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The effects of gender, age, marital satisfaction, and physical impairment on patterns of giving and receiving social support and social undermining (e.g., personal criticism) were examined in two samples totaling 431 older married couples. In the first sample, data were collected from husbands and their wives, half of whom were long-term breast cancer (BC) survivors and half who constituted an a symptomatic, matched control group. The second sample included data from husbands and their wives who had recently been diagnosed to have breast cancer. Wives reported giving more social support to their husbands than they felt they received from them; and they reported giving more support than their husbands reported giving to them. Similarly, husbands reported receiving more social support from their wives than their wives reported receiving from them, except for the group of recently diagnosed BC. Advanced age was correlated with husbands' reports of receiving more social support, and in the two breast cancer groups, of also giving more social support and engaging in less social undermining. It was also found that among the women in the a symptomatic control group, those who were more physically impaired reported both giving and receiving less social support, and this was corroborated by husbands' reports. In contrast, there were no associations between wives' degree of impairment and social support in the two breast cancer groups. The differential effects were hypothesized to result from the husbands' causally attributing their wives' impairment and difficulties to internal characterological factors versus to external ones beyond their control (i.e., the BC disease).

We asked in an open-ended way in 1999???2000 what national and world events Israeli Jews consider most important from the past 60 years. Ten events were identified as foremost, including three from the time of independence and one that was quite recent. All the major memories are associated with efforts of the state through commemorations and in other ways to create a unitary collective memory. Five social background variables help account for which events are mentioned as most important: birth cohort, education, gender, ethnic origin, and religiosity. Other specific factors such as personal Holocaust experience and voting preferences are also considered.

One class of theories explains group induced shifts in individual choice in terms of interpersonal comparison process. By comparing himself with others a member finds out that his position is uncomfortably discrepant, e.g., he is overly cautious or overly risky. Knowledge of this discrepancy presumably is necessary and sufficient to induce him to change his initial choice. Another class of theories holds that merely knowing one is different from others is unimportant. Shifts in choice occur because during discussion a member is exposed to persuasive arguments which prior to discussion were not available to him. Two experiments were conducted, the results of which give considerable support to persuasive-argument theories and none to those based on interpersonal comparison: When a member did not know whether others were arguing for their own position or were forced to support a position contrary to the one they had originally chosen, and the former in fact was the case, typical shifts in choice were obtained. However, if a member had to argue for a position contrary to the one he had initially chosen (and thus he would not be able to muster highly persuasive arguments) typical shifts did not occur, even though another's initial choice could be accurately inferred.

One class of theories explains group induced shifts in individual choice in terms of interpersonal comparison process. By comparing himself with others a member finds out that his position is uncomfortably discrepant, e.g., he is overly "cautious" or overly "risky". Knowledge of this discrepancy presumably is necessary and sufficient to induce him to change his initial choice. Another class of theories holds that merely knowing one is different from others is unimportant. Shifts in choice occur because during discussion a member is exposed to persuasive arguments which prior to discussion were not available to him. Thus, if in a factorial design one independently varied (a) the number of others' choices available for comparison and (b) the number of arguments others presented in support of these choices, interpersonal comparison theories would predict the magnitude of the shift to be a function of (a) and not of (b), while theories of persuasive argumentation would predict the opposite. When such an experiment was performed the only reliable main effects were based on the number of arguments, (b), as predicted by persuasive arguments. In no instance did effects involving (a) approach significance.

Small shifts in choice occur even without discussion, when individuals merely know each other's preference. This appears to support an interpersonal comparison explanation of group induced shifts in choice and to refute explanations based on persuasive argumentation. The present study demonstrates the contrary, that such effects are consistent with the persuasive-arguments formulation and are obtained under particular conditions specified only by the latter theory, to wit: Knowledge of other's choices is assumed to lead a person to think of reasons (arguments) others might have had for their choices-reasons which ordinarily would not come to mind without this knowledge. Such reasoning functions in the same way as persuasive argumentation during group discussion; it causes the person to persuade himself that an alternative course of action now has greater merit than the one he initially preferred. To test this analysis, an experiment was performed in which subjects responded to choice-dilemma items under three different conditions: Following their own choice (I) they learned what several others had chosen and then wrote arguments in support of alternatives given in that same item; (II) they learned what several others had chosen and then wrote arguments in support of alternatives given in a different item; and (III) they received no information about others' choices but merely wrote arguments on that item. As predicted, shifts in choice occurred only if the person knew what others chose and had an opportunity to think about the latter (condition I); they did not occur if an opportunity to think of others' choices was denied (condition II), nor if knowledge of others' choices was withheld (condition III). Content analysis of the arguments subjects produced in conditions I and II completely supported the hypothesis, as did analyses of responses to postexperimental questionnaire which directly asked the subjects about their feelings and thoughts upon learning what other