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Research in the field of behavioral ethics has traditionally viewed ethical decision making as rational and deliberate. However, some recent research has proposed a dual process model of ethical decision making that has both conscious and subconscious components (Reynolds, 2006). We extend current theory by using subconscious ethical and unethical priming to test the effects of subconscious processes on ethical behavior through an automatic process of schema activation and implicit association. Studies 1 and 2 extend self-concept maintenance theory (Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008) by exploring the mediated process through which subconscious ethical and unethical primes trigger the activation of moral standards, thereby influencing categorization and subsequent responses to morally ambiguous situations. Study 3 demonstrates that both subconscious ethical and unethical priming reduce dishonesty even when participants are unmonitored and are given difficult performance goals that previously have been shown to lead to unethical behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By use of path analysis on data from 600 shoppers, the authors explore the sequential relationships among several variables pertinent to retail crowding. Results furnish evidence that perceived crowding systematically affects shopping behavior and consumers' feelings about retail outlets and shopping trips. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that disputants differ substantially in how they experience, or cognitively "frame," conflict--even the same conflict. We explored the influence of cognitive frames on negotiation processes and outcomes. Results suggest that such frames significantly influence the processes and outcomes of conflict along three specific dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author examines the effectiveness of role playing exercises in research, social work, counseling and other disciplines. The author notes that role playing exercises are defined as a dynamic process that involves participants assuming specified roles and acting out significant events. He discusses some pervious studies on role playing that found that participants expressed greater confidence in their opinions, that attitudes could be changed and that creativity could be bolstered by role playing.

Introduction: The objective of this study was to investigate the knowledge, attitudes and behavior regarding antibiotics of the general population. Methods: The study sample consisted of adult subjects who consulted general practitioners at health centers in Serbia and agreed to complete the questionnaire. A total of 668 questionnaires were distributed; 500 respondents completed the entire questionnaire (response rate 74.85%). Results: The average age was 51.65 ± 16.56 years, 60.80% of the respondents were women. The median antibiotic knowledge score was 9. Predictors of adequate antibiotic knowledge were higher education level and a family member whose ocuppation was related to health-care. Overall, 58.4% of respondents believed that antibiotics could be used to treat common cold. Around a half of the respondents (47.2%) self-medicated with antibiotics at least once during their life-time, and around a quarter (24.2%) during the last treatment of infection. Patients with inadequate knowledge had 3 times higher chances of self-medicating with antibiotics compared to those with adequate knowledge. Although 98.20% of respondents claimed that antibiotic treatment should be started after a visit to a doctor and receiving a prescription, only 65.8% obtained antibiotics with prescription from a doctor during the last infection. Conclusions: Although these results demonstrate that respondents had a relatively adequate level of knowledge regarding antibiotics use, some areas of misconceptions and improper behavior were identified. Therefore, further rationalization should be focused on educational campaigns targeting the behavior of patients with regard to antibiotic use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pro-environmental behavioural spillover – when performing one pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) increases the likelihood of performing another – has been identified as a possible way to increase the amount of environmentally friendly behaviours that individuals perform. The current research investigated this spillover process, the role of chronic environmental motivations, goal priming and behavioural similarity. Three studies (two conducted with students and one conducted with the general Australian public) provided evidence to suggest that positive spillover occurs between PEBs that are similar in terms of the resources required to perform them, but not between PEBs that are resource-dissimilar. There was no evidence to suggest that negative spillover (the instance where performing one PEB lessens the likelihood of subsequently performing another) occurred. Chronic environmental striving seems to independently influence the performance of PEBs, especially spending time to be more environmentally friendly. The role of priming goals in the spillover process remains unclear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the social dynamics of crime by means of evolutionary game theory, and we model the choice of boundedly rational potential victims to privately self-protect against prospective offenders. Negative externalities from self-protection, as the socially transmitted fear of victimization, can influence the strategic choices of victims even with constant or declining crime rates, and this circumstance may lead to Pareto inefficient equilibria with excessive expenses for private protection. Providing higher levels of public security (or of appropriate social care) financed through discriminatory taxation of private defensive behaviors can prevent crime and reduce superfluous self-protection, thus driving the social dynamics toward a more efficient equilibrium. Public policy can therefore be effective in implementing the social optimum. This article extends previous work by Cressman, Morrison, and Wen by increasing the range of possible dynamics and the scope for public intervention. Consequently, in our model, public policy can deter crime and improve the welfare of victims by addressing the intangible aspects of crime, that is, the social dynamics of fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little work has examined whether implicit evaluations can be effectively "undone" after learning new revelations. Across 7 experiments, participants fully reversed their implicit evaluation of a novel target person after reinterpreting earlier information. Revision occurred across multiple implicit evaluation measures (Experiments la and lb), and only when the new information prompted a reinterpretation of prior learning versus did not (Experiment 2). The updating required active consideration of the information, as it emerged only with at least moderate cognitive resources (Experiment 3). Self-reported reinterpretation predicted (Experiment 4) and mediated (Experiment 5) revised implicit evaluations beyond the separate influence of how thoughtfully participants considered the new information in general. Finally, the revised evaluations were durable 3 days later (Experiment 6). We discuss how these results inform existing theoretical models, and consider implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commentary to: The case for investigating social context in laboratory studies of smoking [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examined the coordination of interrogator and suspects' verbal behavior in interrogations. Sixty-four police interrogations were examined at the aggregate and utterance level using a measure of verbal mimicry known as Language Style Matching. Analyses revealed an interaction between confession and the direction of language matching. Interrogations containing a confession were characterized by higher rates of the suspect matching the interrogators' language style than interrogations without a confession. A sequence analysis of utterance-level Language Style Matching revealed a divergence in the type of matching that occurred across outcome. There was a linear increase in interrogator-led matching for interrogations containing a confession and an increase in suspect-led matching for nonconfession interrogations. These findings suggest that police interrogations play out, in part, at the basic level of language coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By integrating insights from economic and sociological theories, this article investigates whether and through which mechanisms friends’ fertility behavior affects an individual’s transition to parenthood. By exploiting the survey design of the Add Health data, our strategy allows us to properly identify interaction effects and distinguish them from selection and contextual effects. We use a series of discrete-time event history models with random effects at the dyadic level. Results show that, net of confounding effects, a friend’s childbearing increases an individual’s risk of becoming a parent. We find a short-term, curvilinear effect: an individual’s risk of childbearing starts increasing after a friend’s childbearing, reaches its peak approximately two years later, and then decreases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author reflects on the evolution of the human brain and the impact of history to the human senses in making moral decisions. The author is critical on the Gestalt principles of awareness in the exploration of association between evolutionary biology, cultural psychology and Gestalt theory. Also investigated is the potential threat or benefit of the brains and its use in the behavior adjustment.

A consensus has been forming among structural social psychologists that most Americans hold beliefs in both individualistic and structural explanations of inequality. Yet, even many who espouse structural beliefs nonetheless emphasize individual-level explanations of inequality to disproportionate extents. This study is aimed to identify common trends in the logic used by a conventional group of Americans – MBA students – to rationalize their more general political and economic beliefs. While a large number of studies have emphasized the prevalence of dominant ideology beliefs, and others have speculated theoretically on how such beliefs are reproduced, this study aims to bring these bodies of work together. I sought to build an initial understanding of how contradictions in Americans' political and economic ideologies are transmuted, and to identify heuristic concepts fundamental to this process. Findings suggest that particular assumptions about human nature serve to "fill" the cognitive "gap" which would otherwise present individuals with insurmountable ambiguities in their ideologies about economic justice. Respondents also reflected some level of awareness of the impact of ideology on their thought processes, even as they accept such processes, and the realities they constitute, as inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oxytocin (OT) is a neuropeptide that is attracting growing attention from researchers interested in human emotional and social behavior. There is indeed increasing evidence that OT has a calming effect and that it facilitates pair-bonding and social interactions. Some of OT's effects are thought to be direct, but it has been suggested that OT also may have indirect effects, mediated by changes in behavior. One potentially relevant behavioral change is an increased propensity for “emotional sharing” as this behavior, like OT, is known to have both calming and bonding effects. In this study, 60 healthy young adult men were randomly assigned to receive either intranasal placebo (PL;n = 30) or oxytocin (OT;n = 30). Participants were then instructed to retrieve a painful memory. Subsequently, OT and placebo participants’ willingness to disclose to another person event-related facts (factual sharing) vs. event-related emotions (emotional sharing) was evaluated. Whereas the two groups were equally willing to disclose event-relatedfacts, oxytocin was found to specifically increase the willingness to share event-relatedemotions. This study provides the first evidence that OT increases people's willingness to share their emotions. Importantly, OT did not make people more talkative (word counts were comparable across the two groups) but instead increased the willingness to share the specific component that is responsible for the calming and bonding effects of social sharing: emotions. Findings suggest that OT may shape the form of social sharing so as to maximize its benefits. This might help explain the calming and bonding effects of OT. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the attitudes and emotions of American judges as of October 2012, focusing on the potential impact of judicial anger against attorneys, parties, and witnesses on the integrity of the U.S. legal system. Angry behavior by judges is addressed in relation to Chief Judge Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and judicial decisionmaking. Other topics include human emotion studies, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and modern psychology.

Peer predictions of future behavior and achievement are often more accurate than those furnished by the self. Although both self and peer predictions correlate equally with future Outcomes, peers tend to avoid the degree of overoptimism so often seen in self-predictions. In 3 studies, the authors tested whether this differential accuracy arises because people give more weight to past behavior when predicting others, but emphasize agentic information, in particular data about their aspiration level, when predicting the self. Studies I and 3 showed that the exact same participants rated past behavior more diagnostic of future performance when predicting another person but viewed aspiration-level data as more valuable when someone else was trying to predict them. In Studies 2 and 3 (predicting an upcoming exam score and performance in a lab task, respectively), participants gave greater weight in self-predictions to aspiration level data than did a yoked peer, who instead gave greater weight to evidence of past achievement. This differential weighting explained why peer predictions tended to be less optimistic and, thus, more accurate. Discussion centers on strategies for predicting future behavior and why people may remain ignorant of their own incompetence despite feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the ratio of males to females in a population is known to influence behavior in nonhuman animals, little is known about how sex ratio influences human behavior. We propose that sex ratio affects women's family planning and career choices. Using both historical data and experiments, we examined how sex ratio influences women's career aspirations. Findings showed that a scarcity of men led women to seek high-paying careers and to delay starting a family. This effect was driven by how sex ratio altered the mating market, not just the job market. Sex ratios involving a scarcity of men led women to seek lucrative careers because of the difficulty women have in finding an investing, long-term mate under such circumstances. Accordingly, this low-male sex ratio produced the strongest desire for lucrative careers in women who are least able to secure a mate. These findings demonstrate that sex ratio has far-reaching effects in humans, including whether women choose briefcase over baby. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sustainability is often discussed solely in ecological terms, it cannot be disconnected from the way humans behave in their social environment. This article presents a theoretical approach toward sustainability that takes a human behavior and knowledge view on sustainability as a starting point. This approach requires that human behavior should change, individually and collectively, in order to achieve sustainability. Knowledge is identified as the driving force behind human behavior and its effect on the ecological and social environment. In connecting knowledge with sustainability, two concepts are introduced: knowledge of sustainability (KoS), which refers to the sustainability content of knowledge, and sustainability of knowledge (SoK), which denotes the dynamics of the continuing process of knowledge creation and application. To apply SoK and KoS, we argue that a cognitive interpretation of human behavior should be formulated within a knowledge management approach that incorporates the stages of knowledge creation, integration, and application and that ensures the critical evaluation of created knowledge. In order to show that our new approach is practical, we use existing research from the Dutch starch potato industry to reformulate possibilities for the enhancement of sustainability in terms of KoS and SoK. In addition, the research led to the development of a mechanism for evaluating knowledge. Group interaction, information technology, and decision support systems are used to realize knowledge integration. The combination of conceptual design and domain of application is common in the engineering sciences, where a design methodology is used to make the steps from conceptual design to functional design and technical implementation. A conceptual design may show ways to improve existing practices, which in turn might result in superior practices. Of course, it is necessary to empirically test the interventions in reality. For AGROBIOKON that has not been done, yet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Executive functioning (EF) refers to the set of neurocognitive processes that facilitate novel problem solving, modification of behavior in response to environmental changes, planning and generating strategies for complex actions, and ability to override pre-potent behavioral and emotional responses to engage in goal-directed behavior. To provide an overview of research on individual differences in EF and examine the extent to which these individual differences confer risk and resilience for poor stress regulation. Review of the literature suggests that individual differences in EF are evident at multiple levels of analysis including genotype, endophenotype (e.g., performance on cognitive tasks), and phenotype (e.g., temperament and personality). These individual differences are associated with differential stress exposure, reactivity, recovery, and restorative processes. A theoretical framework that includes individual differences in EF will inform behavioral medicine research on stress risk and resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article pretends to show conflict as natural and proper of human nature. The author thinks the conflict is a manifestation of the limited adaptation ability the human brain has; thus, it needs to transform the environment and the others to survive. On the other hand, culture as a human creation settles rules not shared by all people. Then, the keys for a functional handling of conflicts can be found in the improvement of raising habits as a long-term solution, and in the transformation of education, oriented now to live in community, creativity and difference acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to assess behaviors, eating disorder (ED), related cognitions, and core beliefs in university students. The sample was composed of 449 psychology students (13.2% men and 86.8% women). The instruments included sociodemographic and eating related data, the MAC questionnaire (Mizes Anorectic Cognitions), the ICA scale (Inventory of Eating Behaviors) and the SQ questionnaire (Schema Questionnaire). Results from inventories showed important ED symtomathology in a 10% of the sample. Women showed more severe behaviors and specific ED cognitions compared to men. Those students who had previous ED treatment presented more ED-related behaviors and more severe cognitions compared to those who did not have such a treatment. A strong association between ED-related behaviors and specific cognitions was found in this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. Because US smoking rates have not declined during the past decade, there is a renewed need to identify factors associated with smoking cessation. Using a nested case — control design, we explored the association between ability to sustain cessation over an extended period and demographic, smoking, medical, and behavioral variables. Methods. We selected a sample of 1379 sustained quitters (abstinent from smoking for at least 40 months) and 1388 relapsers (abstinent for more than 8 months before relapse) from participants in the Alpha-Tocopherol Beta-Carotene Cancer Prevention Study, a nutritional intervention study involving Finnish men aged 50 to 69 years at baseline. Contingency table and multiple regression analyses were used to evaluate potential differences between the 2 groups on baseline variables. Results. Compared with sustained quitters, relapsers were more likely to report symptoms of emotional distress and higher levels of nicotine dependence, to drink more alcohol, and to report more medical conditions. Conclusions. Factors associated with both tobacco use and comorbid conditions impact an individual's ability to maintain long-term smoking cessation. Understanding the underlying mechanisms of action and potential common pathways among these factors may help to improve smoking cessation therapies. (Am J Public Health. 2008; 98:549-555. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2005.084137) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Equity theory proposes that individuals compare ratios of their own outcomes and inputs to the ratios of outcomes and inputs of others. According to this theory, if the ratios are unequal, individuals are motivated to take actions that will restore equity. Although equity theory has received considerable attention from organizational scholars, relatively few studies have investigated the cross-cultural applicability of the theory. In this conceptual paper, the value-orientation model of culture is used to identify the ways in which the cultural context may influence how employees conceptualize inputs and outcomes, their selection of referent others, their equity preferences, and their reactions to inequity. The paper also describes potential avenues for future investigations of equity theory in cross-cultural settings. Finally, some practical implications of this work are discussed as well. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]