Personality predicts obedience in a Milgram paradigm.

This study investigates how obedience in a Milgram-like experiment is predicted by interindividual differences. Participants were 35 males and 31 females aged 26-54 from the general population who were contacted by phone 8 months after their participation in a study transposing Milgram's obedience paradigm to the context of a fake television game show. Interviews were presented as opinion polls with no stated ties to the earlier experiment. Personality was assessed by the Big Five Mini-Markers questionnaire (Saucier, 1994). Political orientation and social activism were also measured. Results confirmed hypotheses that Conscientiousness and Agreeableness would be associated with willingness to administer higher-intensity electric shocks to a victim. Political orientation and social activism were also related to obedience. Our results provide empirical evidence suggesting that individual differences in personality and political variables matter in the explanation of obedience to authority.

Assigned experts with competitive goals withhold information in group decision making.

Expertise assignment has been proposed to improve unshared information pooling in group decision making. The current research revises this view by hypothesizing that expertise assignment is beneficial when group members have cooperative goals, but is detrimental when group members have competitive goals. Three-person groups were confronted with a hidden-profile task. Members were either assigned experts or not and were instructed to either cooperate or compete with other members. The results confirmed that expertise decreased unshared information pooling and repetitions in competition, while the reverse was found in cooperation. This interaction effect was mediated by self-other difference in perceived competence. Thus, expertise favours or hinders information sharing in group decision making as a function of members' cooperative or competitive goals.

Effect of priming cooperation or individualism on a collective and interdependent task: changeover speed in the 4 x 100-meter relay race.

Priming effects of cooperation vs. individualism were investigated on changeover speed within a 4 x 100-m relay race. Ten teams of four adult beginner athletes ran two relays, a pretest race and an experimental race 3 weeks later. Just before the experimental race, athletes were primed with either cooperation or individualism through a scrambled-sentence task. Comparing to the pretest performance, cooperation priming improved baton speed in the exchange zone (+30 cm/s). Individualism priming did not impair changeover performance. The boundary conditions of priming effects applied to collective and interdependent tasks are discussed within the implicit coordination framework.

Denial of responsibility: a new mode of dissonance reduction.

Denial of responsibility as a mode of dissonance reduction and the conditions under which it is likely to occur were explored in 3 experiments. Two experiments tested and supported the hypothesis that following a counterattitudinal behavior, participants prefer the mode of reduction made available to them first, regardless of whether it is attitude change, trivialization, or denial of responsibility. The 3rd experiment tested and supported the hypothesis that denial of responsibility reduces the negative affective state induced by dissonance. The mechanism of denial of responsibility in dissonance reduction is discussed.

Differential access to information and anticipated group interaction: impact on individual reasoning.

Two studies examined the impact of relative differences in access to information and anticipated group interaction on individual reasoning. On 2 different reasoning tasks (P. C. Wason's [1966] selection task and D. Kahneman & A. Tversky's [1973] lawyer-engineer problem), participants sensing that they knew more in anticipation of group interaction or knew less when not anticipating interaction were less susceptible to typical cognitive biases demonstrated by these tasks. Study 2 also showed that the effect of these social contexts was contingent on the task presentation format. Thus, knowing more in anticipation of group interaction and knowing less when not anticipating group interaction seemingly compensated for task features that enhance suboptimal reasoning strategies. These results illustrate the importance of the social context in which reasoning is situated and are discussed in terms of cognitive tuning, social comparison, and social motivations.