The rules of the game were explained, and participants were informed that the first two minutes of the game would constitute a practice session, after which the computer would begin to record their performance for an additional 8 minutes. The experimenter then left the room and returned at the allotted time, at which point participants completed a post-task questionnaire.Īfter filling out the questionnaire, participants were told that they would next be completing a spatial test that made use of a computer game. Participants were instructed to go through the passages and cross out every a and e in the text, completing as many passages as possible in ten minutes. In this investigation, the task consisted of a series of identical passages composed of “greeking” text-nonsense words designed to mimic Latin-based language. (1985) and was designed to create a conflict in a participant's mind between the need to help the experimenter and the desire to avoid engaging in an unpleasant task. The task was adapted from the one used by Steele et al. They then completed a mood measure, namely, the 20-item Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), after which they were introduced to the “linguistic test,” an arduous and boring task. Participants were informed by a male experimenter that the study involved two tests of cognitive abilities, one linguistic and one spatial. Consistent with our past research on attentional myopia, we predicted that participants under high cognitive load would be more influenced by relevant cues that either promoted or inhibited helping behavior than would participants under minimal cognitive load. Participants played a video game that involved either substantial or minimal cognitive demands while being asked to engage in helping behavior-a request in which salient cues ensured that the pressure to comply would either be strong (Study 1) or weak (Study 2). At the same time, it allowed us to ensure that participants would be exposed to a continuous source of cognitive load, requiring sustained attention, even while they attempted to process and respond to the request. To impose limits on attention, we chose a task that pretesting revealed would present a significant cognitive load but would not be so distracting to participants that they could not heed the pertinent helping request. In the studies reported here, we sought to investigate the implications of the attentional myopia model for helping, focusing on attentional limitation in the presence of salient cues that either promoted or inhibited the behavior in question. In prior investigations, both eating and smoking behavior have been shown to be influenced by salient environmental cues when participants have found themselves under significant cognitive load ( Ward & Mann, 2000 Westling, Mann, & Ward, 2006). and by others (e.g., MacDonald, Fong, & Zanna, 2000). More recently, Mann and Ward (2004, 2007) advanced the attentional myopia model, arguing that any source of cognitive limitation can potentially result in the same shortsighted attentional consequences observed in studies of alcohol by Steele et al. 115 see also Giancola, Josephs, Parrott, & Duke, 2010). Josephs and Steele (1990) maintained that alcohol myopia arises because alcohol “consistently impairs the capacity to engage in controlled, effortful cognitive processing” (p. Indeed, when prominent cues failed to promote helping, drunk individuals were no more likely than sober individuals to agree to provide assistance. According to the researchers, alcohol intoxication made it difficult to focus on anything except the salient need for help expressed by the experimenter in the study. The results of the study showed that drunk individuals were more likely to accede to a request for help with the task than were sober individuals, but only when environmental cues promoting helping (occasioned by an especially impassioned plea by the experimenter) dominated those favoring resistance. Participants thus faced a conflict between their desire to help the experimenter and their inclination to avoid the tedious task. In particular, individuals were asked to help an experimenter by agreeing to complete an extremely boring task (namely, repeatedly crossing out certain letters in a series of identical paragraphs). In one early investigation of what they termed inhibitory conflict (see Steele & Southwick, 1985), Steele, Critchlow, and Liu (1985) exposed both sober and intoxicated participants to a situation that pitted pressures to engage in a behavior against those associated with resisting the behavior. Support for this “distraction” account comes from work by Steele, Josephs, and colleagues on alcohol myopia, “an acute state of shortsightedness in which process fewer cues less well” ( Steele & Josephs, 1988, p.
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