Psychological Boundaries and Ethnic Conflict: How Identity Constrained Choice and Worked to Turn Ordinary People into Perpetrators of Ethnic Violence During the Lebanese Civil War

Why do ordinary people commit ethnic atrocities? To understand the psychology of ethnic violence we constructed a pilot project based on narrative interviews with five ordinary people who participated in acts of ethnic violence during the Lebanese Civil War. The interviews present striking evidence that identity constrains choice for all individuals, regardless of their particular ideological or socioeconomic demographic background. Our findings challenge both the rationalist approaches of realistic conflict theory and rational choice and the institutional claims of consociational democracy and suggest the tremendous power of identity and perceptions of self in relation to others to constrain political actions.     

The Promise and Pitfalls of Consensus Decision Making in School Management

School/Community‐Based Management (SCBM) advocates insisted that changing the bureaucratic structure of governance, moving from top‐down decision making to a shared decision making at the local level, would revolutionize schools and result in higher student achievement. Many schools have struggled with shared decision‐making processes. This article examines one high school's attempt to implement a dress code using consensus‐based decision‐making. Organizations that strive to make decisions by consensus should be aware of the pitfalls that may occur and work to address them if they arise.     

Big Brother as a Contract Monitor: An Assessment of the Use of Contract Staff to Monitor Offender Communications

The privatization of prison services is a growing trend in the field of corrections; however, this growth has not been matched by evaluative research. This study examines the use of contract staff to supplement state intelligence investigators’ efforts to monitor outgoing offender telephone communications for evidence of illicit activity at 18 adult institutions in a Midwestern department of corrections. Percent-change models and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) modeling are used to examine aggregates of intelligence reports documenting drug, expressive, instrumental, and administrative violations. Our findings indicate that the introduction of contract services was associated with substantial increases in the number of intelligence reports filed within each of these categories. Furthermore, these results suggest that the use of privatized services that supplement rather than replace public efforts appear to be an ethical, efficient, and cost-effective alternative to comprehensive privatization.     

Attitudes on the Responsibility for Child Safety: Key Child Protection Worker Characteristics

The child protection workers’ attitude toward responsibility for child safety is complex and requires further examination. Using the Quality Improvement Project on Differential Response data from Illinois we examined the characteristics that influence worker attitude towards child safety. The attitude variable measures workers’ belief in family responsibility for child safety compared to state responsibility for child safety. Regression analyses suggest that self-perception of skills, confidence in community resources, confidence in the child protection system, and worker age significantly predict worker attitude. Findings support organizations to direct resources towards shifting attitudes in the direction that favors agency mandate and needs.     

Public Preferences for Bipartisanship in the Policymaking Process

At a time of a high level of polarization in Congress, public opinion surveys routinely find that Americans want politicians to compromise. When evaluating legislation, does the preference for bipartisanship in the legislative process trump partisan identities? We find that it does not. We conduct two experiments in which we alter aspects of the political context to see how people respond to parties (not) coming together to achieve broadly popular public policy goals. Although citizens can recognize bipartisan processes, preferences for bipartisan legislating do not outweigh partisan desires in the evaluation of public policies.     

Cues to Deception and Ability to Detect Lies as a Function of Police Interview Styles

In Experiment 1, we examined whether three interview styles used by the police, accusatory, information-gathering and behaviour analysis, reveal verbal cues to deceit, measured with the Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) and Reality Monitoring (RM) methods. A total of 120 mock suspects told the truth or lied about a staged event and were interviewed by a police officer employing one of these three interview styles. The results showed that accusatory interviews, which typically result in suspects making short denials, contained the fewest verbal cues to deceit. Moreover, RM distinguished between truth tellers and liars better than CBCA. Finally, manual RM coding resulted in more verbal cues to deception than automatic coding of the RM criteria utilising the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software programme.In Experiment 2, we examined the effects of the three police interview styles on the ability to detect deception. Sixty-eight police officers watched some of the videotaped interviews of Experiment 1 and made veracity and confidence judgements. Accuracy scores did not differ between the three interview styles; however, watching accusatory interviews resulted in more false accusations (accusing truth tellers of lying) than watching information-gathering interviews. Furthermore, only in accusatory interviews, judgements of mendacity were associated with higher confidence. We discuss the possible danger of conducting accusatory interviews.