Violations of dominance in pricing judgments

The dominance principle states that the judged price of gamble A should be equal to or greater than the judged price of gamble B whenever A's outcomes are equal to or better than the corresponding outcomes of B, holding everything else constant. Subjects often violate the dominance principle by assigning a higher price to a gamble with some probability of winning a positive amount, Y, otherwise zero, than to a superior gamble with the same chances of winning Y, otherwise winning X. Violations also occur with losses. Results are consistent with a configural-weight theory in which the decision weight for each outcome depends on the rank of the outcome with respect to the other outcomes in the lottery and the value of the outcome (zero vs. nonzero).The authors thank Shi-jie Chang, Duncan Luce, and Lisa Ordóñez for comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported by a National Science Foundation grant to the first author (BNS-8451368). Requests for reprints should be sent to Barbara Mellers, Dept. of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.     

First Nations and community economic development: a case study

A training project in a northern Canadian community providedan opportunity to examine participatory planning approachesand the meaning of work in First Nations communities. Focusgroups conducted three years after the unsuccessful interventionof a community economic development (CED) project suggest thatcomplex factors such as lack of support from community leadersand rate of pay for workers determine whether CED is alwaysappropriate in northern, First Nations contexts.     

The humorous construction of disability: 'stand-up' comedians in the United States

We examine how stand-up [sic] comedy constructs, circulates, perpetuates and/or disrupts stereotypical images of disabled persons in the United States. We use disabled people, rather than people-first language, to remind readers that disability is an ill-defined, culturally imposed attribute. Although humor is culturally specific, we draw on works of an international cadre of humanities scholars and social scientists to ground our analyses. We conclude that disability humor constitutes an emerging, liberatory art form. Disabled and non-disabled comedians elicit thought-provoking laughter and present disability as an interesting way to live. However, disabling humor still perpetuates stereotyping and isolation.     

Four‐Month‐Olds' Discrimination of Voice Changes in Multimodal Displays as a Function of Discrimination Protocol

Past studies have found equivocal support for the ability of young infants to discriminate infant‐directed (ID) speech information in the presence of auditory‐only versus auditory + visual displays (faces + voices). Generally, younger infants appear to have more difficulty discriminating a change in the vocal properties of ID speech when they are accompanied by faces. Forty 4‐month‐old infants were tested using either an infant‐controlled habituation procedure (Experiment 1) or a fixed‐trial habituation procedure (Experiment 2). The prediction was that the infant‐controlled habituation procedure would be a more sensitive measure of infant attention to complex displays. The results indicated that 4‐month‐old infants discriminated voice changes in dynamic face + voice displays depending on the order in which they were viewed during the infant‐controlled habituation procedure. In contrast, no evidence of discrimination was found in the fixed‐trial procedure. The findings suggest that the selection of experimental methodology plays a significant role in the empirical observations of infant perceptual abilities.     

Organizations as the building blocks of social inequalities

Most contemporary inequalities emerge in and are constituted through organizations. In this article, we review research at the intersection of organizations and inequalities, bringing the organizational literature and social stratification literature into conversation with one another. In doing so, we outline an emerging theoretical perspective, Relational Inequality Theory (RIT), that helps to make sense of how inequalities emerge within and between organizations. RIT places social relations within organizational contexts as constitutive of inequalities in access to organizational resources such as income, jobs, and respect. Much research supports theorizing inequalities as emerging through social relations within organizations, and we suggest comparative organizational designs as the key methodological strategy to study organizational inequalities.     

Complementary person-supervisor fit: An investigation of supplies-values (S-V) fit,leader-member exchange (LMX) and work outcomes

By applying the supplies-values (S-V) fit approach from the complementary person-environment (P-E) fit literature to the leader-employee perspective, and drawing upon social exchange theory, we examine how fulfillment of different work values is related to Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and work outcomes. First, polynomial regression analyses combined with response surface analysis of data collected at two time points (N = 316) showed that LMX (Time 2) was higher the more the leader fulfills the employee's work values (Time 1). Second, LMX (Time 2) was higher when leader supplies (Time 1) and employee work values (Time 1) were both high than when both were low. Third, analyses of data from a sub-sample of matched leader-employee dyads (N = 140), showed that LMX (Time 2) played a mediating role on the relation between S-V fit (Time 1) and work outcomes (Time 2). Specifically, we found eight out of 10 relationships between S-V fit (Time 1) and leader-rated task performance and OCB (Time 2) to be fully mediated by LMX (Time 2). LMX (Time 2) partially mediated the relation between S-V fit (Time 1) and job satisfaction (Time 2) as only two out of five relationships were fully mediated.