Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

A Cross-Cultural Examination Of The Conformity Effect When Co-Witnesses Discuss A Crime, Sungil Bang

Student Theses

Prior research has shown that discussions with a co-witness can lead to the spread of false information, better known as the memory conformity effect. Specifically the effects of independence and interdependence on memory conformity have been examined. People who perceived their selves as a distinctive and unique were related to less memory conformity whereas those who identified themselves within their social relationships were not related to memory conformity. One of the limitations of the previous study is that they only focused on Western populations even though there is a cultural difference between Western European culture and Eastern Asian culture in …

The Role Of Social Class And Construal Level In Social Justice And Fairness Beliefs, Prerana Bharadwaj

Doctoral Dissertations

What predicts support for the redistribution of resources to improve socioeconomic inequality? Social class, or the subjective perception of one’s resources and position in relation to others in a larger society, was examined as one relevant characteristic. Across four experiments, social class as subjective social status was manipulated (two) and measured (all four), and found to have a significant negative effect on support for the moral values of group-based equality (social justice) but not on individual deservingness (fairness) separate from political identity and other demographic characteristics. This effect was seen on stated principles but particularly relevant in approval ratings of …

Same Words, Different Impressions: How Accent Upstages Words In Communication, Alexandria Farris

Scholars Week

The current study investigated how different non-native accents of English are perceived. A person's accent can be used to take the place of the individual's race or any other marker used to make judgements (Shuck, 2006). Participants listened to a recording of one out of five non-American female speakers of English from Mexico, Russia, Germany, India, or China, or a female native speaker of American English; the participants heard either a formal or informal text and then evaluated the speaker on factors of competence, caring/goodwill, and trustworthiness. Demographic data on age, gender, languages spoken, extent travelled, and time lived in …

Cognitive Sociology, Michael W. Raphael

Publications and Research

Cognitive sociology is the study of the conditions under which meaning is constituted through processes of reification. Cognitive sociology traces its origins to writings in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of culture, cognitive and cultural anthropology, and more recently, work done in cultural sociology and cognitive science. Its central questions revolve around locating these processes of reification since the locus of cognition is highly contentious. Researchers consider how individuality is related to notions of society (structures, institutions, systems, etc.) and notions of culture (cultural forms, cultural structures, sub-cultures, etc.). These questions further explore how these answers depend on learning processes …

Cognitive And Emotional Processes Involved In The Experience Of Objects As Holy Or Transcendent, Lotte J. Pummerer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, attitudes about religion/spirituality have become more pluralistic (Pew Research Center, 2015a). At the same time, the number of individuals who identify themselves as nonreligious, atheist or agnostic are growing (Pew Research Center, 2015b), yet we are lacking words and research to describe their attributions of transcendence in language not bound to religious concepts. This study aims at examining both concepts – holiness and transcendence – in their similarities and differences through assessing cognitive and emotional processes involved in experiences of objects.

The study consisted of two parts with a total of 206 Christian and 52 nonreligious/atheistic/agnostic participants. …

Are All Interferences Bad? Bilingual Advantages In Working Memory Are Modulated By Varying Demands For Controlled Processing, Hwajin Yang, Sujin Yang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

We investigated bilingual advantages in general control abilities using three complex-span tasks of working memory (WM). An operation-span task served as a baseline measure of WM capacity. Additionally, two modified versions of the Stroop-span task were designed to place varying attentional-control demands during memoranda encoding by asking participants either to read the to-be-remembered item aloud (lower cognitive control; i.e., Stroop-span task) or to name the font color of the to-be-remembered item while still encoding the word for later recall (greater cognitive control; i.e., attention-impeded Stroop-span task). Twenty-six Korean-English bilinguals and 25 English-native monolinguals were tested. We found that bilinguals outperformed …