A "change-of-standard" perspective on the relations among context, judgment, and memory

Social-Judgment Comparisons in Daily Life

Comparison processes are critical to social judgments, yet little is known about how individuals compare people other than themselves in daily life (social-judgment comparisons). The present research employed a 7-day experience-sampling design (Nparticipants = 93; Nsurveys = 3,960) with end-of-week and 6-month follow-ups, to examine how individuals make social-judgment comparisons in daily life as well as the cumulative impact of these comparisons over time. Participants compared close (vs. distant) contacts more frequently and made more downward than upward comparisons. Furthermore, downward, relative to upward, comparisons predicted more positive perceptions of the contact, greater closeness to the contact, and greater relationship satisfaction. More frequent downward comparisons involving a particular contact also predicted greater closeness 1 week and 6 months later. When participants made upward comparisons, they were motivated to protect close, but not distant, contacts by downplaying domain importance, and engaging in this protective strategy predicted greater closeness to the contact 1 week later.

They Had It Coming: The Relationship Between Perpetrator-Blame and Victim-Blame

Though the study of blame is far from new, little to no research has systematically investigated how perpetrator-blame and victim-blame influence one another. The current series of studies used correlational (Study 1), experimental (Studies 2 and 3), and mediational (Studies 3A and 3B) designs to address this issue. Results indicated that when it comes to perpetrators and victims, blame is zero-sum. Across a diverse set of crimes of varying severity, the more that a victim is seen as playing a causal role in a crime, the less blame is assigned to the perpetrator. In addition, when victim-culpability is experimentally manipulated, having a more causally responsible victim actually mitigates blame for the perpetrator, and this discounting of perpetrator-blame occurs because the victim is seen as more deserving of what happened. Results are discussed in terms of real-world implications.

Preconscious and Postconscious Processes Underlying Construct Accessibility Effects: An Extended Search Model

In this article we first review research relevant to current models of assimilation and contrast effects. Second, we introduce a new theoretical model that specifies how preconscious and postconscious processes jointly contribute to the occurrence of assimilation and contrast effects. Furthermore, a central tenet of our model is that the perceiver's information-processing goals (expediency and accuracy goals) regulate these preconscious and postconscious processes, and they thus play an important role in moderating the magnitude of assimilation and contrast effects. We propose that our new theoretical model provides a parsimonious account for existing findings and derives a number of novel hypotheses to be tested by empirical research.

Rapid ecosystem change challenges the adaptive capacity of Local Environmental Knowledge

The use of Local Environmental Knowledge has been considered as an important strategy for adaptive management in the face of Global Environmental Change. However, the unprecedented rates at which global change occurs may pose a challenge to the adaptive capacity of local knowledge systems. In this paper, we use the concept of the shifting baseline syndrome to examine the limits in the adaptive capacity of the local knowledge of an indigenous society facing rapid ecosystem change. We conducted semi-structured interviews regarding perceptions of change in wildlife populations and in intergenerational transmission of knowledge amongst the Tsimane', a group of hunter-gatherers of Bolivian Amazonia (n = 300 adults in 13 villages). We found that the natural baseline against which the Tsimane' measure ecosystem changes might be shifting with every generation as a result of (a) age-related differences in the perception of change and (b) a decrease in the intergenerational sharing of environmental knowledge. Such findings suggest that local knowledge systems might not change at a rate quick enough to adapt to conditions of rapid ecosystem change, hence potentially compromising the adaptive success of the entire social-ecological system. With the current pace of Global Environmental Change, widening the gap between the temporal rates of on-going ecosystem change and the timescale needed for local knowledge systems to adjust to change, efforts to tackle the shifting baseline syndrome are urgent and critical for those who aim to use Local Environmental Knowledge as a tool for adaptive management.

Paying for Someone Else's Mistake: The Effect of Bystander Negligence on Perpetrator Blame

The success of criminal acts can sometimes depend critically on the oversight or negligence of uninvolved bystanders (e.g., someone leaving a first-floor window open). Four studies examined how the contribution of a negligent bystander affects blame for the perpetrator of a crime. Although participants stated that discounting blame for the perpetrator was normatively inappropriate in this context, they expected that others would make this very “error.” Instead, across all four studies, bystander negligence amplified ascriptions of perpetrator blame. This amplification occurred because the bad action of the bystander provided an implicit standard of comparison for the perpetrator's act, framing it as more blameworthy. A variety of alternative mechanisms— that bystander negligence altered perceived crime avoidability, prompted spontaneous counterfactualizing, or increased victim empathy—were tested and ruled out. Implications for legal contexts are discussed.

The neural substrates of person comparison--an fMRI study

Person comparison is pervasive in social judgment and human decision making and yet its neural substrate is poorly explored. We measured brain activity when participants compared psychological (intelligence) and physical (height) characteristics of famous people and found activation of medial frontal, orbitofrontal and limbic areas and the temporoparietal junction. This network was largely driven by the psychological comparison, with activity being higher for intelligence than height comparison in several areas in medial prefrontal cortex, suggesting that their activation scales with the demand on person comparison. The person comparison network overlaps strikingly with that commonly described for classic theory of mind tasks. We interpret this overlap as indexing the use of perspective taking common to person comparison and theory of mind.

Value from hedonic experience and engagement

Recognizing that value involves experiencing pleasure or pain is critical to understanding the psychology of value. But hedonic experience is not enough. I propose that it is also necessary to recognize that strength of engagement can contribute to experienced value through its contribution to the experience of motivational force--an experience of the intensity of the force of attraction to or repulsion from the value target. The subjective pleasure/pain properties of a value target influence strength of engagement, but factors separate from the hedonic properties of the value target also influence engagement strength and thus contribute to the experience of attraction or repulsion. These additional sources of engagement strength include opposition to interfering forces, overcoming personal resistance, using the right or proper means of goal pursuit, and regulatory fit between the orientation and manner of goal pursuit. Implications of the contribution of engagement strength to value are discussed for judgment and decision making, persuasion, and emotional experiences.

Context and the interpretation of likelihood information: the role of intergroup comparisons on perceived vulnerability

Four experiments investigated how people's perceptions about a group's (e.g., women's) vulnerability to a disease are influenced by information about the prevalence of the disease in a comparable group (e.g., men). Participants read symptom and prevalence infomation about fictitious diseases before answering questions regarding target group vulnerability. Participants used the prevalence rate for a nontarget group as an immediate comparison standard for intuitively interpreting the degree of vulnerability of a target group, resulting in robust contrast effects. Experiments 3 and 4 illustrated that these contrast effects can cause a person's intuitive perceptions about a group's vulnerability to selected diseases to conflict with his or her knowledge of the prevalence rates for the diseases. The results support a distinction between 2 components of psychological uncertainty-beliefs in objective probability and more intuitive perceptions of certainty.

Memory states and memory tasks: an integrative framework for eyewitness memory and suggestibility

An integrative framework (IMP) is presented which depicts performance in eyewitness suggestibility experiments as the participants' solutions of memory tasks, depending on (a) a specified task-relevant memory base and (b) the participants' perception of the memory task. Three theoretical explanations of the effect of misleading post-event information are reinterpreted and reduced to one single core: individuals answer test questions while assuming the consistency of event and post-event information. The impact of such consistency assumptions (a) is demonstrated in a first experiment, where the usual misinformation effect obtained with the Loftus standard test procedure disappeared when the participants' consistency assumptions were destroyed prior to testing, and (b) manifests itself in a qualitative analysis of individual processing strategies for discrepancies between details. Experiment 2, employing methodological innovations suggested by IMP, examined the memory base and found no evidence for memory impairment or misattributions of post-event details to the witnessed scene. However, a follow-up study conducted four and a half months later revealed a strong tendency for such misattributions which might indicate long-term integration of information.

Clinical communication skills teaching: the role of cognitive schemata

Although the inclusion of the teaching of clinical communication skills is common in the training of health professionals, few published papers exist which either describe the theoretical basis of such teaching or provide comprehensive assessment procedures. This paper highlights the contributions of behavioural analysis and, centrally, the development of cognitive scripts or schemata to the understanding of the teaching of clinical communication skills. A model for a course designed explicitly to develop such scripts is described and the implications of such an understanding are discussed.