Grazyna Wieczorkowska

Varieties of groups and the perception of group entitativity.

Three studies examined perceptions of the entitativity of groups. In Study 1 (U.S.) and Study 2 (Poland), participants rated a sample of 40 groups on 8 properties of groups (e.g., size, duration, group member similarity) and perceived entitativity. Participants also completed a sorting task in which they sorted the groups according to their subjective perceptions of group similarity. Correlational and regression analyses were used to determine the group properties most strongly related to entitativity. Clustering and multidimensional scaling analyses in both studies identified 4 general types of groups (intimacy groups, task groups, social categories, and loose associations). In Study 3, participants rated the properties of groups to which they personally belonged. Study 3 replicated the results of Studies 1 and 2 and demonstrated that participants most strongly valued membership in groups that were perceived as high in entitativity.

Individualism, Collectivism, and Authoritarianism in Seven Societies

Building on Hofstedes finding that individualism and social hierarchy are incompatible at the societal level, the authors examined the relationship between individualism-collectivism and orientations toward authority at the individual level. In Study 1, authoritarianism was related to three measures of collectivism but unrelated to three measures of individualism in a U.S. sample (N = 382). Study 2 used Triandiss horizontal-vertical individualism-collectivism framework in samples from Bulgaria, Japan, New Zealand, Germany, Poland, Canada, and the United States (total N = 1,018). Both at the individual level and the societal level of analysis, authoritarianism was correlated with vertical individualism and vertical collectivism but unrelated to horizontal collectivism. Horizontal individualism was unrelated to authoritarianism except in post-Communist societies whose recent history presumably made salient the incompatibility between state authority and self-determination.

Beliefs about birth rank and their reflection in reality.

Beliefs about birth rank reflect what the society regards as social reality, and they may also influence that reality. Three studies found that people believe those with different birth ranks differ in their personalities, that higher birth ranks are likely to attain higher occupational prestige, and that the personality characteristics attributed to the various birth ranks favor the actual attainment of higher occupational prestige. In one example of such beliefs, firstborns were rated as most intelligent but least creative whereas the opposite was true of last-borns. The 4th study found that those with higher birth ranks in fact attain more prestigious occupations and actually do complete more years of schooling.

Adapting to the Transition From Socialism to Capitalism in Poland: The Role of Screening Strategies in Social Change

Before making a final choice, people screen available options for acceptability; those considered “good enough” constitute a goal-category. Foraging theories assume screening is an adaptation whereby low-ranked options are accepted when search costs (i.e., effort or risk associated with striving) are high and rejected when search costs are low. We argue that some individuals, called interval strategists, typically consider many options acceptable and, hence, form broad goal-categories; others, called point strategists, typically consider few options acceptable and form narrow goal-categories. We also argue that because of limited capacity, there is a trade-off between encoding ends and encoding means so that as the goal-category range increases, detailed planning decreases. Findings in our first study support this analysis. The next two studies assumed search costs in Poland (e.g., the effort or risk involved in shopping, housing, traveling) were greater under central planning than under the current market economy. Hence, prior to 1989, broad goal-categories were more adaptive than narrow goal-categories; since 1989, however, the reverse has been true. Consistent with this hypothesis, in Study 2, Poles who were point strategists perceived their conditions of life and self-efficacy had improved more since 1989 than did Poles who were interval strategists. Study 3 demonstrates a capacity to recognize which screening strategy is more adaptive under central planning and market conditions: An entrepreneur who failed prior to 1989 but succeeded afterward was inferred to be a point strategist, and one who succeeded prior to 1989 but failed afterward was inferred to be an interval strategist.

Individual Differences in Adaptation to Social Change

There are many ways to describe a social transformation of the magnitude that took place in Poland in last decade of the twentieth century. Among the most important is the sudden increase in the number and variety of options available in most domains of life, from education and careers to consumer goods and services. We analyze two general strategies people use to make choices or set goals in these domains. In one, called an interval strategy, individuals are less discriminating and are willing to accept a large number of possible goals. Hence, they adapt well when there is a scarcity of attractive options, but if the environment is rich in possibilities, their strategy can force them to deal with an overwhelming amount of information, and, as a result, to become ineffective. The other method of goal setting, called a point strategy, refers to people who are discriminating in their choices and typically reject a large number of options as not good enough. Such people thrive in an environment where there are plenty of good options; however, when such options are few and far between, they become frustrated and adapt poorly. After discussing these strategies we describe some recent studies that test three hypotheses suggested by our model: (1) Point strategists adapt better to the transition than interval strategists if their resources are significant; whereas interval strategists adapt better than point strategists if their resources are meager. (2) Success and failure produce more extreme emotional reactions in point strategists than in interval strategists. (3) Among unemployed individuals with few resources (e.g., they are unskilled), those who are interval strategists find a job more rapidly than do point strategists.

Hunting for a Job: How Individual Differences in Foraging Strategies Influence the Length of Unemployment

A model of individual difference in foraging is used to predict the speed with which unemployed Poles gain employment. Foraging theory assumes an evolved computational mechanism that produces a trade-off between search costs, the amount of preparation individuals foresee as required to achieve an outcome, and whether they deem the outcome worth pursuing. We argue that the expression of this mechanism varies over individuals (as well as situations, the traditional focus of foraging theory) and distinguish between two ideal-type foraging strategies based on the nature of the trade-off. One, called a point strategy, denotes individuals who are willing to incur significant search costs. They characteristically engage in meticulous planning and consider only a few options as worth pursing. The other, called an interval strategy, describes individuals who are typically averse to incurring search costs. They plan in a perfunctory manner and are willing to accept many options as ‘good enough’. Two hypotheses are tested: (i) Interval strategists find jobs more rapidly than point strategists. (ii) Women, because they incur greater search costs, find jobs less rapidly than men. In addition, we conjectured if women’s search costs are sufficiently greater, they may benefit more than men by adopting an interval strategy. Two studies, the first with a convenience sample and the second with a representative national sample, provide strong support for the first hypothesis, reasonable support for the second, and weaker support for our conjecture. A third study demonstrates that in evaluating the attractiveness of a job individuals weigh its features in a fashion consistent with their foraging strategy.

The role of agency beliefs in transition: Commentary to the Special Section

These four papers together offer a fairly rare satisfaction, at least in the social sciences: First, they deal with the same general problem, the relationship between agentic beliefs and achievement, mostly educational or occupational. Second, the data are from different samples in different societies undergoing different kinds of sociopolitical and economic change and they are are analysed by a variety of methods. Finally, mirabile dictu, their findings agree on the general nature of the relationship between agency and achievement, namely, it is to a considerable degree reciprocal—agentic beliefs influence achievement, and achievement, especially success, influences agentic beliefs. In addition to demonstrating the generality of this effect, they present other findings that suggest basic similarities between rather different social systems. For instance, Schoon (2007, this issue) shows that a child’s education in the UK is largely determined by his/ her parents’ education. Despite 50 years of socialism, with its special laws making it easy for working-class children to enter university, this is just as true in Poland. To illustrate, Cichomski (2004) found that among citizens of Warsaw who only completed primary school, nearly half had fathers who also had no more than a primary school education, whereas less than 10% had fathers who were university graduates. Similarly, Diewald (2007, this issue) finds that agentic Germans see their successes as dispositional (due to personal effort and skill), and failures as situational (due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control), an effect that is observed in many different societies and that follows directly from attribution theory. Equally interesting are the cross-national differences. For example, Evans (2007, this issue) demonstrated that the level of educational and occupational success varies from one country to another depending on the range of different kinds of education and jobs the social system makes available to members; Schoon (2007, this issue) observed comparable differences in predictors of success as a function of the cohort. Taken together, these findings imply that in societies undergoing social change, cohort differences in achievement are likely because the range of opportunities afforded to individuals early in the process of change is different from that afforded later on. For instance, the best predictor of adult social status for disadvantaged individuals born in 1958 was their teenage educational aspirations; however, for disadvantaged youths born in 1970 the best predictor of adult social status was exam performance. This suggests that the former cohort had better opportunities; that is, a larger number of career options were available to these individuals, and thus, success depended less on the demonstration of academic competence than it did in the latter cohort. Under these conditions, processes mediating between individual agentic beliefs and educational or occupational outcomes may be critical in explaining cohort differences in the agency–achievement relationship. In Poland, for instance, the number of different kinds of schooling or careers available to individuals entering the labour market prior to the transition to a market economy was relatively small compared to the range available to those entering the labour market several years later after the transition. With this in mind we attempted to predict successful adaptation to the transition taking into

Ten Pitfalls of Research Practices in Management Science

This essay-like text discusses 10 pitfalls in the analysis of data in management science: (1) Too small a number of experimental studies; (2) Ignoring the specifics of the research object; (3) Lack of standard operationalizations; (4) Weakness of measurement ; (5) Weakness of data analyses; (6) Too high a level of generality of theory and too few replications; (7) Misinterpretation of the outcomes of statistical analyses; (8) Reviewers’ expectation regarding the samples and hypotheses testing; (9) Missing “time” in the list of predictors; (10) Wrong standards of publication. Most of these risks apply also to psychological and sociological research.