The experience of receiving scholarship aid and its effect on future giving: a listening guide analysis

Why are there so many people who receive scholarship aid who do not give back to the schools that gave it? Social exchange theories grounded in the assumption of direct reciprocity have long been the framework used within higher education to understand donative behavior. As a result, conventional wisdom within higher education holds that recipients of scholarship aid will later donate money to the institution that provided it. However, the philanthropic data show that most aid recipients do not, in fact, give back. This study probes the underlying factors for this phenomenon by using the Listening Guide, a voice-centered relational method of discovery, to analyze and interpret interviews with 10 scholarship recipients. By providing a more robust understanding of the experience of receiving, the findings challenge some of the most basic psychological and sociological assumptions about giving and generosity within higher education.     

Effects of exercise self-schema on reactions to self-relevant feedback

ObjectivesThe purpose of this study was to test the influence of exercise self-schema on the processing of self-relevant information in the sport and exercise domain. It was hypothesized that exercise schematics would cognitively prefer consistent feedback over positive feedback (self-consistency principle), whereas affectively, participants without exercise self-schema would prefer positive feedback over consistent feedback (self-enhancement principle).DesignCross-sectional online study with a 2 × 3 mixed model design.Method472 subjects (52.54% female, M_age = 31.35, SD = 11.90) participated in an online-study providing them with bogus test results consistent with as well as positively and negatively deviating from their self-assessments in exercise-related aspects. To measure preference, affective and cognitive reactions were assessed after each feedback presentation.ResultsMixed-model ANOVAS (between-subject factor: exercise self-schema, within-subject factor: type of feedback) reveal significant interactions for both affective and cognitive reaction. However, these are not based on an interaction of the levels ‘consistent’ and ‘positive’ of type of feedback, but on an interaction of ‘negative’ and ‘consistent’ feedback. For exercise schematics, the gap between reactions to consistent and negative feedback is larger than for participants without exercise self-schema.ConclusionsThe original hypotheses could not be confirmed, indicating a general dominance of the self-enhancement principle. However, the unexpected interaction suggests that participants with exercise self-schema seem to devalue negative feedback more than those without exercise self-schema, which could be explained by self-consistency principles.     

Mother–Toddler Affect Exchanges and Children's Mastery Behaviours during Preschool Years

This study examined the longitudinal relations of mother–child affect exchanges at 18 months with children's mastery motivation at 39 months. Observation and questionnaire data were collected from mother–child dyads when children were 18 months; 43 mothers again rated their children's mastery motivation at 39 months. Results suggested that after controlling for gender and the corresponding 18‐month mastery aspect, positive affect exchanges had long‐term positive relationships with children's persistence and competence, whereas dismissed affect exchanges had long‐term negative relationships with children's persistence and independent mastery. Findings suggest that children's autonomous mastery‐oriented endeavours have deep roots in their early mother–child affective interactions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Generating Trust in Congregations: Engagement,Exchange, and Social Networks

The relationship between religion and trust is complex and there is little consensus on why, in general, religious people appear to be more trusting than their unaffiliated peers. Most research on religion and trust focuses on differences between traditions and denominations, which offers rather limited insight into the genesis of trust for religious persons. In this study, we draw on recent theoretical developments in social psychology to explore how specific patterns of social interactions within congregations enhance within‐congregation trust among members to the benefit of both churches and individuals. Using survey data from the Portraits of American Life Study, we find that the positive relationship between religiosity and trust is driven less by religious beliefs or practices and more by particular characteristics of micro‐level processes that occur in churches (e.g., closeness of relationships to religious leaders, density of congregational ties, and both giving and receiving aid from other congregation members). In light of research on social learning and trust, we also discuss the potential benefits of this particularized trust for individuals’ levels of generalized trust.     

The utility of a multifoci approach to the study of organizational justice: A meta-analytic investigation into the consideration of normative rules,moral accountability,bandwidth-fidelity,and social exchange

Multifoci justice pulls from research on social exchange theory to argue that despite the proliferation of rule sets in the literature (often referred to as the “types” of justice), individuals seek to hold some party accountable for the violation/upholding of such rules, and it is these parties (e.g., supervisors, the organization as a whole) that are most likely to be the recipients of attitudes and behaviors (i.e., target similarity effects). To explore these issues, we meta-analytically (k = 647, N = 235,682) compared the predictive validities of source- vs. type-based justice perceptions and found that (a) multifoci justice perceptions more strongly predicted outcomes directed at matched sources than did type-based justice perceptions, (b) multifoci justice perceptions more strongly predicted target similar than dissimilar outcomes, and (c) the relationships between multifoci justice perceptions and target similar outcomes were mediated by source-specific social exchange.     

Single-process versus multiple-strategy models of decision making: Evidence from an information intrusion paradigm

When decision makers are confronted with different problems and situations, do they use a uniform mechanism as assumed by single-process models (SPMs) or do they choose adaptively from a set of available decision strategies as multiple-strategy models (MSMs) imply? Both frameworks of decision making have gathered a lot of support, but only rarely have they been contrasted with each other. Employing an information intrusion paradigm for multi-attribute decisions from givens, SPM and MSM predictions on information search, decision outcomes, attention, and confidence judgments were derived and tested against each other in two experiments. The results consistently support the SPM view: Participants seemingly using a “take-the-best” (TTB) strategy do not ignore TTB-irrelevant information as MSMs would predict, but adapt the amount of information searched, choose alternative choice options, and show varying confidence judgments contingent on the quality of the “irrelevant” information. The uniformity of these findings underlines the adequacy of the novel information intrusion paradigm and comprehensively promotes the notion of a uniform decision making mechanism as assumed by single-process models.