The bogus pipeline (BPL), a procedure intended to improve the truthfulness of self-reports, was examined in terms of the validity of its effects, its optimal procedural format, and its appropriate domain of use. Social psychological research that has used the BPL is reviewed and meta-analyzed. Thirty-one studies were coded for effect size and relevant procedural characteristics. A significant mean BPL versus control condition effect was evident across these studies, indicating that the BPL engendered reliable effects consistent with a reduction in socially desirable responding. The BPL produced larger effects when task instructions required Ss to guess the BPLs output. These findings, coupled with previous indirect validation, provide reasonable documentation that the BPL shifts self-reports toward veracity. Past criticisms of the BPL are considered, and recommendations for its future use are made.For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.-Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In MemoriamPsychologists have long attempted to measure accurately individuals' attitudes and opinions. Ultimately, a direct pipeline to the soul has been desired, a method that somehow pierces through strategic facades and bypasses the concealing words of which Tennyson wrote. Such a direct pipeline is clearly not possible, but in their pioneering 1971 article, Edward Jones and Harold Sigall described a "bogus" pipeline (BPL) to the soul, a procedure ostensibly providing a far closer approximation of the contents of souls than was previously possible with traditional paper-and-pencil (PP) questionnaires. By convincing subjects that a physiological measurement apparatus was capable of recording their genuine attitudes and opinions, the BPL was thought to invoke a motivation in subjects to offer more veracious self-reports.

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Adopting a power-conflict perspective on change, this study examines some parameters of power and conflict in the classroom. Questionnaire data were collected from high school, undergraduate, and graduate students on their teachers' bases of power and their own methods of handling conflict with teachers. Results highlight the imbalance of power between students and teachers and the prevalent use of coercion by teachers at the high school and undergraduate levels. This uise of coercive power is shown to be negatively related to student satisfaction, learning, and the extent to which teacher influence transcends the classroom. Despite considerable dissatisfaction, students at all levels report relative passivity in attempting to change what occurs in the classroom.

The paradigmatic research of Byrne (1971) on the similarity-attraction relation has been recently challenged by the view that it is the similarity of people's pastime preferences more than the similarity of their attitudes that may better predict both friendship and initial attraction (Werner & Parmelee, 1979). An integration of these two views is proposed in the hypothesis that the personality variable of self-monitoring (Snyder, 1974) may moderate both the attitude similarity-attraction relation and the activity preference similarity-attraction relation in initial interpersonal attraction. An experiment is reported in which low and high self-monitors formed impressions of four same-gender persons representing each of the crossed combinations of high and low value-based attitude similarity, and high and low activity preference similarity. These stimulus persons were presented by a microcomputer that created them idiographically on the basis of each subject's responses to previous attitude and activity surveys. As predicted, for low self-monitors, attitude similarity influenced initial attraction to the stimulus persons more than did activity preference similarity, and this was expressed most strongly on attraction ratings relevant to the attitude domain (i.e., judgments of respect and inferences of intellectually desirable personality traits). By contrast, for high self-monitors, activity preference similarity influenced initial attraction more than did attitude similarity, and this was expressed most strongly on attraction ratings relevant to the activity preference domain (i.e., judgments of liking and inferences of socially desirable personality traits). Speculations are offered about the tendency for low and high self-monitoring individuals to attend to different types of information when first forming their impressions of others. This tendency in the first stages of acquaintanceship may reflect the very kinds of interaction goals these individuals also later manifest when creating and maintaining their preferred friendship worlds.Research in the area of impression formation has yielded consistent evidence that similarity between people in terms of their attitudes and values is a strong predictor of initial interpersonal attraction. For example, Donn Byrne and his associates have repeatedly shown that liking for another varies as a generally linear function of manipulated attitude similarity (Byrne & Griffit, 1973). To demonstrate the attitude similarity-attraction relation, these workers used the attraction paradigm (Byrne, 1971), a procedure in which information is given to subjects about a person they are presumably about to meet for the first time. Known by its detractors as the "stranger paradigm," this method has left open the question of whether attitude similarity is a variable of any real importance in actual ongoing relationships. Accordingly, a number of studies have been conducted to explore the determinants of real world liking and friendship choice (e.g.

The transition from acquaintanceship (nonunit) to friendship (unit) was conceptualized in terms of a preunit relationship. The authors theorized that in transitional relationships, discrete interactions are imbued with surplus meaning. Using a mental simulation procedure in 3 studies, participants randomly assigned to focus their attention on an exemplar from their social worlds representing unit, preunit, or nonunit same-sex relationships responded to social exchange scenarios. Preunits intended to act like a friend and not an acquaintance, yet they experienced more discomfort following a communal script than those in a unit relation. Content analyses of open-ended responses revealed that preunits were more likely than units or nonunits to see a nice gesture by the other person as having some social meaning. Failure to reciprocate a favor by either party was deemed more important to preunit than unit or nonunit relations. In Study 4, in which actual interaction records were used, the quality of individual discrete interactions was more highly correlated with momentary, on-line perceptions of relationship closeness for preunit interactions than unit or nonunit interactions.