Scott PlousWesleyan University · Department of Psychology
Scott Plous
PhD
About
47
Publications
18,884
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Introduction
I serve as Executive Director of Social Psychology Network, a nonprofit educational organization founded in 1996. With over 11,000 members from more than 160 countries, SPN promotes peace, social justice, and sustainable living through education, research, and the advancement of psychology. For more information, please visit: http://www.socialpsychology.org/
Education
September 1981 - January 1986
Publications
Publications (47)
How can we best internationalize undergraduate psychology education in the United States and elsewhere? This question is more timely than ever, for at least 2 reasons: Within the United States, educators and students seek greater contact with psychology programs abroad, and outside the United States, psychology is growing apace, with educators and...
Some years ago, I was grading final papers for a seminar I teach on the psychology of prejudice, and I noticed an usually eloquent passage from a student who was not an especially strong writer. At first I was impressed with the poetic quality of the passage, but the more I thought about it, the less sure I was that this particular student could ha...
Describes several benefits of using the World Wide Web (Web) for instructional purposes, and offers 8 tips on how to create and maintain an educational Web site. The author notes that most of these tips are easy to implement if readers have a basic grasp of hypertext markup language (HTML), the language most Web pages are written in. For readers wh...
Action teaching refers to a style of instruction that contributes to peace, social justice, and sustainable living at the same time as it educates students. For example, a peace educator who practices action teaching might follow a course unit on mediation techniques by inviting students to mediate actual conflicts between friends, family members,...
American society uses millions of animals each day for food, recreation, and a variety of other purposes, yet psychologists—in contrast to other social scientists—have devoted very little attention to studying how people think about their use of animals. In this article, I propose that many factors supporting the use of animals are psychological in...
Recent evidence suggests that racial and gender biases in magazine advertisements may be increasing. To explore this possibility, a content analysis was performed on 10 years of fashion advertisements drawn from magazines geared toward White women, Black women, or White men (N= 1,800 advertisements from 1985–1994). The results indicated that (a) ex...
Edited by award-winning author Scott Pious,
Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination is unlike any other anthology on the topic of prejudice. With selections that range from classics by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gordon Allport; to contemporary essays by scholars such as Stephen Jay Gould, Claude Steele, and Peggy McIntosh, the anthology inclu...
A random sample of 50 Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs) participated in a study of the protocol review process. Each committee submitted three animal behavior protocols it had recently reviewed, and these protocols were reviewed a second time by another participating committee. The results reported in this [Policy Forum][1] show...
In the News of the Week article “Researchers fight plan to regulate mice, birds” (6 Oct., p. [23][1]), David Malakoff portrays animal researchers as being “furious” with a decision by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to add mice, rats, and birds to the list of animals protected under the
Nearly 50 years ago, a program of Lewinian "action research" explored the most effective way to respond to prejudiced comments (Citron, Chein, & Harding, 1950). In this article, I describe a classroom adaptation of that research in which students receive 10 scenarios involving a prejudiced comment and rotate playing 1 of 3 roles (prejudiced speaker...
As part of a recent survey of IACUC members, the authors questioned respondents about their attitudes concerning including rats, mice, and birds under the AWA definition of "warm blooded animals," and present the results of this survey.
In 1990, an attitude survey was conducted of 402 animal rights activists attending a national march in Washington, DC (S. Plous, 1991). The present article reports the results of a follow-up survey of 372 activists attending a similar event in 1996. A comparison of the 1990 and 1996 surveys suggests that during this time a significant shift took pl...
Responds to the comments of Y.-F. Lau and C. Cheney (see record 1998-02643-001) regarding S. Plous's (see records 84-20622 and 84-09797) articles on animal research in psychology. Addressing each of the points raised by Lau and Cheney, Plous summarizes that the methodological critique they offer is flawed on several grounds. Plous agrees, however,...
Responds to the comments of Y.-F. Lau and C. Cheney (see record
1998-02643-001) regarding S. Plous's (see records 84-20622 and 84-09797) articles on animal research in psychology. Addressing each of the points raised by Lau and Cheney, Plous summarizes that the methodological critique they offer is flawed on several grounds. Plous agrees, however,...
In recent years, affirmative action has been debated more intensely than at any other time in its 35-year history. Many supporters view affirmative action as a milestone, many opponents see it as a millstone, and many others regard it as both or neither--as a necessary, but imperfect, remedy for an intractable social disease. My own view is that th...
Animal research has played a central role in psychology, yet its clinical value and ethical propriety have recently come under attack. In an effort to assess current thinking on this controversial subject, a mail survey was sent to 5,000 randomly selected members of the American Psychological Association. Responses were received from 3,982 individu...
Animal research has played a central role in psychology, yet its clinical value and ethical propriety have recently come under attack. In an effort to assess current thinking on this controversial subject, a mail survey was sent to 5,000 randomly selected members of the American Psychological Association. Responses were received from 3,982 individu...
Animal research has played a central role in psychology, yet its clinical value and ethical propriety have recently come under attack. In an effort to assess current thinking on this controversial subject, a mail survey was sent to 5,000 randomly selected members of the American Psychological Association. Responses were received from 3,982 individu...
This article reports the results of a national survey in which psychology majors were asked about the use of animals in psychological research and teaching. In general, the attitudes of psychology majors closely resembled the attitudes of practicing psychologists. Students tended to (a) support animal experiments involving observation or confinemen...
Self-enhancement biases have been found in a variety of self-rated skills, traits, and abilities, yet past research has not examined whether people show such biases in ratings of their social concern and activism. In the present paper, we report the results of two surveys on this question. In the first survey, 549 adults rated their level of concer...
The present experiments examined several strategies designed to reduce interval overconfidence in group judgments. Results consistently indicated that 3–4-person nominal groups (whose members made independent judgments and later combined the highest and lowest of these estimates into a single confidence interval) were better calibrated than individ...
Despite the importance of dietary factors in treating and preventing heart disease, relatively little work has explored how well cardiac patients understand the nutrition information they are given. This study was designed to assess the nutrition knowledge and attitudes of cardiac patients.
An onsite survey was administered to patients who were wai...
During the days of American slavery, many whites held stereotypes of blacks as inferior, unevolved, and apelike. The present study was designed to see whether such stereotypes persist in contemporary American society. A random-digit telephone survey was conducted of 1,490 Connecticut residents, resulting in completed interviews with 686 respondents...
Traditionally, the most common game-theoretic model of the Soviet-US nuclear arms race has been an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. According to such a model, on any given trial both superpowers are better off arming regardless of what the other side chooses, but if both sides arm the outcome is less desirable than had both sides reduced their supply o...
Although it is virtually impossible to live in American society without relying on animals to some extent, psychologists have been slow to study the role animals play in human society. The present articles are intended to redress this lack of coverage and to stimulate future research in this area. Three general topics are examined: human-animal rel...
How do people make decisions? How do they sift through the information without drowning in a sea of alternatives? And what are the factors that lead them in a certain direction?
This book offers some tentative answers. It is a book intended for nonspecialists who would like an introduction to psychological research on judgment and decision making...
How do people make decisions? How do they sift through the information without drowning in a sea of alternatives? And what are the factors that lead them in a certain direction?
This book offers some tentative answers. It is a book intended for nonspecialists who would like an introduction to psychological research on judgment and decision making...
Field surveys and anecdotal evidence suggest that supporters and opponents of a given technology tend to draw opposite conclusions from noncatastrophic breakdowns. Three studies confirmed this tendency by presenting supporters and opponents of a particular technology with identical descriptions of various technological breakdowns. As predicted, the...
Animal rights activism is increasing rapidly, yet no empirical research has sought to determine who the animal rights activists are, what they believe, and what they hold as their agenda. An attitude survey was therefore conducted of 402 animal rights activists who attended a recent rally in Washington. Results indicated that nearly half of these a...
“Anchoring” results from insufficient adjustment up or down from an original— often arbitrary—starting value. Six sets of surveys were designed to assess the effects of anchoring on subjective likelihood estimates of a nuclear war. Based on responses from 1600 students, results indicated that: (a) likelihood estimates were strongly susceptible to a...
The present paper differentiates the political objectives of nuclear disarmament, nuclear arms control, and peace, and it selectively reviews psychological research relevant to each of these areas. The term nuclear disarmament—originally intended to indicate the complete elimination of nuclear weapons—is now commonly used to describe the reduction...
Traditionally, the most common game-theoretic model of the nuclear arms race has been the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which participants are bound in conflict by the structure of the situation. Recent evidence suggests, however, that the nuclear arms race may be better approximated by a “Perceptual Dilemma” arising from discrepant perceptions of various...
We assessed the attributional style of psychoanalysts, behavior therapists, and nontherapists by using a mail survey. Respondents listed causal explanations for three hypothetical problems experienced by either themselves, their friends, or their clients. Results indicated that (a) psychoanalysts gave more dispositional explanations than situationa...
Assessed the attributional style of 30 psychoanalysts, 32 behavior therapists, and 78 nontherapist undergraduates by using a mail survey. Ss listed causal explanations for 3 hypothetical problems experienced by either themselves, their friends, or their clients. Results indicate that (a) psychoanalysts gave more dispositional explanations than situ...
Past research on game theory has used the Prisoner's Dilemma as a model of the nuclear arms race between the superpowers. According to such a model, the United States and the Soviet Union are always better off individually by arming, but if both superpowers arm, the outcome is lower in utility than if both countries disarm. Using survey data from t...
The acute problem with respect to nuclear weapons is not their existence, but their numbers. Six strategic and psychological difficulties inherent in current solutions to this problem are examined, followed by a new and somewhat different proposal. The new proposal consists of a 10-year, bilateral agreement between the United States and the Soviet...
A representative sample of a decade of contributors to the journals Behavior Therapy, Behaviour Research and Therapy, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry was asked to report on their motivations for conducting studies that had been published in that journal. Results indicated that the...