Can the Same Politician Help and Hurt the Evaluations of Another Politician? The Role of Categorization on the Elicitation of Assimilation and Contrast Effects in the Mexican Political Context

Two studies investigated the effects of bringing a highly controversial politician to mind on the evaluations of another politician in the Mexican political context. We took advantage of the dynamic nature of the Mexican political context in which politicians often threaten to leave or actually leave their political parties, influencing the categorization process. We hypothesized that the same controversial politician could elicit assimilation and contrast effects on the evaluations of another politician, depending on whether both political figures were treated as lateral categories or members of the same superordinate category. Study 1 found support for the predicted contrast effects but only among those who did not classify both political figures as members of the same political party. Study 2 found support for the expected interexemplar assimilation effects but only among those who classified both political figures as members of the same political party. The theoretical and applied implications of our results were discussed.     

Do Student Evaluations of University Reflect Inaccurate Beliefs or Actual Experience? A Relative Rank Model

It was shown that student satisfaction ratings are influenced by context in ways that have important theoretical and practical implications. Using questions from the UK's National Student Survey, the study examined whether and how students' expressed satisfaction with issues such as feedback promptness and instructor enthusiasm depends on the context of comparison (such as possibly inaccurate beliefs about the feedback promptness or enthusiasm experienced at other universities) that is evoked. Experiment 1 found strong effects of experimentally provided comparison context—for example, satisfaction with a given feedback time depended on the time's relative position within a context. Experiment 2 used a novel distribution‐elicitation methodology to determine the prior beliefs of individual students about what happens in universities other than their own. It found that these beliefs vary widely and that students' satisfaction was predicted by how they believed their experience ranked within the distribution of others' experiences. A third study found that relative judgement principles also predicted students' intention to complain. An extended model was developed to show that purely rank‐based principles of judgement can account for findings previously attributed to range effects. It was concluded that satisfaction ratings and quality of provision are different quantities, particularly when the implicit context of comparison includes beliefs about provision at other universities. Quality and satisfaction should be assessed separately, with objective measures (such as actual times to feedback), rather than subjective ratings (such as satisfaction with feedback promptness), being used to measure quality wherever practicable. © 2014 The Authors. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

The Medium Shapes the Message: McLuhan and Grice Revisited in Race Talk Online

Compared with the wealth of research accumulated on face‐to‐face social interactions, relatively little research has examined race talk within anonymous Web 2.0 mediums. We investigated online threaded comments on YouTube video clips of two race‐related incidents involving New Zealand television presenter Paul Henry. Through thematic content analysis, thematic analysis, and discourse analysis, it was found that characteristics unique to Web 2.0 were associated with the appearance of old‐fashioned racism and high‐levels of obscenity (together with modern racism/symbolic racism). The hyper‐low context of communication led to interpretive ambiguity; conversation sequences failed to follow Gricean maxims for cooperative communication, with most comments attracting no replies and the modal sequence being two turns. There was almost never resolution to a disagreement online: rather there was points‐scoring against opposing opinions and a tangential style of dialogue influenced by the asynchronous and anonymous nature of communication. The YouTube medium shaped but did not determine the message, as obscenity and racist content in the target video from the eliciting public figure influenced the subsequent degree of obscenity and hostility in the responses. A third corpus that examined responses to our own research on race talk presented on a news website (stuff.co.nz) underlined this point by engendering a dramatically different response to the same subject, retaining the tangential style of communication, but with little to no obscenity. A framework to understand race talk as a function of both medium and context effects is proposed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Doctors,Patients, and Nudging in the Clinical Context—Four Views on Nudging and Informed Consent

In an analysis of recent work on nudging we distinguish three positions on the relationship between nudging founded in libertarian paternalism and the protection of personal autonomy through informed consent. We argue that all three positions fail to provide adequate protection of personal autonomy in the clinical context. Acknowledging that nudging may be beneficial, we suggest a fourth position according to which nudging and informed consent are valuable in different domains of interaction.     

Engineering ethics, individuals, and organizations

This article evaluates a family of criticism of how engineering ethics is now generally taught. The short version of the criticism might be put this way: Teachers of engineering ethics devote too much time to individual decisions and not enough time to social context. There are at least six version of this criticism, each corresponding to a specific subject omitted. Teachers of engineering ethics do not (it is said) teach enough about: 1) the culture of organizations; 2) the organization of organizations; 3) the legal environment of organizations; 4) the role of professions in organizations; 5) the role of organizations in professions; or 6) the political environment of organizations. My conclusion is that, while all six are worthy subjects, there is neither much reason to believe that any of them are now absent from courses in engineering ethics nor an obvious way to decide whether they (individually or in combination) are (or are not) now being given their due. What we have here is a dispute about how much is enough. Such disputes are not to be settled without agreement concerning how we are to tell we have enough of this or that. Right now we seem to lack that agreement—and not to have much reason to expect it any time soon. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2005 conference, Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology, Linking Workplace Ethics and Education, co-hosted by Gonzaga University and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 9–10 June 2005.     

Does survival context enhance memory for source? A within-subjects comparison

ABSTRACT

Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada [2007. Adaptive memory: Survival processing enhances retention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 263–273] demonstrated that processing words according to their relevance to a survival scenario enhanced their subsequent retrieval in recall and recognition tasks compared to a variety of control scenarios. From an adaptive perspective, it is maintained that processing words in a survival context should also enhance memory for source; however, evidence in the literature is rather mixed regarding a survival context advantage for source memory. In the current study, we conducted four experiments to systematically investigate the survival advantage in source memory, when the context itself is the source, with both recall (Experiments 1A and 1B) and recognition tests (Experiments 2A and 2B). Results showed a survival advantage for item memory over the control contexts in all experiments. The survival context advantage was not extended to source memory performance in Experiment 1A. Results from all other experiments, however, indicated a survival context advantage for both item and source memory. Findings are discussed in relation to possible proximate mechanisms underlying the survival processing effect.     

Religious Context and Prosociality: An Experimental Study from Valparaíso,Chile

Are people more prosocial in a religious context? We addressed this question through an experiment. We randomly placed participants in the control group in a neutral location (a lecture hall), and we placed participants in the experimental group in a religious location (a chapel). The participants then took part in a one‐shot three‐person public goods game, which measured participants’ degree of cooperativeness. The results showed that participants in the experimental group cooperated significantly more than did participants in the control group. Furthermore, participants’ beliefs about other participants’ cooperativeness were more positive in the experimental group than they were in the control group. Improved expectations of others partially explained the enhanced cooperation in the religious context. We found no main or interaction effect of self‐reported religiosity in the experiment.