The effects of experimentally induced attitudes upon task proficiency.

Abstract

Eighty Ss received preliminary training on a complicated compensatory pursuit task involving simulated aircraft instruments and controls, then continued work for four hours after having been distributed among 10 combinations of two motivational and five pharmacological conditions. The treatment effects were appraised in terms of subjective dispositions and task performance, and the functional connection between these outcomes was explored. Both motivational and pharmacological treatments induced divergent task dispositions. Motivational effects, however, were not discernible in performance. Large performance effects due to drugs could only slightly, if at all, be accounted for by subjective effects. While it may be conservative to suppose that these results are specific to the conditions of the present study, they nevertheless tend to discredit the general practice of invoking attitudinal constructs to explain work-decrement phenomena in the absence of confirming exptl. demonstrations.