Willingness to fake: Examining the impact of competitive climate and hiring situations

Applicants may be willing to fake in job interviews with the aim of creating a positive impression. In two vignette‐based experiments, we examined if a competitive—versus noncompetitive—climate (Study 1) and hiring situation (Study 2) increased participants' willingness to fake. We also examined if Honesty–Humility and Competitive Worldviews moderated the relation between willingness to fake and how competitive participants believed they must be in order to secure the job. Results demonstrated that a competitive climate and hiring situation increased willingness to fake. Honesty–Humility and Competitive Worldviews were related to willingness to fake, but these relations did not change substantially at different levels of perceived need for competitiveness. Overall, results lend some theoretical support to propositions about applicant faking.     

传统媒体上强势品牌广告竞争溢出效应的作用机制及分布规律

由于产品之间存在相互关联性, 一个企业的广告不仅会对本企业产品的市场需求产生促进作用, 而且对其它企业产品的市场需求也会产生一定影响, 这种影响被称为广告的溢出效应。以往研究发现, 强势品牌广告竞争对弱势品牌具有溢出效应, 但该研究仅验证了溢出效应存在, 并未对其作用机制进行深入挖掘。通过实验方法探讨强势品牌广告竞争对弱势品牌的溢出效应的作用机制及边界条件是当务之急, 实验一探讨强势品牌广告竞争对弱势品牌溢出效应的作用机制, 主要包括探讨中介变量和调节变量两个方面的问题。中介变量包括消费者对强势品牌的涉入度、感知产品质量、行业市场份额变化三个变量, 调节变量包括消费者广告态度、消费者任务导向、产品生命周期、产品同质性四个变量。实验二探讨强势品牌广告竞争对弱势品牌的溢出效应的整体分布规律, 包括产品成长期和成熟期两个时期的溢出效应分布规律。研究将揭示强势品牌广告竞争的作用机制和整体分布规律, 有利于丰富溢出效应理论和广告效果理论。     

Cognitive performance is improved while walking: Differences in cognitive–sensorimotor couplings between children and young adults

We investigated how 9-year-olds and young adults performed a working memory task under different difficulty conditions while walking on a treadmill. Stride-length and stride-time variability tended to decrease with cognitive load in young adults, whereas children showed an increase in walking variability when cognitive load was very high. Participants in both age groups improved their cognitive performance when walking at their preferred speed as opposed to sitting or walking at a fixed, non-preferred speed. We conclude that the interaction of walking and cognitive performance is influenced by sharing resources between two tasks, and that performance improvements in cognition may be caused by an exercise-induced activation of resources.     

Can hearing puter activate pupil? Phonological competition and the processing of reduced spoken words in spontaneous conversations

In listeners' daily communicative exchanges, they most often hear casual speech, in which words are often produced with fewer segments, rather than the careful speech used in most psycholinguistic experiments. Three experiments examined phonological competition during the recognition of reduced forms such as [pjut?r] for computer using a target-absent variant of the visual world paradigm. Listeners' eye movements were tracked upon hearing canonical and reduced forms as they looked at displays of four printed words. One of the words was phonologically similar to the canonical pronunciation of the target word, one word was similar to the reduced pronunciation, and two words served as unrelated distractors. When spoken targets were presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and in sentential contexts (Experiment 2), competition was modulated as a function of the target word form. When reduced targets were presented in sentential contexts, listeners were probabilistically more likely to first fixate reduced-form competitors before shifting their eye gaze to canonical-form competitors. Experiment 3, in which the original /p/ from [pjut?r] was replaced with a “real” onset /p/, showed an effect of cross-splicing in the late time window. We conjecture that these results fit best with the notion that speech reductions initially activate competitors that are similar to the phonological surface form of the reduction, but that listeners nevertheless can exploit fine phonetic detail to reconstruct strongly reduced forms to their canonical counterparts.     

Trash talking,respect for opponents and good competition

Trash talking, which is the North American term for verbal barbs directed at opponents during a sporting event in order to gain a competitive edge, is widely accepted by athletes and the athletic community as a legitimate part of sport. It is, however, morally indefensible. A simple Kantian injunction against treating opponents merely as objects to be overcome is sufficient to condemn this verbal abuse. Attempts to justify trash talking as a strategic ploy that implies no disrespect are disingenuous in view of the fact that its effectiveness depends on opponents' being offended by it. Nor can we defend trash talking as enhancing the goal of athletic competition, since the ability to verbally abuse opponents and remain impervious to their abuse are extraneous to the athletic excellence that contests are designed to measure. Attempts to deflect criticisms by partially immunizing sport from moral scrutiny are implausible. With few exceptions, we judge actions in sport by the same moral standards that we use in any other context. Moreover, the view that neither trash talking nor other actions in sport are fit subjects for strict moral scrutiny is inconsistent with the often-heard claim that sport promotes moral development.     

Nietzsche,competition and athletic ability

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the agon (Greek for contest) and the construction of athletic ability. In ‘Homer's contest’, Nietzsche claims that the ancient Greek agon was a contest that included only the most qualified competitors battling each other for honour and victory. Nietzsche seeks to restore the agon in contemporary society. Nietzsche believes that contests have lost this agonistic meaning since they are no more than contrived competitions between underqualified opponents. I am extending the discussion to the domain of sport. If we stage an agon reminiscent of Greek antiquity, we could have a genuine competition between the most qualified athletes.     

Matters Olympic and Paralympic

Over the past several years, I have been arguing that nature sports such as surfing, backcountry skiing, and mountaineering are best described as sports in which athletes interact dynamically with natural features rather than compete with other humans. This article is part of a larger attempt to trace the implications of that view. Specifically, I consider the relationship between nature sports and competition. To this purpose, I address three separate, but related topics: First, I reply to Leslie Howe’s article, ‘On Competing Against Oneself, Or, I Need to Get a Different Voice in My Head’, in which she argues that there is a version of self-competition that is central to nature sports. Second, I argue that adapting nature sports to fit into formal competitive frameworks is problematic because, when we do so, the focus shifts from athletes interacting with natural features to athletes using natural features to outdo other athletes. And third, I argue that nature sports may seem competitive because the interaction between humans and natural features produces a type of intensity that is very similar to the intensity produced in competition. I argue further that because nature sports can produce this intensity in an environment that is not based on competition, they present an important alternative to traditional sports.     

Revisiting Competitive Categories: A Reply to Royce

In this article, I respond to the criticisms that Richard Royce has made of my theory of competition in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy. While I find some of his attacks misplaced, a number of his criticisms address key difficulties to which I offer clarification and defense.     

The great transition: A process view of history and its implications

The collapse of confidence since the nineteenth century, and the turbulence which has followed, are incorporated in an historical model describing the development of western civilization. It suggests that they are threshold symptoms of a forthcoming transition of profound importance and without earlier parallel. Three different, and not mutually exclusive perceptions of the transition are provided. There is no suggestion that we can anticipate what will happen, but recent rapid advances in communications and information technologies are likely to play a critical formative part in a development which will involve both a growth in collective self‐consciousness and the conceptual expansion of our minds.