Pilot personality and crew coordination: implications for training and selection

The performance of pilots can be construed as a product of skill, attitude, and personality factors. Although a great deal of effort within the aviation community has been focused on ensuring technical expertise, and new efforts highlight attitudes associated with crew coordination, personality factors have been relatively unexplored. Further, it is argued that past failures to find linkages between personality and performance were due to a combination of inadequate statistical modeling, premature performance evaluation, and/or the reliance on data gathered in contrived as opposed to realistic situations. The goal of the research presented in this article is to isolate subgroups of pilots along performance-related personality dimensions and to document limits on the impact of crew coordination training between the groups. Two samples of military pilots were surveyed in the context of training in crew coordination. Three different profiles were identified through cluster analysis of personality scales. These clusters replicated across samples and predicted attitude change following training in crew coordination.     

Special perspectives: adversarial forum. Fox on corporate personhood,limited liability,and community control: a critique

Dennis Fox argued in a Special Perspective contribution that psychologists ought to mount a campaign to demonstrate the adverse impact of the activities of large corporations on social and individual well-being (Fox, 1996). This Special Perspective takes issue with Fox's position in terms of the inadequacy of any supporting data and the failure to consider adequately the wideranging implications of recommendations such as the elimination of shareholder limited liability. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Legitimizing the Leader: Endorsement by Male Versus Female Authority Figures

Subjects viewed a videotaped group discussion by a leader and four other group members and evaluated each of them for leadership competence. The leader, either a man or a woman, was either personally endorsed ("legitimized") or unendorsed by either a male or a female authority figure. Legitimation raised both leaders' performance evaluations. Legitimation by the female authority affected the leaders' evaluations, overall, as much as legitimation by a male authority. For the male leader, legitimation by the male and female authority figures produced equal impact. However, legitimation by the female authority figure produced significantly greater impact on evaluations of the female leader's performance than the same legitimation by a male authority figure. The data suggest that female authority figures can be effective legitimizers of both sexes, but male authority's endorsements of a female subordinate may be viewed as suspect.     

TV commercials as achievement scripts for women

This study suggests that sex stereotypes implicitly enacted, but never explicitly articulated, in TV commercials may inhibit women's achievement aspirations. Men and women (N=180) viewed locally produced replicas of four current, sex-stereotyped commercials, or four replicas that were identical except that the sex roles were reversed, or (control) named their favorite TV programs. All subjects then wrote an essay imagining their lives “10 years from now.” The essays were coded for achievement and homemaking themes. Women who viewed traditional commercials deemphasized achievement in favor of homemaking, compared to men and compared to women who had seen reversed role commercials. The reversed role commercials eliminated the sex difference in net achievement focus. Control subjects were indistinguishable from their same-sex counterparts in the traditional condition. The results identified some social changes needed to make “equality of opportunity” a social reality for women as well as men.     

The Michael-Adler report (1933): criminology under the microscope

This paper details the responses made by social scientists as well as criminal justice practitioners during 1932 to a study focusing on the status of criminology by the Bureau of Social Hygiene. These responses ultimately led to the publication of the controversial Crime, Law and Social Science (1933), which gave much-needed direction to the development of criminology. Despite the importance of these responses to the creation of criminological thought, only one (by Edwin H. Sutherland) has previously been published. Examining the responses of all of the individual participants in the project gives a clearer picture of controversies and changes which ultimately occurred as the field of criminology gradually became institutionalized as an academic discipline.     

Assaults in the air: Concerning attacks against flight attendants

Violence directed at airline personnel by passengers while an aircraft is in flight presents an interesting and uncommon form of deviant behavior that can inform the study of deviance in general. Such behavior has been identified by various observers as a growing social problem. This paper explores the phenomenon of assaults against flight attendants through analysis of official data including both case files and statistics, interviews with officials, and a multidisciplinary literature review. Specifically, we identify factors related to both the etiology of, and reactions toward such behavior. Factors related to etiology include (1) the physical environment of an aircraft; (2) the juxtaposition of status roles between passenger and attendant; (3) the exercise of authority as a precipitating event; (4) the pervasiveness of sexual stereotypes; (5) the consumption of alcohol and drugs; and (6) psychological changes related to the experience of flying. In examining the responses to assaults we discuss (1) the statutory laws regarding aircraft assaults; (2) patterns in official statistics; (3) factors related to the underreporting of such incidents; (4) reactions by companies, unions, and the government, including the politics of deviance‐defining; and (5) changes in patterns of response. Unlike common assaults, the offenders are almost exclusively middle‐ and upper‐class persons. Suggestions for further research are offered.