Two experiments examined the relationships between the knowledge that another person has won in a gamble, the illusion of control and risk taking. Participants played a computer-simulated French roulette game individually. Before playing, some participants learnt that another person won a large amount of money. Results from a first experiment (n = 24) validated a causal model where the knowledge of another person's win increased the illusion of control, measured with betting times, expectancy and self-reports on scales, which in turn encourages risk taking. In the second experiment (n = 36), some participants were told the previous player acknowledged the win to be fortuitous. The suppression of the belief that the previous winner had himself exerted control over the outcome resulted in lower rates of risk-taking behaviors. This suggests that it was not the knowledge of another person's win in itself that increased risk taking, but rather, the belief that the other person had some control over the gamble's outcome. Theoretical implications for the study of social mechanisms involved in gambling behavior are discussed.

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Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, 2004, 36:4, 310-320 RésuméLa présente étude se propose de tester l'effet de l'annonce du résultat d'autrui sur la prise de risque et la perception d'adresse des participants dans un jeu de roulette française. Il était supposé que l'annonce de ce résultat constituerait un point de référence dans le codage des différentes options de pari. Les résultats montrent que l'annonce du résultat d'autrui induit une accentuation de la prise de risque : plus le montant annoncé est important, plus les joueurs choisissent des paris risqués. Les résultats concernant la perception d'adresse ont révélé que les participants confrontés à la perte d'autrui sont ceux qui estiment que l'adresse intervient le plus dans un jeu de roulette. La discussion porte sur le fait que le gain d'autrui pourrait servir de niveau d'aspiration. Ainsi, les gens auraient, lors de la pratique des jeux de hasard et d'argent, un objectif intermédiaire, le prestige, conditionnellement préférable aux valeurs attendues constantes.

The question of how political ideology influences the perception of others is central for an understanding of relations between political groups. To characterize how political positions shape social perception, 106 students were selected according to political affinity and asked to describe political groups using either psychological or sociological qualifiers. Right-wing subjects were more likely to use psychological terms to describe political groups, whereas left-wing ones preferred sociological descriptors. Students with a right-wing position reported greatest satisfaction with psychological descriptors, while those with a left-wing position were more concerned with the relevance of qualifiers for constructing an`objective' perception of reality. These observations confirm the existence of differing inclinations in the perception of social facts and social groups. Such perceptive/cognitive processes, linked to ideological patterns, seem to be inseparable from the contents to which they apply, and express the social positioning and the ideological orientations of their authors.

Why and under what conditions do subjects from diverse political orientations tend to offer different explanations of a social problem? Past studies have found evidence of a connection between political orientations and explanations of delinquency, for example. However, observing such differences among subjects with diverse political orientations is not enough to prove the existence of an organic link between social differentiation and the representations of delinquency. The aim of this paper is to provide an experimental proof of such a link. The results show that: (a) right-wing and left-wing subjects tend to offer different types of explanations of delinquency, but they refer to several common organizing principles; (b) divergence increases when social comparison between groups is activated; (c) differences are bigger if this comparison induces a discrimination; (d) the bigger the differences the more likely are the groups to resort to their ideological principles. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical, methodological, deontological, and practical implications. How and to what extent do subjects from different social categories differ when accounting for a social problem? This paper intends to clarify this question through an experiment about the effect of social differentiation-here between Right-wing ("R") and Left-wing ("L") political orientations-on the perception of and attitudes towards delinquency.Various scientific disciplines (criminology, psychology, sociology, etc.) have generated a great deal of research into the origins and causes of delinquency (e.g.,