The present study examined the hypothesis that students would show performance impairment when they were exposed to teachers who were pressured to maximize student performance level and who used controlling strategies. For this purpose, 4th-grade teachers and their students participated in a field experiment in which teachers either were pressured to maximize student performance or were told simply to help their students learn. In addition, the teaching sessions were videotaped to assess teachers' use of controlling strategies, as rated by blind coders. Following the teaching sessions, student performance on tasks initially taught by teachers as well as on a generalization task was assessed by blind experimenters. As predicted, the data indicated that students evidenced performance impairment during the subsequent testing session only when they were exposed to pressured teachers using controlling strategies. The results are discussed within the context of self-determination theory.

No abstract

We predicted that being more religious in one way-as an intrinsic end in itself-is associated with displaying less racial prejudice when the prejudice is overt, but not when it is covert. We predicted that being more religious in another way-as an open-ended quest-is associated with displaying less racial prejudice even when the prejudice is covert. We tested these predictions by using an attributional ambiguity technique developed by Snyder, Kleck, Strenta, and Mentzer (1979). Forty-four white undergraduates interested in religion chose between sitting with a black person or sitting with a white person to watch a movie. In the overt prejudice condition, the same movie was being shown in both locations; in the covert prejudice condition, two different movies were being shown. Although not all predicted relations were statistically reliable, the pattern of correlations was consistent with both predictions. An intrinsic orientation to religion was significantly negatively correlated with choosing to sit with the white person in the overt condition, but this correlation was close to zero in the covert condition. Only the quest orientation to religion was significantly negatively correlated with choosing to sit with the white person in the covert condition.

Using a round-robin design in which every subject served both as judge and target, subjects made liking judgments, trait ratings, and physical attractiveness ratings of each other on each of 4 days. Although there was some agreement in the liking judgments, most of the variance was due to idiosyncratic preferences for different targets. Differences in evaluations were due to at least 2 factors: disagreements in how targets were perceived (is this person honest?) and disagreements in how to weight the trait attributes that predicted liking (is honesty more important than friendliness?) When evaluating the targets in specific roles (as a study partner), judgments showed much greater agreement, as did the weights of the trait attributes. A 2nd study confirmed the differential weighting of trait attributes when rating liking in general and the increased agreement when rating specific roles.

No abstract