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A procedure similar to correspondence training was used to assess the propensity of children to lie under varying levels of adult monitoring. Thirteen children selected pieces of food to be eaten later as a snack, and reported their selections to an experimenter. The manipulation involved reinforcement for reports of having selected a previously unselected food. Eleven of 13 subjects were completely honest with no differences between subjects with a history of frequent lying and subjects with a generally honest history. These data are inconsistent with previously published correspondence training studies. Subjects may have responded to environmental cues that served as discriminative stimuli indicating that subjects' behavior was being monitored. Subjects may have entered the study with a generalized correspondence rule which left their behavior insensitive to contingencies in the protocol. Parental reports of frequent motives for lying and behavior problem scores are also reported. Suggested directions for future research within this paradigm include comparisons across levels of cognitive development, incorporating naturalistic settings with more familiar adults, examining influence of live or symbolic modeling of lying, and using more clearly aversive target behaviors. / Master of Science

The effects of simple physical countermeasures on the validity of the control question test (CQT). a physiological detection of deception (PDD) technique. was investigated in a laboratory mock criae paradigm. Forty-eight Introductory Psychology students served as subjects and were assigned to either an innocent group or to one of three guilty groups. who participated in a mock crime. Two of the guilty groups were trained in a countermeasure technique, either self-induced pain or muscle tension, and were coached as to when to produce responses in order to beat the test. All subjects were motivated to produce truthful responses by the offer of credit points toward their final grades if they were classified as truthful on a subsequent PDD examination. All subjects were given a field type CQT examination by an experienced field PDD examiner. The examiner correctly classified 52% of the subjects, incorrectly classified 61% and called 42% inconclusive. Countermeasure usage did not produce changes in the frequency of either inconclusive of incorrect classifications. Statistically significant differences were found between the innocent and guilty groups in the semi-objective scores and in all of the objectively reduced measures (except heart rate). A significant but small difference was found between the guilty control and the countermeasures groups in finger pulse amplitude but in no other objective measure nor in the semi-objective scores. These results suggest the validity of the CQT to be robust in the face of the countermeasures used. Implications for field use of the CQT were discussed. / M. S.

Children's response to a resistance-to-temptation (RTT) task was investigated under three punishment threat conditions: negative consequence, removing an anticipated reward, and no explicit punishment. Ninety first and second graders participated in the RTT task and seventy-three parents completed the Behavior Assessment System for Children and the Psychopathy Screening Device. As only 4% of children transgressed, results are unclear. Hypotheses tested using approximations of transgression showed no differences in RTT. Children with temperaments characterized by hyperactivity, impulsivity, attention problems, and conduct problems (HIA-CP) had the highest levels of psychopathic traits compared to all others. In addition, spanked children were rated as having significantly more behavioral problems than non-spanked children. Limitations of the current study and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Most of the research conducted to measure credibility has focused on comparing one type of media with another, i.e., newspaper vs. television. Other research has looked into how different target audiences of corporate or company newspapers perceive the credibility of the publication. To date, there has been little research into how the target audiences perceive the credibility of a military installation's command newspaper. This study examined how active-duty Army personnel perceived the credibility of an Army installation's command newspaper; specifically, The Paraglide from Fort Bragg, North Carolina.The study employed the model developed by Meyer (1988) to measure perceptions of credibility. The study also used a model developed by Surlin and Walker (1975) to measure the respondent's self-agreement with how three hypothetical "bad news" stories should and would be covered by the command newspaper. The independent variables for the study were: civilian education level, years of service in the military, and job level/rank. The data was collected using a survey questionnaire distributed to Army units assigned to the 82nd Infantry Division (Airborne). Respondents were directed by their supervisors to complete the survey.The results indicated education level was not significant in perceptions of credibility; years of service was significant in perceptions of credibility; and job level/rank was significant in perceptions of credibility. Additionally, education level, years of service, and job level/rank were all significant in the respondent's self-agreement with how controversial issues were covered, but the significance appeared to be issue dependent. / Department of Journalism

Univ., Diss.--Paris., 2002.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1967. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis explores the use of unstructured data, and specifically textual data, in providing consumer insights and improving business decisions. The thesis consists of two essays. In essay I, I examine how the linguistic similarity between the language used by reviewers of a product and a prospective customer’s own writing style can be leveraged to assess the match between customers and products. Applying tools from machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and computational linguistics to a large-scale dataset from Yelp, I find that the closer the writing style of a restaurant’s past reviews are to a prospective customer’s writing style, the more likely that customer is to write a review for that restaurant. This effect holds across restaurant types and is driven by the linguistic similarity between the customer’s own reviews and positive past reviews for the restaurant. Further, I find that similarity with respect to words related to leisure (e.g., family, wine, beer, weekend), biology (e.g., eat, life, love), as well as swear words are most influential in creating a match between customers and restaurants. In essay II, I examine whether borrowers consciously or not, leave traces of their intentions, circumstances, and personality traits in the text they write when applying for a loan. I find that this textual information has a substantial and significant ability to predict whether borrowers will pay back the loan above and beyond the financial and demographic variables commonly used in models predicting default. Using text-mining and machine-learning tools to automatically process and analyze the raw text in over 120 thousand loan requests from Prosper.com, an online crowdfunding platform, I find that including the textual information in the loan significantly helps predict loan default and can have substantial financial implications. I find that loan requests written by defaulting borrowers are more likely to include words related to their family, mentions of God, the borrower’s financial and general hardship, pleading lenders for help, and short-term focused words. I further observe that defaulting loan requests are written in a manner consistent with the writing style of extroverts and liars.

Personality assessments have a long history in psychology and have become the backbone of the human capital management industry, with the Big-Five model being the most prevalent. The central criticism of personality assessments for employment decisions is validity of responses since applicants for employment often endorse items to make themselves more desirable for hire, referred to as faking behavior. The present study examined faking behavior using the Assess Personality Survey (APS). Using a sample of applicant and incumbent data (N = 8,020), the objective was to identify response difference between applicant and incumbents, and the prevalence of faking behavior in applicants. Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to compare groups. Results indicate a clear distinction between applicant and incumbent response patterns. Additional analyses suggest 6 classes of testing patterns among applicants, and results are compared with previous faking identification procedures to improve criteria used to establish faking behavior in respondents.