We examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task, first under a non-competitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance, men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance. While seventy-three percent of the men select the tournament only thirty-five percent of the women make this choice. This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only play a negligible role. Instead the tournament-entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition. The result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it. * We thank Scott Kinross, who conducted all the experiments reported in this paper, for his excellent research assistance. We thank the editors and the referees who helped us improve the paper. We also

This article reviews the now extensive research literature addressing the impact of accountability on a wide range of social judgments and choices. It focuses on 4 issues: (a) What impact do various accountability ground rules have on thoughts, feelings, and action? (b) Under what conditions will accountability attenuate, have no effect on, or amplify cognitive biases? (c) Does accountability alter how people think or merely what people say they think? and (d) What goals do accountable decision makers seek to achieve? In addition, this review explores the broader implications of accountability research. It highlights the utility of treating thought as a process of internalized dialogue; the importance of documenting social and institutional boundary conditions on putative cognitive biases; and the potential to craft empirical answers to such applied problems as how to structure accountability relationships in organizations. Accountability is a modern buzzword. In education (Fairchild &

Competitive high ranking positions are largely occupied by men, and women remain scarce in engineering and sciences. Explanations for these occupational differences focus on discrimination and preferences for work hours and field of study. We explore an additional explanation, namely that women and men may differ in their selection into competitive environments. Men and women in a laboratory experiment perform a real task under a non-competitive piece rate and a competitive tournament scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance under either of these compensations, there is a substantial gender difference when participants subsequently choose the scheme they want to apply to their next performance. Twice as many men as women choose the tournament over the piece rate. This gender gap in tournament entry is neither explained by performance before nor after the entry decision. Furthermore, while men are more optimistic about their relative performance, differences in beliefs only explain a small share of the gap in tournament entry. In a final task, we find that women are less likely to select tournament compensations even when they select it for past performance. In predicting tournament entry we use the compensation choice for past performance as a control for non-tournament specific gender differences (such as risk aversion, general feedback aversion and overconfidence), and we find a large residual gender effect.

Philosophical theories summarized here include regularity and necessity theories from Hume to the present; manipulability theory; the theory of powerful particulars; causation as connected changes within a defined state of affairs; departures from "normal " events or from some standard for compar-ison; causation as a transfer of something between objects; and causal propagation and production. Issues found in this literature and of relevance for psychology include whether actual causal relations can be perceived or known; what sorts of things people believe can be causes; different levels of causal analysis; the distinction between the causal relation itself and cues to causal relations; causal frames or fields; internal and external causes; and understanding of causation in different realms of the world, such as the natural and artificial realms. A full theory of causal inference by laypeople should address all of these issues. The main purpose of this article is to survey philosophical theories of causation in a manner intended to be suitable for psychologists interested in causation. The article has two sec-tions: The first presents brief summaries of philosophical theo-ries of causation from Aristotle to the present. In the second, issues found in the philosophical literature are used to suggest new approaches to the study of causation in psychology. Philosophical Theories of Causation Several psychologists have written about selected philosophi-cal theories of causation (Cook & Campbell, 1979; Einhorn &

We present three mechanisms of attention shift for autonomous agents within the framework of the SALT model of memory [5]: activationbased attention shift, attention shift by event-driven emotion and attention shift by anticipation-driven emotion. The three mechanisms rely on automatically computed properties of memory (as opposed to deliberative processes).

There is currently a great deal of interest in the development of intelligent agents. While there is little agreement on exactly what constitutes an intelligent agent, many definitions embody a user interface model that differs from the traditional one where users perform tasks with the help of computer-based “tools. " In contrast, the "delegation " model associated with agents is based on entrusting tasks to an autonomous, sometimes anthropomorphized system, whose performance is monitored and evaluated. This change in user interface model is a dramatic one since delegation can be a difficult and often-avoided behavior in humans. Agent interface designs need to overcome well-established drawbacks in delegation. For this purpose, designers should find the management sciences and organizational psychology literatures to be as relevant as that of traditional human factors. This paper describes issues regarding task delegation as they pertain to the design of intelligent agent user interfaces. 1.

Virtual distributed groups must adapt to a number of sociotechnical characteristics in order to relate positively and work effectively over distance. Short-term groups, in particular, experience considerable difficulty in making the adaptations to systems and partners in virtual teams. When adaptation failures occur, such group members are prone to make attributional judgments about distant partners rather than to consider their own adjustment difficulties. However, by redirecting participants ’ attributional attention to situational issues, through experience with local rather than distributed virtual interaction, participants become more effective when they encounter subsequent distributed virtual environments. This report describes the theoretical dynamics and the results of three pilot studies, the data from which, in comparison to one another, begin to substantiate this attributional framework for virtual work groups.

y be factored into the decision more heavily than is price. The execu- tive may choose to ride dow-ntown by taxi and then implement this decision by standing on line and taking a taxi to the hotel. To bring these sorts of decision situations into the laboratory, researchers commonly focused on the goal of obtaining money, which they assume is shared across people. In the prototypical task, subjects are given choice options that differ in probability and amount. The use of gambles enabled researchers to explore decision making under risk. Often, a number of different choices are made in a single experimental session, and the pattern of choices across sets is analyzed. For ample, people might be asked whether they prefer a 45% chance to win $200 or a 50% chance to win $150. Later in the same ses sion, they might be asked whether they prefer a 90% chance to win $200 or a 100% chance to win $150. At issue in studies like these is the consistency of people's choices. The anal- yses would in

This paper argues that an integrated approach to developing computer-based information systems will provide significant benefits to IS/IT professionals, end-users and improve the realization of the business benefits of IT investments. Having made this claim, the paper's central thesis -- that philosophical and conceputal issues must be addressed to provide such integration -- is presented. The philosophical issues identified are then addressed, resulting in a dialectic method for theory development. Using this method as a starting point, the literatures of information systems and several reference disciplines are drawn upon to construct a candidate integrated theory. The relationship between theory are practice is then briefly examined and the practical implications of the theory are considered.

Negotiation theory and research has proliferated over the last several decades, causing Kramer and Messick (1995) to remark that “few areas of conflict research have enjoyed as much vogue…or can claim as much substantive progress, as negotiation theory ” (p. vii). While true, we also contend that the negotiation theory that has evolved over the last 25 years of research in the United States and Northern Europe is laden with values and assumptions that are Western. Though it may be an historical accident that negotiation theory originated and proliferated in the West, a non-Western origin would surely generate a social science that would look very different, because social science theory reflects the dominant patterns of the culture in which it originates (Pruitt, 2004). In this chapter, we take a meta-theoretical approach to the field of negotiation. Our purpose is to identify what the underlying assumptions of negotiation theory might look like from the point of view of non-Western culture, by which we mean primarily, but by no means exclusively, Asian cultures. Our purpose is not to provide a detailed review of all the negotiation and culture literature. Such a review is available in our edited volume Handbook of Negotiation and Culture (Gelfand & Brett, 2004). The Handbook has chapters on cognition, motivation, emotion, communication, conflict management, context, etc. Each chapter by a negotiation scholar is paired with a chapter by a scholar who studies culture and negotiation. In reading the Handbook, it is clear that the two sets of scholars are often working from contrasting assumptions about what is normative for social interaction. We begin by defining culture and explaining the role of fundamental cultural assumptions in organizing social interaction. We then identify five assumptions that dominate Western culture theorizing about negotiations. We examine each assumption in terms of the fundamental problem of social interaction to which the assumption is a response, refer to the research that relies on the assumption, explain how the assumption reflects Western cultural traditions, describe an alternative