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Legal scholars have long assumed that plea bargains are contracts negotiated between rational actors who adhere to the dictates of the normative shadow-of-trial model. The two key features that rational actors presumably haggle over in the shadow of trial are the criminal charge (and associated sentence) and the probability of trial conviction. The behavioral economics theory of discounting, however, offers a theoretical foundation for testing the shadow-of-trial model. This article summarizes findings from experimental discounting studies in behavioral economics and psychological science – showing that these paradigms can be successfully applied to the plea-bargaining decision context wherein the likelihood of trial is uncertain and delayed, and the plea bargain is relatively certain and immediate. We suggest that the implications of applying discounting to plea bargaining are three-fold: (1) empirical evidence suggests that the shadow-of-trial model is too narrow; (2) the discounting of non-monetary losses may involve slightly different psychological processes than contexts involving monetary outcomes; and (3) probability of conviction and delay until trial constitute situational features that elicit guilty pleas despite a defendant’s factual innocence.

Judgment and decision-making research on discounting suggests that when humans are thinking about gains, they tend to prefer certain and immediate outcomes to uncertain and delayed outcomes. However, discounting has been studied primarily using monetary commodities and, until recently, by testing one feature of the binary forced-choice task at a time: delay, probability, or amount of money received/lost. The present research is the first test of a dual discounting task that combines probability and delay into a single, binary forced-choice task in a non-monetary loss context. The key findings, based on three studies, suggest that delay and probability discounting play a significant role in decisions including non-monetary loss commodities like plea bargaining. Future work should explore the boundary conditions of dual discounting based not only on the nature of the binary choice (probability and delay) but also on the nature of the commodity (amount, valence, and quantifiability).

The content of the Asian American model minority stereotype is important for understanding how Asian American individuals are perceived. Existing theories about stereotype content may not capture the unique historical and cultural context that could affect perceptions of Asian American individuals. We have identified a more differentiated underlying structure with four dimensions—warmth, competence, self-centeredness, and submissiveness—that differ in their rated typicality and desirability for Asian and White Americans. We then developed the 16-item Asian American Stereotypes Scale to measure perceptions of Asian Americans on these four dimensions. Ratings on the different dimensions predict unique variance in attitudes toward Asian Americans and other minority groups, contact with Asians or Asian Americans, perceptions of size of the Asian American population, and system justification. The four-dimensional model and the Asian American Stereotypes Scale allow us to predict and examine the unique impacts of Asian American stereotypes in a way that differs from more general models.

Contemporary inquiries in psychology and law increasingly cross disciplinary boundaries for inspiration. Our focus is on whether such research is substantive in both directions and whether interdisciplinary psychology-and-law author teams produce more meaningful interdisciplinary work, specifically in decision-making research conducted between 2004 and 2017. We found that interdisciplinary psychology-and-law author teams ( a) produce publications that show more cross-disciplinary integration in methods than single-discipline teams, ( b) produce publications with more conceptual integration in the introduction and discussion than only law author teams, and ( c) elicit more citations than only law or only psychology author teams. When considering a collaborative team approach, we suggest that the disciplinary background of the collaborators is a meaningful indicator of the type of interdisciplinary research to be conducted. We also suggest that it would be beneficial for both psychology and law journals to be more open to publishing scholarship from mixed disciplinary teams.

People are better able to correctly identify the faces of individuals who belong to their own race. Research linking the cross-race effect in face recognition to racial attitudes has been limited to explicit measures and sequential presentation formats. Using a simultaneous lineup task, our results from two studies revealed a systematic relationship between explicit racial bias and increased false identification of Black faces. We observed inconsistent evidence to suggest that individual differences in implicit attitudes impact judgments of Black faces. Nevertheless, nonconscious activation of crime-related concepts prior to encoding facial targets impaired White perceivers’ accuracy for Black faces. Nonconscious priming of crime concepts did not affect White perceivers’ judgments of White faces. Thus, among Whites, racial bias, as a function of both individual differences and contextual cues, can increase the false identification of Black faces in simultaneous lineups. Theoretical and legal implications for face recognition and eyewitness memory are discussed.

In the United States, acceptance of sexual minorities (e.g., gay men and lesbians) has increased substantially since the early 1990s. This study examined whether authoritarians' attitudes have been influenced by the societal shift toward greater acceptance of sexual minorities. Using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) collected between 1992 and 2012, we tested a model in which authoritarianism, endorsement of egalitarian values, and social norms shifting in the direction of tolerance predict individual attitudes toward sexual minorities and LGBT rights issues. Results indicated that (1) there was a subset of authoritarians who endorsed egalitarian values, (2) authoritarians in general became more tolerant (i.e., held less negative attitudes) toward sexual minorities between 1992 and 2012, and (3) “egalitarian authoritarians” held more positive attitudes toward sexual minorities than other authoritarians. The findings contribute to contemporary theory and research on authoritarianism, which is moving from a monolithic view of authoritarianism to one in which culture and core values activate and shape manifestations of authoritarian tendencies.

Volunteer citizen monitoring is an increasingly important source of scientific data. We developed a volunteer program for early detection of new invasive species by private landowners on their own land. Early detection of an invasive species, however, subjects the landowner to the potentially costly risk of government intervention to control the invasive species. We hypothesized that an adult experiential learning module could increase recruitment and retention because private landowners could learn more about and understand the social benefits of early detection and more accurately gauge the level of personal risk. The experiential learning module emphasized group discussion and individual reflection of risks and benefits of volunteering and included interactions with experts and regulatory personnel. A population of woodland owners with >2 ha of managed oak woodland in central Minnesota were randomly assigned to recruitment treatments: (a) the experiential learning module or (b) a letter inviting their participation. The recruitment and retention rates and data quality were similar for the two methods. However, volunteers who experienced the learning module were more likely to recruit new volunteers than those who merely received an invitation letter. Thus the module may indirectly affect recruitment of new volunteers. The data collection was complex and required the volunteers to complete timely activities, yet the volunteers provided sufficiently high quality data that was useful to the organizers. Volunteers can collect complex data and are willing to assume personal risk to contribute to early detection of invasive species.

Although psychological science has documented individual and situational factors that affect the process of system justification, the temporal dimension of system justification has not been systematically examined. This study used the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a naturalistic setting in which to test for the existence of a temporal dimension. We propose that the potential for a Clinton victory represented a system threat for individuals who supported traditional gender roles, and the approaching election provided a mechanism for measuring the effect of the temporal proximity of the system-threatening event. The results show that gender role ideology played a substantial role in decision-making during the 2016 election, and they support the existence of a temporal dimension of system justification. Participants who began the study with a stronger gender-system justification motive exhibited greater changes in their psychological responses to Clinton over time and greater sensitivity to the temporal proximity of the election.

Decades of social-psychological research show that gender bias can result from features of the social context and from individual-level psychological predispositions. Do these sources of bias impact legal decisions, which are frequently made by people subject to factors that have been proposed to reduce bias (training and accountability)? To answer the question, we examined the potential for three major social-psychological theories of gender bias (role-congruity theory, ambivalent sexism, and implicit bias) to predict outcomes of labor arbitration decisions. In the first study, undergraduate students and professional arbitrators made decisions about two mock arbitration cases in which the gender of the employee-grievants was experimentally manipulated. Student participants' decisions showed the predicted gender bias, whereas the decisions of experienced professionals did not. Individual-level attitudes did not predict the extent of the observed bias and accountability did not attenuate it. In the second study, arbitrators’ explicit and implicit gender attitudes were significant predictors of their decisions in published cases. The laboratory and field results suggest that context, expertise, and implicit and explicit attitudes are relevant to legal decision-making, but that laboratory experiments alone may not fully capture the nature of their effect on legal professionals’ decisions in real cases.

Introduction Providing accurate information about the constituents in nicotine-containing products may help tobacco users make informed decisions about product choices. An experimental study examined a novel approach for presenting accurate constituent information about brands and types of smokeless tobacco (SLT) that could be understood by the general public. Methods Participants were recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk and presented information online about 2 constituent dimensions of SLT products-nicotine and/or toxicity (for simplicity, "toxicity" in this study refers to carcinogenic constituents) Participants completed measures of knowledge and tobacco health risks at 2 time points: before and after exposure to constituent information. Results Participants were found to increase their knowledge that toxicity contributes to disease risk and nicotine contributes to addiction, that SLT products vary in their levels of nicotine and toxicity, and that both SLT and cigarette products have higher toxicity than medicinal nicotine replacement therapies (e.g., nicotine lozenges). Study results showed no differences when presenting toxicity information alone versus presenting it in conjunction with nicotine information, and found no misperceptions or confusions about the relative harmfulness of cigarettes, SLT, or nicotine replacement therapy. Conclusions Providing tobacco constituent information to smokers and nonsmokers will improve their knowledge about the relative toxicity across products and variations within a class of tobacco products without compromising the health risks associated with tobacco use.

In an analysis of the 2012 presidential election, we sought to optimize two key desiderata in capturing campaign effects: establishing causality and measuring dynamic (i.e., intraindividual) change over time. We first report the results of three survey-experiments embedded within a three-wave survey panel design. Each experiment was focused on a substantive area of electoral concern. Our results suggest, among other findings, that retrospective evaluations exerted a stronger influence on vote choice in the referendum (vs. the choice) frame; that among White respondents, racial animosity strongly predicted economic evaluations for knowledgeable Republicans who were led to believe that positive economic developments were the result of actions taken by the Obama administration; and that information-seeking bias is a contingent phenomenon, one depending jointly on the opportunity and motivation to selectively tune in to congenial information. Lastly, we demonstrate how the panel design also allowed us to (1) examine the reliability and stability of a variety of election-related implicit attitudes, and to assess their impact on candidate evaluation; and (2) determine the causal impact of perceptions of candidates’ traits and respondents’ policy preferences on electoral preferences, and vice versa, an area of research long plagued by concerns about endogeneity.

In 2011, more than 3% of all black men in the United States were imprisoned, compared to only 0.5% of all white men. Among prisoners ages 18 to 24, black men were imprisoned at a rate more than seven times that of white men (Carson and Sabol 2012). It is becoming increasingly urgent for researchers to understand what accounts for these race-based disparities. While a broad constellation of social problems exist that likely contribute to these disparities in concert, different fields of social science tend to focus on different types of explanations. Political scientists and sociologists have tended to emphasize the role of institutional factors, including criminal justice policies and practices, in maintaining race-based disparities. Social psychologists, in contrast, have tended to emphasize individual factors, including punitive responses to crime by jurors, judges, and criminal justice professionals.

We examine the role of moral typecasting in lay individuals' punitive responses to crime. Individuals perceive criminal offenders and victims in ways that are biased by their perceptions of the actors' moral roles in prior simulated criminal incidents. We find that this psychological process of moral typecasting has important implications for punitive responses to criminal offenders, and these findings make 2 major contributions to the literature. First, we show that moral agency is distinct from moral deservingness, which is 1 of the dominant explanations for punitive behavior in social psychology. Second, the role of moral typecasting in punitive responses means that these responses can occur regardless of the valence of moral character. We argue that theories of lay punitive responding that do not take moral typecasting processes into account are incomplete. (PsycINFO Database Record

Despite changing societal norms that are less tolerant of overt discrimination, demonstrable disparities between racial and gender groups remain. The contributors to this impressive special issue document and offer explanations for these disparities in employment and professional contexts, and with regard to disparate outcomes associated with the legal system, and in medical and health care contexts. In our commentary, we examine these aggregate-level disparities and the individual-level explanatory accounts proposed for their existence. The evidence that these papers present is often enough to rule out alternative explanatory accounts, and implicit bias remains a viable account for disparities that, to varying degrees, fit with the available data and the claim that implicit biases are contributing to an understanding of ongoing real-world disparities. As such, we believe that implicit bias research will continue to play a crucial role in understanding and hopefully reducing these aggregate-level disparities in employment, legal, and health care domains.

This investigation tested whether social norms and endorsement of humanitarian values interact to influence authoritarians' attitudes toward immigrants. Oyamot, Borgida, and Fisher (2006) found correlational evidence for a model in which: (1) clear social norms for attitudes toward an outgroup (favorable or unfavorable) influence the authoritarianism–attitude relationship in the direction of the norm, and (2) in the absence of clear social norms, endorsement of humanitarian–egalitarian values attenuate the intolerant tendencies of authoritarians. The current investigation tested the model in a survey experiment conducted in a diverse adult sample (N = 388). We measured participants' levels of authoritarian predisposition and endorsement of humanitarian values. Participants were then randomly told that Americans in general had either negative, positive, or mixed opinions about immigrants and immigration (social norm condition), and then asked about their attitude toward immigrants. Consistent with the model, authoritarianism was negatively related to attitudes toward immigrants in the negative norm condition. However, authoritarians' tendency toward intolerance was attenuated when they thought that Americans in general had positive opinions about immigrants. Also as predicted, when societal norms were depicted as mixed, authoritarians' attitudes depended upon endorsement of humanitarian values: humanitarian authoritarians held positive attitudes and non-humanitarian authoritarians held the most negative attitudes toward immigrants. Implications for understanding the effects of authoritarian predispositions in varying social contexts are discussed.

The enforcement of Arizona's new immigration law (Senate Bill 1070) requires police officers to make countless everyday judgments about whether individuals they encounter might be illegal immigrants. Understanding officers’ attitudes about immigrants, therefore, as well as the social and personal factors that influence these attitudes, will be important to predicting the consequences of enforcing this new law. Our program of research examines the role of authoritarianism, personal values, and descriptive social norms in determining attitudes about immigrants. Given the current social and political climate, as reflected in recent Arizona and national-level polls, coupled with research on psychological predispositions, our model suggests that Arizona police officers are likely to hold negative attitudes about immigrants, and that these negative attitudes may in turn influence how officers choose to enforce Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070). To reduce improper enforcement of SB 1070, our model suggests that police training interventions would be better informed by taking into consideration (1) the general ambiguity surrounding Americans' attitudes toward immigrants, and (2) the American tradition of egalitarianism.

The present study relies on symbolic politics theory to predict public attitudes toward the federal regulation of conventional tobacco products (a familiar attitude object) and reduced-exposure tobacco products (a relatively novel attitude object). We predicted that attitudes toward most forms of regulation would be more strongly influenced by symbolic beliefs about the role of government in society than by self-interested concerns, with the exception of taxation. We predicted that the financial consequences of taxation policies would be less ambiguous for those who are affected, resulting in a stronger relationship between self-interest and policy attitudes. The results strongly supported our hypotheses, suggesting a process by which symbolic beliefs and self-interested concerns influence attitude formation. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

We discuss how organizations can evaluate psychological science for its potential usefulness to their own purposes. Common sense is often the default but inadequate alternative, and bench-marking supplies only collective hunches instead of validated principles. External validity is an empirical process of identifying moderator variables, not a simple yes-no judgment about whether lab results replicate in the field. Hence, convincing criteria must specify what constitutes high-quality empirical evidence for organizational use. First, we illustrate some theories and science that have potential use. Then we describe generally accepted criteria for scientific quality and consensus, starting with peer review for quality, and scientific agreement in forms ranging from surveys of experts to meta-analyses to National Research Council consensus reports. Linkages of basic science to organizations entail communicating expert scientific consensus, motivating managerial interest, and translating broad principles to specific contexts. We close with parting advice to both sides of the researcher-practitioner divide.

Scholars of public opinion have struggled to explain why people often vote against their economic self-interest in favor of a value-based rationale. Based on Construal Level Theory (Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007), we argue that both values and material self-interest affect social and political attitudes, but in different temporal contexts. Specifically, because material self-interest is more concrete and applicable to everyday concerns, we predict that it should carry more weight with regard to judgments made in the context of the near future. In contrast, values, which are more abstract by nature, should carry greater weight for judgments made in the distant future. In an experimental test of this hypothesis, we presented participants with a fictitious policy that affected their pocketbooks in an otherwise value-laden domain. We found that people's financial self-interest more strongly predicted attitudes toward a proposal to increase tuition in the near condition, whereas antiegalitarian values more strongly predicted attitudes in the far condition. These findings offer new insights into the symbolic politics debate.

Quality science provides the foundation for expert testimony in court, a claim illustrated here by three established principles of social cognition frequently applied to litigation in employment discrimination cases. First, dual processes, automatic and controlled, underlie “hidden” bias. The Implicit Association Test exemplifies one controversial but scientifically tractable application of such automaticity principles. Second, encoding and attention reveal incredibly early bias. Their potential application via neuroscience in the courtroom will challenge both science and the law. Third, mental construal produces categorical representation. Legal applications show categories’ tenacity despite commonsense expectations about the impact of individuating information. Psychological scientists, expert witnesses, legal scholars, legal practitioners, and organizational managers each benefit when quality science is imported into legal contexts. Normal science disagreements should not mistakenly tarnish the credibility of quality science.

The present research examines whether and to what extent the underlying structure of attitudes toward harm reduction and specific reduced-exposure products contributes to an understanding of public attitudes toward harm reduction. Past research has focused on the extent to which some attitude objects are primarily affective or cognitive. Using survey data from a 5-state Upper Midwest sample, we tested the relevance of 4 pertinent properties of attitudes for predicting overall attitudes toward tobacco harm reduction: affective and cognitive bases of attitudes; knowledge; experience with smoking and reduced-harm products; and affective/cognitive consistency. We found that feelings about harm reduction are most predictive of overall attitudes toward harm reduction and specific reduced-harm products. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

Democratic deliberative theory has long emphasized the importance of citizen deliberation as a form of political participation and a centrally important component of any vital democracy. Public deliberation and discourse among citizens has been less frequently investigated as a form of political participation than more standard indicators such as voting or volunteering for political organizations. This research examines the extent to which internalized beliefs about deliberation are associated with deliberation outcome measures among a national sample of high school students participating in a year-long deliberation forum, Project 540. Using a multilevel analysis, the research specifically tested the extent to which scales of personal and normative deliberation beliefs, independently and moderated by Project 540 participation, predict key deliberative outcomes (e.g., civic skills, intention to participate in civic affairs). We find that predeliberation endorsement of both personal and normative beliefs predicts increases in certain positive deliberative outcomes, and that these effects are not moderated by participation in Project 540. The implications of these findings for deliberative democracy theory and for developing effective citizen deliberation forums are discussed.

Considerable interest has focused on making warning labels on tobacco-product packaging more effective in communicating risk to current and potential smokers. However, none of this work to date has involved the communication of risk information about reduced-exposure products, or how a graphic warning label may function in advertisements. Reduced-exposure products pose an interesting public health challenge in light of the fact that many advertisements for such products convey safety claims that may undermine the likelihood that potential consumers will process warnings about the products. The present study examines the influence of graphic warning labels on ratings of advertisements for 3 different types of tobacco products. Results showed that including a graphic picture lowered the appeal ratings for the product.

We contend that political context is important to consider when analyzing social capital and that context has an important but neglected impact on understanding the consequences of civic activity. Our focus is on the influence of rural, local leadership in two Minnesota communities and policies that these elites have developed to bring Internet connectivity to their citizens. One city developed a community electronic network and the other opted for an individualistic, entrepreneurial approach to information technology. Using a quasi-experimental research design and four-wave panel data, we find that elite policy approaches interact with civic activity to predict technology use among citizens, even long after the policies’ initial implementation. In the city with a community network, residents who are integrated into civic life are able to harness these political resources to become more technologically sophisticated.

Many fascinating questions have been raised about the “transformative” influence of the Internet on everyday social life. Some research suggests that the Internet has a positive and transformative influence on many lives, but other studies suggest that this influence is overstated and not always associated with such positive consequences. This article briefly discusses some of these claims, especially those grounded in research from social and political psychology. It focuses on the extent to which the Internet is providing (a) an important and increasingly influential forum for acquiring politically relevant information and (b) a new context for researchers to study traditional social-psychological processes that may be associated with the way citizens enhance their political knowledge online and bolster their political attitudes and partisan affiliations. More generally, the article suggests that there are potential theoretical and empirical payoffs associated with studying online information-seeking behavior in the political realm.

Focusing on two rural cities in Minnesota, this paper analyses ways in which these communities have gone about providing information technology to their citizens. This paper will explain why one city has chosen to take an entrepreneurial approach to networking and the other city has chosen a more collaborative approach, promoting equal access for its citizens. Based on interviews, focus groups, and surveys in the two cities, we find that these divergent approaches are related to fundamental cultural differences in the two communities. One city seems to have a more pronounced reservoir of social capital, meaning that people in this community tend to be more trusting, have more cohesive social ties and are prone toward collaboration. Cooperation and social trust, particularly among community leaders, seem to have played large roles in triggering the development of a community electronic network. Moreover, we discover that political engagement and interpersonal trust among the citizenry in this city seem to be pivotal in sustaining and perpetuating the community endeavor.

In this article, the authors discuss the implementation of a community electronic network in a rural Minnesota town. The network is intended to help the community keep up with global technological progress by increasing access to the Internet. The current project compares this community approach to electronic networks with an economic, for-profit approach utilized in a nonequivalent control community. Drawing on the theory of social capital, the authors consider the relative impacts of privately oriented social engagement versus publicly oriented political engagement in relation to collective outcomes. The findings to date show that in the presence of a broadly based community electronic network, political as well as economic resources are linked to the use and knowledge of computer resources. The implications of these findings for larger issues of fair and equitable access to technology are discussed.

The concept of social capital reflects the norms and social relations embedded in the social structure of societies that enable people to coordinate community action to achieve desired goals. Our research focuses on the role that norms of cooperation and civic and political culture play in addressing the "digital divide" in computer use and Internet access. We review evidence from mail surveys of randomly selected respondents in two rural Minnesota communities as well as qualitative focus group and archival evidence suggesting that the communities have adopted different approaches to technology diffusion. Whether information technology is viewed as a public or private good depends in part on the civic culture of a community.

Modifications occur when interviewers contradict statements made by witnesses or imply that witnesses provided information that they (interviewers) did not provide. Because of their suggestive nature, modifications threaten the reliability of investigative interviews. This study investigated developmental differences in witnesses' responses to modifications during interviews as well as in inclusion of modified misinformation in subsequent answers. Preschool, elementary school, and college students were interviewed about a video presentation. In the experimental conditions, the interviewer contradicted information about the video provided by the participants. Participants then answered two sets of follow-up questions: one immediately following the interview and another 6-8 days later. Results indicated that participants were more likely to ignore modifications than to correct or agree with them. Adult participants were most likely to disagree with modifications. Preschoolers were most likely to incorporate modified misinformation into subsequent answers. Implications of these findings for investigative interviews are discussed.

A model of the relationship between attitude involvement and attitude accessibilitywas developed and tested. The model specifies that attitude involvement leads to selective(biased) issue-related information-gathering strategies, which in turn produce extreme andunivalent (unambivalent) attitudes. Finally, attitudes associated with univalent and extremeunderlying structures should occasion relatively little decision conflict and thus should be highlyaccessible. Questionnaire response data gathered in a national telephone survey and from twosamples of undergraduates revealed that both attitude extremity and attitude ambivalence onselected political issues mediated the relationship between attitude involvement and attitudeaccessibility. Some findings indicated that selective processing mediated the relationshipbetween attitude involvement and attitude extremity and ambivalence. Discussion focuses on theprocesses linking involvement to accessibility, the factors that moderate theambivalence-accessibility relationship, and the relevance of the model to media-based primingeffects and tothe nature of public opinion and the survey response.

Two studies investigating renal transplant patients compliance with their post-transplant medical regimen are presented. Compliance was operationalized as a multidimensional construct incorporating behaviors that represent adherence to the regimen. Study 1 examined the association of noncompliance with clinically significant outcomes and the medical and demographic predictors of noncompliance. Noncompliance was associated with rejection episodes, graft loss, and multiple transplants. The best predictors of noncompliance were medication side effects, age, education, and insurance coverage. Study 2 examined the psychosocial predictors of noncompliance. After age and side-effects complaints, self-efficacy and threat appraisal were the best predictors of compliance. The implications of these results for expectancy-value models of health behaviors (e.g., protection motivation theory; Rogers, 1983) and their ability to predict compliance in patients following long-term regimens are discussed.

The recent implementation of a community electronic network is examined. The network is intended to help the rural community of Grand Rapids in northern Minnesota keep up with global technological progress. The present study is a baseline examination of social, political, and technological conditions in the community. Changes in social capital are hypothesized as a result of the wide-area network. Focus groups and survey research are used to assess inequalities in knowledge, access, and use of technologies as they relate to underlying inequalities in socioeconomic status and social capital. Results suggest that initial adoption of technological advances occurs among those with greater resources. Those with resources of social, but not necessarily economic, capital follow suit once an opportunity arises. Among the implications of the study's findings is that citizens lacking such resources need to be actively recruited into using the new technology as a means to bolster their existing resources.

Using data from four national surveys, we examined the role of affective-cognitive ambivalence in moderating the relative impact of affect and cognition on overall attitudes and behavior. Each survey assessed the affective and cognitive components of attitudes toward presidential candidates, as well as overall candidate attitudes and reported voting behavior. We found support for a primacy of affect (vs. cognition) effect among respondents withambivalentaffective-cognitive structures: For respondents with oppositely valenced affect and cognition, affect generally exerted a stronger influence on candidate attitudes and voting behavior than did cognition. However, for respondents withunivalentaffective-cognitive structures (i.e., similarly valenced affect and cognition), affect and cognition exerted a roughly equal influence on overall attitudes and voting behavior. Results are discussed in terms of the processes through which the ambivalence-moderated primacy of affect effect occurs, and its potential consequences.

A refined model of sex-role spillover theory (SRST), which posits a role for gender subtypes and harasser motivations in understanding perceptions of sexual harassment, is tested. Fifty male and 61 female undergraduates were asked to assess female targets on stereotypic characteristics, and to make attributions of harasser motivations for six scenarios describing three types of harassment (unwanted sexual attention, gender harassment, sexual coercion) at two levels of severity (nonphysical and physical) toward women in two different types of occupations (traditional and nontraditional). As predicted, scenarios about traditionally and nontraditionally employed female targets elicited different gender subtypes and different attributions of harasser motivations, depending on the type of sexual harassment experienced. Theoretical implications of this research are discussed.

The authors examined whether expert testimony serves an educational or a persuasive function. Participants watched a simulated sexual abuse trial in which the child witness had been prepared for her testimony (i.e., she was calm, composed, and confident) or unprepared (i.e., emotional, confused, and uncertain). The trial contained different levels of expert testimony: none, standard (i.e., a summary of the research), repetitive (i.e., standard testimony plus a 2nd summary of the research), or concrete (i.e., standard testimony plus a hypothetical scenario linking the research to the case facts) testimony. Repetitive testimony bolstered the child's testimony, whereas concrete and standard testimony did not. Concrete testimony sensitized jurors to behavioral correlates of sexual victimization; standard and repetitive testimony desensitized jurors to these correlates. Implications for the use of procedural innovations in sexual abuse trials are discussed.