Deception and Mutual Gains Bargaining: Are They Mutually Exclusive?

Conclusion We have made great strides in recent years teaching more people — in classrooms, corporate training sessions, and actual negotiations — about negotiations, including how to be more ethical and how to ensure that integrative joint gains are not left on the table. The fact that we even need to write an article like this is an indication of the advances that have been made.Yet exactly because of these advances, more care needs to be taken to ensure that the subtle distinction between what is ethical and what is integrative is maintained. Being ethical in negotiations is more complicated than producing greater joint utility, and the techniques that are helpful for producing greater joint utility should not be made more complicated by the addition of ethical concerns. Each issue — ethics and mutual gains bargaining — can stand on its own, and benefits by being considered on its own. By maintaining this distinction, we believe each will have greater clarity and greater impact, and our teaching and training will be both better received and more valuable to those we teach.     

Application of Lamendin's adult dental aging technique to a diverse skeletal sample

Lamendin et al. (1) proposed a technique to estimate age at death for adults by analyzing single-rooted teeth. They expressed age as a function of two factors: translucency of the tooth root and periodontosis (gingival regression). In their study, they analyzed 306 singled rooted teeth that were extracted at autopsy from 208 individuals of known age at death, all of whom were considered as having a French ancestry. Their sample consisted of 135 males, 73 females, 198 whites, and 10 blacks. The sample ranged in age from 22 to 90 years of age. By using a simple formulae (A = 0.18 x P + 0.42 x T + 25.53, where A = Age in years, P = Periodontosis height x 100/root height, and T = Transparency height x 100/root height), Lamendin et al. were able to estimate age at death with a mean error of +/- 10 years on their working sample and +/- 8.4 years on a forensic control sample. Lamendin found this technique to work well with a French population, but did not test it outside of that sample area. This study tests the accuracy of this adult aging technique on a more diverse skeletal population, the Terry Collection housed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Our sample consists of 400 teeth from 94 black females, 72 white females, 98 black males, and 95 white males, ranging from 25 to 99 years. Lamendin's technique was applied to this sample to test its applicability to a population not of French origin. Providing results from a diverse skeletal population will aid in establishing the validity of this method to be used in forensic cases, its ideal purpose. Our results suggest that Lamendin's method estimates age fairly accurately outside of the French sample yielding a mean error of 8.2 years, standard deviation 6.9 years, and standard error of the mean 0.34 years. In addition, when ancestry and sex are accounted for, the mean errors are reduced for each group (black females, white females, black males, and white males). Lamendin et al. reported an inter-observer error of 9+/-1.8 and 10+/-2 sears from two independent observers. Forty teeth were randomly remeasured from the Terry Collection in order to assess an intra-observer error. From this retest, an intra-observer error of 6.5 years was detected.     

States of Environmental Justice: Redistributive Politics across the United States, 1993–2004

In the 20 years since a president committed federal government agencies to achieving environmental justice (EJ), states have been at the forefront of policy development. But states have varied in the nature and extent of their EJ efforts. We use Guttman Scaling to measure state EJ effort and test hypotheses regarding the relative importance of problem severity, politics, and administrative variables to variation in state policy development. Our analysis offers a novel characterization of state policy intensity and demonstrates its scalability. Income‐based problem severity, environmental group membership, and nonwhite populations were important predictors of state EJ policy intensity during our study period. The political geography of EJ policy also displayed a distinctive southern pattern and the EJ policy intensity model contrasted significantly with a model of environmental policy innovation. The findings suggest that state EJ politics are more indicative of redistributive policy than regulatory.     

Valence and satisfaction with democracy: A cross‐national analysis of nine Western European democracies

In recent studies, scholars have highlighted factors that influence citizen satisfaction with democracy, with particular emphasis on the role played by the institutional features of political systems, and ideology. This article presents the first empirical study of whether changes in important party characteristics can affect individuals' satisfaction with democracy. Using a measure of parties' character‐valence derived from content analysis of news reports, evidence is presented that when governing parties' images decline with respect to important valence‐related attributes such as competence, unity and integrity, then citizen satisfaction with democracy similarly declines. However, this relationship is conditional on the performance of opposition parties. These findings are relevant to studies of regime support, political representation, democratic accountability and voter behaviour.