Jackson, Craig Campbell

Testing a new theory of dynamic social influence, 39 mock juries in two studies deliberated student honor court cases by electronic mail. After reading about each case, participants sent and received messages to a spatially coherent or random subset of jurors on each of five sessions. Individuals appeared to take their role of juror seriously and were responsive to each others' arguments; one-third changed their verdicts after receiving two out of two opposing messages and just over half changed in the face of four of four opposing messages. Polarization toward the majority verdict was common in both studies; however, consistent with a key prediction of dynamic social impact theory, unanimity was suppressed among the spatial compared to random juries by the emergence of spatially distinct subgroups. Clustering and polarization were prevalent even among juries passing as few as two messages per juror each round, providing strong evidence that DSIT applies even to important issues.

Archival data collected from a private-practice career counseling center was analyzed to evaluate the extent to which situational constraint measures can be applied as moderators of person-occupation congruence. Demographic, personality, and career interest inventory responses, particularly those for the Strong Interest Inventory (SII), the 16PF, and the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, served as the primary units of analyses. Data was collected by career counselors over a ten-year period for 202 clients (125 men and 77 women; M age = 36.9). Difference score measures were calculated for clients by comparing SH scores to normative means for the general reference sample of the SH and appropriate occupational samples. Situational constraints such as age, income, marital status, having children, time spent in one's career field, and time spent in one's job were hypothesized to be positively associated with seeking career counseling for less voluntary reasons (i.e., terminations or lay-offs) than those who sought counseling for other reasons (i.e., career change, relocations, reentry, or resignation). Although situational constraint hypotheses were not supported, career counseled clients were highly incongruent with the occupational interests of their occupations. The magnitude of this finding exceeds that of those typical of the career-interest congruence literature. Despite clients' incongruence with the interests most commonly associated with their occupations, clients were more congruent on those interest dimensions when scores were compared to general reference sample means. That is, through selection practices or socialization, clients have achieved a minimal degree of congruence yet do not completely match the characteristics of the majority of others in their occupations. The results of this study suggest there is a maximum level of incongruence expected of interest congruence studies. Career-counseled clients in this sample spent considerable sums of money to find work situations that would improve their level of work satisfaction. Further research is necessary to verify whether the inclusion of career counseled clients provides a ceiling for the measurement of congruence-satisfaction relationships. Although situational constraint measures were not identified as effective moderators, their inclusion in future nonarchival studies may yield more sensitive tests of situational constraint hypotheses.