Search results

AbstractBorn of a growing national demand for accountability, the field of evaluation has itself become increasingly suspect. Distinguishing between ethical standards and methodological guidelines may aid in the evaluation of evaluators.

The present paper attempts to employ aspects of the incentive-dissonance controversy regarding the effects of monetary reward in a discussion of the relationship between the likeability or attractiveness of a source and his persuasiveness. To this end 'persuasive communication' and 'forced compliance' are distinguished as two paradigms of social influence. The case is made that a positive attractiveness-persuasiveness relationship follows an incentive rule and has been most strongly supported in the persuasive communication context. In contrast, a negative attractiveness-persuasiveness relation follows a dissonance rule and emerges from the forced-compliance literature. Balance terminology is utilized to molecularly analyze this problem, the separation of 'liking' and 'unit' relations being especially useful in our attempts to diagram the dynamics of forced compliance. Such analysis allows a diagrammatical comparison of the persuasive communication and forced compliance paradigms. In general, our interpretation suggests that the traditional 'positive product' rule for balance is best applied to the persuasive communication paradigm while a 'negative product' rule is most profitably applied to the forced compliance paradigm. What mediates these diverse situations, we suggest, is the formation of a personal unit relation (i.e., p produces the discrepant event through his own actions). Antecedents to personal unit formation are discussed for both paradigms as are applications of our analysis to the general dissonance-incentive controversy.

Students in a high rise dormitory complex were surveyed to investigate the effects of floor height, view, and sex on perceptions of spaciousness and lightness of a room and evaluations of its decor. Height, and not view per se, was related to perceived spaciousness of one's room, with women on higher floors reporting their rooms more spacious than those on lower floors. Opposite results were obtained for men. Further, there were fewer posters and wall hangings on the upper floors than on the lower floors, and women were found to spend more time in their rooms and to decorate them more than men. Of related interest: while men showed no preference for a social or spatial definition of crowding, women significantly preferred a spatial definition. These findings are related to an optimal level of stimulation model and to sex differences in the dormitory literature.