Career Decision‐Making Self‐Efficacy Change in Italian High School Students

The authors explored the effects of a structured‐group career intervention among 280 Italian high school students. Hierarchical linear models indicated the intervention's effectiveness in increasing career decision‐making self‐efficacy and, consequently, career exploration, but not in decreasing career choice anxiety. In addition, partial confirmation was found for the moderating effects of participants' expectations and motivation to change on the relationship between career decision‐making self‐efficacy and career choice anxiety. The findings support the development of a systematic vocational guidance program in Italian schools.     

Leaping to Conclusions: Why Premise Relevance Affects Argument Strength

Everyday reasoning requires more evidence than raw data alone can provide. We explore the idea that people can go beyond this data by reasoning about how the data was sampled. This idea is investigated through an examination of premise non‐monotonicity, in which adding premises to a category‐based argument weakens rather than strengthens it. Relevance theories explain this phenomenon in terms of people's sensitivity to the relationships among premise items. We show that a Bayesian model of category‐based induction taking premise sampling assumptions and category similarity into account complements such theories and yields two important predictions: First, that sensitivity to premise relationships can be violated by inducing a weak sampling assumption; and second, that premise monotonicity should be restored as a result. We test these predictions with an experiment that manipulates people's assumptions in this regard, showing that people draw qualitatively different conclusions in each case.     

Verbalization of Decision Strategies in Multiple‐Cue Probabilistic Inference

In multiple‐cue probabilistic inference, people choose between alternatives based on several cues, each of which is differentially associated with an alternative's overall value. Various strategies have been proposed for probabilistic inference (e.g., weighted additive, tally, and take‐the‐best). These strategies differ in how many cue values they require to enact and in how they weight each cue. Do decision makers actually use any of these strategies? Ways to investigate this question include analyzing people's choices and the cues that they reveal. However, different strategies often predict the same decisions, and search behavior says nothing about whether or how people use the information that they acquire. In this research, we attempt to elucidate which strategies participants use in a multiple‐cue probabilistic inference task by examining verbal protocols, a high‐density source of process data. The promise of verbal data is in their utility for testing detailed information processing models. To that end, we apply protocol analysis in conjunction with computational simulations. We find converging evidence across outcome measures, search measures, and verbal reports that most participants use simplifying heuristics, namely take‐the‐best. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aging,source memory,and the experience of “remembering”

In a previous study, we found source memory for perceptual features to differentiate between younger but not older adults’ reports of recollective (“remember”; R) and “know” (K) experiences. In two experiments with younger (17–30 years) and older (64–81 years) participants, we examined whether memory for meaningful speaker sources would accompany older adults’ recollective experience. Indeed, memory for male and female speakers (but not partial memory for gender; Experiment 1) as well as bound memory for speakers and their facial expressions (Experiment 2) distinguished between both younger and older adults’ RK reports. Thus, memory for some sources forms a common basis for younger and older adults’ retrieval experience. Nonetheless, older adults still showed lower objective source memory and lower subjective source-attribution confidence than younger adults when reporting recollective experiences, suggesting that source memory is less relevant to their retrieval experience than for younger adults.     

Blame Game and Rotten Apples in Private Investigation Reports: The Case of Hadeland and Ringerike Broadband in Norway

Blame game is a term often used to describe a phenomenon that happens in groups of people when something goes wrong. The blame game hypothesis postulates that private investigators may be misled in their search for suspects and that suspected individuals do not necessarily become subject to a fair investigation by financial crime specialists and fraud examiners. The rotten apple hypothesis postulates that it is comforting to assume that one bad apple within an organisation is essentially responsible for the crime that is all too prevalent. The rotten apple view of white‐collar crime is a comfortable perspective to apply to business and public organisations as it allows them to look no further than suspect a single individual. Based on a case study of the Norwegian company Hadeland and Ringerike Broadband, this paper discusses blame game and rotten apple issues in an internal investigation report written by an external financial crime specialist. The study finds support for both hypotheses, as blame is mainly isolated to the criminal and his superior, and both board and top management are protected from scrutiny. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Divergent Interpersonal Paths to Well‐Being for Insecurely Attached Emerging Adults

This study explored attachment, social support, and well‐being among 237 emerging adults. The model predicted that social support would (a) mediate the relationship between attachment anxiety and well‐being and (b) moderate the relationship between attachment avoidance and well‐being. All hypotheses were supported. Implications for counselors are discussed.     

Psychopathy and internalism

Do psychopaths make moral judgments but lack motivation? Or are psychopaths’ judgments are not genuinely moral? Both sides of this debate seem to assume either externalist or internalist criteria for the presence of moral judgment. However, if moral judgment is a natural kind, we can arrive at a theory-neutral criterion for moral judgment. A leading naturalistic criterion suggests that psychopaths have an impaired capacity for moral judgment; the capacity is neither fully present nor fully absent. Psychopaths are therefore not counterexamples to internalism. Nonetheless, internalism is empirically problematic because it is unable to explain psychopaths’ moral deficits.     

Examining the indirect effects of religious orientations on well‐being through personal locus of control

Religiosity often positively correlates with well‐being. Some orientations towards religion may, however, adversely affect well‐being by decreasing perceptions of personal locus of control—a critical antecedent of mental health. We examined this possibility in a New Zealand‐based national sample of religiously identified adults (N = 1486). As predicted, fundamentalism had a negative indirect effect on life satisfaction, but a positive indirect effect on psychological distress. Conversely, people's intrinsic religious orientation had a positive indirect effect on life satisfaction, but a negative indirect effect on psychological distress. Notably, all four indirect effects were transmitted through personal, but not God, locus of control. These results highlight the diversity of religious orientations and show that religious orientations that deemphasize people's personal locus of control have negative consequences for well‐being.