Peer pressure against prejudice: A high school field experiment examining social network change

Individuals often conform to the intergroup attitudes and behaviors modeled by their peers in a given situation. To what extent does peer influence on intergroup prejudice 1) diffuse across a social network of peers and 2) affect attitudes and behavior across time? Student leaders (“Peer Trainers”) were trained to confront expressions of intergroup prejudice in five randomly assigned high schools across a period of five months; students recruited to be Peer Trainers in five control schools waited to be trained. Independent surveys of Peer Trainers' social networks reveal that treatment Peer Trainers were significantly more likely than control Trainers to be nominated by peers as students who confront prejudice. Treatment Peer Trainers' tolerant behavior spread to close friends and to acquaintances in their social network; their attitudes spread inconsistently, and only to close friends. Studying peer influence within social networks can improve understanding of social influence, prejudice reduction, and social change.     

The promise and potential of studying the “invisible hand” of teacher influence on peer relations and student outcomes: A commentary

Peers influence children's social-emotional development and school engagement in important and unique ways. Recent research on peer social networks documents that children are affected by the nature of the school-based peer ecology, as well as by their personal peer experiences. Yet, little is known about how teachers affect the peer ecology, nor how teachers can promote positive peer influences in the school context. The four studies in this special section examine this issue. Together, they document the promise and the potential of studying the “invisible hand” of teacher influence on peer relations, and illustrate the need for further research in this area. This commentary considers the contributions of these papers for conceptualizing processes of transactional teacher and peer influence on student outcomes, and implications for interventions designed to reduce problem behaviors or increase school engagement. In addition, it considers the limitations of current knowledge and directions for future research.     

Effects of the global and local attention on the processing of categorical and coordinate spatial relations

Participants made categorical or coordinate spatial judgments on the global or local elements of shapes. Stimuli were composed of a horizontal line and two dots. In the Categorical task, participants judged whether the line was above or below the dots. In the Coordinate task, they judged whether the line would fit between the dots. Stimuli were made hierarchical so that the global patterns composed of a “global line” made of local dots-and-line units, and “global dot” made of a single dots-and-line unit. The results indicated that the categorical task was better performed when participants attended to the local level of the hierarchical stimuli. On the other hand, the coordinate task was better performed when they attended to the global level. These findings are consistent with computer simulation models of the attentional modulation of neuronal receptive fields’ size suggesting that (1) coordinate spatial relations are more efficiently encoded when one attends to a relatively large region of space, whereas (2) categorical spatial relations are more efficiently encoded when one attends to a relatively small region of space.     

Intentional transaction

The second person is often set in contrast to the first person. And there is a contrast. It does not reside in a difference of what is thought as I from what is thought as you. For that is not different. The contrast is that of monadic and dyadic predication, action and transaction. It is the contrast, not of I and You, but of I and I–You. The second person does not add a You to an I. It divides the I and makes it a relation. We consider, first, the form of predication that is common to first- and second-person thought. Then, we define the second person as a species of this form of thought. Last, we find the source and condition of this form of thought in a thought of this very form. This thought, being the source of its own form, is one of which one cannot be conscious from outside it. It is a last word, or, better, a first word.¹1. Compare Thomas Nagel's notion of a last word (Nagel 2001 Nagel, Thomas. 2001. The Last Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]). Nagel's development of the notion reveals no reason why he should call what is last a word. From what he writes in the book, one would think its title to be “The Last Thought”. (Indeed, chapter 2 bears the title “Why We Can't Understand Thought from the Outside”.) However, if the last thought is I–You, then the last thought is a word; indeed, it is the word. In reaching for “The Last Word”, Nagel may express an inchoate appreciation of this.     

Followership at a distance: Follower adjustment to distal leadership during COVID-19

Leader distance theory has received scant empirical attention in the extant literature; however, the “work from home” orders associated with COVID-19 have made this theory and its empirical findings highly relevant for organizations. Our study integrates leader distance theory and followership theory to understand how follower role beliefs affect follower effort, performance, and withdrawal under physical leader distance and varying conditions of leader interaction frequency. Using a three-wave survey methodology with 260 adults working remotely, our study finds that followers' levels of effort, performance, and withdrawal were contingent on leader interaction frequency. Specifically, followers with a coproduction role orientation, who see their role as more collaborative, reported higher levels of effort under conditions of high leader interaction. Furthermore, the indirect effect of coproduction on follower performance and withdrawal via effort was moderated by leader interaction frequency. The results for followers with passive role orientations, however, were in the opposite direction. These followers reported less effort when leader interaction was high, and the mediational chain predicting performance and withdrawal was contingent on leader interaction frequency. Our study contributes to the ongoing conversation about the positive and negative effects of leader distance and positions followership characteristics as important boundary conditions of distal leadership.     

多元文化经历对领导者能力及发展的影响

随着全球化发展的深入, 越来越多的企业领导者具有多元文化经历。多元文化经历是指个体具有直接或间接与外国文化元素或人群进行交互的经历。拟从领导者发展(leader development)和领导力发展(leadership development)两个层面, 全面地探讨多元文化经历对企业领导者能力形成及发展的影响：第一, 探讨多元文化经历对领导者能力发展(包括个人层面、关系层面和社会层面能力)的影响及内部机制; 第二, 探讨多元文化经历对领导力发展(包括领导力涌现、领导力选拔和领导力效能)的影响及内部机制。项目成果不仅能够丰富领导者能力形成与发展等组织管理相关理论, 还能为企业的全球化管理及国际化人才培养实践提供建议。     

Anticipatory looks reveal expectations about discourse relations

Previous research provides evidence for expectation-driven processing within sentences at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels of linguistic structure. Less well-established is whether comprehenders also anticipate pragmatic relationships between sentences. To address this, we evaluate a unit of discourse structure that comprehenders must infer to hold between sentences in order for a discourse to make sense—the intersentential coherence relation. In a novel eyetracking paradigm, we trained participants to associate particular spatial locations with particular coherence relations. Experiment 1 shows that the subset of listeners who successfully acquired the location∼relation mappings during training subsequently looked to these locations during testing in response to a coherence–signaling intersentential connective. Experiment 2 finds that listeners’ looks during sentences containing coherence-biasing verbs reveal expectations about upcoming sentence types. This work extends existing research on prediction beyond sentence-internal structure and provides a new methodology for examining the cues that comprehenders use to establish relationships at the discourse level.