Hiring bias and the disabled interviewee: Effects of manipulating work history and disability information of the disabled job applicant

Ninety MBA students were randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions in a 3(levels of disability) × 2(levels of employment history) design. Levels of disability (Physical, Psychiatric, and No Disability) and levels of employment history (Good and Poor) were manipulated by giving the subjects bogus information on a job application form prior to hearing a taped job interview. Subjects then rated the quality of the interview and stated the probability that they would hire the interviewee. Evaluations of the interview and hiring probabilities were different between the experimental groups. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Measuring the importance of information in judgment: Individual differences in weighting ability and effort

Measuring the importance of cues in social judgment has been a longstanding problem. Past research has shown individual differences in the impact of ability and study effort on judgments of student performance. This research examined the hypothesis that the individual differences are due to the weight given to the information as opposed to the perceived extremity of the values of the information. Subjects judged the performance of hypothetical students described by ability, study effort, and effort during an exam. Individual differences in the impact of the three types of information were obtained and were predictable from self-reports of the relative importance of information. Different values of weights were necessary to account for the differences in the impact of information, although there were also differences in the perceived extremity of the information. The theoretical and applied significance of distinguishing the weight given to information in judgment from its subjective value are discussed. On the basis of a new review of the literature, as well as the present results, it is concluded that self-reports of the relative importance of information are predictive of individual differences in information use in judgment, but that they may reflect the total impact of information rather than only the weight.     

Father identification,achievement, and occupational behavior of rural youth: 10-year follow-up

Males from rural economically deprived school districts, who had previously been surveyed as high school seniors, again 1 year after graduation, and again 5 years after graduation, were surveyed a fourth and final time 10 years after high school graduation concerning their occupational status and aspirations, their marital status, their spouses' educational and occupational achievements, the importance of life roles, and their occupational and personal satisfactions. In the original study the participants had been divided into two groups, low-identification males (LIM) and high-identification males (HIM) based on independent evaluators' judgments of the adequacy of their fathers as identification models. Each group's responses to the survey were compared. The results indicate that there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups on the variables of optimism about the future, spouses' occupational achievements, role importance, occupational satisfaction, and personal satisfaction. There were statistically significant differences on the variables of occupational status, occupational aspirations, educational achievements, educational plans, marital status, and spouses' educational achievements. The results are discussed in the context of the three previous surveys. Over the 10-year period the occupational and educational achievements and aspirations have been significantly higher for the HIM group than for the LIM group. Equally consistent is the finding that over the 10-year period there has been no differences between the two groups in satisfaction with status.     

Depression and the generation of complex hypotheses in the judgment of contingency

This experiment tests the hypothesis that relative to nondepressed college students, depressed college students will underestimate the potential amount of control they can exert over an environmental outcome when they must generate a complex hypothesis in order to exert control, but not when the complex hypothesis is generated for them. Following the method of Alloy and Abramson (1979b), depressed and nondepressed students' judgments of response-outcome contingency were assessed in either a ‘self-generated’ or an ‘experimenter-generated’ condition. In the ‘self-generated’ condition, subjects generated and tested potential hypotheses for controlling the outcome themselves. In the ‘experimenter-generated’ condition, the experimenter generated a small set of potential hypotheses to be tested by the subject. Relative to nondepressed students, depressed students were less likely to perform the correct controlling response, received fewer rewards, and judged that they exerted less control over the outcome in the ‘self-generated’ condition. These results fail to support the ‘associative’ deficit of the learned helplessness theory of depression, but are consistent with the ‘motivational’ deficit of helplessness theory.     

Growth functions for rapid remembering

Children between ages 9 and 13 were tested for recognizing and remembering words from 6- and 12-word lists. Opportunities for using deliberate mnemonics were severely restricted. Developmental functions showed different growth patterns for remembering the items in a short list than for remembering order, and different patterns for storing items from a long list than for retrieving them. However, none of these functions was parallel to the growth function of rapid word recognition. This absence of parallel growth contradicted a hypothesis that memory develops when item recognition develops. The data suggested, instead, that modest but reliable gains in rapid processes of storage and retrieval contribute to memory development during middle childhood.     

Necessary versus sufficient causal schemata: Attributions for achievement in difficult and easy tasks

Previous research on Kelley's schemata for multiple sufficient and multiple necessary causes has failed to examine the hypothesis that a schema influences both predictions of an event and attributions of its causes. This research examined the effects of the difficulty of a hypothetical exam on predictions of exam grades, and on attributions of ability and effort. Exam difficulty influenced both the pattern of judgments of grades and reported beliefs in multiple necessary versus multiple sufficient causes. Contrary to the predictions of the schema theory, exam difficulty had little influence on the pattern of attributions of ability and effort. Kelley's concept of a causal schema is reinterpreted in terms of current views of human judgment, and the possible implications of the data for the interpretations of a causal schema are examined. The results question the assumption that attributions are based on beliefs about how causes combine to determine an effect, and suggest further research on the relationship between predictions and attributions.     

The personality characteristics of the rigid learner

The present research investigated the personality dimensions concomitant with learner's cognitive rigidity. The results showed a highly reliable multiple relationship between rigidity scores and dimensions of IPAT's 16PF. Specifically, the personality dimensions of tenseness, compulsivity, group dependency, absent mindedness, sensitivity, and emotional stability explained 36% of the variability in subjects' increasing levels of cognitive rigidity. The results were interpreted as showing a pervasive use of stereotype behavior as a coping strategy in dealing with a greater amount of anxiety concomitant with cognitive rigidity.     

Dissociative effects of flooding on a multivariate assessment of fear reduction and on jump-up avoidance extinction

Two experiments examined the effectiveness of three different amounts of flooding on hastening extinction of a jump-up avoidance response and on reducing fear as assessed by the multivariate fear assessment techniques of D. P. Corriveau and N. F. Smith (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1978, 107, 145–158). In Experiment 1, a 40-min flooding treatment significantly hastened jump-up avoidance extinction, 10 min of flooding had a marginal effect, and 5 min had no effect. In Experiment 2, flooding treatments of 5, 10, and 40 min duration were all effective in reducing fear of the grid floor as indexed by seven of our nine dependent measures, including approach latency, safety test latency, and amount of time spent on the grids. Flooded subjects that were dumped onto the grid floor once at the start of the fear observation phase were found to show somewhat more fear reduction than were flooded subjects that were simply placed on the ledge at the outset of the fear observation phase and never dumped. These results, i.e., less flooding is required to reduce fear than to hasten avoidance extinction, are contrasted with those of previous experiments indicating that more flooding may be required to reduce fear than to hasten shuttlebox avoidance extinction. Such differences are discussed in the context of SSDR theory.     

Dissociation between conditioned emotional response and extended avoidance performance

The present experiments examined the dissociation between the strength of a shuttlebox avoidance response (AR) and one index of fear of the avoidance CS. Avoidance response strength was indexed by resistance to extinction of the AR and by changes in response latency, and fear of the CS was indexed by the conditioned emotional response (CER) technique. Experiments 1, 2A, and 3A all found that rats trained to a criterion of 27 consecutive avoidance responses (CARs) showed response strength comparable or superior to rats trained to a criterion of 9 CARs. Experiments 2B and 3A demonstrated that rats trained to 27 CARs showed less suppression of bar pressing during the avoidance CS (less CER) than rats trained to 9 CARs. Experiment 3A also found that, when extinguished in the shuttlebox to a moderate criterion (5 consecutive trials without a response) before CER testing, rats trained to 9 CARs showed some, although not complete, loss of CER, whereas rats trained to 27 CARs showed no loss of CER. In Experiment 3B rats that took 1 vs 2 days to reach a criterion of 27 CARs were compared for their AR strength and for their CER. Although rats taking 2 days to reach criterion showed somewhat greater resistance to extinction of the AR than rats reaching criterion in 1 day, this variable had no apparent effect on the CER. Implications of the present results for current theories of avoidance learning are discussed.