Business climate attitudes and company relocation decisions.

A total of 438 manufacturing firms reported their business relocation activity, their overall attitude toward the business climate in Michigan, and their assessment of 34 business climate dimensions. Using a lens model paradigm, we explored reasons for a lack of relation between actual relocation decisions and overall business climate attitudes. Location decisions were most highly correlated with distance and labor considerations, whereas overall business climate was most highly correlated with tax considerations, and secondarily correlated with labor problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Growth in HMO share of the Medicare market, 1989-1994

Between 1989 and 1994 the health maintenance organization (HMO) share of the Medicare market grew rapidly. It is still heavily concentrated geographically, however. The most influential factor in this growth is HMO penetration into an area's general health care market. Medicare payment rates and prior Medicare HMO penetration also have an impact, but their effects are much weaker. Thus, payment rate reform is likely to have only a modest impact on Medicare HMO growth in the short term. In the longer term, the HMO share of the Medicare market will continue to grow, because HMO penetration in the general health care market is growing rapidly.     

A failure of common sense: An empirical study of the impact of the draft on college disenrollment decisions.

During the Vietnam conflict, policymakers were concerned that many young men had entered college primarily for a draft deferment and that they would therefore drop out when they were no longer threatened. The subsequent introduction of a lottery to determine draft vulnerability made it possible to rigorously test this prediction. 571 males from 3 universities completed questionnaires before and after they were randomly assigned draft numbers. Results provide no support for the commonsense predictions regarding disenrollment, although draft numbers did change the importance of a deferment as an inducement. Data partially support several more formal models of organization behavior that viewed opportunity costs as a moderator in the reward levels–decision to participate relationship. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Tacit components of medical ethics: making decisions in the clinic

When a patient visits his doctor there is, as well as a spoken dialogue, also an unspoken, or tacit, dialogue between them. This may not be evident unless that dialogue breaks down when the psychological or moral terms of reference of each are seen to be different. The author of this paper tries to elucidate the framework in which physician and patient think, and in so doing allow an understanding of why the physician may appear to be rigid and authoritarian in his dealing with his patients and the patient uncooperative.     

When success breeds failure: History, hysteresis, and delayed exit decisions.

The effects of feedback equivocality, information availability, and prior decision-making history on escalation and persistence were investigated. Replicating the findings of J.L. Bragger, D.H. Bragger, D.A. Hantula, and J.P. Kirnan (1998), this study found that participants receiving equivocal feedback on their decisions invested more money and invested across more opportunities; those who could purchase information invested fewer resources than did participants who did not have the opportunity to purchase information. There was an inverse linear relationship between the percentage of opportunities in which participants purchased information and the delay to exit decisions and total resources invested. Six weeks earlier, some participants took part in a more profitable investment scenario, and prior experience led to later increased investing when participants were faced with failure, even above that invested in a preceding, succeeding scenario. These results are consistent with an equivocality theory account of escalation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Dutch medical language processor: part II: evaluation

This paper provides a preliminary evaluation of a general Dutch medical language processor (DMLP). Four examples of different potential applications (based on different linguistic modules) are presented, each with its own evaluation method. Finally, a critical review of the used evaluation methods is offered according to the state of the art in medical language processing.     

Information pooling: When it impacts group decision making.

Three-person groups decided which of 2 professors was nominated for a teaching award. Prior to discussion, half of the information available for this decision was given to every group member (shared information), whereas the rest was evenly divided among them (unshared information). Further, this information was distributed in such a way that the correct choice was not obvious to members prior to discussion. As predicted, discussion focused more on members' shared than unshared information. However, decision quality was affected only by the amount of unshared information discussed and by member's prediscussion choice preferences. The amount of shared information discussed did not affect decision quality. These results suggest a dual-process model of how the prediscussion distribution of decision-relevant information impacts group decision-making effectiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Management of poor performance: A comparison of manager, group member, and group disciplinary decisions.

Managers and 231 members of 41 work groups representing 4 diverse organizations participated in an experiment involving disciplinary decisions. Managers and group members responded individually to scenarios describing a group member's poor performance, followed by group members meeting to reach consensus on the disciplinary decisions. As hypothesized, manager disciplinary decisions were more severe than decisions made by individual group members. Contrary to predictions, the severity of manager and group disciplinary decisions did not differ. A test of choice shifts revealed that when the prevailing view among individual group members was for a relatively lenient disciplinary action, the group consensus decision was more severe than the average of the individual decisions. Attributions and outcome seriousness were found to influence the severity of manager, group member, and group decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Projection in surrogate decisions about life-sustaining medical treatments.

To honor the wishes of an incapacitated patient, surrogate decision makers must predict the treatment decisions patients would make for themselves if able. Social psychological research, however, suggests that surrogates' own treatment preferences may influence their predictions of others' preferences. In 2 studies (1 involving 60 college student surrogates and a parent, the other involving 361 elderly outpatients and their chosen surrogate decision maker), surrogates predicted whether a close other would want life-sustaining treatment in hypothetical end-of-life scenarios and stated their own treatment preferences in the same scenarios. Surrogate predictions more closely resembled surrogates' own treatment wishes than they did the wishes of the individual they were trying to predict. Although the majority of prediction errors reflected inaccurate use of surrogates' own treatment preferences, projection was also found to result in accurate prediction more often than counterprojective predictions. The rationality and accuracy of projection in surrogate decision making is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Improving group decisions by better pooling information: A comparative advantage of group decision support systems.

This study compared a group decision support system (GDSS) with face-to-face (FTF) group discussion on characteristics of information exchange and decision quality. Participants given conflicting information tended to share more of their unique data and engaged in more critical argumentation when using the GDSS than when meeting FTF. Conversely, when information was consistent among members, there were no such differences between FTF and GDSS groups. The GDSS groups significantly outperformed the FTF groups in agreeing on the superior hidden profile candidate, especially when there was a lack of prediscussion consensus. Individual-level analyses revealed that members of GDSS groups that did not have a prediscussion consensus tended to experience stronger preference shifts toward the group's consensus decision. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Authoritarianism and decisions of mock juries: Evidence of jury bias and group polarization.

A mock-jury experiment investigated the effects of authoritarianism on juror and jury decisions and examined the generalizability of the group polarization hypothesis for a simulated jury task. 132 high- and 125 low authoritarians (as assessed by the California F Scale) listened to a murder trial and then made judgments about guilt and punishment as individuals, in 6 person juries, and again after deliberations as individuals. As predicted, both high-authoritarian jurors and juries reached guilty verdicts more frequently and imposed more severe punishment than low authoritarians. Further, high authoritarians showed more prediscussion–postdiscussion verdict changes than low authoritarians. Results also support the polarization hypothesis in a jury paradigm. Deliberations produced a shift toward greater severity of punishment for high authoritarians but toward increased leniency for low authoritarians. Guilt verdicts shifted toward acquittal for all jurors. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prediction of screening decisions in a medical school admission process

To study and predict a set of screening decisions in a medical school admission process, a stratified sample (n = 864) was drawn to represent the range of applicants to the Yale University School of Medicine during a single year. A smaller sample from the following year's applicants was drawn in a similar fashion for purposes of cross-validation. Prior to the prediction of screening decisions, a set of independent variables was selected by a factor analytic procedure from credentials in an applicant's admission folder. These folder variables ranged in nature from quantitative measures of academic performance to demographic information and types of extracurricular activity. Two multivariate statistical procedures, Sonquist's Automatic Interaction Detection (AID) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), were used to predict screening decisions. Measures of academic performance and ability proved to be the most effective predictors of screening decision, as evidenced in the final AID tree and the discriminant function.     

When matching up features messes up decisions: The role of feature matching in successive choices.

Two studies examined feature matching in successive judgments. College students in both studies read about 2 apartments with shared positive and unique negative features, and 1 less globally positive apartment with all unique features. In the feature-cancellation condition, participants first saw the shared-features apartments together and then saw the all-unique apartment. In the no-cancellation condition, participants first saw 1 shared-features apartment and the all-unique apartment together and then saw the other shared-features apartment. Shared-features apartments were rated higher when they were not seen together. The all-unique apartment was rated higher when it was seen last, when the first 2 apartments' shared features canceled out. Study 2 replicated Study 1 and also demonstrated that 2 additional variables failed to moderate the effect. Memory measures suggest that shared features are paired up as an organizational strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

HMOs and ESRD: can it work?

Who wins and who loses in the game of managed care and end-stage renal disease? Can capitation fulfill its promise of both improving quality and reducing costs in the chronically ill population? In part II of our interview with Ramon G. Hannah, MD, MS, the Assistant to the Physician Regional Manager of Operations for the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, we discuss the potential for pre-ESRD care, how the risks and rewards of capitation could be shared, and what quality improvement tools can make an impact on ESRD care. The first part of this interview was published in the July issue of NN&I.     

Individual and group reward allocation decisions in two situational contexts: Effects of relative need and performance.

Assessed the effects of relative need and performance information on individual and group reward allocation decisions in 2 situational contexts. 320 male undergraduates, as individuals or in 4-person groups, were asked to divide a reward between either 2 workers who had performed a given task (work situation) or 2 students who had qualified for a particular scholarship. Performance and need information (high vs low levels) about each target person were presented. Performance and need information affected allocation decisions differently in the 2 situations. Individual decisions were affected by the need information to a greater degree than were group decisions, but only in the work situation. A social decision scheme analysis of the group decision process showed that the individual/group difference found for the work situation could be accounted for by the plurality/majority decision rule used by groups. Results are discussed in relation to reward allocation and group decision making in general. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Guilty by association: When one's group has a negative history.

The impact of the history of one's own group's treatment of another group on feelings of collective guilt and behavioral reactions to this guilt were examined in 2 studies. In a laboratory experiment it was shown that it is possible to elicit feelings of group-based guilt and that those are distinct from feelings of personal guilt. In a 2nd study, a field experiment, low-identified group members acknowledged the negative aspects of their own nation's history and felt more guilt compared with high identifiers when both negative and positive aspects of their nation's history were made salient. Perceptions of intragroup variability and out-group compensation closely paralleled the interactive pattern on guilt. Links between social identity theory and the experience of specific emotions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)