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Lake Wobegon be gone! The "below-average effect" and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments.

Like the inhabitants of Garrison Keillor's (1985) fictional community of Lake Wobegon, most people appear to believe that their skills and abilities are above average. A series of studies illustrates one of the reasons why: when people compare themselves with their peers, they focus egocentrically on their own skills and insufficiently take into account the skills of the comparison group. This tendency engenders the oft-documented above-average effect in domains in which absolute skills tend to be high but produces a reliable below-average effect in domains in which absolute skills tend to be low (Studies 1 and 2). In Study 3, cognitive load exacerbated these biases, suggesting that people "anchor" on their assessment of their own abilities and insufficiently "adjust" to take into account the skills of the comparison group. These results suggest that the tendency to see oneself as above average may not be as ubiquitous as once thought.

Cognition↗

Making judgments about ability: the role of implicit theories of ability in moderating inferences from temporal and social comparison information.

Two studies examined the novel proposal that implicit theories of intelligence (C. S. Dweck & E. L. Leggett, 1988) moderate both the effects of performance trends on ability inferences and the perceived diagnosticity of temporal versus normative feedback. Results from 613 adolescents and 42 teachers confirmed that entity theorists perceived initial outcome as more diagnostic and inferred higher ability in another (Study 1) and in the self (Study 2) in a declining outcome condition; incremental theorists perceived last outcome as more diagnostic and inferred higher ability in an ascending condition. Experimental induction of beliefs about ability had similar effects. As predicted, self-appraisal was affected more by temporal feedback among incremental theorists and by normative feedback among entity theorists. Results help resolve prior mixed findings regarding order effects and responses to temporal and normative evaluation.

Adolescent↗

Judgment under emotional certainty and uncertainty: the effects of specific emotions on information processing.

The authors argued that emotions characterized by certainty appraisals promote heuristic processing, whereas emotions characterized by uncertainty appraisals result in systematic processing. The 1st experiment demonstrated that the certainty associated with an emotion affects the certainty experienced in subsequent situations. The next 3 experiments investigated effects on processing of emotions associated with certainty and uncertainty. Compared with emotions associated with uncertainty, emotions associated with certainty resulted in greater reliance on the expertise of a source of a persuasive message in Experiment 2, more stereotyping in Experiment 3, and less attention to argument quality in Experiment 4. In contrast to previous theories linking valence and processing, these findings suggest that the certainty appraisal content of emotions is also important in determining whether people engage in systematic or heuristic processing.

Adult↗

Performance monitoring in a confusing world: error-related brain activity, judgments of response accuracy, and types of errors.

The error-related negativity (ERN) represents a neural response, recorded from scalp electrodes, that is associated with monitoring activities. It is most likely generated in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Measures of the ERN, and of behavioral and perceived accuracy, were obtained from participants while they performed a visual 2-choice reaction time task under degraded stimulus conditions. Irrespective of behavioral accuracy, the amplitude of the ERN (measured at the time of the response) covaried with the perceived inaccuracy of the behavior (measured at the end of the trial). Errors due to premature responding (errors perceived as errors) were associated with large ERNs. Errors due to data limitations (errors about which there was uncertainty) were associated with smaller ERNs. These and other results are consistent with the proposal that performance monitoring, as manifested by the ERN, involves a comparison between representations of the appropriate response and the response actually made.

Adult↗

The role of the sound of tapping for nonvisual judgment of gap crossability.

The author investigated the possibility that nonvisual locomotion with a cane depends on the sound of the cane tapping. Blindfolded participants were asked to judge whether a gap in front of them could be crossed by walking. An acoustic analysis suggested that sound could, in theory, distinguish the gaps. Blindfolded sighted participants in Experiments 1 and 2 judged crossability under conditions in which only the sound of tapping was available and in which the sound was minimized; the third and fourth experiments included experienced cane users. Both inexperienced observers and experienced cane users were unaffected by sound reduction and were less able to discriminate gaps when using sound only than when using reduced sound. A fifth experiment indicated that active-passive differences were not responsible for these effects. Results indicate that sound is not necessary or sufficient for judging nonvisible crossability with a probe.

Auditory Perception↗

Sensory and cognitive factors in judgments of loudness.

One thousand Hertz tones were presented at equal or unequal intensities to the two ears. In a binaural-summation experiment, the presentation of components was simultaneous, the auditory system integrated the components automatically, and the subjects judged the loudness of the unitary sensation. In two cognitive-summation experiments, the presentation of components was successive, and the subjects had to integrate the two sensations consciously to judge their "total loudness." Results of all three experiments are consistent with models of linear summation of "loudness," but the loudness scales differ in the two tasks: The scales that underlie binaural summation and cognitive summation are nonlinearly related. This outcome suggests two nested processes: First, the auditory system transduces stimulus energy to loudness sensations by means of a nonlinear function; second, tasks that require subjects to judge combinational relations between sensations may impose additional nonlinear transformations on the sensations before the latter are combined.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

The role of subtractions and comparisons in comparative judgments involving numerical reference points.

Experiments in which subjects are asked to decide which of two digits is closer in magnitude to a third raise problems for many theories of linear orders. Holyoak (1978), for example, performed a number of these reference point experiments and concluded that they posed serious difficulties for a number of leading models. In their place, he offered the distance ratio model in which the ease of the decision in a reference point task is a function of the ratio of the distances between each stimulus and the reference point. In the present article, three experiments are presented that bear on the adequacy of Holyoak's position. In the first two studies, we present evidence that an important assumption of the distance ratio model is incorrect. In the third experiment, we compare the empirical adequacy of the distance ratio model with our own subtraction model. This model treats the reference point task as a concatenation of two subtractions and a simple digit comparison. This comparison operation is equivalent to the magnitude comparison required in standard linear order experiments. Overall, the subtraction model gives a somewhat better account than the distance ratio.

Adolescent↗

Optimism in children's judgments of health and environmental risks.

Although optimistic bias has been well documented for adults, little is known about how children view their own risks vis-à-vis those of their peers. Two studies of 6th graders examined optimism and the degree of differentiation in perceived risks across diverse health, lifestyle, and environmental problems. The findings revealed perceptions of relative invulnerability and highly differentiated risk assessments. The strongest levels of optimism emerged for controllable and stigmatizing events such as illicit drugs, smoking, and AIDS. The effects of gender, assessment context, and methodological variations were minimal. Discussion focused on the implications for health-promoting interventions with school-age children, the need for developmental information about risk perception processes, and the difficulty of distinguishing realistic from biased optimism.

Adolescent↗

Judgments of natural and anomalous trajectories in the presence and absence of motion.

Recent studies have shown that many people demonstrate erroneous beliefs about motion when asked to predict the trajectories of objects. The present experiments examine whether people can select as correct natural trajectories over anomalous ones when presented with the actual on-going event (motion condition) or static representations of the event (no-motion condition). McCloskey's curved tube problem was used as the event. Results indicate that adults benefit from the motion information in these stimuli, choosing the correct path more often in the motion condition. Men performed better than women in both conditions; this gender effect could not be attributed to formal instruction in physics. Only in the no-motion condition did any men prefer a path which reflected an impetus model of motion. Some women chose a curvilinear path in the motion condition, and in the no-motion condition the curvilinear path was their most often selected alternative. Fifth-grade children demonstrated no effect for gender and their path preferences resembled those of adult males. Children's responses failed to demonstrate a preference for those curvilinear paths which reflect an impetus-based approach to the problem. Adults' performance in the no-motion condition was not enhanced by instructions to employ mental imagery of the event.

Adult↗

Using numerosity judgments to determine what is learned during automatization.

An important question in learning is the nature of the information required to support skilled, or automatic, performance. In 2 experiments, participants counted patterns of 8-10 objects displayed on a computer screen for 4 sessions of 240 trials each before being transferred to a different set of patterns for a final session of 240 trials. The patterns in the final session differed from those seen in the 4 training sessions in either overall configuration (Experiment 1) or identity of constituents (Experiment 2). Results indicated that both types of information are important in learning and automatization of a counting task and support the idea that what is attended to during training will be necessary to support subsequent automatic performance.

Automatism↗

Dissociative affective and associative priming effects in the lexical decision task: yes versus no responses to word targets reveal evaluative judgment tendencies.

The affective priming effect (AP; i.e., shorter evaluative or lexical decision latencies for affectively congruent prime-target pairs) has often been interpreted as evidence for spreading activation from the prime to affectively congruent targets. The present study emphasizes the view that in the lexical decision task, the prime-target configuration is implicitly evaluated as a question of the form "Is (prime) (target)?" (e.g., "Is death wise?") so that there is a tendency to affirm in cases of congruency and to negate in cases of incongruency. Therefore, after establishing the AP with the lexical decision task in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 the assignment of yes responses to words and nonwords was varied. For the word = yes condition, the AP emerged, whereas the data pattern was reversed for the word = no condition. In Experiment 3, a comparable pattern of results was not found for symmetrical or backward associatively related prime-target pairs.

Adult↗

Comparative judgment of numerosity and numerical magnitude: attention preempts automaticity.

It is commonly believed that humans are unable to ignore the meanings of numerical symbols, even when these meanings are irrelevant to the task at hand. In 5 experiments, the authors tested the notion of automatic activation of numerical magnitude by asking participants to compare, while timed, pairs of numerical arrays on either numerosity or numerical value. Garner and Stroop effects were used to gauge the degree of interactive processing. The results showed that both effects were sensitive to the discriminability of values along the constituent dimensions, to the number of stimulus values used, and to practice and motivation. Notably, Stroop and Garner effects were eliminated under several conditions. These findings are incompatible with claims of obligatory activation of meaning in numerical processing, and they cast doubt on theories positing automatic processing of semantic information for alphanumerical symbols.

Adult↗

Clinicians' judgments of clinical utility: a comparison of the DSM-IV and five-factor models.

Clinical utility, or the usefulness of a diagnostic system in clinical practice, has been identified as an important construct in proposed revisions to the diagnostic nomenclature and a significant limitation of dimensional models of personality disorder, such as the 5-factor model (FFM). Only 1 study to date has addressed explicitly the clinical utility of the FFM, and the findings suggested significant limitations. In the current study, 245 practicing psychologists described 3 historic cases using both the FFM and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 2000) and then rated each model on 6 aspects of clinical utility. In contrast to prior research, the psychologists in this study considered the FFM to have greater clinical utility than the existing diagnostic categories.

Antisocial Personality Disorder↗

Relative importance of personality and general mental ability in managers' judgments of applicant qualifications.

Eighty-four managers who make hiring decisions in 1 of 6 occupations representative of J. L. Holland's (1973) 6 job typologies (medical technologist, insurance sales agent, carpenter, licensed practical nurse, reporter, and secretary) rated 39 hypothetical job applicants on 2 dependent variables, hirability and counterproductivity. Applicants were described on the Big Five personality factors (Emotional Stability, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) and on general mental ability. Results showed that general mental ability and conscientiousness were the most important attributes related to applicants' hirability and that Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness were the most important attributes related to counterproductivity. In most respects, these results mirror meta-analytic reviews of validity studies, thereby confirming hypotheses.

Cognition↗

Implicit policies about relations between personality traits and behavioral effectiveness in situational judgment items.

This paper develops the concept of implicit trait policy (ITP), which is a variant of the accentuation effect described by Tajfel (1957). ITPs are implicit beliefs about causal relations between personality traits and behavioral effectiveness. Studies reported here tested the hypotheses (a) that personality traits affect ITPs so that agreeable people, for instance, believe the relation between agreeableness and effectiveness is more strongly positive than disagreeable people do and (b) that ITPs can predict behavior that expresses associated personality traits. Two studies with undergraduate research participants supported the first hypothesis for traits of agreeableness and extraversion (the average correlation between traits and associated ITPs was .31 for agreeableness and .37 for extraversion) but not for conscientiousness. A 3rd study with student participants found that individual differences in ITPs for agreeableness predicted agreeable behavior (the average correlation was .33) in simulated work settings. These results suggest that ITPs may be useful for predicting work behavior that expresses personality traits even though ITPs may not be strongly correlated with the personality traits themselves.

Attitude↗