Angelo Strenta’s research while affiliated with Dartmouth College and other places

Observers viewed a videotape in which an able-bodied person was shown giving positive, neutral, negative, or evaluatively mixed performance feedback to either a handicapped or a nonhandicapped individual. Subjects were less likely to perceive positive feedback provided to handicapped performers as indicative of task accomplishment than when the same feedback was administered to able bodied individuals. In addition, feedback that included both praise and criticism was (a) seen to be more contingent on actual performance than consistent feedback, whatever its valence, and (b) viewed as a relatively effective strategy for improving performance.

After people work on unsolvable problems, they often perform poorly on a subsequent task. Egotism explains this decrement as the result of a strategy of low effort designed to blunt an attribution of poor ability should failure occur on the new task. The egotism explanation predicts that adding an element alleged to inhibit performance allows Ss to try without fear of an attribution of low ability. In contrast, learned helplessness predicts that adding an allegedly inhibitory element should lower the expectancy of control, making performance worse than usual. A 3rd explanation is "negativity." Like egotism, it predicts improved performance if an element said to inhibit performance is introduced, but for a different reason: to produce results opposite to the experimenter's suggestion. Unlike egotism, the negativity hypothesis predicts that adding an allegedly facilitating element will worsen performance. 50 college students were given either solvable or unsolvable concept formation problems and then worked on anagrams with or without music said to be distracting. In addition, there was a 5th condition in which Ss were given unsolvable problems followed by music said to facilitate performance. The performance decrement occurred only in the no-music condition, supporting the egotism explanation. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

24 female undergraduates were led to believe that they were perceived as physically deviant in the eyes of an interactant when in fact they were not. Following a brief discussion, they commented on those aspects of the interactant's behavior that appeared to be linked to the deviance. Ss who thought that they possessed negatively valued physical characteristics found strong reactivity to the deviance in the behavior of their interactant, whereas those with a more neutrally valued characteristic did not. An expectancy/perceptual bias explanation is advanced to account for these results, although experimental demand is also a plausible interpretation. Study 2, with 50 male and female Ss, reaffirmed that both the expectancy and the demand explanations were plausible. Study 3 with 30 female Ss used a new set of instructions devised to test the competing explanations. Results strongly undermine a demand interpretation of the original results. In Study 4, with 32 female Ss, persons who had observed the behavior of the interactants in Study 1 via videotape also perceived greater reactivity to an imputed negative form of deviance than to a neutral one. Data support the notion that the results of Studies 1 and 3 reflect the operation of an expectancy/perceptual bias mechanism and tend to rule out a self-fulfilling prophecy dynamic. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

We demonstrated a general strategy for detecting motives that people wish to conceal. The strategy consists of having people choose between two alternatives, one of which happens to satisfy the motive. By counterbalancing which one does so, it is possible to distill the motive by examining the pattern of choices that people make. The motive used in the demonstration is the desire we believe most people have to avoid the physically handicapped. Because they do not wish to reveal this desire, we predicted that they would be more likely to act on it if they could appear to choose on some other basis. In two studies we found that people avoided the handicapped more often if the decision to do so was also a decision between two movies and avoidance of the handicapped could masquerade as a movie preference.

Conducted 2 experiments with a total of 64 undergraduates to demonstrate a general strategy for detecting motives that people wish to conceal. The strategy involves having people choose between 2 alternatives, one of which happens to satisfy the motive. By counterbalancing which one does so, it is possible to distill the motive by examining the pattern of choice that people make. The motive employed was the desire to avoid the physically handicapped. It was predicted that because most people would not wish to reveal this desire, they would be more likely to act on it if they could appear to be choosing on some other basis. Results show that Ss avoided the handicapped more often if the decision to do so was also a decision between 2 movies and avoidance of the handicapped could masquerade as a movie preference. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).