Presidential prototypes

The American public expresses considerable consensus on those qualities of character and performance indispensable to a modern president. Contrary to expectations, however, such conceptions of an ideal president (or presidential prototypes) generally failed to provide standards by which actual presidential candidates were evaluated. Across five complementary tests, qualities that citizens thought important for an ideal president counted no more heavily in their evaluations of presidential hopefuls than did qualities thought less important—with one consistent and striking exception. Conceptions of an ideal president did set the standards by which the incumbent president was evaluated, and quite powerfully so. In the final section of the paper, we provide several interpretations of these results, suggest how public conceptions of an ideal president are acquired, and speculate about processes of presidential appraisal.     

Community police crime prevention

This study examines the opinion of citizens regarding the police becoming a part of the community, by locating police station in all communities irrespective of size, in order to prevent crime from occurring. The results indicate that a significant number of residents interviewed would want the police to live and work in their community, be integrated into the school system, as well as participating in the community activities. An earlier version of this paper was read at the 1993 Annual Meeting of the Mid-South Sociological Association (Criminal Justice Section), Governor’s House Hotel, Montgomery, Alabama October 27–30, 1993. I would like to thank Professors Donald Yates and Salathiel Ansah, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.     

Perceptions of control,depressive symptomatology,and self-esteem of women in transition from abusive relationships

The relation between women’s histories of experiencing violence and current psychological health were examined. Locus of control, feelings of personal power, depressive symptomatology, self-esteem, and judgments of control over a contingently responsive computer display were investigated in groups of 21 abused women and 18 comparison women. Within the sample of abused women, relationships between severity of abuse and the psychological variables were also examined. The group of abused women had lower beliefs in self-efficacy, were more depressed, and had lower self-esteem than the comparison women. There were no differences found, however, between the two groups in perceptions of control on the computer task. Severity of physical abuse among the abused women was positively correlated with depression scores. Verbal abuse was found to contribute significantly to many of the between-group differences. Empirical evidence of the positive impact of transition house residence on the abused women’s mental health was also presented. The importance of future research into both the differential effects of verbal and physical abuse on women and the role of the transition house in empowering abused women were discussed.     

Modeling Facts,Culture, and Cognition in the Gun Debate

Can empirical data generate consensus about how to regulate firearms? If so, under what conditions? Previously, we presented evidence that individuals' cultural worldviews explain their positions on gun control more powerfully than any other fact about them, including their race or gender, the type of community or region of the country they live in, and even their political ideology or party affiliation. On this basis, we inferred that culture is prior to facts in the gun debate: empirical data can be expected to persaude individuals to change their view on gun policies only after those individuals come to see those policies as compatible with their core cultural commitments. We now respond to critics. Canvassing the psychological literature, we identify the mechanisms that systematically induce individuals to conform their factual beliefs about guns to their culturally grounded moral evaluations of them. To illustrate the strength and practical implications of these dynamics, we develop a series of computer simulations, which show why public beliefs about the efficacy of gun control can be expected to remain highly polarized even in the face of compelling empirical evidence. Finally, we show that the contribution culture makes to cognition could potentially be harnessed to generate broad, cross-cultural consensus: if gun policies can be framed in terms that are expressively compatible with diverse cultural worldviews, the motivation to resist compelling empirical evidence will dissipate, and individuals of diverse cultural persuasions can be expected rapidly to converge in their beliefs about what policies are best. Constructing a new, expressively pluralistic idiom of gun control should therefore be the first priority of policy-makers and -analysts interested in promoting the adoption of sound gun policies.