How do anticipated short-term costs affect the likelihood of engaging in an activity that has long-term benefits. Five studies investigated the factors that determine (a) how anticipated short-term costs elicit self-control efforts and (b) how self-control efforts eventually diminish the influence of short-term costs on behavior. The studies manipulated short-term costs (e.g., painful medical procedures) and assessed a variety of self-control strategies (e.g., self-imposed penalties for failure to undergo a test). The results show that short-term costs elicit self-control strategies for self rather than others, before rather than after behavior, when long-term benefits are important rather than unimportant and when the costs are moderate rather than extremely small or large. The results also show that the self-control efforts help people act according to their long-term interests. People sometimes know what they prefer but feel uncertain that this is what they will actually do. This uncertainty often reflects feasibility constraints such as lack of opportunity, freedom of choice, or prerequisite skills. In some cases, however, people may know that what they prefer is entirely feasible but may nevertheless suspect that when faced with the actual choice they will be tempted to do something else. A considerable amount of basic and applied research on self-control has investigated how immediate temptations prevent people from acting according to their preferences and has suggested techniques that may help people resist the

Three studies tested the idea that when social identity is salient, group-based appraisals elicit specific emotions and action tendencies toward out-groups. Participants ' group memberships were made salient and the collective support apparently enjoyed by the in-group was measured or manipulated. The authors then measured anger and fear (Studies 1 and 2) and anger and contempt (Study 3), as well as the desire to move against or away from the out-group. Intergroup anger was distinct from intergroup fear, and the inclination to act against the out-group was distinct from the tendency to move away from it. Participants who perceived the in-group as strong were more likely to experience anger toward the out-group and to desire to take action against it. The effects of perceived in-group strength on offensive action tendencies were mediated by anger. The annals of history and contemporary news sources bear overwhelming witness to the variety of ways in which out-groups are devalued, discriminated against, and sometimes decimated by the members of other groups. One group is shunned and avoided, a second economically exploited, another belittled and scapegoated, and yet another systematically murdered. In contributing a social psychological perspective to the understanding of negative intergroup behavior, social psychologists have typically focused on prejudice---a negative evaluation of a group and its members-as the cause of discrimination. Despite the insights provided by such an approach (for reviews, see Brewer & Brown, 1998;

Interruptions have commonly been viewed as negative and as something for managers to control or limit. In this paper, I explore the relationship between interruptions and acquisition ofroutines—a form ofknowledge—by teams. Recent research suggests that interruptions may play an important role in changing organizational routines, and as such may influence knowledge transfer activities. Results suggest that interruptions influence knowledge transfer effort, and both knowledge transfer effort and interruptions are positively related to the acquisition ofnew work routines. I conclude with implications for research and practice.

One popular justification for punishment is the just deserts rationale: A person deserves punishment proportionate to the moral wrong committed. A competing justification is the deterrence rationale: Punishing an offender reduces the frequency and likelihood of future offenses. The authors examined the motivation underlying laypeople’s use of punishment for prototypical wrongs. Study 1 (N � 336) revealed high sensitivity to factors uniquely associated with the just deserts perspective (e.g., offense seriousness, moral trespass) and insensitivity to factors associated with deterrence (e.g., likelihood of detection, offense frequency). Study 2 (N � 329) confirmed the proposed model through structural equation modeling (SEM). Study 3 (N � 351) revealed that despite strongly stated preferences for deterrence theory, individual sentencing decisions seemed driven exclusively by just deserts concerns. There are many situations in which people wish to punish another. When a person is unjustly harmed through assault or robbery, people typically experience a strong desire to punish the offender. From a psychological point of view, what is the source of this motivation, the justification for this behavior? When people, as voters, jurors, and citizens, exact punishment from a perpetrator

Most research to date has approached employee empowerment as an individual-level phenomenon. In this study we proposed a work-unit-level construct, empowerment climate, and tested a multiple-level model integrating macro and micro approaches to empowerment. Empowerment climate was shown to be empirically distinct from psychological empowerment and positively related to manager ratings of work-unit performance. A cross-level mediation analysis using hierarchical linear modeling showed that psychological empowerment mediated the relationships between empowerment climate and individual performance and job satisfaction. Employee empowerment has become a trend over the last decade, approaching the status of a movement or of a fad, depending on one’s perspective (Abrahamson, 1996; Block, 1987). At its core the concept of empowerment involves increased individual motivation at work through the delegation of authority to the lowest level in an organization where a competent decision can be made (Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Thomas & Velthouse, 1990). Thus, the empowerment concept has roots in such substantive issues as intrinsic motivation, job design, participative decision making, social learning theory, and self-management (Liden & Tewksbury, 1995). Empirical support has begun to accumulate regarding the relationship of employee empowerment to important work-related outcomes (Liden,

Inspiration has received little theoretical or empirical attention within psychology. Inspiration is conceptualized herein as a general construct characterized by evocation, motivation, and transcendence. In Studies 1a and 1b, a trait measure of inspiration was developed and was found to have strong psychometric properties. Studies 2a–2c documented a nomological network consistent with the present conceptualization. Study 3 related inspiration to the holding of U.S. patents. Study 4 linked trait inspiration to daily experiences of inspiration, extended the nomological network to the state level, documented antecedents and consequences, and established incremental validity. This research provides a foundation for further study of inspiration, both as a general construct and in specific content domains (e.g., religion, creativity, interpersonal relations). Inspiration is an experience with which we are all familiar. We are inspired when insights or ideas imbue a task with a sense of necessity and excitement. We are inspired when a mentor or role model reveals new possibilities that we would not have recognized on our own. We are inspired when a sense of beauty, truth, or the divine moves us to pursue a goal more important than the mundane concerns that often occupy our minds. Although such experiences of inspiration are no doubt familiar to the psychologist, the topic has received little sustained attention within psychology and has been virtually ignored within personality and motivational psychology. Furthermore, inspiration has typically been conceptualized narrowly within particular content domains (e.g., religious, creative, interpersonal) or theoretical frameworks. We advocate a phenomenon-based approach (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2001) to inspiration that both embraces the breadth of the inspiration concept understood by the layperson and is informed by diverse theoretical perspectives. Our aims in the present research are to offer a conceptualization of inspiration, to validate the inspiration construct, and to establish its importance in mainstream empirical psychology.

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Abstract. Collaborative learning has been hypothesized to be related to the cognitive effort engaged by co-learners to build a shared understanding. The process of constructing this shared understanding requires each team member to build some kind of representation of the behavior, beliefs, knowledge or intentions of other group members. This contribution reports interesting findings regarding to the process of modeling each other. In two empirical studies, we measured the accuracy of the mutual model, i.e. the difference between what A believes B knows, has done or intends to do and what B actually knows, has done or intends to do. In both studies, we found a significant correlation between the accuracy of A's model of B and the accuracy of B's model of A. This leads us to think that the process of modeling one's partners does not simply reflect individual attitudes or skills but emerges as a property of group interactions. We describe on-going studies that explore these preliminary results.

Linear causal models known as structural equation models (SEMs) are widely used for data analysis in the social sciences, economics, and artificial intelligence, in which random variables are assumed to be continuous and normally distributed. This paper deals with one fundamental problem in the applications of SEMs – parameter identification. The paper uses the graphical models approach and provides a procedure for solving the identification problem in a special class of SEMs. 1