Elizabeth Collins

ScriptingRT: A Software Library for Collecting Response Latencies in Online Studies of Cognition

ScriptingRT is a new open source tool to collect response latencies in online studies of human cognition. ScriptingRT studies run as Flash applets in enabled browsers. ScriptingRT provides the building blocks of response latency studies, which are then combined with generic Apache Flex programming. Six studies evaluate the performance of ScriptingRT empirically. Studies 1–3 use specialized hardware to measure variance of response time measurement and stimulus presentation timing. Studies 4–6 implement a Stroop paradigm and run it both online and in the laboratory, comparing ScriptingRT to other response latency software. Altogether, the studies show that Flash programs developed in ScriptingRT show a small lag and an increased variance in response latencies. However, this did not significantly influence measured effects: The Stroop effect was reliably replicated in all studies, and the found effects did not depend on the software used. We conclude that ScriptingRT can be used to test response latency effects online.

Integrating advice and experience: Learning and decision making with social and nonsocial cues

When making decisions, people typically gather information from both social and nonsocial sources, such as advice from others and direct experience. This research adapted a cognitive learning paradigm to examine the process by which people learn what sources of information are credible. When participants relied on advice alone to make decisions, their learning of source reliability proceeded in a manner analogous to traditional cue learning processes and replicated the established learning phenomena. However, when advice and nonsocial cues were encountered together as an established phenomenon, blocking (ignoring redundant information) did not occur. Our results suggest that extant cognitive learning models can accommodate either advice or nonsocial cues in isolation. However, the combination of advice and nonsocial cues (a context more typically encountered in daily life) leads to different patterns of learning, in which mutually supportive information from different types of sources is not regarded as redundant and may be particularly compelling. For these situations, cognitive learning models still constitute a promising explanatory tool but one that must be expanded. As such, these findings have important implications for social psychological theory and for cognitive models of learning.

The Multi-Norm Structural Social-Developmental Model of Children’s Intergroup Attitudes: Integrating Intergroup-Loyalty and Outgroup Fairness Norms

This chapter presents a new complete theoretical model of intergroup attitudes of children—the Multi-Norm Structural Social-Developmental (MNSD) model. The MNSD offers a comprehensive and integrative approach that builds on three extant social-developmental theories that explain the dynamic variation of prejudiced responses during child development. The unique contribution of MNSD is in integrating hypotheses on the role of competing social norms, using social-developmental and social psychological theory. The MNSD proposes that two strong social norms, the ingroup loyalty norm and the norm not to be prejudiced (outgroup fairness norm), operate in a complementary rather than mutually exclusive way in social-developmental intergroup contexts. In specifying when and how these norms become influential and shape intergroup biases of children, the MNSD proposes two kinds of hypotheses, one regarding lasting changes in the availability and internalization of these norms and one regarding the situational and context dependent salience of them. With this the authors explain existing results and generate novel untested systematic hypotheses on how the dynamic relationship between groups’ complex normative repertoires and socio-structural variables proposed by social identity theory (status differences, their stability and legitimacy) might operate insidiously to protect or reify the status quo within asymmetric intergroup contexts.