Violations of out-group and in-group regulations in the eyes of ordinary and protected prisoners: an instance of judgmental modularity

According to the functional theory of cognition, everyday life blaming for wrongdoing reflects individuals' functional morality. The judgments of normative people were found to be modular, that is, changeable as a function of the social role taken at the moment of the judgment. This article presents several empirical indications that prisoners' functional moral judgments are modular as well. These studies were conducted within the experimental framework of functional measurement, which was chosen due to its ability to bypass prisoners' suspicion and resistance to out-group investigations. The studies focus on delinquents' core moral issues such as eyewitness testimony and informing to out-group authorities. As expected, the judgments of ordinary and protected inmates were modular. It is claimed that these findings are applicable to offender rehabilitation and correction and to offender therapy.     

The challenge of diversity management: police reform and the Arab minority in Israel

Diverse societies present different challenges for police forces that have to gain the trust and legitimacy of minorities. Police forces must develop the ability to engage with diversity and overcome their own biases and prejudices in order to better serve minorities. Police reforms, however, may fail to address the challenge successfully if core problems are not clearly identified. In such a case, reforms may be misdirected and fail to achieve the desired results. This paper, based on a study of the Arab minority in Israel, suggests a bottom-up approach that concentrates on identifying the attitudes of minority groups as the basis for any reform plan. A survey was conducted among Arab citizens to identify general attitudes, perceptions of over-policing and under-policing and assessment of three potential reforms; recruitment of minority members into the police, community involvement in policing, and cultural training for police officers.     

On the Causes and Consequences of Ballot Order Effects

We investigate the effect of ballot order on the outcomes of California city council and school board elections. Candidates listed first win office between four and five percentage points more often than expected absent order effects. This first candidate advantage is larger in races with more candidates and for higher quality candidates. The first candidate advantage is similar across contexts: the magnitude of the effect is not statistically distinguishable in city council and in school board elections, in races with and without an open seat, and in races consolidated and not consolidated with statewide general elections. Standard satisficing models cannot fully explain ballot order effects in our dataset of multi-winner elections.     

A tale of two cities and one telegram: The Ottoman military regime and the population of Greater Syria during WWI

This article compares the evacuations of the two port cities of Gaza and Jaffa in southern and central Palestine, respectively, by their civilian population on the orders of Cemal Pasha, the Ottoman commander of the Syrian front, during the spring of 1917. While these evacuations are usually regarded as mutually exclusive events, they were in fact part of the same process. We claim that the general evacuation order for two of the main coastal cities of Palestine was driven by the exigency of war and military considerations, rather than by political motivations such as the desire to destroy Zionism or take revenge against the Arab population. This view does not negate the exceptionality of each case but rather aims to better contextualize them within the larger framework of civilian affairs in the region and the Empire at large during WWI. For this purpose we analyse a 17-page enciphered Ottoman telegram that sheds new light on the rationale and the execution of the evacuation of populations in Palestine and compare it to other controversial events in Greater Syria during the war.     

Mandated justice: The potential promise and possible pitfalls of mandating procedural justice in the workplace

This study addresses the question of whether and how legal authorities ought to intervene in work organizations in order to most effectively regulate the behavior of employees. This question is examined empirically, by exploring whether the association between the level of fairness employees experience in procedures regarding pay and benefits, and their adherence to workplace rules, differs depending upon whether those procedures are enacted by companies voluntarily or mandated by law. This question was addressed using both a survey of a representative sample of employees in Israel, as well as their reactions to an experimental vignette. The results generally suggest that evaluations of the procedural justice of performance appraisal hearings more strongly influenced judgments of overall workplace fairness, perceptions of management legitimacy, and employee rule‐adherence behavior when employees believed fairer workplace procedures were required by law.     

School violence in the eyes of the beholders: an integrative aggression-victimization perspective

Five experiments explored, within the framework of functional measurement, the importance assigned by 3rd and 4th graders (n = 117) to expectations of potential perpetrators from their potential victims. Each participant was requested to imagine potential incidents of school violence where four familiar classmates were presented as protagonists (i.e., perpetrator and victim). An orderly manipulation of the combination of the level (high or low) of aggressiveness and susceptibility to victimization in each protagonist was made. The participants were informed whether or not the victim was about to deliver tangible rewards, display signs of suffering, or retaliate (2*2*2 = 8 conditions). For each potential incident, the participant estimated the likelihood that an attack will take place. The following order of importance was found: Reward > Retaliation > Suffering. Victim's aggressiveness was slightly effective. From an applied perspective, most notable is the tendency to lower the likelihood of violence when the educator knows about the incidents.