Rivals without a cause? Relative performance feedback creates destructive competition despite aligned incentives

Whether people compete or cooperate with each other has consequences for their own performance and that of organizations. To explain why people compete or cooperate, previous research has focused on two main factors: situational outcome structures and personality types. Here, we propose that—above and beyond these two factors—situational cues, such as the format in which people receive feedback, strongly affect whether they act competitively, cooperatively, or individualistically. Results of a laboratory experiment support our theorizing: After receiving ranking feedback, both students and experienced managers treated group situations with cooperative outcome structures as competitive and were in consequence willing to forgo guaranteed financial gains to pursue a—financially irrelevant—better rank. Conversely, in dilemma situations, feedback based on the joint group outcome led to more cooperation than ranking feedback. Our study contributes to research on competition, cooperation, interdependence theory, forced ranking, and the design of information environments.     

THE DEVELOPMENT OF STRATEGIES IN EMBEDDED FIGURES TASKS*

The starting point of the investigation was the field dependence-independence construct as measured with the Embedded Figures Test of H.A. Witkin. An overview of the research on the information-processing strategies in solving the items of this test was converging into a theory in which strategies for a successful solution can be located on a bipolar dimension with at one extreme a simultaneous strategy and at the other extreme a successive strategy. A new administration procedure for evaluating the use of four solution strategies was developed: the simultaneous, the successive, the extemalized-successive and the global-manipulatory strategy. Based on the prediction that the use of strategies was related to sex and age, we carried out an experiment involving groups of ten boys and ten girls of 5, 6 and 7 years of age, who were given eight tasks with the new administration procedure. No. significant difference was found between boys and girls. However, significant differences existed in strategy profiles in six of the eight tasks between the three age groups.     

Develocracy vs democracy

In a sequence of contributions in Developmental Review,(Moshman, 1990a, Moshman 1990b; Commons & Rodriguez, 1990), researchers have recently applied a developmental approach to constitutional policy. In particular, they discussed whether student religious groups in public schools should be permitted in light of the potentially conflicting constitutional principles of religious freedom on the one hand and of the ban against the establishment of a religion by the government on the other hand. Although they differed in important respects, Moshman as well as Commons and Rodriguez made the permissibility of student religious groups fully or partly contingent on the students' developmental stage. Because newer developmental theories differentiate several stages of adult development, such linkage of constitutional rights with developmental stages raises the specter of “develocracy.” Develocracy is a term I suggest to characterize a constitutional system in which a substantial number of rights and duties of adults depends on their developmental stage.     

Visual perception of surface curvature: psychophysics of curvature detection induced by motion parallax

The continuous approach to optic-flow processing shows that the curvature of a moving surface is related to a second spatial derivative of the velocity field, the spin variation (Droulez & Cornilleau-Pérès, 1989). With this approach as a theoretical framework, visual sensitivity to the curvature of a cylinder in motion was measured using a task of discrimination between cylindrical and planar patches. The results confirm the predictions suggested by the theory: (1) Sensitivity to curvature was always greater when the cylinder axis and the frontal translation were parallel than when they were orthogonal. The ratio of curvature detection thresholds in the two cases was between 1.3 and 2.5; the value predicted from the spin variation theory is about 2. (2) Sensitivity to curvature increased strongly with the velocity of the motion but was only weakly affected by its amplitude and the duration of viewing for the range of values used in our experiments.     

Variations on the Ramsey test: More triviality results

The purpose of this note is to formulate some weaker versions of the so called Ramsey test that do not entail the following unacceptable consequenceIf A and C are already accepted in K, then if A, then C is also accepted in K. and to show that these versions still lead to the same triviality result when combined with a preservation criterion.