Conscious Judgments Research Articles

On agents and actions

Human social cognition relies to some degree on the ability to attribute actions to their proper agents and the ability to understand the meaning of actions when they are performed by others. Some of the symptoms of psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia have been suggested to result from an impaired awareness of one's own actions and to a disrupted ability to recognize the actions of others. It therefore follows that studying the performance of these patient groups may lead to a greater understanding of agency—the attribution of actions. Daprati et al., 1997 Daprati E. et al. Looking for the agent: an investigation into consciousness of action and self-consciousness in schizophrenic patients. Cognition. 1997; 65: 71-86 Crossref PubMed Scopus (396) Google Scholar studied the ability of schizophrenic subjects, with and without delusion of control, to perform simple finger and wrist movements in the absence of direct visual control of their hand. Using a sophisticated video and mirror arrangement, subjects were shown a real-time image of either their own gloved hand performing the movement, or an alien gloved hand performing either the same movement or a different movement. The subjects' task was to discriminate their own hand movement. The results indicated that the delusional and hallucinating schizophrenic subjects were less able to discriminate their own hand from alien hands when compared with non-hallucinating subjects. They also had a tendency to attribute mistakenly an alien hand as their own. These results are consistent with reports that hallucinating subjects are likely to incorporate external events into their perception of their own experience, and are discussed in the context of the cues that are used to produce conscious judgements regarding the origin of actions.

Comparing the Decision Structures of Public Relations Agencies and Clients

In this study, I use K. R. Hammond's version of social judgment theory (Hammond, Stewart, Brehmer, & Steinmann, 1975) to examine the conscious and covert judgment patterns of a group of public relations agency consultants and their clients. Respondents assessed 30 hypothetical public relations proposals that combined different mixtures of five decision factors: cost effectiveness, measurability, image support, marketing support, and feasibility. Analysis based on the lens model equation revealed that both groups emphasized bottom-line considerations over less quantifiable ones; that clients, more than agency professionals, understood how they valued the decision factors and acted on that knowledge; that the two groups' subjectively specified judgment weights showed closer agreement than their actual decisions about public relations plans; and that flawed self-understanding and inconsistent decision making, particularly among agency professionals, accounted for most disagreement in practice.

Assessments of the Emotional States of Others: Conscious Judgments Versus Emotional Contagion

Clinicians have identified two techniques for gaining information about clients' emotional states: (1) they can consciously try to assess clients'emotional states and/or (2) they can monitor their own emotional reactions during the therapeutic hour, hoping to «feel themselves into» their clients' emotions. Usually, clients'emotional self-reports are in synchrony with their facial, vocal, and postural expressions of emotion. But, what happens when they are not?

Spontaneous trait inferences as self-generated primes: Implications for conscious social judgment.

Spontaneous trait inferences as self-generated primes: Implications for conscious social judgment.

Spontaneous trait inferences as self-generated primes: implications for conscious social judgment.

The priming literature has documented the influence of trait terms held outside of conscious awareness on later judgment relevant to the primed trait dimension. The present research demonstrated that spontaneous trait inferences can serve as self-generated primes. In Experiment 1, Ss instructed to memorize trait-implying sentences (thus spontaneously inferring traits outside of consciousness) showed assimilation effects in judgment. Ss instructed to form inferences from these sentences (thus consciously inferring traits) showed contrast effects. Experiment 2 demonstrated that these findings were due to semantic activation rather than to a general evaluative response. When evaluatively inconsistent trait constructs were primed, similar patterns of assimilation and contrast were found. Implications for the ubiquitous occurrence of priming through the process of social categorization are discussed.

Eye movements and illusions of alignment.

Extraction of the location of a target in the visual periphery is a fundamental visual process which may be manifested both in conscious judgments of location, such as decisions about alignment, and in the processing required to execute an eye movement to a peripheral target. In both cases, location judgement is affected by the neighbouring visual configuration. An experiment is reported in which the amplitude of saccadic eye movements has been measured to study the effect of a configuration consisting of a single 'induction line'. The results demonstrate systematic effects of this line on the size of the saccade which are closely similar to those previously found in an alignment task.

Ascending spinal axons that signal the position of the hindlimbs under static conditions: location and receptor input.

Psychophysical experiments have shown that signals from slowly adapting subcutaneous receptors are used to sense limb position under static conditions (i.e., when the joints are stationary). The ascending collaterals of the slowly adapting primary sensory neurons supplying the deep tissues of the hindlimb do not project to the brain via the fasciculus gracilis. In experiments on cats, we have found a population of axons in the lateral fasciculus that signal the position of the ipsilateral hindlimb with a slowly adapting discharge. In the lower thoracic cord these fibers lie between the spinocervical tract and the ventral roots. Although plentiful in the lower thoracic cord, they are sparse or absent below L3. In addition, a few position signaling axons with crossed input were found in the ventral part of the lateral white matter and in the ventral columns. Since the clinical evidence suggests that the spinal pathway for position sense is uncrossed, we propose that information used for conscious judgments of limb position when the joints are stationary initially ascends via the dorsal columns and then relays to the lateral fasciculus on the same side. These slowly adapting signals also may be used to judge limb position when the joints are moving. To determine whether this slowly adapting discharge originates from muscle or joint receptors, the tendons crossing the ankle joint were exposed but left in continuity and then pulled on while the joint was stationary. In this way individual lateral fascicular axons that signaled ankle flexion, extension, abduction or adduction could be shown to receive a strong excitatory input from muscle receptors. After the muscle tendons crossing the ankle joint were cut, tract fibers signaling ankle flexion, extension, abduction or adduction could no longer be found in this portion of the spinal white matter. Axons signaling clockwise or counterclockwise twist of the ankle were reduced in number but a few were still present. These results suggest that muscle receptors provide the predominant signal used to sense ankle flexion, extension, abduction and adduction and that receptors in articular tissues may signal ankle twist.

Automatic information processing and social perception: The influence of trait information presented outside of conscious awareness on impression formation.

The accessibility of a category in memory has been shown to influence the selection and interpretation of social information. The present experiment examined the possibility that information relevant to a trait category (hostility) presented outside of conscious awareness can temporarily increase that category's accessibility. Subjects initially performed a vigilance task in which they were exposed unknowingly to single words. Either 0%, 20%, or 80% of these words were semantically related to hostility. In an ostensibly unrelated second task, subjects read a behavioral description of a stimulus person that was ambiguous regarding hostility, and then rated the stimulus person on several trait dimensions. The amount of processing subjects gave to the hostile information and the negativity of their ratings of the stimulus person both were reliably and positively related to the proportion of hostile words to which they were exposed. Several control conditions confirmed that the words were not consciously perceived. It was concluded that social stimuli of which people are not consciously aware can influence conscious judgments.

Developmental Distinctions between Behavior and Judgment in the Operation of the Discounting Principle

WELLS, DIANE, and SHULTZ, THOMAS R. Developmental Distinctions between Behavior and Judgment in the Operation of the Discounting Principle, CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 1307-1310. An experiment was conducted to examine reasons for discrepancies in the previous literature regarding the emergence of the scheme for multiple sufficient causes. Children between 4.3 and 5.4 years of age were asked to predict their own behavior and that of another child in both a real and a hypothetical situation where the agent was rewarded or not for choosing a particular toy to play with. The children's judgments did not reveal any preference for either the rewarded or unrewarded toy in any of the four conditions. However, in their own actual behavior, children showed a clear discounting effect (i.e., they played more with the unrewarded than with the rewarded toy). Although there are alternative noncognitive explanations of the overjustification effect, the results were discussed as support for a cognitive hypothesis that the scheme appears in behavior before it can be used to make conscious judgments about behavior.

Instuition. IV. Primal images and primal judgment.

1. Schizophrenia, borderline conditions, and neuroses often involve highly cathected, pathogenic images of a special type, which are archaic relics from infancy and childhood and have not undergone the normal processes of modification and resolution. Some (or all) normal people also have a store of such primal images based on infantile experiences, but in this case they have been decathected, mastered, and effectively assimilated. 2. These images, whether conscious or unconscious, are sometimes (or always) activated in interpersonal relationships and are related to the formation of basic judgments concerning people encountered. In normal adults, under ordinary conditions, such primal judgments do not come directly into awareness; conscious judgments of other people are derivatives of primal judgments, modified by cultural and other influences. 3. Some forms of intuition are derivatives of primal judgments based on primal images. Such intuitions are thus derived from infantile experiences. Other forms may be based on later clinical experience. 4. The possible diagnostic value to the clinician of his own primal judgments is discussed.

Is Capitalism Baptised?

Until recently the majority of Catholics would have instinctively felt that the Church was on the whole opposed to capitalism. They would not have made a conscious judgment about such a thing because the majority of Catholics was hard at work trying to keep the obvious day-today demands of the Christian law in the face of a mounting antagonism from the non-Christian environment. But they would have instinctively recoiled from associating the direct moral teaching of the Church with an approval of the possession and accruing of wealth without labour and without responsibilities. They knew their Gospels too well for that, and they had often heard the Franciscan message declaring the blessings on the poor in spirit.Non-Catholics on the other hand would as naturally have tended to associate the Catholic Church with capitalism in view of the apparent association between her ecclesiastical organisation and what had come to be regarded as traditional business methods. They had seldom heard of the social encyclicals that came from Rome and they had never read them. They thought they recognised the Church as most securely established in those countries where the peasants and artisans were most exploited for the benefit of the rich few. Today, with war between the Church and Communism at its height, there can be only a handful of non-Catholics who do not regard that conflict as implying an identification of the Church with capitalism or who, on the other hand, have read such books as Fanfani’s Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism which concludes an intelligent analysis of the question with the judgment that ‘Catholics, so long as they held closely to the social teachings of the Church, could never act in favour of capitalism’.

The Problem of Host Relations with special reference to Entomophagous Parasites

The Problem of Host Relations with special reference to Entomophagous Parasites