Albert Pepitone

The selectivity of nonmaterial beliefs in interpreting life events

An experimental study addresses the propositions that nonmaterial beliefs, including supernatural powers and transcendental moral laws, function to enhance comprehension of life events, and perform this function selectively. Informal surveys of newspaper articles and two pilot experiments consistently indicated that the beliefs in fate, God, luck, chance, just reward, and just punishment are elicited to explain life events that are difficult to explain in material terms, and are more or less specialized in the life events they explain. In a final experiment, a sample of U.S. university students (N=103) was presented with 12 life event cases designed to match the belief specializations and asked to interpret freely. Analysis of the reliably coded spontaneous comments confirmed both predictions. In addition, subjects who personally held a given nonmaterial belief used it more selectively than those who did not. Finally, employing the same design and measures, a sample from North India replicated the major U.S. findings.

The role of justice in interdependent decision making

Abstract A motivational analysis of decision making in which payoffs are interdependent suggests that choices can be regarded as means of allocating rewards in accordance with certain ethical principles, which may not correspond to “rational” decision criteria of the sort proposed by statistical decision and game theorists—e.g., mazimizing expected utility. Specifically, individuals a and b appear to make maximizing choices with the frequency that is required to maintain or achieve justice in the distribution of rewards—a condition quantitatively defined as equality of the ratios of their perceived relative merit (X) to the amount of reward (R) felt to be deserved. Thus, X a R a = X b R b . Experiments designed to test hypotheses derived from this “exchange” theory of choice behavior yielded entirely affirmative results.

The justice and injustice of life events

An experiment employing a sample (N=280) of undergraduates from an urban university was designed to test the general hypothesis that the perception of justice and injustice in life events depends upon the relationship between two variables that are part of the stimulus situation : the valence of the person being observed (good or bad), and the valence of the outcome experienced by that person (positive or negative). The findings from both qualitative (analysis of spontaneous comments) and quantitative scale ratings supported the prediction that justice and injustice perceptions depend respectively on whether the signs of the person-outcome valences are the same or different. Two perceptual biases were revealed by the analysis. The first was a positive outcome bias : respondents rated as more just outcomes that were positive regardless of the goodness or badness of the person in the life event. The second was a justice bias : respondents in both measures found the just life events to be more just than unjust life events to be unjust. Finally the more religious respondents perceived the life events as more just regardless of the patterns of person-outcome valences than did the less religious, suggesting a third, religiosity bias. A number of theoretical implications and questions for future research were discussed, including the quantification of the hypothesis and its cross-cultural generality.

Culture and the cognitive paradigm in social psychology

Abstract Within the historical frame of the paradigmatic change in psychology from behaviourism to cognitivism, the paper critically examines the basic metatheoretical features of cognitive social psychology, focusing the analysis on three major areas of that field: attribution, the impression of persons, and stereotypes. Of core concern in each theory-research enterprise are processes of the individual mind: causal inference, organization of traits, retrieval of stimulus information, etc. that are assumed to be general over content-domains, and universal across cultural contexts. A critique of cognitive process theory centres on these problematic assumptions, and argues that a priori aculturism prevents falsification of the hypothesized processes; tests of content-generality require that the meaning of varying surface content be constant, yet by ignoring culture, access to the source of meaning is precluded; cross-cultural research is necessary to specify the shared objective basis of social cognition wh...

Additional cross-cultural evidence on the selective usage of nonmaterial beliefs in explaining life events.

Two studies, one conducted in the Netherlands (N=87) and one in Italy with two samples—Catholic Youth (N=41) and Young Communists (N=41)—assessed the cross-cultural generality of the previously confirmed hypothesis (Pepitone & Saffiotti, 1997) that six universal nonmaterial beliefs—fate, God, luck, chance, just punishment, and just reward—are used selectively to interpret life events. A ‘selective correspondence’ between the six beliefs and the standard life event cases specifically constructed to engage the belief-specializations was predicted. All three samples showed the predicted correspondence in terms of significant ordinal correlations in a 6 nonmaterial belief ×9 life events classification. In addition, the findings are consistent with the assumption that the degree of selective correspondence depends upon the importance of beliefs in the sample under study. Copyright

Justice in Cultural Context: A Social-Psychological Perspective

This article critically examines two major theoretical perspectives on justice in social psychology-equity and just world-particularly, the confusion between believing in justice versus believing that justice exists, and the neglected moral dimension of justice, the belief that God or transcendental law creates the universal imperative. Research on the implications for justice in life events confirms the hypothesis that justice is perceived when the valences of the person and the outcomes affecting that person are balanced, that this proposition holds in comparisons of US. and Indian samples, and that highly religious persons perceive more justice in life events than less or nonreligious persons.

Attitudes toward Rape A Comparison of the Role of Chastity in India and the United States

In comparing attitudes toward rape in India and in the United States, it was predicted that: (1) because of the importance of female chastity in Indian society, information about victim chastity would influence judgments about rape more in India than in the United States, and (2) because of cultural differences in concepts of individual self-determination, Indian respondents would blame both criminal and victim less than would Americans. Respondents (N = 473) were asked to make judgments about varied rape cases. Information about victim chastity affected judgments by both groups of respondents, although Indian respondents stated this as a reason for their judgments much more frequently than did Americans. Indian respondents tended to blame both criminal and victim less than did Americans, emphasizing instead the circumstances surrounding the offense.

Descriptive and Prescriptive Beliefs About Justice: A Sino-U.S. Comparison

The present article focuses on the distinction between descriptive (i.e., what will happen) and prescriptive (i.e., what should happen) beliefs in justice and shows that person valence and belief type had an interactive effect on outcome valence. Specifically, the 2 (Chinese and American culture) x 2 (Good and Bad person) x 2 (Will as descriptive and Should as prescriptive belief) study revealed that both Chinese and Americans believe that good people should receive better outcomes than they will; but Chinese believe that bad people should receive worse outcomes than they will, whereas Americans believe that bad people should receive better outcomes than they will. This may suggest that, in comparison with Chinese, Americans are more tolerant of or lenient toward immoral behavior and are prescriptively less committed to moral justice.

Toward a Cultural Social Psychology

The paper examines how the natural science perspective of social psychology expressed in the preference for intraindividual theories and models has systematically led the field away from a consideration of the specifically cultural sources of social behaviour. To demonstrate the role of cultural determinants in social behaviour, for example, the topic of moral behaviour has been discussed citing some experimental findings with implications for the development of a truely cultural social psychology of moral behaviour.

A social psychology perspective on the study of culture : An eye on the road to interdisciplinarianism

This article deals with segregation among the social sciences, an especially dysfunctional state of affairs for those disciplines committed to understanding culture and social behavior through comparative research. A necessary condition to reduce barriers is a dialogue in which disciplines define their identities and perspectives on theory and research. The article initiates such a self-analysis in social psychology. First, a historical overview of major theoretical systems and schools maps the territory of social psychology, its mission and method. Then, an examination of the strategy, design of experiments, and the interpretation of findings reveals specific sources of resistance to theorizing about cultural influences and conducting theory-driven cross-cultural research. Finally noted are barriers in ethnographic research, including restrictive definitions of culture that inhibit inquiry into mass cultures, a body of phenomena that defines a common meeting ground for fruitful exchange.