 = .16), but the standard personality test did not (deltaR2 = .05). The authors' discussion focuses on implications for personality theory and research and on implications for increasing the validity of personality tests in organizational settings.     

A comparative investigation of seven indirect attitude measures

We compared the psychometric qualities of seven indirect attitude measures across three attitude domains (race, politics, and self-esteem) with a large sample (N?=?23,413). We compared the measures on internal consistency, sensitivity to known effects, relationships with indirect and direct measures of the same topic, the reliability and validity of single-category attitude measurement, their ability to detect meaningful variance among people with nonextreme attitudes, and their robustness to the exclusion of misbehaving or well-behaving participants. All seven indirect measures correlated with each other and with direct measures of the same topic. These relations were always weak for self-esteem, moderate for race, and strong for politics. This pattern suggests that some of the sources of variation in the reliability and predictive validity of the indirect measures is a function of the concepts rather than the methods. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Brief IAT (BIAT) showed the best overall psychometric quality, followed by the Go–No-Go association task, Single-Target IAT (ST-IAT), Affective Misattribution Procedure (AMP), Sorting Paired Features task, and Evaluative Priming. The AMP showed a steep decline in its psychometric qualities when people with extreme attitude scores were removed. Single-category attitude scores computed for the IAT and BIAT showed good relationships with other attitude measures but no evidence of discriminant validity between paired categories. The other measures, especially the AMP and ST-IAT, showed better evidence for discriminant validity. These results inform us on the validity of the measures as attitude assessments, but do not speak to the implicitness of the measured constructs.     

Psychometric Models of Small Group Collaborations

The social combination theory of group problem solving is used to extend existing psychometric models to collaborative settings. A model for pairwise group work is proposed, the implications of the model for assessment design are considered, and its estimation is addressed. The results are illustrated with an empirical example in which dyads work together on a twelfth-grade level mathematics assessment. In conclusion, attention is given to avenues of research that seem most fruitful for advancing current initiatives concerning the assessment of collaboration, teamwork, and related constructs.     

Inaccurate self-knowledge formation as a result of automatic behavior

Four studies tested a post-priming misattribution process whereby a primed goal automatically influences people's behavior, but because people are unaware of that influence, they misattribute their behavior to some other internal state. People who were primed with a goal were more likely to choose an activity that was relevant to that goal, but did not recognize that the prime had influenced their choices. Instead, people used more accessible and plausible reasons to explain their behavior. The goals were seeking romantic interaction (Studies 1 and 2), helping (Study 3) and earning money (Study 4). People made choices related to these goals but misattributed the choices to temporary preferences (Studies 1 and 3) and more permanent dispositions (Studies 2 and 4). The misattribution had downstream effects, leading to choice behavior consistent with the erroneous self-knowledge. We suggest that automatic behavior can lead to a confabulated self-knowledge with behavioral consequences.     

Russian nationalism and the “Yanov thesis”

The Russian New Right: Right‐Wing Ideologies in the Contemporary USSR by Alexander Yanov, Berkeley, California, Institute of International Studies of the University of California, 1978, 188 pp., $4.50.     

The effect of object–valence relations on automatic evaluation

Two experiments tested the effect of co-occurrence of a target object with affective stimuli on automatic evaluation of the target when the relation between the target and the affective stimuli suggests that they have opposite valence. Participants learned about targets that ended an unpleasant noise or a pleasant music. The valence of such targets is opposite to the valence of the affective stimuli that co-occur with them. Participants reported preference for targets that ended noise over targets that ended music, but automatic evaluation measures revealed the opposite preference. This suggests that automatic evaluation is sensitive to co-occurrence between stimuli more than to the relation between the stimuli, and that relational information has a stronger influence on deliberate evaluation than on automatic evaluation. These conclusions support the associative-propositional evaluation model (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006), and add evidence regarding the sensitivity of the evaluative-conditioning effect to relational information.     

Dislocations and cracks at Vickers indentations in (0 0 0 1) GaN single crystals

Single-crystal (0 0 0 1) GaN samples have been deformed with a Vickers indenter at room temperature using loads in the range from 0.02 to 4.90 N. Dislocations and cracks at the indentations were examined by means of scanning electron microscopy, cathodoluminescence, light microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Geometrical relations could be found between the dislocation arrangement, cracks and the orientation of the indenter. The orientation of the indenter has only a slight effect on the dislocation pattern, but the crack system is predominantly determined by the symmetry and the orientation of the indenter.