Psychological research online: report of Board of Scientific Affairs' Advisory Group on the Conduct of Research on the Internet

As the Internet has changed communication, commerce, and the distribution of information, so too it is changing psychological research. Psychologists can observe new or rare phenomena online and can do research on traditional psychological topics more efficiently, enabling them to expand the scale and scope of their research. Yet these opportunities entail risk both to research quality and to human subjects. Internet research is inherently no more risky than traditional observational, survey, or experimental methods. Yet the risks and safeguards against them will differ from those characterizing traditional research and will themselves change over time. This article describes some benefits and challenges of conducting psychological research via the Internet and offers recommendations to both researchers and institutional review boards for dealing with them. ((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)     

The objectivity of color and the color of objectivity

I am grateful to Peter King, David Lewis, George Schumm, Stewart Shapiro, Allan Silverman, William Taschek, Neil Tennant, and Mark Wilson for helpful and stimulating discussions; and especially to Diana Raffman and Michael Watkins for ongoing arguments about the importance of ongoing arguments about the ontology of color.     

Machiavellianism in patients and their children.

The role of the family in the development of Machiavellianism was examined in this study. High- and low-Machiavellian sixth graders played a bluffing game. Their parents completed Machiavellian belief measures. The Machiavellianism of fathers and mothers was positively related to their children's success at deceiving others but not at seeing through others' attempts at deception. In addition, fathers' Machiavellianism was positively related to their children's Machiavellian beliefs. These data support a modeling hypothesis for the development of Machiavellianism. Unexpectedly, the children's own behaviors and beliefs were unrelated. This pattern of results suggests that a child's manipulative behaviors and beliefs are learned separately and only become consistent over time.     

A two-factor theory of stimulus-repetition effects

It is a well-documented finding that children respond more slowly to a stimulus that has been presented repeatedly just before test than to a novel stimulus. The effect, for which a two-factor theory has recently been proposed, did not occur in the only previous study of adults using a comparable procedure. Experiment 1 demonstrated the effect with adults. The previous negative finding may have been the result of too few repetitions of the stimulus. Experiment 2 provided additional support for the two-factor theory. The theory suggests that the effect is the net result of partially counteracting changes in two attentional processes. One process, the alertness elicited by a stimulus, is held to decrease as a result of repeated presentation of the stimulus, while the second process, encoding, is facilitated. The hypothesis tested in Experiment 2 was that the alertness decrement dissipates over a brief passage of time, while the facilitation of encoding does not. Subjects exposed to a repeatedly presented color were tested either immediately thereafter or after a 15-min or 30-min interval. As predicted, the observed effect shifted from one of flower response to one of faster response to the repeated stimulus as the delay interval increased.