Fallible judgments

published by Routledge in 1989. He is a British psychologist who resides at Ormonde House. He was formerly with the department of psychology at the University of Nottingham.     

Political judgments,perceptions of facts,and partisan effects

We test two competing hypotheses about the impact of partisanship and information on people's political judgments and perceptions of facts using Canadians' reactions to a major scandal. Our findings with respect to subjective political judgments confirm the argument that partisan predispositions are crucial. But there is no evidence to support the argument that the polarizing effect of partisanship is most evident among the most informed. When it comes to perceptions of “objective” facts, the results are consistent with Zaller's reception axiom: the more informed people are, the more likely they are to correctly perceive objective facts. Partisanship does not appear to affect these perceptions.     

Evaluating consumer product hazards

A regression analysis is described which correlates the hazard level of a group of consumer products according to several definitions of hazard with potentially dangerous characteristics of products and their use. A surprisingly good fit to the data is observed and various observations are drawn from the analysis, among them that open flames are characteristic of high injury potential, but flammability is not. Hypotheses and open questions concerning the human factors of product safety and government intervention in the marketplace as a regulator of product safety are discussed.     

Evaluating irreversible social harms

In this paper we investigate how irreversible social harms should be evaluated from an ethical perspective. First, we define a general notion of irreversibility, drawing on discussions in ecology and economics. This notion is relational in the sense that “irreversibility” is always “irreversibility for a certain party”. We also note that a change may be more or less difficult to reverse, with full reversibility and irreversibility as two extremes. Second, we examine what can make an irreversible change a harm, and why these kinds of harms have particular ethical significance. Here we draw on discussions from ethics, particularly regarding the capability approach. We also show how our notion of irreversibility connects to, and can add to, discussions in the fields of development studies and disaster management, particularly on the concept of resilience. Third, we suggest how potentially irreversible harms can be recognised and dealt with in policy-making. Finally, we show how our framework can be applied by evaluating the land acquisition process of two biofuel producers in Tanzania.     

Evaluating the Devolution Revolution1

This article provides an evaluation of the impact of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. The evidence clearly shows that PRWORA has had a major impact on the poverty population and the welfare system. The data analyzed identify those policy areas in which positive changes can be identified, along with implementation and design problems that need reform. The data also show that while some states have made considerable progress in implementing the law, many are lagging.     

Bases of political judgments: The role of stereotypic and nonstereotypic information

Three experiments investigated the role of stereotypic and nonstereotypic criteria in judgments of political candidates. The effects of physical attractiveness, political party, and stands on specific issues on both absolute and comparative judgments of political candidates were examined to evaluate three hypotheses about stereotype and attribute use. In the absence of other information, candidates' physical attractiveness (conveyed through photographs) had a substantial influence on subjects' global evaluations of them and inferences of both their personal qualities and their political ideology. When other information about the candidates' party membership and stands on specific issues was available, however, the candidates' attractiveness had no effect on the evaluations of them. When subjects made judgments of only one candidate, subjects relied exclusively on the candidate's voting record. When subjects were asked to make comparative judgments of two candidates, however, they based their judgments on each candidate's party membership and not on their respective voting records. Implications of these results for the processes that underlie political judgments and decisions are evaluated.     

Evaluating the OEO Legal Services Program

During 1970 and 1971, the complex and politically sensitive OEO Legal Services Program received its first independent national evaluation. This paper describes how evaluators dealt with the policy issues arising during the evaluation. Their decisions involved the interaction of three factors: conceptual problems, access to data, and a sense of what would be relevant to public policy. They found only a small area of intersection between a large set of issues important to policy-makers and an equally large, but usually different, set of issues amenable to systematic research.One finding was that the program's use of full-time poverty lawyers is a less expensive way to provide poor clients with legal services than underwriting the fees of private lawyers would be. Another was that the Legal Services attorneys' strong emphasis on law reform apparently adds very little to the cost of providing more routine services.The writer was the government's technical representative on this contract, but the viewpoints expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Office of Economic Opportunity.     

Evaluating congressional reform: Deregulation revisited

An evaluation of the changes in Congress's structure that occurred in the 1970s requires attention to three dimensions of its performance as a policymaking institution: representation of interests, deliberation, and conflict resolution. Considered this way, the changes seem to have enhanced some aspects of congressional capacity (especially the representation of broadly-based interests) but to have diminished others (especially deliberation and conflict resolution on issues that are salient to mass constituencies). The resulting strengths and weaknesses help to explain differences in congressional performance on trucking deregulation and natural gas deregulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. To some degree, they have altered the opportunities, strategic considerations, and central skills for policy analysts who seek to influence congressional decisions.