Effects of a symbolic model's originality, sex and doodles on original responses

In order to assess the effects of a written model upon the originality of responses to three tasks, 90 male and 107 female college students were randomly assigned to see responses of an original or unoriginal male or female model with or without accompanying doodles. Those seeing an original model gave more original responses and those seeing an unoriginal model gave more common responses, but there were no sex effects or interactions and only slight support for the idea that seeing a model's doodles will increase imitation of his behavior.

Stereotypes of athletes

To ascertain whether racial and sexual stereotypes of athletes exist, 140 female junior high school students rated six descriptions of athletes which were presented as pertaining to a male or female Black, Chicano, or Anglo athlete. No evidence for ethnic or sexual stereotyping was found, although descriptions of athletes in different sports were rated differently.

Models and creativity

In order to determine whether exposure to a symbolic model could affect creative behavior, 130 male and female college students were randomly exposed to a prolific divergent thinking model, a prolific convergent thinking model, an inadequate convergent thinking model or no model on an unusual uses task. On identical, similar, and generalization tasks, Ss exposed to either convergent model tended to show more convergent responses and fewer divergent responses than those exposed to a divergent thinking model. On 4 of the 9 measures females had significantly higher scores than males, but there were no significant sex by treatment interactions.

A self-control approach to reducing smoking

A self-control program for reducing smoking which emphasized the use of record-keeping, positive reinforcement, punishment, stimulus control, breaking up the chain of behaviors, and other behavior modification techniques was developed and tried out with 5 Ss. The flexibility and economy of such a program suggest that more widespread tests of its effectiveness would be worthwhile.

The portly psychologist, or, on the perils of using a control group

A questionnaire was sent to people who had requested reprints of an article on weight control as well as to a control group of people who requested reprints of articles on other topics. Although a majority of people who requested the weight-control paper reported that they had a weight problem, were overweight, had an overweight friend or relative, etc., the control group reported an equal preoccupation with obesity; in fact, the two groups did not differ on any measure except frequency of openended comments. The results imply that adequate control groups should be used whenever possible in generalizing about characteristics of groups.