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Multidimensional constructs like procedural justice and trustworthiness are important drivers of public trust in the police. Less attention has been paid, however, to the differential import of the dimensions of procedural justice (voice, respect and impartiality) or trustworthiness (ability, benevolence and integrity). A national convenience sample of US residents was asked to prioritize among the dimensions of procedural justice (Study 1) or trustworthiness (Study 2) in designing the officer with whom they would want to interact in each of the four scenarios. These scenarios were then varied as a function of the ostensible severity and concreteness of the salient, police-controlled harm. Our results suggest that, when forced to allocate limited resources among them, participants systematically prioritized some dimensions over others. The findings also shed preliminary light on the elements of the situation that may impact that prioritization.

SummaryThe Área de Conservación Osa (ACOSA) contains the largest population of Scarlet MacawsAra macaoin Costa Rica. Despite their influence on ecosystem dynamics and status as a flagship species, empirical data on the foraging patterns of this population is lacking. This information is crucial in implementing effective conservation strategies, particularly reintroduction attempts. Observations of feeding behaviour were made systematically over a 12-month period to provide the first direct examination of Scarlet Macaw diet within the ACOSA region. Scarlet Macaws feed on various items including seeds, flowers, bark, and leaf-gall larvae. Key findings included a demonstration of a smaller dietary niche breadth than that recorded for other Central American populations, use of button mangroveConocarpus erectus, a species not previously recognised as a food source for Scarlet Macaws, and a heavy reliance on an exotic non-native species,Terminalia catappa.We argue that whilst human-modified coastal locations may present viable habitat for Scarlet Macaws, anthropogenic influences including the removal of native food sources and proliferation of exotic and cultivated species have left the Scarlet Macaws of the ACOSA particularly dependent on a small number of species.

Contact tracing (CT) can limit the spread of infectious diseases, however its effectiveness hinges on public participation. We evaluated perceptions of the financial and health risk posed by COVID-19 and trust in information about COVID-19 provided by the state health department that manages CT as predictors of comfort and willingness to comply with CT. We further examined the moderating effect of political ideology on these relationships.We used structural equation modeling to test hypotheses in data from a cross-sectional survey completed by a representative sample of Michigan residents (N = 805) in 2020.Perceptions of the risk of COVID-19 to one's health (but not finances) was negatively related to comfort and willingness to participate in CT. Trust in information about COVID-19 and liberalism were positively related to comfort and willingness. There was also a moderating effect of political ideology, such that conservatives were less comfortable and willing at greater perceptions of health risk.Conservatives and those who perceive a greater health risk may require targeted messaging and more deliberate engagement strategies to increase CT participation.

The recent protests regarding the state of policing in the United States clearly demonstrate that how the police do their job creates a salient potential for harm to the public. This study applies a multidimensional paradigm of risk perception to quantify evaluations of police-caused harm. Using data from a national (U.S.) convenience sample ( n = 1,890) that oversampled individuals who self-identified as black or Muslim, we tested whether these evaluations vary systematically (using confidence intervals), whether they covary with police legitimacy (using structural equation modeling), and the extent to which that covariance differs by demographic status (using multiple groups structural equation modeling). Our results suggest that black and Muslim individuals evaluate police-caused harm differently than do majority group members (white and Christian) on most, but not all, of the measured dimensions. We also find that those evaluations are predictive of trust and provide evidence of some level of consistency across communities.

The current study uses data collected from defendants immediately after their hearings to test hypotheses regarding the relations among constructs relevant to perceptions of the state courts. Takin...

The current research adds to the literature addressing police body-worn cameras (BWCs) by experimentally evaluating their effect on an interaction that has, to date, received relatively little systematic, empirical attention: police–eyewitness interactions. Although research suggests that BWCs generally have positive effects, legal scholars and media professionals have long argued that deploying cameras in this context may backfire, especially by chilling public willingness to speak with police. The current study utilized an online national convenience sample (N = 508) to test the effect of four factors that were varied across seven mock interview video conditions on participants’ willingness to cooperate, the amount of information provided, accuracy and confidence in an eyewitness identification task, and perceptions like procedural fairness and trust. We hypothesized that the presence and activation of the camera would have positive effects on the interaction. Regarding the factors, the manipulated presence of a recording camera had the most consistent positive impact. Whether the camera was present, and the participant’s awareness of the camera and the fact that it was recording were also tested, but these comparisons were less likely to reach statistical significance. Regarding the conditions, the best outcomes were associated with officers who turned on the camera and did not explain why. Conversely, the worst outcomes were associated with officers who turned off the cameras without explanation. Our results suggest that the positive effects of BWCs may extend to police–eyewitness interactions and reveal no evidence of a chilling effect on eyewitness-relevant outcomes.

Food labeling is one approach to encourage safe, healthy, and sustainable dietary practices. Consumer buy and pay preferences for specially labeled food products (e.g., U.S. Department of Agriculture organic, raised without antibiotics, and locally raised) may promote the adoption of associated production practices by food producers. Thus, it is important to understand how consumer buy and pay preferences for specially labeled products vary with their demographics, food-relevant habits, and foodborne disease perceptions. Using both conventional statistical and novel machine learning models, this study analyzed Michigan State University Environmental Science and Policy Program annual survey data (2019) to characterize consumer buy and pay preferences regarding eight labels related to food production practices. Older consumer age was significantly associated with lower consumer willingness to pay more for labeled products. Participants who prefer to shop in nonconventional grocery stores were more willing to buy and pay more for labeled products. Our machine learning models provide a new approach for analyzing food safety and labeling survey data and produced adequate average prediction accuracy scores for all eight labels. The label "raised without antibiotics" had the highest average prediction accuracy for consumer willingness to buy. Thus, the machine learning models may be used to analyze food survey data and help develop strategies for promoting healthy food production practices.

In this study we assess the extent to which the regulations governing the use of drones in the United States address the concerns held by the public they are meant to protect. In general, respondents were most supportive of those regulations that could be categorized as limiting one's exposure to an unwanted drone. The most popular policies were those that protected personal privacy, while the least popular were those that hampered drones used for public safety. The largest discrepancy was found to be respondents' preference for laws protecting personal privacy compared with the lack of regulatory constraints currently in place. Federal regulators have only begun to introduce regulations on how drones can be used in our national airspace, with additional regulations for other types and sizes of drones likely to be introduced in the future. The results of this study may be utilized by regulators and lawmakers to create a regulatory structure that effectively mitigates risk and supports the public interest.

In the United States, more than 200 communities are designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as areas of concern for dioxins. Informing the public about potential risks associated with dioxins and delivering information about how to avoid such risks are essential activities. News coverage of environmental and health problems affects how members of the public assess those problems in terms of both severity and how they are understood, as well as the extent of attention given to the problem by policy-makers. To contextualize public and institutional responses to dioxin contamination and remediation in a dioxin-affected community, we assessed 176 newspaper articles published over 30 years concerning dioxin contamination in Midland, Michigan, in terms of risk, trust in institutions, environmental stigma, and citizen participation. Articles about dioxin contamination and remediation in Midland appeared in both domestic and international newspapers. Domestically, both national and local newspapers covered this issue. The risks for human health and the environment caused by exposure to dioxins were widely covered, with much less media attention given to the trustworthiness of the organizations responsible for managing the risk, environmental stigma, and citizen participation. News coverage of these four themes also changed significantly overtime. Overall, our findings highlight the important role of local news media in communicating risk information, guiding safe behaviors, and facilitating community-level decision-making.

The focus of this study is to examine citizen satisfaction with the police. Specifically, the authors aim to understand the factors that determine citizen satisfaction with police services in India, a former English colony and a relatively new republic that has achieved a significant economic development in recent decades. Findings from analysis of a convenience sample (N = 845) obtained from four Northern states in India suggest that perceived procedural fairness, fear of crime, and age of the respondents predict satisfaction with police services. Moreover, perceived professionalism of police officers is found to increase their perceived procedural fairness.

Positive public perceptions are a critical pillar of the criminal justice system, but the literature addressing them often fails to offer clear advice regarding the important constructs or the relationships among them. The research reported here sought to take an important step toward this clarity by recruiting a national convenience sample to complete an online survey about the police in the respondent’s community, which included measures of the process-based model of legitimacy and the classic model of trust. Our results suggest that although both are predictive, the models can be integrated in a way that allows the strengths of each model to address the weaknesses of the other. We therefore present this model as a first step toward an Integrated Framework of Police Legitimacy that can meaningfully incorporate much of the existing scholarship and provide clearer guidance for those who seek to address these constructs in research and practice.

Trust is critical for natural resource management (NRM). In recognition of this, a noteworthy body of literature has investigated the construct but is, as yet, still developing. The current research proposes and tests an increasingly complete model that integrates the major advances in not only the NRM literature but in the social psychological literature addressing trust more generally as well. To that end, the current analyses were conducted with a large sample of Michigan hunters (n = 23,954). The results suggest that, as hypothesized, the theoretical model is a statistically defensible account of trust in this context and suggest that both trustworthiness and motivation have important roles to play in driving cooperation intention and behavior. Thus, the current work suggests that although it is important for NRM institutions to attend to their trustworthiness, they should not ignore the motivation that arises from benefits they provide.

Based on the survey of 495 police officers from the Croatian capital of Zagreb, this chapter explores the relation between organizational justice and police integrity. Grounded in the theory of police integrity and the related methodology developed by Klockars and colleagues, our study incorporates a number of hypothetical scenarios, ranging from police corruption and use of excessive force, to organizational deviance and interpersonal deviance. Bivariate analyses show that, for the overwhelming majority of scenarios included in the questionnaire, the police officers’ evaluations of procedural, distributive, and interactional justice are strongly related to the their evaluations of misconduct seriousness. In subsequent logistic regression models that control for demographic factors (e.g., length of service, supervisory position) and organizational factors (e.g., knowledge of official rules, severity of expected discipline), we find that evaluations of organizational justice are strong predictors of the respondents’ seriousness evaluations in about two-thirds of the scenarios. Our findings also demonstrate that relative evaluations of seriousness (i.e., how serious each scenario is evaluated compared to the other scenarios in the questionnaire) are not related to the police officers’ perceptions of organizational justice.

Political trust is a perennially important concern and the events of the last few years have, in many ways, heightened this importance. The relevant scholarship has done much to meet this challenge but continues to struggle with definitional unclarities and an inability to provide accounts that consistently operate as expected. The current research seeks to test the potential of a classic model of trust from the organizational sciences that makes specific arguments regarding the psychological nature and mechanisms of the construct in helping to address these concerns. Using data from a national convenience sample, we provide preliminary evidence which suggests that measures and models addressing this theoretical account of psychological trust form unidimensional and reliable measures that may more precisely explain the process of political trust and outperform current measures in predicting relevant correlates. We conclude by discussing the implications and limitations of our work and, in so doing, lay a foundation for a new research agenda for political trust.

Trust is generally recognized as important for risk-relevant behavior but research suggests that trust in different organizations may have varying effects. This research advances the literature by testing two hypotheses which postulate that this variability can be explained by risk perception. We collected data from 351 anglers regarding their trust in nine organizations whose efforts are relevant to dioxin contamination in Michigan's Saginaw Bay Watershed, risk perceptions, and self-reports of risky behavior (i.e., consumption of local fish identified as especially likely to contain contaminants). As hypothesized (H1), the negative effect of trust in two agencies-the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) and a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services-sponsored River Walker Program (RWP)-on risky behavior was significantly mediated by risk perception but these effects differed from each other such that trust in the MDNR was associated with increased perceptions of risk while trust in the RWP was associated with decreased perceptions of benefit. Also as hypothesized (H2), the positive effect of trust in Dow Chemical Company on risky behavior was significantly mediated by risk perception such that increased trust in Dow was associated with reduced risk perception. The current results lend credence to arguments regarding the importance of specificity in the target of trust and advance this literature by suggesting that differential effects on risk perception help explain this variability. Thus, organizations whose efforts focus on risk communication appear ideally situated to reduce risky behavior through a negative impact on risk perception. Other organizations, however, may run the risk of increasing risky behavior if their efforts result in reduced perceptions of risk.

This article examined the extent to which residents living in the Midland–Saginaw–Bay City area in Eastern Michigan felt stigmatized due to industrial contamination. Seventy in-depth interviews were conducted with local residents, focusing on the extent to which they experienced three aspects of stigma—affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Results indicated that although some participants were not concerned with living in a contaminated community, local residents largely perceived dioxin as a risk to individual health and the local environment. Concern, shock, and irritation were typical affective responses at the time participants learned of the contamination. Several participants indicated a feeling of embarrassment and fear of being rejected by others because of the stigma associated with industrial contamination. Instead of actively seeking information about dioxin contamination and remediation, participants often relied on information provided to them by government officials. Behaviorally, participants avoided eating locally caught fish and prepared fish more carefully in order to avoid exposure to contaminants. As a whole, this study provided insight to understand affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses to environmental stigma.

Using confirmatory factor analyses and multiple indicators per construct, we examined a number of theoretically derived factor structures pertaining to numerous trust-relevant constructs (from 9 to 12) across four institutional contexts (police, local governance, natural resources, state governance) and multiple participant-types (college students via an online survey, community residents as part of a city's budget engagement activity, a random sample of rural landowners, and a national sample of adult Americans via an Amazon Mechanical Turk study). Across studies, a number of common findings emerged. First, the best fitting models in each study maintained separate factors for each trust-relevant construct. Furthermore, post hoc analyses involving addition of higher-order factors tended to fit better than collapsing of factors. Second, dispositional trust was easily distinguishable from the other trust-related constructs, and positive and negative constructs were often distinguishable. However, th...

Older adults are an increasingly relevant subpopulation for criminal justice policy but, as yet, are largely neglected in the relevant research. The current research addresses this by reporting on a psychometric evaluation of a measure of older adults’ Confidence in Legal Institutions (CLI). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) provided support for the unidimensionality and reliability of the measures. In addition, participants’ CLI was related to cynicism, trust in government, dispositional trust, age, and education, but not income or gender. The results provide support for the measures of confidence in the courts and law enforcement, so we present the scale as a viable tool for researchers and practitioners interested in understanding older adults’ confidence in these institutions. We conclude by discussing the implications of our work on efforts to improve interactions between older adults and legal institutions, and we highlight avenues for further research.

Contemporary natural resource management (NRM) emphasises the role of the public in general and land owners in particular as voluntary participants in the process. Understanding the role of trust in voluntary cooperation is therefore critical, but the current state of the relevant literature is such that it fails to systematically address a few important issues. This inquiry sought to address these issues by presenting and testing a model of land owners’ trust in and cooperation with a NRM institution. The model hypothesises that the six major drivers of trust in this context (dispositional trust, care, competence, confidence, procedural fairness and salient values similarity) are distinct but correlated constructs that drive cooperation and whose effects are moderated by the sophistication (relevant knowledge and experience) of the trustor. The results provide complicated partial support for the hypotheses and suggest that (1) although the six constructs are separable, their effects on cooperation are no...

Community engagement is a vital aspect of addressing environmental contamination and remediation. In the United States, the Superfund Research Program (SRP) forms groups of academic researchers from the social and physical sciences into Community Engagement Cores (CECs) and Research Translation Cores (RTCs), which focus on various aspects of informing and working with communities during and through the resolution of environmental crises. While this work typically involves engaging directly with members of affected communities, no two situations are the same. In some cases, alternative approaches to community engagement can be more appropriate for community improvement than traditional approaches. In particular, when research teams become involved in contamination crises at a late point in the process, their contributions can be better directed at supporting and reinforcing the work of institutional stakeholders charged with remediating pollution. Relevant factors include issue fatigue among a local population, and contamination that is due to a major employer. Supported by literature and experience, we offer several propositions that we believe lay out conditions that warrant such an approach by academic teams, rather than their direct engagement with unaffiliated individuals in communities.

This study examined a knowledge-centered theory of institutional trust development. In the context of trust in water regulatory institutions, the moderating impact of knowledge was tested to determine if there were longitudinal changes in the bases of institutional trust as a function of increases in knowledge about a target institution. We hypothesized that as people learn about an institution with which they were previously unfamiliar, they begin to form more nuanced perceptions, distinguishing the new institution from other institutions and relying less upon their generalized trust to estimate their trust in that institution. Prior to having specific, differential information about a new institution, we expected institutional trust to be a function of generalized trust variables such as dispositional trust and trust in government. The longitudinal experiment involved 185 college students randomly assigned to one of three information conditions. Every 3 months for 15 months, participants read information about water regulatory institutions or a control institution. At each time point, participants reported their trust in and perceptions of the trust- and distrust-worthiness of the water regulatory institutions. Participants also completed measures of knowledge of water regulatory institutions, dispositional trust, and governmental trust. Our manipulation check indicated that, as expected, those in the experimental group increased in subjective knowledge of water regulatory institutions to a greater extent than those in the control condition. Consistent with our hypotheses, there was some evidence that, compared to the control group, the experimental group relied less on their general trust in government as a basis for their trust in water regulatory institutions. However, contrary to our hypotheses, there was no evidence the experimental group relied less on dispositional trust as a basis for institutional trust. There also was some evidence the experimental group's trust in water regulatory institutions was less affected by fluctuations of trustworthiness (but not distrustworthiness) perceptions over time. This suggests that knowledge results in the development of more stable institutional trust attitudes, but that trustworthiness and distrustworthiness perceptions may operate somewhat differently when impacting trust in specific institutions.

Research from across disciplines has demonstrated that social and political contextual factors at the national and subnational levels can impact the health and health behavior risks of individuals. This paper examines the impact of state-level social capital and ideology on individual-level health outcomes in the U.S. Leveraging the variation that exists across states in the U.S., the results reveal that individuals report better health in states with higher levels of governmental liberalism and in states with higher levels of social capital. Critically, however, the effect of social capital was moderated by liberalism such that social capital was a stronger predictor of health in states with low levels of liberalism. We interpret this finding to mean that social capital within a political unit—as indicated by measures of interpersonal trust—can serve as a substitute for the beneficial impacts that might result from an active governmental structure.

While the story of the Flint water crisis has frequently been told, even sympathetic analyses have largely worked to make invisible the significant actions of Flint residents to protect and advocate for their community. Leaving the voices of these stakeholders out of narratives about the crisis has served to deepen distrust in the community. Our project responds to these silences through a community-driven research study aimed explicitly at elevating the frame of Flint residents in and around the Flint water crisis. This paper describes the coming together of the research team, the overall project design for each of the three research efforts, and lessons learned. The three sub-projects include: (1) a qualitative analysis of community sentiment provided during 17 recorded legislative, media, and community events, (2) an analysis of trust in the Flint community through nine focus groups across demographic groups (African American, Hispanic, seniors, and youth) of residents in Flint, and (3) an analysis of the role of the faith-based community in response to public health crises through two focus groups with faith based leaders from Flint involved with response efforts to the water crisis. Our study offers insight for understanding trust in crisis, which could be valuable to other communities and researchers seeking to address similar situations. The project offers community science as a model for considering community engagement in research as part of the process of resilience.

Although researchers have consistently demonstrated the importance of confidence in public institutions like the courts, relatively little attention has been paid to understanding what confidence itself really is. This article presents data from two samples of community members, thereby building on and extending a preliminary investigation that sought to understand constructs related to confidence in state courts with student samples. Structural equation modelling results provide support for the dimensionality of the measures and indicate that dispositional trust has little to no independent effect on confidence. However, tendency to trust in governmental institutions, cynicism toward the law and felt obligation to obey the law are important predictive constructs. The current results are important both for researchers seeking to understand confidence in the courts and the judges and administrators who would seek to increase it.

This article examines the effectiveness of using different kinds of written reminders to reduce misdemeanor defendants’ failure-to-appear (FTA) rates. A subset of defendants was surveyed after their scheduled court date to assess their perceptions of procedural justice and trust and confidence in the courts. Reminders reduced FTA overall, and more substantive remind ers (e.g., with information on the negative consequences of FTA) were more effective than a simple reminder. FTA varied depending on several offense and offender characteristics, such as geographic location (urban vs. rural), type of offense, and number of offenses. The reminders were somewhat more effective for Whites and Hispanics than for Blacks. Defendants with higher institutional confidence and those who felt they had been treated more fairly by the criminal justice system were more likely to appear, though the effectiveness of the reminder was greatest among misdemeanants with low levels of trust in the courts. The implications for public policy and pretrial services are discussed.

As argued throughout this volume, trust matters. This importance has spawned a number of major contemporary efforts to increase trust in numerous domains. These efforts typically seek to leverage the best available science for understanding and motivating trust but it is, as yet, not well understood to what degree trust is essentially the same or importantly different across the various domains. Trust building efforts are, therefore, often left with little guidance as to the critical issues to address when applying work from other domains. This chapter takes up this deficiency by reviewing the major mainstream conceptualizations, antecedents, and outcomes of trust in four domains: public administration, policing, state courts, and medicine. The chapter concludes that trust is in fact notably similar across domains but that there are critical differences to be attended to. Specifically, we argue that trust across contexts can be thought of as a willingness to accept vulnerability in dealings with an "other" but that the most important drivers of that willingness are likely to vary somewhat as a function of the domain.

Clarifying the “conceptual morass” of the social science of trust is a critical endeavor, and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is an important tool for researchers seeking to investigate the relationships among and relative influence of the many trust constructs in this expanding literature. Problematically, however, the often conceptually overlapping nature of the constructs themselves can create covariance problems that are only exacerbated by SEM’s ability to partition shared and unshared variance among indicators. These challenges can, in some situations, entirely preclude researchers from using SEM to test theoretically important hypotheses. There are a number of potential strategies available to researchers to address these problems, notably including both item- and factor-level aggregation techniques. Importantly, however, these aggregation strategies often compromise many of the benefits that make SEM so attractive in the first place. We therefore recommend that researchers with strongly correlated latent constructs test a specific alternative model in which higher-order factors are used to predict the covariance among the latent factors. These models address the problems that arise from working with excessive covariance while preserving the conceptual and statistical distinctiveness of the lower-order factors and permitting researchers to test their independent influence on important outcomes. To aid in illustrating this approach, the chapter includes a real-world data example in which various alternative model specifications are tested, highlighting the utility of higher-order factor models for trust researchers.

PurposeMunicipalities commonly ask the public to give input by answering questions about their preferences. There is some belief that input enhances the public's confidence in government. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether different types of input activities (obtained by phone or online surveys, or via face‐to‐face engagements) differentially impact confidence.Design/methodology/approachData were collected over two years from different input activities undertaken to inform a city's budgeting and performance measures' determinations.FindingsSignificant amounts of variance in the public's confidence in municipal governments are accounted for by independent predictors such as current satisfaction, perceived trustworthiness, legitimacy, and loyalty to the institution. Compared to online and phone surveys, face‐to‐face input methods seem to have a particularly strong, positive relationship with the public's perceptions of the trustworthiness (e.g. competence, integrity, benevolence) of municipal government officials. Persons who participate in face‐to‐face, online, or phone events differ both in extent of confidence and, to a small extent, in the bases of their confidence.Research limitations/implicationsThe study design is correlational rather than experimental and data were not originally gathered to test the identified hypotheses. In addition, it is not prudent to put too much stock in results from only one jurisdiction that relied primarily on convenience samples.Originality/valueIn instances in which enhancing confidence in the institution is a specific objective of public input, this work provides researchers and practitioners with guidance to better anticipate which input technique(s) works best and why.

The purpose of this article is to test whether the use of public participation by a local government increases perceptions of procedural fairness among the public and to propose an explanation for why fairness is a strong predictor of satisfaction with governmental decisions. To do this, we draw on the uncertainty management model to hypothesize that indications of procedural fairness can increase public support for government and its decisions and that fairness effects are greater for individuals who are more uncertain (less knowledgeable) about the governmental body in question. To test the hypothesis, we embedded an experiment in a survey of the public that was used by a local government to inform its budgetary decisions. The results provide support for the notion that governmental use of public input does increase perceptions of governmental fairness and that, in turn, perceptions of fairness have stronger relationships with overall governmental assessments for those who are relatively uncertain about a governmental institution.

Although several frameworks for assessing the resilience of social-ecological systems (SESs) have been developed, some practitioners may not have sufficient time and information to conduct extensive resilience assessments. We have presented a simplified approach to resilience assessment that reviews the scientific, historical, and social literature to rate the resilience of an SES with respect to nine resilience properties: ecological variability, diversity, modularity, acknowledgement of slow variables, tight feedbacks, social capital, innovation, overlap in governance, and ecosystem services. We evaluated the effects of two large-scale projects, the construction of a major dam and the implementation of an ecosystem recovery program, on the resilience of the central Platte River SES (Nebraska, United States). We used this case study to identify the strengths and weaknesses of applying a simplified approach to resilience assessment. Although social resilience has increased steadily since the predam period for the central Platte River SES, ecological resilience was greatly reduced in the postdam period as compared to the predam and ecosystem recovery program time periods.

Natural resources management in the United States is a complicated endeavor and, although a variety of institutions are involved, most day to day management falls to state natural resource authorities. Given the large percentage of private land in some states and the often opposing interests of the parties, these authorities’ efforts often put them in conflict with land owners. Navigating these conflicts well is important for the effective and efficient management of natural resources in the US and the current paper applies the social science of procedural fairness to identify three critical concerns that should be attended to in these conflicts: (1) the reason for the importance of perceived procedural fairness lies in its ability to signal that the individual is valued in the process, (2) voice in the process and the ability to influence the decision are critical components of perceived procedural fairness in this context, (3) the perception of procedural fairness will be most important in the face of uncertainty.

"Regulating water resources is a critically important yet increasingly complex component of the interaction between ecology and society. Many argue that effective water regulation relies heavily upon the compliance of water users. The relevant literature suggests that, rather than relying on external motivators for individual compliance, e.g., punishments and rewards, it is preferable to focus on internal motivators, including trust in others. Although prior scholarship has resulted in contemporary institutional efforts to increase public trust, these efforts are hindered by a lack of evidence regarding the specific situations in which trust, in its various forms, most effectively increases compliance. We report the results of an experiment designed to compare the impacts of three trust-related constructs, a broad sense of trust in the institution, specific process-fairness perceptions, and a dispositional tendency to trust others, on compliance with water regulation under experimentally varied situations. Specifically, we tested the potential moderating influences of concepts relevant to water regulation in the real world: high versus low information conditions about an institutional decision, decision consistency with relevant data, and decision outcome valence. Our results suggest that participants??? dispositional trust predicts their intent to comply when they have limited information about decisions, but the effects of dispositional trust are mediated by trust in the institution. Institutional trust predicts compliance under narrow conditions: when information is lacking or when decision outcomes are positive and are justified by available data. Finally, when the regulatory decision is inconsistent with other data in high-information conditions, prior judgments of institutional process fairness are most predictive of intent to comply. Our results may give guidance to water regulators, who may want to try to increase trust and thus increase voluntary compliance; the results suggest, in particular, that such efforts be tailored to the situation."

Despite its contemporary and theoretical importance in numerous social scientific disciplines, institutional confidence research is limited by a lack of consensus regarding the distinctions and relationships among related constructs (e.g., trust, confidence, legitimacy, distrust, etc.). This study examined four confidence-related constructs that have been used in studies of trust/confidence in the courts: dispositional trust, trust in institutions, obligation to obey the law, and cynicism. First, the separability of the four constructs was examined by exploratory factor analyses. Relationships among the constructs were also assessed. Next, multiple regression analyses were used to explore each construct's independent contribution to confidence in the courts. Finally, a second study replicated the first study and also examined the stability of the institutional confidence constructs over time. Results supported the hypothesized separability of, and correlations among, the four confidence-related constructs. The extent to which the constructs independently explained the observed variance in confidence in the courts differed as a function of the specific operationalization of confidence in the courts and the individual predictor measures. Implications for measuring institutional confidence and future research directions are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.