When stereotypes hurt: Three studies of penalties for sex-role reversals

Three studies that demonstrate penalties for sex-role reversals are reported. In each study, subjects evaluated men and women who behaved either in line with sex-role stereotypes or counter to them. The results show that popularity ratings and perceived psychological adjustment of both passive-dependent men and aggressive-assertive women were adversely affected. The findings are discussed in terms of their contribution to recent theories about women's achievement motivation.     

The effects of increasing familiarity on infants' reactions to adult strangers

The influence of the presence and novelty of an adult stranger on the reactions of 12-mo-old infants was investigated. Subjects were placed near their mothers in a room containing a new toy and either the same, a different, or no adult stranger for 8 4-min trials. Results indicated that the Same-Adult Group spent more time near the adult, less time near and touching their mothers, and more time near and touching the toys than the Different-Adult Group. These trends emerged as the trials progressed, and evidenced the Same-Adult Group's growing familiarity with the adult. The No-Adult Group spent less time near or touching their mothers and more time near or touching the toys than the Different-Adult Group, but did not differ from the Same-Adult Group on these responses. The findings suggest that fearful or cautious reactions to adult strangers disappear rapidly as the adult becomes familiar and point to the value of studying the process whereby the infant becomes familiar with new people.     

The effects of a memory aid on three types of conservation judgments

Twelve boys and 12 girls at each of 3 ages (4, 5, and 6 years) were tested on three types of conservation judgments (qualitative, quantitative, and equivalence) on both continuous and discontinuous substances. Half of the subjects were provided a memory aid while the other half were not. Conservation ability was determined both with and without verbal justification. The memory aid increased the number of equivalence conservation responses only when verbal justification was not required. The number of subjects conserving on each of the three tasks varied as a function of the scoring criteria used. Type of materials, sex, and age effects were found. The role of transitive inferences and memory in the equivalence conservation task was discussed. Inconsistencies in previous research due to different scoring techniques were noted.     

Developmental changes in predicting one's own span of short-term memory

Developmental changes in the accuracy of predicting one's own recall were studied, using preschool, third grade, and college subjects in Experiment 1 and third grade and college subjects in Experiment 2. Experiment 1 showed that prediction accuracy increased from the preschool to the college years, subjects were not influenced by a potential “expectancy” bias in the procedure, and only third grade subjects were influenced by the presence of norms about peer performance. Experiment 2 showed that third graders and college subjects lower their predictions in the face of “false” norm information, with college subjects being the only group to under predict actual recall in both experiments. Thus, although adults are significantly more accurate than elementary shool children in estimating short-term recall, their susceptibility to norm information suggests that even they have uncertainty about their exact capabilities.     

Children's comprehension of complex sentences

Four tasks were given to children from 4–12 to test their comprehension of complex sentences containing main verbs taking underlying sentences as their complements (Sally knew that she was early). In an imperatives task, very young children interpreted only the complement verb and ignored the complex verb. In a short-term memory task, sentences with two negations usually lost the second not in recall. In direct questioning and anomaly-detection tasks, children tended to make pragmatic inferences and excessively depend on knowledge about the world, as opposed to linguistic information. Overall results showed that even sixth graders had not yet attained adult-level comprehension of complex sentences.     

Effects of public and private deviancy on compliance with a request

A confederate requester asked subjects to write letters for an educational campaign after they had completed a battery of tests and received either deviant or nondeviant feedback. Half of the subjects were led to believe that the requester had knowledge of their test performance; the remaining half believed that the confederate did not know their test scores. Within these conditions, some subjects believed that complying with the request would involve future meetings with the requester while others were not led to anticipate any future interaction. As expected, deviants complied more than nondeviants replicating Freedman and Doob's (1968) results; however, neither the secret/known nor the future interaction variations produced effects. Contrary to the prediction that deviants are compliant because they wish to avoid mistreatment, secret deviants complied slightly more than known deviants. Compliance was discussed as instrumental in improving self-image.     

Qualities of color vision in infancy.

Four-month-old infants attended differentially to eight equally bright, monochromatic spectral lights; that is, they discriminated colors. Moreover, infants showed the same pattern of differential attention regardless of experimental group (different groups of infants saw different subsets of all possible pairings of colors) or experimental method (paired comparisons or single stimulus). In general, the differential attention of infants to colors parallels the ratings of the pleasantness of those same colors by adults. Finally, infants looked significantly longer at color category centers than at color category boundaries. These results suggest that looking at this early stage of infancy can better be understood in terms of preference rather than in terms of stimulus categorization. The results also provide further evidence for a neural excitation model of early visual attention.