Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality,Parenting, and Motivational Factors

Anecdotal evidence suggests an increase in entitled attitudes and behaviors of youth in school and college settings. Using a newly developed scale to assess “academic entitlement” (AE), a construct that includes expectations of high grades for modest effort and demanding attitudes towards teachers, this research is the first to investigate the phenomenon systematically. In two separate samples of ethnically diverse college students comprised largely of East and Southeast Asian American, followed by Caucasians, Latinos, and other groups (total N = 839, age range 18–25 years), we examined the personality, parenting, and motivational correlates of AE. AE was most strongly related to exploitive attitudes towards others and moderately related to an overall sense of entitlement and to narcissism. Students who reported more academically entitled attitudes perceived their parents as exerting achievement pressure marked by social comparison with other youth and materially rewarding good grades, scored higher than their peers in achievement anxiety and extrinsic motivation, and engaged in more academic dishonesty. AE was not significantly associated with GPA.

Art 2.0

<正>A new media art project concerns itself with the distinctive characteristics of the Chinese Internet ‘Shake your head with the cat."It may take a moment to realize what the words mean.The cat in question is frozen on the screen.Then the Internet catches up and the white feline begins waving its head back and forth.The way its whiskers bounce is     

Municipal Socialism Then and Now: some lessons for the Global South

Given the large and growing literature opposed to the privatisation of services such as water and electricity, it is peculiar that so little has been written about the experience of ‘municipal socialism’—a set of roughly analogous historical movements that used local governments to challenge private service delivery and advance ‘socialist’ agendas from the late 1800s to the 1940s. Although primarily a European and American phenomenon, and emerging from different contexts than those prevailing today, municipal socialism found widespread support and transformed many public services. Results were mixed, with some experiments being little more than (pre)Keynesian attempts to revitalise capital accumulation in the face of ‘irrational’ private sector services, but the lessons are important as these experiments provided the first intellectually and politically sustained resistance to privatisation and other prototypical forms of what we now call neoliberalism, and demonstrated the possibility of effective service delivery by the public sector. This paper reviews these experiments, focusing on the experience of the United Kingdom and drawing lessons for contemporary efforts to build alternatives to privatisation in cities in the South, where local-level, socialist-oriented reforms have been relatively strong.     

Making space for restorative justice in criminal justice and criminology curricula and courses

Restorative justice, rooted in the practices of indigenous people across the globe, has grown exponentially in both theory and practice since its beginnings in Canada in the 1970s. Restorative justice has influenced the interactions between offenders and victims, helped community members address crime and develop self-efficacy, and changed the way some countries rebuild after a history of oppression. Despite these restorative justice influenced changes, many criminology and criminal justice programs pay scant attention to restorative justice in curricula. This paper will examine ways to include restorative justice in criminal justice and criminology curriculum and the challenges involved in the process. The paper will then examine how the Law and Justice Department at Central Washington University has incrementally added restorative justice components to its curriculum, culminating most recently with the addition of a Community and Social Justice course. The paper will conclude with several examples of classroom activities and assignments that have helped connect students with the theory and practice of restorative justice.     

Attitudes toward the criminal legal system: Scale development and predictors

The purpose of this study was to assess attitudes toward the criminal legal system and determine how they are related to rule-violating behaviors and experiences with the criminal legal system. To this end, the Attitudes Toward the Criminal Legal System Scale (ATCLS) was developed and five studies were conducted with participants from New England, including college students, high school students, and the community. Studies 1 and 2 found support for the reliability and validity of the ATCLS, and a relation between the ATCLS and authoritarianism and belief in a just world. Study 3 examined the test–retest reliability of the ATCLS. Studies 4 and 5 were conducted primarily to uncover the relation between the ATCLS and law- or rule-related behaviors with a community and high school sample, respectively. Generally, results suggested that there were no sex differences on the ATCLS, but attitudes toward the criminal legal system might function differently for men and women with regards to authoritarianism and behavior.     

Credibility of the emotional witness: A study of ratings by police investigators

Abstract

Credibility judgments by police investigators were examined. Sixty-nine investigators viewed one of three video-recorded versions of a rape victim's statement where the role was played by a professional actress. The statements were given in a free recall manner with identical wording, but differing in the emotions displayed, termed congruent, neutral and incongruent emotional expressions. Results showed that emotions displayed by the rape victim affected police officers’ judgments of credibility. The victim was judged as most credible when crying and showing despair, and less credible when being neutral or expressing more positive emotions. This result indicates stereotypic beliefs about rape victim behavior among police officers, similar to those found for lay persons. Results are discussed in terms of professional expertise.     

Are you talking to me? Influencing behaviour and culture in police interviews

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between two types of influencing behaviour in police interviews (being kind and rational persuasion) and three types of interview effectiveness, i.e. the suspects’ willingness to give a statement, their estimation of the quality of the relationship with the detective, and suspects’ admission. We expected that being kind and rational persuasion (arguments referring to logic and rationality) would have a different effect on suspects from cultures that tend to be direct and content-oriented (low-context cultures) versus cultures in which communication is more indirect and context orientated (high-context cultures). To examine this, experienced police detectives interviewed mock theft suspects from low-context (n=25) and high-context (n=27) cultures. As predicted, and particularly for high-context suspects, being kind in terms of rewarding and offering was positively related to the perceived quality of the relationship of the suspect, while being kind in terms of active listening behaviour was positively related to admissions. Furthermore, and as expected, there was a positive relationship between rational persuasion of the police detective and admissions for low-context suspects, but also a negative relationship between rational persuasion and admissions for high-context suspects.