No abstract

This study investigated the effects of social comparisons of outcomes and procedures on fairness judgments. Participants performed 1 of 2 tasks with which they could earn a bonus. Three variables were manipulated: participant's control over task choice (present vs. absent), comparison other's control over task choice (present vs. absent), and comparison other's outcome (high vs. low). All participants were informed that they themselves earned a low outcome. The dependent variable was participants' judgments of the fairness of the way in which the experiment was conducted. Two 2-way interactions were predicted and found, one involving the participant's control and the comparison other's outcome and the other involving the participant's control and the comparison other's control.

No abstract

We discuss three observations about the state of the field of behavior priming. The first is that there are many more empirical demonstrations of behavior priming than may be apparant at first sight. The second is that some people doubt the validity of behavior priming effects because they are "counterintuitive," and we argue that this reasoning is subjective, often circular, and sometimes based on an underappreciation of relevant theories. The third is that we concede that-just as in many other areas-publication bias and the use of researchers' degrees of freedom have presumably led to a somewhat distorted literature because they caused what we call "information leakage." Because of some of the habits in response to publication bias, our field knows much less about moderators and boundary conditions than we could have known. We conclude that although replication efforts can be very useful, the only true solution to further improve our field is to stop practices, such as the liberal use of researchers' degrees of freedom, that scientists have adopted in response to the pressure to publish only statistically significant results.

This study examines the individuation versus categorization of men and women. Several researchers have argued for structural status differences between men and women - men occupy societal positions of high status, and women positions of low status. This line of research predicts that male participants will individuate other men, but categorize women. Conversely, female participants will individuate men as well as women. In the present study, male and female participants were presented with eight stimulus persons, four men and four women, each described by four attributes. In addition, stimulus-category fit was manipulated such that the attributes were either stereotypical of the gender group they described or gender neutral. Information clustering in free recall and name-matching were main dependent measures. The results support the hypotheses and are discussed in terms of status differentials and contemporary theories of person perception.