Competitive Reward Research Articles

Effects of competitive reward structure and valence of outcome on children's achievement attributions.

Effects of competitive reward structure and valence of outcome on children's achievement attributions.

The importance of status congruency in interaction processes

AbstractThe literature on status congruency is summarized in two statements: 1) Individuals strive after status congruency, and 2) status congruency involves favorable state for individuals, groups and the society. The two reported experiments throw serious doubts on the generality of these statements.Experiment I is a variation of Burnstein and Zajonc's (1965) experiment. It is hypothesized and shown that the striving after congruency is weakened under condition of a competitive reward structure, the Ss giving incongruent self‐rankings. Moreover it is found that nominations for a different task are not congruent at all.Experiment II was designed to replicate and extend Exline and Ziller's (1959) experiment, in which it was shown that status congruency in small groups causes interpersonal conflict. On none of the several measures was clear support obtained.In the discussion it is argued that there is hardly any experimental evidence for the two statements formulated above. It is pointed out that the correlational relationships between status congruency and other variables may be attributed to some internal cognitive link in the person, serving as an intermediate variable, the forces of it perhaps being self‐interest (as supported by Experiment I), a need for clarity and a need for justice.

Effects of uncertainty reduction, material rewards, and variety on children's choice behavior

This experiment was designed to isolate the incentive properties of uncertainty reduction (information) from those of material reward value and variety in a binary, competitive reward situation. After pretraining, fourth-grade children chose between a prescaled high-reward object and a question mark stimulus which concealed one of two lower-valued objects on each of 40 trials. The concealed objects appeared equally often for half the Ss and with a 9:1 ratio for the rest, thus, reducing one or 47 bit of uncertainty, respectively, when chosen. Ss also served as their own controls. In the control condition, stimulus color cued the identity of the concealed object, reducing uncertainty before a choice was made. As predicted, significantly more question marks were chosen when such choice reduced uncertainty ( p < .001). Evidence for the influence of relative-reward value and object novelty was obtained. Uncertainty reduction appears to have incentive value independent of other factors.

Effects of Reward Structure and Cognitive Difference in a Mixed-Motive Two-Person Conflict Situation

A two-factor reward structure permitting variation of the degree to which one person may profit at the other's expense was employed to study conflict between persons working together on an uncertain judgment task. The results show that conflict varied as a complex function of reward factors, experience with the task, and discrepancy between the persons' initial views of the task. Judgmental accuracy was also affected. These findings suggest that by emphasizing unitary reward structures at the expense of important psychological factors, prior studies of mixed-motive conflicts have oversimplified a complex phenomenon. The literature on interpersonal conflict (IPC) is dominated by gaming formulations which treat competitive reward structures as the cause of conflict. In zero-sum games, a player can only profit at the expense of his opponent; in nonzero-sum games, the same condition obtains, but here both players can make an intermediate profit if neither tries for the maximum.1 An alternative approach to IPC treats discrepant meanings as the cause of conflict.2 And it has been shown that persons attributing different meanings to a given cue disagree even in the presence of a fully cooperative reward structure.3 Heretofore, however, mixed-motive conflicts have Received for publication March 27, 1969. This work was supported by NSF Grant GS-1912. Partial results were reported at the 1969 convention of the Southwestern Psychological Association. The authors thank Terry Applegate and Lodis Rhodes for their help in running the experiment. 1 M. Deutsch and R. Krauss, Studies of interpersonal bargaining, J. Confl. Resol., 6, 1962, 52-76; A. Rapoport and C. Orwant, Experimental games: A review, Behav. Sci., 7, 1962, 1-37. 2K. Hammond, New directions in research on conflict resolution, J. soc. Issues, 21, 1965, 44-66. 3 L. Rappoport, Interpersonal conflict in cooperative and uncertain situations, J. exp. soc. Psychol., 1, 1965, 323-333; K. Hammond, F. Todd, M. Wilkins, and T. Mitchell, Cognitive conflict between persons: Application of the lens paradigm, J. exp. soc. Psychol., 2, 1967, 343-360. 119 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.191 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 04:29:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 120 RAPPOPORT AND CVETKOVICH been studied only according to the model for nonzero-sum games. The present study investigated them according to a modified version of Hammond's cognitive-conflict paradigm.