Investigating influences of incentives on implicit attitudes toward body size

The Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) was designed to detect relational responding that cannot easily be accessed via traditional survey methods. The IRAP requires participants to meet speed and accuracy criteria during practice trials before proceeding to test trials, which has resulted in an attrition rate of approximately 20%, on average, in the existing research. Variables affecting the attrition rate have not been systematically investigated. I examined the influence of incentives (in this case a $20 voucher contingent on meeting performance criteria) on attrition rate and other IRAP performance measures. In addition, I examined whether the IRAP would reveal an implicit anti-fat bias in 82 university students. I found significant differences in the performance of the incentive group compared to the control group in their response accuracy and measurement of their implicit bias. The results indicated higher levels of bias compared with those from previous research studies, particularly in the incentive group. I did not find statistically significant differences in the attrition rate but found a low attrition rate in both groups. This study reveals the utility of incentives for improving performance on the IRAP, a procedure that demands accurate responses under time pressure for assessing spontaneous relational responding

Mind reading as behaviour reading: Behavour analysis and perspective taking

Theory of Mind (ToM) presents perspective-taking as an ability to infer another person’s mental state. Researchers in various fields have searched for evidence of ToM in both human and non-human subjects; however, this approach is highly “mentalistic,” and rarely scrutinized in the relevant literature. Attempts to identify the behavioural functions of the stimuli involved in perspective taking are still in their infancy. My primary aim was to evaluate and further refine existing behavioural approaches to perspective taking. I focused on the environmental settings required for a person to engage in deriving a perspective of another person, and how the acquired stimulus functions are generalised to novel contexts. First, I examined the integrity of the concept of “deictic framing,” which proposes that deictic expressions (I-You, Here-There, Now-Then) are the core components of perspective-taking behaviour, as defined within relational frame theory (RFT). Participants were first trained with the existing deictic-framing protocol with and without the deictic expressions. I then measured response generalisation using two different tasks designed to measure perspective taking: a visuospatial and an implicit relational assessment procedure (IRAP). No evidence of response generalisation to the other tasks was observed. Additionally, there was no difference in the performance of the participants in the two experimental groups, suggesting that deictic expressions do not have their claimed core status in perspective taking. Secondly, I examined the Relational Triangulation (RT) framework to investigate whether a specific stimulus function (i.e., perspective) would be derived in accordance with contextual stimuli bearing same and oppositional relational properties. The findings supported the broader applicability of the RT framework; however, there are many perspective-taking tasks that are beyond its scope. After considering the findings from these two experiments, I developed the proposition that we can treat perspective taking as problem-solving behaviour because there are considerable overlaps between the core behaviour relevant to various perspective-taking and problem-solving tasks, including stimulus generalisation of relevant stimuli, simple and complex discriminative stimulus functions, and relational responses. Based on this conceptual analysis, I hypothesised that a common false-belief task, the Sally-Anne test, can be represented and evaluated purely by using the concept of stimulus control. I used a conditional discrimination task in which reinforcement for identifying an individual’s false belief depended on a stimulus change in a given setting. Participants completed a non-verbal computer task and selected a particular stimulus dependent on certain stimulus changes, replicating the conditional discriminative stimuli available in this false-belief task. Approximately 61% of participants in Experiment 1 and 88% in Experiment 2 successfully discriminated the pattern of stimulus changes. In conclusion, analysis of the stimulus functions involved in deriving another’s perspective suggests that mind-reading is in fact a type of behaviour-reading. With this functional definition, we can help to address the practical challenge of resolving perspective-taking deficits in a range of contexts

Influences of monetary incentives on Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) performance

Performance-based incentives may improve the validity of results from implicit attitude assessment tasks and improve attrition rates. Participants working to obtain the incentive may be less likely to edit their responses to conform to social expectations and more likely to meet experimental inclusion criteria. We examined the influences of a monetary incentive ($20 voucher) for fast and accurate performance on an Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) task evaluating implicit attitudes about bodyweight. We randomly assigned 82 university students to incentive and control (non-incentive) groups. Although there was no significant effect on accuracy or latency measures, participants in the incentive group displayed a significantly stronger bias against overweight individuals than did participants in the control group. There were no differences between groups with respect to attitudes toward slim individuals. More participants in the incentive group (97.5%) met performance criteria than in the control group (87.8%). These results suggest that incentives for meeting performance criteria may reduce the attrition rate and increase the validity of the IRAP and other implicit measures, but additional research is required to determine the predictive validity of implicit attitude assessments with and without performance-based incentives

Deictic Framing Performance Fails to Generalize to Other Perspective-Taking Tasks

The behavioral processes underlying perspective taking have not been studied extensively. One approach to understanding and enhancing perspective taking, deictic framing, has been proposed. Proponents of this approach have suggested that deictic framing is a core property of perspective taking. A training protocol based on deictic framing has been developed and tested, but researchers generally evaluate the effectiveness of the protocol using tasks that have a similar format to the training protocol. Little research has examined the protocol’s effectiveness for improving performance in different perspective-taking tasks. We investigated generalization of the performance of three groups of university students trained with a deictic-framing protocol (or not) and tested with two other perspective-taking tasks: a visuospatial perspective taking using a cupboard containing a range of objects and a version of the implicit relational assessment procedure specifically designed to measure perspective taking. The first group was trained with the original verbal protocol with deictic expressions; the second group with the same protocol involving nondeictic words; and the third group was merely exposed to deictic expressions as a control condition. The results suggested that deictic framing is not fundamental to perspective taking, as the performance of the two experimental groups was not significantly different from the control group’s performance. Identification of specific stimulus functions involved in successful perspective taking and how those functions can be established should be addressed in future research