The Longitudinal Effects of Chronic Mediated Exposure to Political Violence on Ideological Beliefs About Political Conflicts Among Youths

This study examines the effects of chronic (i.e., repeated and cumulative) mediated exposure to political violence on ideological beliefs regarding political conflict. It centers on these effects on young viewers, from preadolescents to adolescents. Ideological beliefs refers here to support of war, perception of threat to one’s nation, and normative beliefs concerning aggression toward the out-group. A longitudinal study was conducted on a sample of Israeli and Palestinian youths who experience the Israeli-Palestinian conflict firsthand (N = 1,207). Two alternative hypotheses were tested: that chronic exposure via the media increases support for war and aggression and elevates feeling of threat, or that chronic exposure via the media strengthens preexisting beliefs. Results demonstrated that higher levels of exposure were longitudinally related to stronger support for war. Regarding normative beliefs about aggression and threat to one’s nation, mediated exposure reinforced initial beliefs, rendering the youths more extreme in their attitudes. These results mostly support the conceptualization of the relation between media violence and behaviors as “reciprocally determined” or “reinforcing spirals.” The results are also discussed in light of the differences found between the effect of exposure to political violence firsthand and exposure via the media.     

The Gendered Face of Partisan Politics: Consequences of Facial Sex Typicality for Vote Choice

Facial cues are consequential for voters’ behavior at the polls. Yet the facial cues that are associated with vote choice remain under-examined. We predicted that vote choice judgments rely, in part, on the sex typicality of facial cues (i.e., the degree of facial masculinity and femininity) that vary as a function of candidate gender and partisan identification. Stimuli included image pairs of winners and runners-up in the elections for the 111th U.S. House of Representatives. In Study 1, we found that female Republican candidates who appeared relatively more feminine and male Republican candidates who looked relatively less masculine in their appearance were more likely to win their election. Democratic candidates’ electoral success was not related to their sex typicality. In Study 2, we found that relatively masculine-appearing Democrats and feminine-appearing Republicans were more likely to be selected in a hypothetical vote choice task. Implications for U.S. partisan politics are discussed.     

Law Enforcement and the Rights of the Accused: Are the Police Getting a Bad Rap?

Nationwide, law enforcement professionals have endured increasing scrutiny regarding their treatment of custodial suspects and their alleged abridgement of suspects’ Constitutional rights. At the same time, in the interests of community safety, many members of the public fully expect police officers to function efficiently in arresting and facilitating the prosecution of likely perpetrators. These perspectives reflect due-process and crime-control models respectively. Very little is known, however, about how law enforcement professionals actually view the rights of the accused when not acutely immersed in the cross-currents of public opinion. Using an anonymous survey, the current investigation addresses both Miranda rights as well as the European Union’s (EU) much more comprehensive approach to the rights of the accused. In general, this sample of 209 urban police officers favored protections of criminal suspects that went considerably beyond Miranda safeguards.     

Dissecting the Prevalence and Incidence of Offending During the Crime Drop of the 1990s

Objectives

To evaluate whether the 1990s crime drop reflects a decrease in offending prevalence (the fraction of the population engaged in crime), offending incidence (the frequency of offending among active criminals), or some combination of the two.

Methods

We use individual-level longitudinal data on adolescent offending patterns from the Pittsburgh Youth study (PYS), integrating information from the youngest and oldest cohorts to compare offending among 17–18 year old males at the beginning and end of the 1990s. Logistic and negative binomial regression models are estimated to assess whether there are significant differences in offending prevalence and incidence during the 1990s.

Results

The reduction in property crime rates in the PYS sample during the 1990s can be attributed to declines in both offending prevalence and incidence. The overall decline in serious violence during the 1990s for the full sample was primarily the result of a falloff in prevalence. However, for black youth our results indicate significant reductions in both the prevalence and incidence of serious violence. We did not detect a significant difference in illegal drug sales during the period.

Conclusions

Using longitudinal data on individuals to decompose aggregate crime trends into changes in the prevalence and incidence of offending offers insights into the nature of the 1990s crime drop that cannot be discerned from aggregate crime data. Future research should build on the current study by examining the specific mechanisms that influence change over time in crime prevalence, incidence, or both.

     

Determinants of Sexual Violence at Sexual Debut against in-School Adolescents in Ghana

Journal of Family Violence - Very few studies examine sexual violence perpetrated on adolescents in Ghana or in sub-Saharan Africa more generally. Using data collected in 2015 as part of a...     

Approval regulation and endogenous consumer confidence: Theory and analogies to licensing,safety, and financial regulation

Safety regulation – in the form of pre-market approval, licensure, screening, and product entry limitations – governs numerous market realms, including consumer finance. In this article, we ask whether the effects of safety regulation go beyond safety and affect consumers' beliefs about the distribution of products they can use. We model “approval regulation,” where a government regulator must approve the market entry of a product based upon observable, unbiased, and non-anticipable experiments. We show that even if regulator and firm disagree about only quality standards, the disagreement induces the firm to provide more information about its product than it would in the absence of regulation. Put differently, purely first-order disagreements in regulation generate second-order consequences (more certainty about product quality). These second-order consequences of regulation are sufficient to generate first-order effects among end-users (more consumption of superior products), even when users are risk-neutral. In other words, even if approval regulation produces little or no improvement in safety or quality, it still aggregates information useful to “downstream” product users; these users will exhibit higher consumption and will more readily switch to superior products. In contrast with libertarian analyses of entry regulation and licensure, the model predicts that entry restrictions may be associated with greater product or service utilization (consumption) as well as with greater price sensitivity among consumers. Because contemporary cost–benefit analyses ignore these second-order effects, they are unlikely to capture the possible confidence effects of approval regulation.     

Selected literature on radicalization and de-radicalization of terrorists: Monographs,Edited Volumes,Grey Literature and Prime Articles published since the 1960s

Crime, Law and Social Change -     

Do Participants and Observers Assess Intentions Differently During Bargaining and Conflict?

Political actors in conflict settings are often uncertain about their counterparts' intentions. This article explores the psychology of how intentions are assessed using a novel experimental design that randomly assigns subjects to one of three roles—"proposer,""recipient," or "observer." Recipients and observers are given identical noisy information about proposers' actions, and make postplay assessments of proposers' intentions that are rewarded based on accuracy. A first experiment explores a context of ambiguity, while a second experiment explores a context of uncertainty . The results suggest that actors' perceptions can sometimes be directly affected by the set of strategic alternatives they possess. When signals about proposer behavior appear "negative," recipients' assessments of proposers' intentions are more negative than observers' assessments if recipients have the ability to respond to the proposer's action—but not if recipients lack this ability. The ability to respond to proposer behavior appears to cause recipients to make more negative inferences about the proposer than circumstances warrant. Interestingly, recipients' and observers' assessments are indistinguishable when signals about proposer behavior instead appear "positive."