Decision makers often display bounded awareness – a tendency to miss or overlook easily accessible, critical information and contextual cues – and make suboptimal decisions. In popular parlance, these defective attentional strategies that seem astonishing with the benefit of hindsight have been described with terms such as “tunnel vision” or “wearing blinders”. In my dissertation, I examine whether certain types of motivational tools commonly used by organizations increase the tendency for bounded awareness. Specifically, using laboratory experiments, I demonstrate that winner-takes-all type of incentive schemes, social comparison, and specific and challenging goals result in excessive and rigid focusing (e.g., on performance benchmarks stated in goals and/or performing better than rivals), decrease scanning of the social context for relevant information, impair ability to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity, and negatively affect decision making performance. These findings indicate that these types of motivational tools should be used with care in managerial and higher-level work where detection of new opportunities, threats and shifts in the organizational environment are of utmost importance. Furthermore, results show that variable reward schemes, broadly-defined goals, and an emphasis on individual performance and accomplishments (compared to an emphasis on performance relative to others) are more effective in inducing flexible, sophisticated attentional strategies. In addition to contributing to the literature on motivation, goal-setting, competition and decision making, results add to a growing body of research on inattentional blindness by exploring the properties of social context (instead of the properties of the stimuli/information) that affect individuals’ ability to notice important information or contextual cues. / Organizational Behavior

Women are significantly underrepresented in senior-level positions within organizations. A great deal of research has provided evidence that both demand-side factors (e.g., bias and discrimination) and supply-side factors (e.g., the different behavioral tendencies of men and women) significantly contribute to this gender disparity. However, demand- and supply-side factors are inextricably linked, such that differences in supply-side behaviors are often elicited in response to the divergent demand-side treatment that members of each gender receive. The aim of the current research was to investigate whether men and women’s goals, which are a strong predictor of downstream behavior, are similarly affected by differences in the ways that men and women are evaluated and treated. Thus, across 12 studies, employing a total of 6,245 participants, we examined differences in the professional advancement goals, perceptions, and behaviors exhibited by men and women. Our findings reveal that, compared to men, women view attaining power at work as less of a goal and opportunities for professional advancement as less desirable. To explore what may be shaping these differential objectives, we examined four potential contributing factors: (i) perceived attainability, (ii) perceptions of negative outcomes, (iii) perceptions of resistance and backlash to one’s ideas and abilities, and (iv) perceived belonging among one’s coworkers. While we found no gender difference for perceptions of attainability, resistance and backlash, or belonging, women did anticipate more negative outcomes (i.e., conflict amongst one’s goals, trade-offs, time constraints, and sacrifice) being associated with a promotion or high-power job opportunity. Moreover, these perceptions explained the relationship between women’s reduced desire for and pursuit of opportunities related to career advancement. These results are in line with the disproportionate level of domestic responsibilities placed on women as well as the conflicting nature of what it means to be a leader and what it means to be a woman from a societal expectations standpoint. Past research has shown that women’s perceptions of this imbalance and incongruity exert considerable influence over their behavior, but the current research suggests that this role conflict manifests itself on an even deeper level, by influencing the underlying goals that women have for themselves. / Organizational Behavior

Our understanding of the relationship between risk factors and resilience has been framed primarily by probability. Resilience has been conceptualized as “beating the odds”: doing better than our statistical predictions would expect given the amount of risk the individual has faced. Undoubtedly, this research has offered a rich picture into trajectories of psychosocial development. However, it has limited our exploration of the mechanisms that explain why risk factors result in resilience. Context-driven work exploring these mechanisms has been limited by the subjective nature of risk factors. In order to extend our understanding of risk factors and resilience we have to understand the difference between actual and statistical risk; we have to understand how individuals make meaning of risk factors within the different ecological systems in their lives. In this study I explore how 38 inner-city charter school youth (ages 16-21) make meaning of self-identified negative life experiences. The school serves youth who have previously dropped out or have been expelled from high school. Additionally, the youth at this school reported a high level of risk factors by most objective standards. Using a mix of narrative writing and interviews, I explored (1) what events the youth self-reported as being detrimental, (2) what themes emerged in the youth’s discussion of the impact of these experiences, and (3) what discourses the youth used in discussing the impact of a particularly persistent experience: the loss of a biological parent. My analysis revealed that the youth framed their meaning around three questions: why have I been affected, how do I make sense of it, and what has changed in my life? In doing this they tried to create new meaning of negative life events, sometimes by internalizing or redefining life experiences. I discuss how meaning-making could be a constructivist mechanism that helps engender resilience; resilience could be explained by the ease with which the discrepancy between global meaning (i.e., schema that orients our understanding of the world) and situational meaning (of a stressful event) is resolved. I discuss the implications of this theory-generating work for future research and school-based practice. / Human Development and Education

European nations, built on democratic foundations, rely on participation that is inclusive of all groups. Among efforts to support social cohesion in Europe, investigating the development of intercultural attitudes—attitudes toward others on the basis of their intersecting group memberships—is a crucial area of research. Further, examining attitudes among adolescents is useful because of their growing capacity to understand complex systems, while still being engaged in formal education in which interventions aimed at developing positive attitudes are often applied. In this dissertation, I used data from the 2009 IEA ICCS (International Civic and Citizenship Education Study) to examine determinants of intercultural attitudes among adolescents (n=16,847) in seven countries across Europe—the United Kingdom (England only), Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Bulgaria, Poland, and Greece—focusing on cultural contexts and school climates. First, I established the measurement invariance of a variety of measures of intercultural attitudes to support the validity of cross-cultural comparison, using a novel approach in the Bayesian framework. Using this method, I was able to validly compare intercultural attitudes across contexts in Europe, and these findings are interpreted and discussed. Then, I examined the ways in which intergroup contact, gender, and school climates were associated with intergroup attitudes across these seven countries. I found limited evidence of an association between native-born and immigrant contact and positive intercultural attitudes. However, I found that positive intercultural attitudes were consistently associated with positive and democratic school climates, as well as with gender and attitudes toward gender equality. In this dissertation, I present these findings, as well as provide interpretation, discussion, and future directions with regard to educational interventions. / Culture, Communities, and Education

Conceptions of learning have evolved from behaviorist and mechanistic models to models that are dynamic, complex, and process-oriented. Educators’ and researchers’ understanding of teaching can benefit from a similar evolution, one that embodies teaching as a dynamic, cognitive skill. Because teaching is an inherently interactive phenomenon, it can be characterized as a social-emotional cognitive skill. Using a dynamic systems and social-emotional cognitive lens, in this dissertation, I describe two studies that explored teaching from these perspectives. The first, presented in Chapter 2, used structured cognitive interviews to elicit expert teachers’ reflections on their teaching processes, as well as to illuminate the interactive nature of these processes and the factors that influence the teachers’ capabilities. In the second study, presented in Chapter 3, I borrowed methods from interactive social-emotional cognitive studies to identify periods of psychophysiologic synchrony between the teachers and students to determine if these correlated with their relational experiences. Five themes, or awarenesses, emerged from the interview data: (a) awareness of learner (AoL), (b) awareness of teaching practice (AoTP), (c) awareness of context (AoC), (d) awareness of self as a teacher (AoST), and (e) awareness of interaction (AoI). Within each theme, I identified several categories that characterized the teachers’ reflections on the individual social-emotional cognitive processes employed during teaching. These data show that expert teaching leverages a complex, social-emotional cognitive framework to achieve learning goals. In the second study, I observed significant increases of psychophysiologic synchrony in the teacher–student dyads that were engaged in a supported teaching task. This elevated synchrony was correlated with multiple domains of two established measures of individual social-emotional cognition. Moreover, after dividing the data by the median of achieved synchrony into an upper and lower group, strong but unique correlation patterns were observed between the teacher–student synchrony and the social-emotional cognitive survey measures. In particular, several student measures of the teachers’ perspective taking demonstrated inverse associations between the lower and upper 50th percentiles of synchrony. These data indicated that the ability to create synchrony during supported interactions was connected to the teacher’s distinct social-emotional cognitive capacity. These results also support the potential neurobiologic and psychophysiologic bases of teachers’ social-emotional cognitive processing. Together, these two studies represent an initial step along a larger trajectory of future research that could advance the conception of teaching as a social-emotional cognitive skill that develops as a complex system.

Measuring health through surveys is challenging. Participants may respond in a socially favorable but untruthful way, and responses across respondents may be difficult to compare. List experiments and anchoring vignette techniques have been proposed to improve survey measures, and this dissertation applied qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate either the usefulness or validity of those techniques. The first paper explored how list-based questions perform compared to direct questions when measuring two behaviors, smoking and intravenous infusion use. The difference-in-differences between the two survey methods and two behaviors was non-significant. List experiments might introduce downward biases rather than alleviate them due to cognitive difficulty in responding. The second paper applied cognitive interviewing to the design of vignettes among Chinese students with objectively different visual acuities. Ten major problems were identified regarding vignette comprehension, judgment, and responses. Respondents rated vignette character’s vision differently from their own, demonstrating a norm of being “strict with oneself and lenient towards others” in an Asian context. The third paper assessed the validity of three vignette survey methods (i.e., indirect comparison between self and vignettes, direct comparison between self and vignettes, and self-assessment primed by vignettes) in measuring distance vision. Surprisingly, it was found that vignette methods were not improvements over self-assessment, and indirect comparison performed the worst. These three studies shed light on a series of cognitive difficulties related to advanced survey techniques. Traditional self-assessment may be as useful as the list experiment and more valid than some anchoring vignette techniques in these studies’ context. / Global Health and Population

This dissertation examines the stigmatization of two health conditions: mental disability and physical disability in the context of China. In particular, it addresses two main themes: the processes and impacts of stigma, and the variables that moderate the association of stigma with social attributes. The first paper applied a qualitative approach to identify the sources of burdens of raising a child with cerebral palsy in China and how stigma and “face” as a cultural factor affect children with cerebral palsy and their families. The findings showed that families with children of cerebral palsy report tremendous financial burdens, insufficient educational and medical services, as well as discrimination among family members and communities. An overwhelming majority of caregivers reported to have had the feeling of “loss of face,” while family members considered the child with cerebral palsy as “useless” and “burdensome.” Their common remarks o “send away the child to orphanage” and “give another birth to a normal child”, reinforced caregivers’ feeling of helplessness, and put many family relationships to an end. The second and third papers on stigma and mental illness studied the underlying social determinants of public stigma and the variations in the general public’s attitudes and reactions toward people with mental illness. Using a population-based stratified sample of 3703 adults from the Stigma in Global Context-Mental Health Study, paper II investigated social attributes, stigma, and the links between them. Paper III assessed how demographics and geographical location structured public perceptions and reactions towards people with mental illness. Findings from paper II indicated that Chinese are less willing to interact with people with depression and schizophrenia than those with a physical illness. Depressive disorders had more rejections than schizophrenia in this study. Age, education, and place of residence among respondents had significant association with public stigma. The label of “mental illness” and perception of dangerousness had significant negative association on social stigma. Findings from paper III indicated that social distance had a significant association with regional context, which suggests that public stigma exists at larger cultural levels. Our findings help inform specific factors in the pursuit of tackling structural discrimination.

<p> Donor behavior in the non-profit organizational environment is a complex matrix of social influences that include social expectations from social media sites, direct cohort and peer influence, and perceptions of organizational performance, transparency and fundraising expenditures. A widespread general problem in non-profit organizations (NPOs) is that organizational members (cohorts) can exert an influence on the donor behavior of others, and organizational fundraising objectives can be adversely impacted. The purpose of this research was to identify those predictor characteristics that negatively influence donor behavior and would assist in minimizing costs associated with fundraising. I employed a quantitative study using a correlational design of multivariate analyses to identify a set of predictor characteristics originating from the influence of organizational cohorts on donor behavior. This study used a modified original survey to collect data from 244 non-randomized participants from the State of Colorado who donated to non-profit organizations (NPOs) in the last year. </p><p> A series of backward regressions produced five statistically significant models that showed positive correlations among the fifteen dependent variables that were included in the survey. In addition, the statistical evidence (p >.001) provided additional support for the three alternate hypotheses in all three research questions. In this study, I attempt to provide correlations that serve as predictor characteristics of cohort influence in the non-profit organizational environment. This data also provides additional information on donation behavior patterns for the three-key areas of interest: Donation Amounts, donation frequency, and volunteer hours. Additional research across other demographic and geographic areas is recommended.</p><p>

Abstract not available.

The effectiveness of an interactive computer game designed to alert children to dangers on the Internet and to encourage them to develop their own guidelines for Internet safety is assessed. Pre- and post-test data were collected from a treatment (n = 181) and comparison group (n = 157) of Grade 6 and 7 students from 8 elementary schools in and around a large Western Canadian city. Reported frequencies of risky online behaviours, Internet safety-related attitudes, and number of Internet safety guidelines were measured in a questionnaire format. Initial frequencies of risky online behaviours and attitudes were quite low, making it difficult to demonstrate change due to playing the computer game. Subjects who had played the game, however, wrote more Internet safety guidelines than did those who had not. These positive results for the safety guidelines provide promising initial evidence that this computer game can be used effectively as part of an Internet safety program in schools. Methodological limitations are discussed to provide direction for future research in this area.