James L. Kuethe

Man and Woman: Social Schemata of Males and Females

Male and female college students placed human figures cut from felt on a felt field. Ss were free to arrange the figures in any manner. Both male and female Ss used the same generic social schemata; human figures were kept together, male figures were placed with female figures, and figures were rarely paired with same-sex figures. Differences between the male and female Ss included the tendency of the female Ss to form male-female pairings separated away from other figures. The use of aggressive schemata was studied as were preferences for non-social orderings.

Grouping and ordering schemata in competition

Two experiments were performed to determine which is the more powerful, the grouping schema or the ordering schema, when they are placed in competition. It was found that, when free to do either, people tend to group elements rather than order them. It was also found that the two schemata are not inherently antagonistic; people will readily employ both when permitted and they can be mutually facilitory. One exceptional case occurs when people have the choice of augmenting a group or an ordering with an internal gap: filling in the ordering is more attractive than adding to the group.

On the Relation between Two Variables

Ir there is a ubiquitous statistic in psychology, it surely is r. Psychometricians, clinicians, industrial psychologists, social psychologists―even experimental psychologists-all use r to an extent that would no doubt astound Pearson. It is the purpose of this article to suggest that r and allied measures of correlation are overused, and that their overuse tends to corrupt psychologists’ thinking about the relations among variables. Anything so popular as r must have strong appeals or attractions. One obvious appeal of r is the prestige, or sanction at least, it receives from the fact of its widespread use. Another appeal is the ease with which it can be calculated and its statistical significance tested. Still another appeal is the extensive mathematical development and elaboration of things that can be done with r, ranging from its use to compute a standard error of estimate to its use in multiple correlation and factor analysis. And there is perhaps a subtle intellectual appeal in the description of the relation between two variables in terms of a single numerical index, in the reduction of a scattergram to a single number. But the fundamental justification for any statistic is that it provides the important information about a set of data. If r fails to do this, the other attractions are only snares. We hold that r does so fail in its applications in psychology, not just occasionally, but often.

Prejudice and aggression: a study of specific social schemata

Ss with high scores on the Negro sub-scale of the Ethnocentrism Scale grouped figures cut from black and white felt separately by color. Low scoring Ss did not employ color grouping schemata. Other sets of figures contained a man with a rifle. Ss who employed aggressive schemata when organizing these groups gave more extrapunitive responses on the Rosenzweig P-F Study than did Ss who employed fewer aggressive schemata in the free organization situations. Specific acceptable aggression schemata were shown to have very high commonality while certain unacceptable schemata were almost entirely absent. There was no significant relationship between prejudice and aggression whether measured by verbalizations or by organizational schemata.