Self-focused attention and belief perseverance

The perseverance of an erroneous belief was investigated in the debriefing paradigm as a function of self-focused attention. Subjects were given either success or failure experiences via bogus performance feedback and received this feedback under high or low mirror self-focusing. All subjects were subsequently debriefed about the false nature of the feedback, and then, before answering questions about their estimated actual performance and ability, mirror self-focus was again manipulated. The results showed that self-focus prior to debriefing increased belief perseverance while self-focus after debriefing reduced the perseverance effects. Discussion of these findings emphasized the role of self-focus in information processing before and adherence to veridical standards after debriefing.     

The purposes of laboratory experimentation and the virtues of deliberate artificiality

Critics of the laboratory experiment have maintained that artificiality (the intrusion into the experiment of “unrealistic” conditions) vitiates any possibility of generalizability beyond the confines of the laboratory. It is argued here that such artificiality in laboratory experimentation is a defect or flaw only within the context of verification and may be a distinct virtue in the context of discovery. Indeed it is argued that social psychological experiments may not be artificial enough when contrasted with the most fruitful experiments in the natural sciences. One purpose of an experiment may be to maximize artificiality deliberately so as to discover regularities that do not presently obtain under the “real” conditions outside the laboratory but which are capable of existing. When such observed laboratory regularities produce potentially beneficial outcomes, an attempt may be made to create the specific artificial laboratory conditions outside the laboratory to benefit mankind. This logic, exceedingly common in the natural sciences, has been virtually ignored in social psychology, even in the laboratory experiment, in favor of “realistic” reproduction of existing or reasonably plausible situations. Theoretical benefits of this additional modality of experimentation are illustrated by two recent developments in psychology.     

The development of grapheme-phoneme correspondence in normal and dyslexic readers

The present experiment was concerned with the development of grapheme-phoneme conversion ability in normal and reading-age matched dyslexic readers. The use of grapheme-phoneme correspondences was observed in a recognition memory task for pronounceable nonwords. The nonwords were presented in either the visual or auditory modality and had to be recognized immediately from the converse modality, thus necessitating decoding of stimuli across modalities. The use of grapheme-phoneme correspondences increased with reading age in the normal readers but not in the dyslexics. It was postulated that dyslexics have a specific difficulty in grapheme-phoneme conversion. For them an increase in reading age is attributable mainly to an increase in size of sight vocabulary.     

The influence of the minority on perception: A note on a possible alternative explanation

This research note raises some concerns about possible alternative explanations to studies using perceptual change as indicative of minority vs majority influence. Having failed to replicate the original study (S. Moscovici & B. Personnaz, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 1980, 16, 270–282), using the same and an alternate measuring procedure, inspection of additional data introduces the role of suspiciousness in explaining this and previous findings. An informal study adds further credence to this explanation.     

Individual differences in speed of retrieval from semantic memory

In the first of two experiments, the stimulus items consisted of category names followed by a single letter (e.g., fruit-P). The subjects (half introverted, half extraverted) were required to respond as quickly as possible with a member of the specified category starting with the letter. Extraverts responded significantly faster than introverts, and more so when the most likely response was of low frequency than when it was of high frequency. In the second experiment, subjects were assigned to one of four groups representing the four combinations of high and low Extraversion and high and low General Activation. The speed-of-recall task from the first experiment was used on some trials; on the remaining trials, a speed-of-recognition task was used. Extraverts had greater response speed than introverts for recall, but not for recognition. That finding, plus interactions between Extraversion and General Activation, suggested an interpretation of the results in terms of the Yerkes-Dodson Law.     

Reaction times and speed-of-processing: Their relationship to timed and untimed measures of intelligence

Eighty-one university students were given a battery of reaction time tests, measuring the speed with which they performed various elementary cognitive processes, and a group test of intelligence which yielded timed and untimed scores. Multiple regression analyses indicated that speed of information-processing was an equally good predictor of timed and untimed intelligence test performance, and that various combinations of speed-of-processing variables accounted for as much as 48% of the variance in intelligence test scores. Different speed-of-processing variables varied relatively systematically in the extent to which they correlated with the individual subtests and scales of the intelligence test.     

Synchronous and desynchronous changes during fear reduction.

The purpose of this experiment, carried out on 27 subjects with intense and circumscribed fears, was to test one main hypothesis and several subsidiary predictions. The prediction that a high-demand in vivo treatment condition produces desynchronous changes and a low-demand treatment condition synchronous changes, was supported by some inter-session findings but not by the intra-session findings. The clear linear relation between heart-rate and reported fear was confirmed, as was the rapid habituation of the heart-rate response to phobic stimulation.The fear-reactions and fear-reductions of psychiatric and non-psychiatric were indistinguishable. High heart-rate responders and low heart-rate responders showed similar patterns of improvement. The constrained laboratory ‘treatment’ procedure used in the experiment produced large and rapid reductions in fear.     

Dissonance motivation: Its nature,persistence, and reinstatement

This paper examines whether arousal is a necessary component of the motivation to reduce dissonance. Alternative responses to attitude-behavior inconsistency include attitude change, explaining the behavior by a consonant cognition (i.e., low choice), and attributing the dissonance-induced state to an alternative source, such as the purported side effects of an ingested “drug.” For conditions in which there are few consonant cognitions (i.e., high choice), a comparison of different “drug” conditions in which attitude change does or does not occur was expected to clarify which components of the dissonance-induced state mediate attitude change. Attitude change occurred in high choice conditions where the “drug” was described as pleasant, but not in high choice conditions where the “drug” was described as unpleasant or in a low choice condition. In addition, when the “drug” was descibed as arousing there was, if anything, more attitude change than when the “drug” was described as nonarousing. These results suggest that unpleasantness and not arousal per se is the motivating factor in dissonance reduction. The effects of the passage of time and reinstating the counterattitudinal behavior on the alternative responses to attitude-behavior inconsistency were also examined. Subjects returned 2 weeks later, stated their attitudes, recalled their original counterattitudinal essay, and again stated their attitudes. Although there was a general decrease in attitude change during this period, the pattern of attitude change remained basically the same. Attitude change following reinstatement increased from its original level only in those conditions where it had been initially attenuated through misattribution or a consonant cognition.