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.     

How much self-presentation behavior do applicants from the United Arab Emirates exhibit?

Applicants from different cultures vary in their self-presentation behavior during job interviews. This study investigates self-presentation behavior in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the second largest economy in the Arab world. Specifically, it examines self-presentation behavior of applicants from the UAE and compares it to the behavior of American, European, and Chinese applicants from previous studies. The randomized response technique was used to gather self-presentation prevalence data of 111 UAE applicants regarding self-presentation behavior in their last job interview. Prevalence rates were lower than those from the United States and from China but higher than those from Iceland and from Switzerland. Results indicate that though UAE culture values modesty, UAE applicants still engage in distinct self-presentation behavior.     

Beyond principal component analysis: A trilinear decomposition model and least squares estimation

The paper derives sufficient conditions for the consistency and asymptotic normality of the least squares estimator of a trilinear decomposition model for multiway data analysis.     

On the concept of language in some recent theories of meaning

The work on this paper was done in the research project V ra begrepp om spr k supported byHumanistisk-samhälls-vetenskapliga forskningsr det. I am indebted to Per Martin-Löf, Hans Ruin, Pär Segerdahl, and Sven Öhman for valuable comments on a previous version of this paper. Thanks to the comments of the anonymous referee I was able to improve some formulations in the paper.     

The relationship between recognition and cued recall in memory of enacted and nonenacted information

Summary An experiment was conducted to determine whether the processes underlying memory for enacted and nonenacted events are the same or different. The experimental paradigm used was that of recognition failure of recallable information. At study subjects were given verbal commands (e.g., break the match, roll the ball), that they were to remember or enact and remember. At test subjects were first asked to recognize the noun in each command in the absence of the verb and then to recall the noun with the verb present as cue. Half the subjects were given the two tests in the reverse order. The results demonstrate that enactment and nonenactment differ with respect to the degree of dependence/independence between recognition and recall. In the enactment condition recognition and cued recall are completely independent and in the nonenactment condition they are almost completely dependent.