Showing papers in "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1978"

Abstract: Adaptation level theory suggests that both contrast and habituation will operate to prevent the winning of a fortune from elevating happiness as much as might be expected. Contrast with the peak experience of winning should lessen the impact of ordinary pleasures, while habituation should eventually reduce the value of new pleasures made possible by winning. Study 1 compared a sample of 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls and also with a group of 29 paralyzed accident victims who had been interviewed previously. As predicted, lottery winners were not happier than controls and took significantly less pleasure from a series of mundane events. Study 2 indicated that these effects were not due to preexisting differences between people who buy or do not buy lottery tickets or between interviews that made or did not make the lottery salient. Paraplegics also demonstrated a contrast effect, not by enhancing minor pleasures but by idealizing their past, which did not help their present happiness.

Abstract: Two studies investigated the effect of good mood on cognitive processes. In the first study, conducted in a shopping mall, a positive feeling state was induced by giving subjects a free gift, and good mood, thus induced, was found to improve subjects' evaluations of the performance and service records of products they owned. In the second study, in which affect was induced by having subjects win or lose a computer game in a laboratory setting, subjects who had won the game were found to be better able to recall positive material in memory. The results of the two studies are discussed in terms of the effect that feelings have on accessibility of cognitions. In addition, the nature of affect and the relationship between good mood and behavior (such as helping) are discussed in terms of this proposed cognitive process.

Abstract: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champa ign Helpless children show marked performance decrements under failure, whereas mastery-oriented children often show enhanced performance. Current theories emphasize differences in the nature of the attributions following failure as determinants of response to failure. The present studies explored helpless versus mastery-oriented differences in the nature, timing, and relative frequency of a variety of achievement-r elated cognitions by continuously monitoring verbalizations following failure. The results revealed that helpless children made the expected attributions for failure to lack of ability; mastery-oriented children made surprisingly few attributions but instead engaged in self-monitori ng and selfinstructions. That is, helpless children focused on the cause of failure, whereas the mastery-oriented children focused on remedies for failure. These differences were accompanied by striking differences in strategy change under failure. The results suggest that in addition to the nature of the attribution one makes, the timing or even occurrence of attributions may be a critical individual difference.

Abstract: In three studies, subjects observed slide and tape portrayals of interacting small groups that were of mixed sex or mixed race. Hypotheses tested were (a) that social perceivers encode person information by race and sex; (b) that this fact leads to minimizing within-group differences and exaggerating between-group differences; (c) that perceivers stereotype accordingly; (d) that within-group attributes, both stereotyped and nonstereotyped, are exaggerated in inverse proportion to the size of the minority subgroup; (e) that better discriminations are made within smaller subgroups; (f) that imputations of attributes to groups as a whole are also sensitive to the makeup of the group; and (g) that all these behaviors are attenuated when the perceiver is a member of the subgroup evaluated. All but the last hypothesis received at least partial support. Results are discussed in terms of categorizatio n processes and suggest that normal cognitive processes explain the process of stereotyping quite well.

Abstract: In the course of social relationships, individuals often attempt to make judgments about the personal attributes of other people At times, this quest for knowledge may involve the testing of hypotheses about other people When we form our early impressions of new acquaintances, we may wish to test hypotheses based upon our expectations about their personal dispositions (Is this new acquaintance as friendly as a mutual friend has

Abstract: Three field experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that complex social behavior that appears to be enacted mindfully instead may be performed without conscious attention to relevant semantics. Subjects in compliance paradigms received communications that either were or were not semantically sensible, were or were not structurally consistent with their previous experience, and did or did not request an effortful response. It was hypothesized that unless the communication occasioned an effortful response or was structurally (rather than semantically) novel, responding that suggests ignorance of relevant information would occur. The predictions were confirmed for both oral and written communications. Social psychological theories that rely on humans actively processing incoming information are questioned in light of these results. Consider the image of man or woman as a creature who, for the most part, attends to the world about him or her and behaves on the basis of reasonable inference drawn from such attention. The view is flattering, perhaps, but is it an accurate accounting of covert human behavior? Social psychology is replete with theories that take for granted the "fact" that people think. Consistency theories (cf. Abelson et al., 1968), social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954; Schachter, 1959), and attribution theory (Heicler, 1958; Jones et al., 1972; Kelley, 1967), for example, as well as generally accepted explanations for phenomena like bystander (non)intervention (Darley & Latane, 1968), all start out with the underlying assumption that people attend to their

Abstract: How likely people are to think of themselves in terms of a given personal characteristic is predicted from the distinctiveness postulate that the person, when confronted by a complex stimulus (such as the self), selectively notices and encodes the stimulus in terms of what is most peculiar about it, since these peculiar characteristics are the most informative in distinguishing it from other stimuli. This partial view of the person as an information-encoding machine (one is conscious of oneself insofar as, and in the ways that, one is different) is used to derive four predictions implying that ethnic identity is salient in children's spontaneous self-concepts to the extent that their ethnic group is in the minority in their social milieu at school. Our measure of salience of ethnicity was its being spontaneously mentioned by the children in response to a nondirective "Tell us about yourself" question. All four predictions were confirmed, though for several of the findings there are plausible alternative explanations.

Abstract: An experiment was conducted to investigate systematic retrospective distortions of past events precipitated by one's current beliefs about another individual. Participants read an extensive narrative about the life of a woman named Betty K. Either immediately after reading the case history or 1 week later, some participants learned that she was currently living a lesbian life-style; others learned that she was currently living a heterosexual life-style; still others learned nothing about her life-style. The impact of this new information on recognition memory for factual events in Betty K.'s life was assessed 1 week after reading the case history. Participants selectively affirmed events that supported and bolstered their current interpretations of Betty K. Performance was the same whether participants learned this information immediately after reading the case history or 1 week later. Additional evidence suggests that these results are best characterized as the product of an interaction between stereotyped beliefs about sexuality and genuine memory for factual events. Implications of these findings for the nature, function, and consequences of social knowledge are discussed.

Abstract: In two closely related experiments, college student subjects were instructed to choose between a drug that allegedly interfered with performance and a drug that allegedly enhanced performance. This choice was the main dependent measure of the experiment. The drug choice intervened between work on soluble or insoluble problems and a promised retest on similar problems. In Experiment 1, all subjects received success feedback after their initial problem-solving attempts, thus creating one condition in which the success appeared to be accidental (noncontingent on performance) and one in which the success appeared to be contingent on appropriate knowledge. Males in the noncontingent-success condition were alone in preferring the performance-inhibiting drug, presumably because they wished to externalize probable failure on the retest. The predicted effect, however, did not hold for female subjects. Experiment 2 replicated the unique preference shown by males after noncontingent success and showed the critical importance of success feedback.

Abstract: Despite widely differing methodologies, previous studies on affect (emotion as represented in language) have often obtained what appear to be the same basic dimensions. Whether these similarly named dimensions from different methodologies are actually equivalent was tested here by intercorrelating dimensions obtained from multidimensional scaling, successive-intervals scaling, semantic differential scaling, and factor analysis of verbal self-report data. Results strongly supported the convergent validity of pleasure-displeasure and degree of arousal, but were equivocal on additional dimensions. Separate multidimensional scalings of pleasant, intermediate, and unpleasant affect terms (a) confirmed the presence of an arousal dimension at each level of pleasure and (b) obtained three additional dimensions: control/potency/dominance, depth of experience, and locus of causation. These three dimensions were interpreted as describing not the emotion per se but rather beliefs about the antecedents or consequences of the emotion. In a final study, internal versus external locus of causation was shown to be reliably decoded from emotion-denoting words.

Abstract: University of Notre DameJohn A. MillerOhio State UniversityThe low-ball technique, a tactic often used by automobile sales dealers toproduce compliance from customers, was examined in a set of three experi-ments. In all three studies, a requester who induced subjects to make aninitial decision to perform a target behavior and who then made performanceof the behavior more costly obtained greater final compliance than a requesterwho informed subjects of the full costs of the target behavior from the outset.The low-ball phenomenon—that an active preliminary decision to take anaction tends to persevere even after the costs of performing the action havebeen increased—was found to be reliable (Experiment 1), different from thefoot-in-the-door effect (Experiment 2), and effective only when the preliminarydecision was made with a high degree of choice (Experiment 3). In competi-tion with three other conceptual explanations, a formulation based on the con-cept of commitment was seen to best account for the results. An ecologicallyderived strategy for the identification and investigation of research questionswas used and discussed.Social psychologists have recently begun toexamine the effects of a variety of factors onthe likelihood that one person will complywith a request from another (cf. Cialdini &Schroeder, 1976). These investigations havegenerally used a similar epistemological se-quence in attempting to uncover the psycho-logical processes that influence compliancebehavior. Typically, factors likely to affectthe tendency to comply with a request havebeen identified on the basis of existing psy-chological theory. Once selected in this man-ner, the variables are submitted to experi-mental test to determine whether they doinfluence compliance probabilities accordingto prediction.

Abstract: Two experiments examined strategies observers use to see through self-presentations. In the first, five male actor subjects lied or told the truth in simulated job interviews. Forty-one observers were moderately accurate in judging the actors' truthfulness. Actors were consistently good or poor liars, but judges were not consistently good or poor. When actors lied, they gave less plausible, shorter answers with longer latencies. Observers seemed to use the plausibility and latency, as well as an answer's vagueness and consistency and an actor's smiling, postural shifting, and grooming, to determine whether he was lying. The second study experimentally manipulated the content of an answer and a nonverbal cue. Observers were more likely to judge a female job applicant as lying when her answers were self-serving. A long hesitation before an answer made observers more suspicious of an already self-serving answer and more certain of the truth of an already forthright one.

Abstract: The present study investigated the effects of depression on causal attributions for success and failure. Specifically, female university students were separated into depressed and nondepressed groups on the basis of Costello--Comrey Depression Scale scores, and then received either 20%, 55%, or 80% reinforcement on a word association task. Following the task, attributions were made for outcome using the four factors of effort, ability, task difficulty, and luck. In accord with predictions generated from a self-serving biases hypothesis, nondepressives made internal (ability, effort) attributions for a successful outcome (80% reinforcement) and external attributions (luck, task difficulty) for a failure outcome (20% reinforcement). As predicted from consideration of the self-blame component of depression, the attributions made by depressives for a failure outcome were personal or internal. Contrary to expectations, depressives also made internal attributions for a successful outcome. The findings for depressives were discussed in relation to the recently revised learned helplessness model of depression, which incorporates causal attributions. For nondepressives, the findings were considered in terms of the self-serving biases hypothesis.

Abstract: Converging data suggest that human facial behavior has an evolutionary basis. Combining these data with Seligman's preparedness theory, it was predicted that facial expressions of anger should be more readily associated with aversive events than should expressions of happiness. Two experiments involving differential electrodermal conditioning to pictures of faces, with electric shock as the unconditioned stimulus, were performed. In the first experiment, the subjects were exposed to two pictures of the same person, one with an angry and one with a happy expression. For half of the subjects, the shock followed the angry face, and for the other half, it followed the happy face. In the second experiment, three groups of subjects differentiated between pictures of male and female faces, both showing angry, neutral, and happy expressions. Responses to angry conditioned stimuli showed significant resistance to extinction in both experiments, with a larger effect in Experiment 2. Responses to happy or neutral conditioned stimuli, on the other hand, extinguished immediately when the shock was withheld. The results are related to conditioning to phobic stimuli and to the preparedness theory.

Abstract: Two experiments were performed in an investigation of the effects of distraction and emotional arousal on the proofreading performance of dieting female subjects. In Experiment 1, it was found that distraction initially impaired the performance of dieters and facilitated the performance of nondieters, a pattern previously shown by Rodin to apply to obese and normal weight subjects, respectively, and interpreted as evidence of greater externality in the obese. Subsequent retesting of the same subjects in succeeding months, however, revealed a complete reversal of the original results. In Experiment 2, the reaction to distraction found in the first phase of Experiment 1 was obtained when subjects were in a situation of minimal threat. In a situation of high threat, the relative distractibility of dieters was reversed, as in the latter phases of Experiment 1. An explanation is offered for these data in terms of the greater emotionality of dieters, the susceptibility of cognitive performance to arousal (distraction, anxiety) manipulations, and the potentially competing effects of distraction and anxiety. Implications for the prevailing "trait" view of externality (stimulus binding) are discussed.