Moderation of classic social psychological effects by demographics in the U.S. adult population: New opportunities for theoretical advancement

For decades, social psychologists have collected data primarily from college undergraduates and, recently, from haphazard samples of adults. Yet researchers have routinely presumed that thus observed treatment effects characterize "people" in general. Tests of seven highly cited social psychological phenomena (two involving opinion change resulting from social influence and five involving the use of heuristics in social judgments) using data collected from randomly sampled, representative groups of American adults documented generalizability of the six phenomena that have been replicated previously with undergraduate samples. The 1 phenomenon (a cross-over interaction revealing an ease of retrieval effect) that has not been replicated successfully previously in undergraduate samples was also not observed here. However, the observed effect sizes for the replicated phenomena were notably smaller on average than the meta-analytic effect sizes documented by past studies of college students. Furthermore, the phenomena were strongest among participants with the demographic characteristics of the college students who typically provided data for past published studies, even after correcting for publication bias in past studies using a new method, called the behaviorally-informed file-drawer adjustment. The six successful replications suggest that phenomena identified in traditional laboratory research also appear as expected in representative samples but more weakly, so observed effect sizes should be generalized with caution. The evidence of demographic moderators suggests interesting opportunities for future research to better understand the mechanisms of the effects and their limiting conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

How Gender-Role Salience Influences Attitude Strength and Persuasive Message Processing

We conducted three studies to examine the relationship between gender and persuasion. We tested the notion that making gender roles salient affects the strength of individuals’ attitudes and the way they respond to persuasive information. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that priming women with the female gender role reduced the strength of their attitudes (Study 1, N = 50) and increased their susceptibility to persuasion through a low-thought process (Study 2, N = 98). In Study 3, we manipulated the salience of both the female and male gender roles among men and women and assessed persuasion to a counter-attitudinal message ( N = 185). We found that the female and male primes affected men and women similarly, with the female prime causing participants to process messages superficially and the male prime leading to thoughtful message processing. These findings help to explain women’s slightly greater persuadability in meta-analyses and provide evidence of harms that stereotypes about women can cause. Moving forward, we urge researchers to be wary of gender salience in the research context, especially when conducting persuasion research.

Coping with Accountability Cross-Pressures: Low-Effort Evasive Tactics and High-Effort Quests for Complex Compromises

The current study explores two classes of strategies of coping with accountability: low-cognitive-effort decision-evasion tactics (buckpassing, procrastination, and exiting the situation) and high-cognitive-effort attempts to craft integratively complex compromises among conflicting perspectives. Some participants read weak arguments on one side of the free trade issue and strong arguments on the other side, and some participants read strong arguments for both the pro-and anti-free trade positions. They then expected their own views to be anonymous or expected to justify those views to a pro-free trade audience or to both a pro-and an anti-free trade audience. Participants were most integratively complex when they read strong arguments from each side and were accountable to conflicting constituencies (maximum intrapsychic and interpersonal conflict). Participants also relied on low-effort decision-evasion tactics to escape accountability and were willing to use escape strategies demanding relatively more time and energy to avoid accountability to contradictory constituencies.

Social power and attitude strength over the life course

Past findings indicate that middle-aged adults in the United States tend to be more resistant to attitude change than younger and older adults, but little is known about why this is so. The authors propose that midlife adults' disproportionate occupation of high-power social roles (which call for resoluteness) may partly explain their heightened resistance to persuasion. Using nationally representative data sets, the article first documents that in various domains the possession of social power peaks in midlife. It next documents that middle-aged adults place a high value on resoluteness, which suggests that they have internalized powerful role norms. Next, it shows that directly activating the concept of social power increases the perceived value of resoluteness. Finally, it demonstrates that the possession of powerful social roles partially mediates the relationship between age and resistance to persuasion. This work is the first to uncover a mechanism responsible for changes in attitude strength over the adult life course.

Openness to attitude change as a function of temporal perspective

Three studies investigated the impact of temporal perspective on people's dominant social goals and explored the implications of these goals for openness to attitude change. Participants who perceived time as limited expressed social preferences in accordance with emotion-regulation goals (Study 1), were more prone to modify their attitude to bring it into line with the attitude of an anticipated social partner (Study 2), and were more likely to go along with peer consensus opinion on a campus issue (Study 3) than were participants who perceived time as expansive. These studies demonstrate that perception of time plays a vital role in motivating social goals within the persuasion context.

Conceptual and methodological issues in testing the circumplex structure of data in personality and social psychology

Circumplex representations of data have enjoyed widespread popularity in personality and social psychological research. In this article we review the conceptual assumptions implied by circumplex representations and we discuss the limitations of traditional statistical methods for testing these assumptions. A relatively nontechnical overview of a new covariance structure modeling approach to testing circumplex structure is provided. The use of this approach is illustrated with two published data sets. The advantages and disadvantages of this approach relative to more traditional statistical approaches are discussed. The conclusion is that the covariance structure modeling approach has significant advantages in that it provides a closer conceptual match to the theoretical assumptions of circumplex representations, supplies information more directly relevant to circumplex representations and permits more precise and flexible testing of hypotheses derived from circumplex representations.

Attitudes in the social context: the impact of social network composition on individual-level attitude strength

Four studies, using both experimental and correlational designs, explored the implications of being embedded within attitudinally congruent versus attitudinally heterogeneous social networks for individual-level attitude strength. Individuals embedded within congruent social networks (i.e., made up of others with similar views) were more resistant to attitude change than were individuals embedded within heterogeneous social networks (i.e., made up of others with a range of views). Mediational evidence suggests that attitudinally congruous social networks may increase attitude strength by decreasing attitudinal ambivalence and perhaps by increasing the certainty with which people hold their attitudes. These results suggest that features of the social context in which an attitude is held have important implications for individual-level attitude strength.

How Surveillance Begets Perceptions of Dishonesty: The Case of the Counterfactual Sinner

Three studies support the hypothesis that observers' impressions of actors reflect not only what actors do but also what they can easily be imagined doing. Participants in Studies 1 and 2 observed a 10-year-old boy take a math test in a context in which the incentive to cheat and the constraints against cheating varied. When the incentive to cheat was high but the likelihood of getting caught was also high, observers perceived a target who resisted the temptation to cheat as less honest than the average boy. This effect was not found when the incentive to cheat was low, which suggests that its occurrence under high temptation resulted from observers in that condition generating the counterfactual thought that the target would have cheated had the likelihood of detection been low. Study 3 further supported the link between spontaneous counterfactual thought and inferences of dishonesty. The implications of the counterfactual correspondence bias are discussed.

Attitude Importance and the Accumulation of Attitude-Relevant Knowledge in Memory

People who attach personal importance to an attitude are especially knowledgeable about the attitude object. This article tests an explanation for this relation: that importance causes the accumulation of knowledge by inspiring selective exposure to and selective elaboration of relevant information. Nine studies showed that (a) after watching televised debates between presidential candidates, viewers were better able to remember the statements made on policy issues on which they had more personally important attitudes; (b) importance motivated selective exposure and selective elaboration: Greater personal importance was associated with better memory for relevant information encountered under controlled laboratory conditions, and manipulations eliminating opportunities for selective exposure and selective elaboration eliminated the importance-memory accuracy relation; and (c) people do not use perceptions of their knowledge volume to infer how important an attitude is to them, but importance does cause knowledge accumulation.

Reexamining the circumplex model of affect

The circumplex model of affect has been among the most widely studied representations of affect. Despite the considerable evidence cited in support of it, methods typically used to evaluate the model have substantial limitations. In this article, the authors attempt to correct past limitations by using a covariance structure model specifically designed to assess circumplex structure. This model was fit to 47 individual correlation matrices from published data sets. Analyses revealed that model fit was typically acceptable and that opposing affective states usually demonstrated strong negative correlations with one another. However, analyses also indicated substantial variability in both model fit and correlations among opposing affective states and suggested several characteristics of studies that partially accounted for this variability. Detailed examination of the locations of affective states for 10 of the correlation matrices with relatively optimal characteristics provided mixed support for the model.

Reexamining the circumplex model of affect

The circumplex model of affect has been among the most widely studied representations of affect. Despite the considerable evidence cited in support of it, methods typically used to evaluate the model have substantial limitations. In this article, the authors attempt to correct past limitations by using a covariance structure model specifically designed to assess circumplex structure. This model was fit to 47 individual correlation matrices from published data sets. Analyses revealed that model fit was typically acceptable and that opposing affective states usually demonstrated strong negative correlations with one another. However, analyses also indicated substantial variability in both model fit and correlations among opposing affective states and suggested several characteristics of studies that partially accounted for this variability. Detailed examination of the locations of affective states for 10 of the correlation matrices with relatively optimal characteristics provided mixed support for the model.

Thinking about Russia: plausible pasts and probable futures

This paper uses both correlational and experimental methods to explore the power of counterfactual cognitions about the past to constrain judgments about the future as well as policy preferences. Study 1 asked 47 specialists on the Soviet Union to assess both the plausibility of controversial counterfactuals and the probability of controversial conditional forecasts. The results reveal deep ideological schisms, with liberals much more likely than conservatives to believe that Stalinism was not inevitable, that the Cold War could have ended earlier, and that Gorbachev might have succeeded in democratizing the Soviet Union if he had been a better tactician, among others. Reactions to these counterfactuals proved to be highly predictive of positions that experts in early 1992 endorsed concerning the advisability of 'shock therapy', expanding NATO eastward, and economic aid to Russia. Study 2 manipulated the salience and plausibility of counterfactual scenarios concerning (a) why the Cold War ended as it did, and (b) how close the US and USSR came to nuclear war. Changes in the counterfactual scenarios that non-experts endorsed produced significant changes in their policy preferences in the direction suggested by the salient counterfactual. Experts, however, were unswayed, often generating counter-arguments against dissonant counterfactuals. Taken together, the studies show that assumptions about what happened in the missing control conditions of history are highly subjective, largely theory-driven and profoundly consequential.

Development of attitude strength over the life cycle: surge and decline

This article explores the relation of age to manifestations and antecedents of attitude strength. Three studies demonstrate that susceptibility to attitude change is greater during early and late adulthood than during middle adulthood. Three additional studies demonstrate that attitude importance, certainty, and perceived quantity of attitude-relevant knowledge are greater in middle adulthood than during early or late adulthood. These antecedents may therefore explain life cycle shifts in susceptibility to change. Susceptibility to change, importance, certainty, and perceived knowledge differ from one another in terms of their correlations with education, gender, and race, challenging the notion that attitude strength is a unitary construct. Evidence that people incorrectly believe that susceptibility to change declines steadily over the life course reinforces the distinction between operative and meta-attitudinal measures of attitude strength.

Development of attitude strength over the life cycle: surge and decline

This article explores the relation of age to manifestations and antecedents of attitude strength. Three studies demonstrate that susceptibility to attitude change is greater during early and late adulthood than during middle adulthood. Three additional studies demonstrate that attitude importance, certainty, and perceived quantity of attitude-relevant knowledge are greater in middle adulthood than during early or late adulthood. These antecedents may therefore explain life cycle shifts in susceptibility to change. Susceptibility to change, importance, certainty, and perceived knowledge differ from one another in terms of their correlations with education, gender, and race, challenging the notion that attitude strength is a unitary construct. Evidence that people incorrectly believe that susceptibility to change declines steadily over the life course reinforces the distinction between operative and meta-attitudinal measures of attitude strength.

Notes on the occurrence of tubercular spines in Schistosoma margrebowiei and Schistosoma mattheei

Scanning electron microscopical (SEM) studies on the tegument of the bovid schistosomes, Schistosoma margrebowiei and Schistosoma mattheei have yielded conflicting results; certain authors observed the tubercles on the tegument of these species to be spined, while others reported that they are spineless. The present study indicates that the protrusion of tubercular spines is subject to phenotypic plasticity regulated by external factors such as the identity of the host species and whether or not the schistosome is paired.

The tegument of Schistosoma hippopotami from Hippopotamus amphibius in the Kruger National Park

Schistosoma hippopotami were collected from the right heart chambers and pulmonary arteries of Hippopotamus amphibius culled in the Kruger National Park. The schistosomes were subjected to scanning electron microscopy as well as optical microscopy. The results indicate that S. hippopotami is not conspecific to S. mansoni as suggested in the literature. On account of the morphology of certain tegumental structures of both male and female parasites, it is suggested that S. hippopotami is adapted to the pulmonary arterial circulation of its host.

Phenotypic differences in Schistosoma mattheei ova from populations sympatric and allopatric to S. haematobium

Schistosoma mattheei ova were collected from cattle in different localities in South Africa and after hatching, miracidia were used to infest Bulinus (Physopsis) globosus. Cercariae harvested from these snails were used to infest the definitive host Praomys (Mastomys) coucha and eggs from the resulting female S. mattheei were collected. These ova were compared with a Schistosoma haematobium X S. mattheei hybrid similarly collected from an infested P. (M.) coucha. The results indicate that S. mattheei populations which are sympatric to S. haematobium possess S. haematobium characteristics. It is suggested that the gene pools of populations of the parasite in these areas are infiltrated with S. haematobium genes via the S. mattheei X S. haematobium hybrid originating from human hosts.

False-positive reactions in the serological diagnosis of schistosomiasis

Stool and urine samples from children living in an area in the Western Transvaal in which human schistosomiasis was not endemic were examined for parasites and the indirect fluorescent antibody test was performed on their sera. Since none of these children passed any schistosome ova in their excreta but approximately half of them had a positive serological reaction they must have been infected with either Schistosoma mattheei, which is common in snails and cattle in the area, or avian schistosomes. In view of the occurrence of such 'false-positive' results, general practitioners are advised not to rely too heavily on serological tests in the diagnosis of schistosomiasis.

Schistosoma mattheei Veglia & LE Roux, 1929, egg output from cattle in a highly endemic area in the eastern Transvaal

The results of 6-month estimations of S. mattheei faecal egg counts on 513 cattle in a highly endemic area of the eastern Transvaal over a 2-year period are given. After an initial high egg output of short duration the egg counts stabilized at a low level. The frequency of high egg counts in young cattle which died naturally was more than twice that of all other cattle, suggesting that S. mattheei egg counts in highly endemic areas is debatable, and it is suggested that egg counts in man might follow a similar pattern.

Schistosoma Weinland, 1858 from Hippopotamus amphibius Linnaeus, 1758 in the Kruger National Park

Adults of Schistosoma edwardiense Thurston, 1964, were recovered from Hippopotamus amphibius in the Kruger National Park. Small round to oval Schistosoma margrebowiei-like eggs, presumed to be those of S. edwardiense, were found fairly frequently in the faeces of infected hippopotami together with a few Schistosoma haematobium-like eggs the identity of which remains uncertain. Biomphalaria sp., exposed to the droppings of infected hippopotami, shed cercariae thought to be those of S. edwardiense. No evidence of schistosoma adults was found at necropsy in rodents exposed to these cercariae. The parasite appears to be host specific to the hippopotamus. Arguments, based on biological and anatomical characteristics are put forward regarding Schistosoma hippopotami Thurston, 1963 as synonymous with Schistosoma mansoni.

Excretion of Schistosoma mattheei eggs from man, baboons and cattle living in their normal environment

Egg excretion of S. mattheei was studied for about a year from man, baboons and cattle living in their normal environment. Although the excretory pattern was not unequivocal from man, there was a tendency of egg counts to decline with time: the baboons showed a seasonal pattern and the cattle a stable pattern throughout the year.