David C. Matz

Why Don't We Practice What We Preach? A Meta-Analytic Review of Religious Racism

A meta-analytic review of past research evaluated the link between religiosity and racism in the United States since the Civil Rights Act. Religious racism partly reflects intergroup dynamics. That is, a strong religious in-group identity was associated with derogation of racial out-groups. Other races might be treated as out-groups because religion is practiced largely within race, because training in a religious in-group identity promotes general ethnocentrism, and because different others appear to be in competition for resources. In addition, religious racism is tied to basic life values of social conformity and respect for tradition. In support, individuals who were religious for reasons of conformity and tradition expressed racism that declined in recent years with the decreased societal acceptance of overt racial discrimination. The authors failed to find that racial tolerance arises from humanitarian values, consistent with the idea that religious humanitarianism is largely expressed to in-group members. Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant.

Social Norms and Identity Relevance: A Motivational Approach to Normative Behavior

Two studies demonstrated that greater identification with a group was associated with more positive emotions for members who conformed with versus violated the group’s norms. These effects were found with injunctive norms, which specify what members should do or what they ideally would do, but emerged less consistently with descriptive norms, which specify what members typically do. Descriptive norms affected emotional responses when they acquired identity-relevance by differentiating an important ingroup from a rival outgroup. For these descriptive norms, much like injunctive norms, greater identification yielded more positive emotions following conformity than violation. The authors suggest that positive emotions and self-evaluations underlie conformity with the norms of self-defining groups.

Cognitive dissonance in groups: The consequences of disagreement

As L. Festinger (1957) argued, the social group is a source of cognitive dissonance as well as a vehicle for reducing it. That is, disagreement from others in a group generates dissonance, and subsequent movement toward group consensus reduces this negative tension. The authors conducted 3 studies to demonstrate group-induced dissonance. In the first, students in a group with others who ostensibly disagreed with them experienced greater dissonance discomfort than those in a group with others who agreed. Study 2 demonstrated that standard moderators of dissonance in past research--lack of choice and opportunity to self-affirm, similarly reduced dissonance discomfort generated by group disagreement. In Study 3, the dissonance induced by group disagreement was reduced through a variety of interpersonal strategies to achieve consensus, including persuading others, changing ones own position, and joining an attitudinally congenial group.

“Dealing” With the Central Limit Theorem

We describe an easy-to-employ, hands-on demonstration using playing cards to illustrate the central limit theorem. This activity allows students to see how a collection of sample means drawn from a nonnormally distributed population will be normally distributed. Students who took part in the demonstration reported it to be helpful in understanding the theorem, enjoyable, and worthwhile. An analysis of open-ended exam questions indicated that students who participated in this demonstration possessed greater understanding of the central limit theorem than those who participated in an alternate demonstration and those who witnessed a standard presentation on the central limit theorem that included no demonstration.

Women's hair as a cue to desired relationship and parenting characteristics.

ABSTRACT We investigated how women’s hair color (blond, brown, black) and length (short, medium, long) influences males’ judgments about the women’s age, health, physical attractiveness, relationship potential, and parenting capability. Results, which are generally consistent with evolutionary psychology approaches, indicate that hair color and, to a lesser extent, length can affect perceptions of personal characteristics. More specifically, we found that lighter hair (blond and brown) compared to darker hair (black) is generally associated with perceptions of youth, health and attractiveness, and generally leads to more positive perceptions of relationship and parenting potential. Furthermore, the relationships between variables suggest that characteristics directly related to reproductive potential may be inferred from more obvious indirect characteristics. These results suggest that males are able to make complex judgments about women concerning their desirable relationship and parenting potential based on discernable characteristics such as hair color and length.

Social influence on the phonemic transformation effect

Earlier studies found that repeated sequences of brief steady‐state vowels are heard as verbal forms, a phenomenon referred to as the phonemic transformation effect (PTE). It has also been established [Chalikia et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 91, 2422(A) (1992)] that, when two listeners’ responses differ, they can identify the particular stimulus corresponding to each other’s verbal forms. Other research suggests that unclear stimuli can be influenced by social forces. The present study examined social influences on the PTE. Participants were first asked to describe their verbal forms for ten vowel sequences used in previous studies. Then they were presented with verbal forms reported by previous listeners and were asked to match them to the ten stimuli. Most listeners performed the matching task, indicating that they could perceptually reorganize each stimulus. Finally, they were asked to listen to the sequences again and describe their verbal forms. About 47% of these responses corresponded to those provide...