社会距离知觉对道德判断的影响研究

理论上,人们对不同个体行为是否违背道德的判断是完全一致的。本研究提出,人们对社会距离线索的知觉会影响对道德行为的判断。研究设计了两个实验,分别从社会距离直接启动和社会距离线索启动的角度对这一假设进行了检验。结果发现,较近的社会距离启动及社会距离线索都能促使个体采取更温和的道德判断,功利主义的色彩比较浓厚,而较远的社会距离启动促使个体采用更加严格的道德判断,表现出道义论倾向。文章最后讨论了这一结果对未来研究的意义。     

Between an Example and a Precept,Which Has Greater Importance? A Comparison of the Channels of Socialization in Military Ethics

In this study, I examined what channels of socialization influence the moral behavior of cadets. We conducted a regression analysis of the effects of parents' attitudes to moral education, the standard and potential curriculum of schools, peer groups, and communication media on individual ethics and discipline using 399 sample participants. The participants were recruited through a questionnaire survey on cadets from academy of military, naval, and air force, and four-year based students from R.O.C. National Defense University. The analysis results showed that the cultivation of morality among cadets was directly influenced by the school's potential curriculum (i.e., intern cadres and officers in company) and their parents' attitudes to moral education during early childhood. The results also indicated that the influence of teaching by example was more significant than that of teaching by precept.     

Can the memory enhancement of the survival judgment task be explained by the elaboration hypothesis?: Evidence from a memory load paradigm1

Many reports have described a survival judgment task that requires participants to judge words according to their relevance to a survival situation, eliciting better recall than that obtained in other judgment tasks (e.g., semantic or self‐judgment tasks). Two explanatory hypotheses (the adaptive hypothesis and the elaboration hypothesis) have been proposed. Here we used the memory load paradigm to investigate whether the adaptive hypothesis or the combination hypothesis can better account for the memory enhancement of the survival judgment task. We used a survival judgment task and an autobiographical recall task with the condition of no memory load or memory load. The 48 participants performed four encoding conditions (memory load—survival, no memory load—survival, memory load—autobiographical, and no memory load—autobiographical). The results showed that memory enhancement of the survival judgment task occurred only in the no memory load condition, but not in the memory load condition. Our results support the elaboration hypothesis. We also discuss the validity of the elaboration hypothesis and future directions to be pursued in this research field.     

The Name-Pronunciation Effect: Further Evidence from Chinese

This study examined the Chinese name-pronunciation effect. The easy-to-pronounce and difficult-to-pronounce Chinese names were created using the same characters in order to control for visual perceptual and conceptual fluency. In Experiment 1, participants rated each name in terms of liking, electability as a state leader, income level, and baby name preference. An additional rating of prevalence was used to estimate familiarity. In Experiment 2, participants did not read the name aloud before rating and performed intentional recall and recognition tests. In both experiments, the easy-to-pronounce names were rated higher than difficult-to-pronounce names on liking. This effect generalized to judgments of electability and baby name preference but not to prevalence and income level. There were no differences in memory performances between the two types of names. Results are discussed in terms of the boundary condition of the name-pronunciation effect and the advantage of using Chinese names to study this effect.     

An Empirical Evaluation of the Diagnostic Criteria for Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder: Problems with Sex Specificity and Validity

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder is a psychiatric disorder that reportedly affects between 3 to 8% of women. Although not an official diagnosis in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, premenstrual dysphoric disorder has received increasing attention in the clinical literature, and considerable debate exists regarding the validity of this proposed condition. This study examined the prevalence of premenstrual dysphoric disorder in a sample of women and men and assessed the construct validity of the disorder. Twenty percent of women met the criteria for provisional diagnosis of premenstrual dysphoric disorder using Diagnostic and Statistical Manual criteria. In addition, 4% of men met these criteria when given sex-neutral assessment forms. Self-reported psychological distress and impaired interpersonal functioning did not predict women's likelihood of meeting the criteria for premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Results cast doubt on the sex-specificity of the diagnostic criteria of premenstrual dysphoric disorder and the construct validity of the disorder. Limitations of this study are discussed.     

True Overconfidence in Interval Estimates: Evidence Based on a New Measure of Miscalibration

Overconfidence is often regarded as one of the most prevalent judgment biases. Several studies show that overconfidence can lead to suboptimal decisions of investors, managers, or politicians. Recent research, however, questions whether overconfidence should be regarded as a bias and shows that standard “overconfidence” findings can easily be explained by different degrees of knowledge of agents plus a random error in predictions. We contribute to the current literature and ongoing research by extensively analyzing interval estimates for knowledge questions, for real financial time series, and for artificially generated charts. We thereby suggest a new method to measure overconfidence in interval estimates, which is based on the implied probability mass behind a stated prediction interval. We document overconfidence patterns, which are difficult to reconcile with rationality of agents and which cannot be explained by differences in knowledge as differences in knowledge do not exist in our task. Furthermore, we show that overconfidence measures are reliable in the sense that there exist stable individual differences in the degree of overconfidence in interval estimates, thereby testing an important assumption of behavioral economics and behavioral finance models: stable individual differences in the degree of overconfidence across people. We do this in a “field experiment,” for different levels of expertise of subjects (students on the one hand and professional traders and investment bankers on the other hand), over time, by using different miscalibration metrics, and for tasks that avoid common weaknesses such as a non‐representative selection of trick questions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Duty to Support Nationalistic Policies

We demonstrate that citizens perceive a duty to support policies that benefit their nation, even when they themselves judge that the consequences of the policies will be worse on the whole, taking outsiders into account. In terms of actions, subjects think they would do their perceived duty rather than violate it for the sake of better consequences. The discrepancy between duty and judged consequences does not seem to result from self‐interest alone. When asked for reasons, many subjects felt an obligation to help their fellow citizens before others, and they also thought that they owed something to their nation, in return for what it did for them. The obligation to help fellow citizens was the strongest predictor of perceived duty. In an experiment with Israeli and Palestinian students, group membership affected both perceived overall consequences and duty, but the effect of group on perceived consequences did not account for the effect on perceived duty. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Normative and Descriptive Models of Military Decisions to Deploy Precision Strike Capabilities

Precision strike capabilities represent a significant and highly controversial part of present day military operations. And yet, there is a surprising dearth of empirical research on military decision making in this domain. In this article, we therefore review different psychological perspectives on how these decisions can be made. Specifically, we compare the application of normative models of judgment and choice against the empirical research on human decision making, which suggests that people are more likely to employ heuristic strategies. We suggest that several features of decision tasks in the precision strike domain evoke the use of intuitive (heuristic) decision making whereas other features such as the sometimes unfamiliar (or novel) nature of the decision task requires analytic strategies to generate good solutions. Therefore, decisions about precision strike capabilities are best made with a mixture of intuitive and analytic thought, a mode of thinking known as quasirationality.     

Combining Explicit Timing with an Interdependent Group Contingency Program to Decrease Transition Times

ABSTRACT

A sixth-grade teacher and consultant serving as a behavioral specialist developed, implemented, and evaluated the Timely Transitions Game (TTG), a procedure designed to reduce room-to-room transition times. The TTG combined several procedures that have been shown to alter student behavior including explicit timing procedures and an interdependent, group-oriented reward program with randomly selected criteria. Five transition times were measured and recorded each day. At the end of the school day, the teacher randomly selected a transition and a criterion (seconds taken to transition). If the class completed the randomly selected transition in less time than the randomly selected criterion, they earned a letter. When students earned enough letters (e.g., the five letters that spell M-U-S-I-C), they received access to the reward (e.g., listening to music during independent seat-work). Results indicated immediate and sustained decreases in transition times following the implementation of the intervention. Although methodological concerns prevent drawing cause-and-effect conclusions, the current study shows how educators can adapt and combine empirically validated strategies and procedures to remedy presenting problems.     

人格判断的准确性:特质特性的作用

特质特性是影响人格判断准确性的重要调节变量。已有的研究表明,可观察性高的特质容易判断,判断的准确性和一致性也更高;特质的可评估性干扰了自我知觉的准确性,与中性特质相比,可评估性特质的自我—他人一致性更低;与清晰特质相比,模糊特质的自我—同伴判断间的一致性更低,且随特质模糊性的增加而递减。不仅如此,特质特性经常与其他因素如熟悉度交互作用于人格判断的准确性,在考查特质特性的作用时,必须提高研究的生态效度,将该变量与特性匹配、特质分类、个体差异及文化差异等因素综合起来考虑。