Margit E. Oswald

Lay-Perspectives on Criminal Deviance, Goals of Punishment, and Punitivity

Empirical studies corroborate a relatively close relation between goals of sentencing and punitiveness. However, it is not clear what aspects of sentencing goals motivate harsh punishment. This study analyzes the structure of sentencing goals and scrutinizes in particular whether the idea of retribution is associated with punitiveness, or whether punishment considerations from a societal perspective (macrolevel) are the source of more punitive responses. A questionnaire was mailed to a random sample drawn in Bern, Switzerland. A total of 357 persons responded to items measuring constructs including goals of sentencing, punitiveness, target of justice considerations, and perceived threat to society, after reading one of three short stories about specific crimes (fraud, physical injury, assault). Results of this study reveal a two-dimensional structure of sentencing goals. One dimension represents readiness to punish and exclude the offender socially. The other dimension refers to concerns of the victim versus the needs of the society as a whole. The analysis provides a new interpretation of sentencing goals.

Detection of Feigned Crime-Related Amnesia: A Multi-Method Approach

Claims of crime-related amnesia appear to be common. Using a mock crime approach, the diagnostic power of seven symptom validity instruments was investigated. Sixty participants were assigned to three conditions: responding honestly; feigning crime-related amnesia; feigning amnesia with a warning not to exaggerate. High sensitivity and specificity were obtained for the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology, the Amsterdam Short-Term Memory Test, and the Morel Emotional Numbing Test. Only three warned malingerers went undetected. The results demonstrate that validated instruments exist to support forensic decision making about crime-related amnesia. Yet, warning may undermine their effectiveness, even when using a multi-method approach.

Why misinformation is reported: evidence from a warning and a source-monitoring task

ABSTRACT People report suggested misinformation about a previously witnessed event for manifold reasons, such as social pressure, lack of memory of the original aspect, or a firm belief to remember the misinformation from the witnessed event. In our experiments (N = 429), which follow Loftuss paradigm, we tried to disentangle the reasons for reporting a central and a peripheral piece of misinformation in a recognition task by examining (a) the impact a warning about possible misinformation has on the error rate, and (b) whether once reported misinformation was actually attributed to the witnessed event in a later source-monitoring (SM) task. Overall, a misinformation effect was found for both items. The warning strongly reduced the misinformation effect, but only for the central item. In contrast, reports of the peripheral misinformation were correctly attributed to the misinformation source or, at least, ascribed to guesswork much more often than the central ones. As a consequence, after the SM task, the initially higher error rate for the peripheral item was even lower than that of the central item. Results convincingly show that the reasons for reporting misinformation, and correspondingly also the potential to avoid them in legal settings, depend on the centrality of the misinformation.

What Did You Just Call Me? European and American Ratings of the Valence of Ethnophaulisms

Previous work has examined the relative valence (positivity or negativity) of ethnophaulisms (ethnic slurs) targeting European immigrants to the United States. However, this relied on contemporary judgments made by American researchers. The present study examined valence judgments made by citizens from the countries examined in previous work. Citizens of 17 European nations who were fluent in English rated ethnophaulisms targeting their own group as well as ethnophaulisms targeting immigrants from England. American students rated ethnophaulisms for all 17 European nations, providing a comparison from members of the host society. Ratings made by the European judges were (a) consistent with those made by the American students and (b) internally consistent for raters’ own country and for the common target group of the English. Following discussion of relevant methodological issues, the authors examine the theoretical significance of their results.

Kognition und Bewußtsein

Welche Rolle spielt das Bewu~tsein bei kognitiven Vorg{ngen? Die verschiedenen Antworten der kognitiven Psychologie zu dieser Frage werden dargestellt und kritisch diskutiert. Ein eigener L|sungsvorschlag wird entwickelt, der auch eine Antwort auf das Leib-Seele-Problem gibt sowie auf die Frage, ob subjektives Erleben Gegenstand objektiver Forschung sein kann.

Cooperation and Distrust – a Contradiction?

Trust is usually considered a prerequisite of cooperation in social dilemmas. Experimental studies show that people cooperate surprisingly often. However, this mayhappen because almost no risk from cooperation exists, and trust canbe shallow. In daily life, trust is normally more evidence-based: that is, sufficient information has to be provided to allow the development of trust. The higher the risk resulting from cooperation, the more necessary such a collection of information becomes. During the phase of information gathering, a state of distrust, rather than a state of trust, may be evolutionarily functional. Experimental studies show that people in a state of distrust (a) do not take the opinion of others automatically as their true position, but rather display extensive attributional considerations, (b) generate ideas opposite to, or incongruent with, those in the message of the distrusted others, and prefer nonroutine strategies, (c) perform better in logical reasoning, and (d) show an increase in cognitiveflexibility.Wewill discusswhether distrust canbe seenas a state ofmind that enhances mindful processing. Furthermore, we examine whether a state of distrust improves accuracy in detecting fraud and lies, and thus decreases the risk involved in cooperation in the long run. 1 What do experimental social dilemmas have in common with social dilemma situations in daily life? In social sciences, decision-making and social interactions are often analyzed by using experiments designed as social dilemmas. The so-called “trust games” are one important group of such social dilemmas: two or more players are provided with a certain amount of money, and each of them is asked to give a share of this money, or all of it, to a collective account (Fehr and Fischbacher 2004). The referee multiplies the resulting amount of money with a factor b (1 < b < n). This outcome determines the returns of the game and is apportioned among the players independent of their particular stake. The structure of social dilemmas in this game can be easily identified. Players win the most by investing the least, but only as long as there are other players who invest enough, and therefore act cooperatively. The gain is maximized if all players cooperate. It is assumed that those players who invest all or most of their money trust the other player or players because they expect cooperation (positive or benevolent behavior) without being able to apply control over the respective outcome. Thus, Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman (1995:712) define trust as follows: “Trust is the willingness of a https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110472974-017 Brought to you by | Utrecht University Library Authenticated | w.przepiorka@uu.nl Download Date | 9/20/17 3:54 PM 358 | Margit E. Oswald and Corina T. Ulshöfer party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party.” Trust (or distrust) may be a disposition as well as a certain state of mind. In the first case, the player has the general tendency to expect benevolence (or malevolence) frommost other people, not only in trust games but also in other situations (cf. Rotter 1967). In the second case, the trust (or distrust) of the player is not generally given but refers to a specific person or to a specific group andmaybe induced bymore or less extensive experiences or sensations. In theirmetaanalyses, Balliet and van Lange (2013) show that overall specific trust is more associated with cooperation (r = .58) than with dispositional trust (r = .26). In these trust games, as well as in other games with other dilemma structures, cooperative behavior may increase, and defective, egoistic, behavior may decrease, under certain conditions. More cooperation is shown if players interact more often, instead of engaging in one-shot games, the monetary incentive for cooperative (compared to that for defective) behavior is relatively high, the players are similar in their attitudes, or the players trust each other (Balliet and Van Lange 2013; Dirks and Ferrin 2001; Fischer 2009; Hardin 2006). So what do these experimental games have in common with social interactions in daily life? First, many social interactions in daily life often have the structure of a social dilemma. Just think of the recent donation appeal by Wikipedia, in late 2015, to support this non-profit informationwebsite, or the decisionwhether or not one should report anobservedoffense to thepolice. Second, people encountering social dilemmas in daily life may also be previously unknown to each other, and may only interact for a short period of time, as is the case in experimental games. However,many“players” indaily lifemaynot come togetherwith the solepurpose of attending to a social dilemma. Interacting partners in daily life may already have more or less competent knowledge about each other, and/or the person to be trusted may represent a certain social role, such as that of a physician or a supervisor. In this respect, person-specific trust or distrust in daily life is even more rationally justified. On the one hand, the justification can be based on one’s own experiences with the other person. Ideally, this trust is built up slowly and turns from a calculus-based trust to a knowledge-based trust, or even to an identification-based trust (Lewicki and Bunker 1996; Lewicki, Tomlinson, and Gillespie 2006; Rempel, Holmes, and Zanna 1985). On the other hand, it may be a role-based trust. The trust of groups of people, such as judges or physicians, aswell as organizations, is transferred to their particular representatives. It is an abstract trust of a function, or a role owner, as well as the system of organization behind him or her which ensures that roleadequate behavior is met and maintained (Kramer 1999; McKnight, Cummings, and Chervany 1998; Oswald 2006; Oswald 2010). This role-based trust can be developed (a) via direct contact with role owners, (b) via information from a third party about the reputation of the person or organization in question, or (c) via information from the media (Ferrin, Dirks, and Shah 2006). Nevertheless, it is necessary to state that in Brought to you by | Utrecht University Library Authenticated | w.przepiorka@uu.nl Download Date | 9/20/17 3:54 PM Cooperation and Distrust – a Contradiction? | 359 most social dilemmas in daily life, people refer to knowledge-based trust developed via direct or indirect experiences. In contrast to daily life, there is rarely role-based trust in one-shot trust games. Knowledge-based trust, whichmay develop through repetitions, is relatively reduced, as possibilities for behavioral feedback are very restricted. In addition, before we ask ourselves if one can speak of trust in these situations at all, we should consider the very low risks at stake in experimental games. In most studies the monetary incentive for a cooperative or defective decision amounts only to a “pocket money” of several Euros, andno real loss is possible if participants’ trust (cooperation) is betrayed by the partner (e.g., Harth and Regner 2016: average earnings 12.23 €, no real loss possible; Brañas-Garza, Espín, and Lenkei 2016: average earnings between 9 and 11 €, no real loss possible). This fact is often criticized, as it has been shown that the magnitude of themonetary incentive influences the decisionbehavior (Gneezy andRustichini 2000; Parco, Rapoport, and Stein 2002). 2 The necessity of well-founded trust varies with the risk from cooperation The risk arising from cooperative behavior can vary strongly. That risk may be a simple loss of game money, or a loss of real money from a few pence up to millions, or several years in prison (if one plays a prisoner’s dilemma in real life), or even the loss of one’s own life. The latter loss can happen, for example, up in the mountains when a rope team with two climbers gets into a dangerous situation. The higher the risk of a social dilemma, the more secure one has to be that one’s partner can be trusted (Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman 1995). Balliet andVanLange (2013) show, using ametaanalysis, that trust exhibits a stronger positive association with cooperation during situations involving larger, compared to smaller, amounts of conflict. Thus, trust matters more when there is a serious conflict of interest. Alternatively, in case of high risks, one can establish control or protective measures, such as the so-called “worst-case protection” or “hedges”, which often exist as supplementary agreements (with corresponding compensations) in case of missing cooperation (Meyerson, Weick, and Kramer 1996). A combination of trust and some control in cases of high risk may be meaningful for the further development of trust (Das and Teng 1998; Gangl, Hofmann, and Kirchler 2015). However, if the decision to cooperate is made by external persons or authorities, the structure of the decision changes. This is no longer a social dilemma at all (cf. Messick and Brewer 1983). If the risks are low, people may choose cooperative behavior because they understand it as a kind of social politeness. If they choose to defect, they will breach this politeness norm andhave to expect social disapproval. In such cases itmaybe enough to see the other person, or to hear their voice, to build up a feeling of trustworthiness. Brought to you by | Utrecht University Library Authenticated | w.przepiorka@uu.nl Download Date | 9/20/17 3:54 PM 360 | Margit E. Oswald and Corina T. Ulshöfer This automatically-developed feelingneeds to be differentiated from themore rational process of assessing the likelihood of becoming the victim of exploitation (Neumann 2014). Dunning et al. (2014) prove, in their studies, that this feeling of trustworthiness towards strangers is due to a norm mandating that they show respect for each other even if they are not convinced of their go

Source Memory for Mental Imagery: Influences of the Stimuli’s Ease of Imagery

The present study investigated how ease of imagery influences source monitoring accuracy. Two experiments were conducted in order to examine how ease of imagery influences the probability of source confusions of perceived and imagined completions of natural symmetric shapes. The stimuli consisted of binary pictures of natural objects, namely symmetric pictures of birds, butterflies, insects, and leaves. The ease of imagery (indicating the similarity of the sources) and the discriminability (indicating the similarity of the items) of each stimulus were estimated in a pretest and included as predictors of the memory performance for these stimuli. It was found that confusion of the sources becomes more likely when the imagery process was relatively easy. However, if the different processes of source monitoring—item memory, source memory and guessing biases—are disentangled, both experiments support the assumption that the effect of decreased source memory for easily imagined stimuli is due to decision processes and misinformation at retrieval rather than encoding processes and memory retention. The data were modeled with a Bayesian hierarchical implementation of the one high threshold source monitoring model.

Influence of credibility, warnings, and source-monitoring questions on the misinformation effect.

Introduction. Erroneous answers in studies on the misinformation effect (ME) can be reduced in different ways. In some studies, ME was reduced by SM questions, warnings, or a low credibility of the source of post-event information (PEI). Results are inconsistent, however. Of course, a participant can deliberately decide to refrain from reporting a critical item only when the difference between the original event and the PEI is distinguishable in principle. We were interested in the question to what extent the influence of erroneous information on a central aspect of the original event can be reduced by different means applied singly or in combination. Method. With a 2 (credibility; high vs. low) x 2 (warning; present vs. absent) between subjects design and an additional control group that received neither misinformation nor a warning (N = 116), we examined the above-mentioned factors’ influence on the ME. Participants viewed a short video of a robbery. The critical item suggested in the PEI was that the victim was given a kick by the perpetrator (which he was actually not). The memory test consisted of a two-forced-choice recognition test followed by a SM test. Results. To our surprise, neither a main effect of erroneous PEI nor a main effect of credibility was found. The error rates for the critical item in the control group (50%) as well as in the high (65%) and low (52%) credibility condition without warning did not significantly differ. A warning about possible misleading information in the PEI significantly reduced the influence of misinformation in both credibility conditions by 32-37%. Using a SM question significantly reduced the error rate too, but only in the high credibility no warning condition. Conclusion and Future Research. Our results show that, contrary to a warning or the use of a SM question, low source credibility did not reduce the ME. The most striking finding was, however, the absence of a main effect of erroneous PEI. Due to the high error rate in the control group, we suspect that the wrong answers might have been caused either by the response format (recognition test) or by autosuggestion possibly promoted by the high schema-consistency of the critical item. First results of a post-study in which we used open-ended questions before the recognition test support the former assumption. Results of a replication of this study using open-ended questions prior to the recognition test will be available by June.

Freiwillige Teilnahme an Wiedergutmachungsprogrammen und die Bereitschaft zur Verantwortungsübernahme

Zusammenfassung: Wird Straftatern/Straftaterinnen freigestellt, ob sie an einem Wiedergutmachungsprogramm teilnehmen, so ist dies zwangslaufig mit der Frage verbunden, ob sich die Gruppe der Teilnahmewilligen nicht von vornherein durch bestimmte Merkmale auszeichnet. Durchgefuhrte Kontrollen einer moglichen Selbstselektion beschranken sich bisher ausschlieslich auf demografische und deliktbezogene Variablen, die den Strafakten entnommen werden konnen. Um eine Uberschatzung der Programmerfolge, z. B. in Bezug auf die Ruckfallwahrscheinlichkeit, zu vermeiden, ware es jedoch wichtig, auch solche Variablen zu kontrollieren, welche die Bereitschaft und die Fahigkeit zur Verhaltensanderung anzeigen. In der vorliegenden Studie wurde in diesem Sinne die Bereitschaft der Straftater/Straftaterinnen kontrolliert, Verantwortung fur ihre Tat zu ubernehmen. Es zeigte sich, dass diejenigen, welche freiwillig das Angebot eines Modellprojektes nutzen wollen (n = 27), von vornherein eine geringere Tendenz zur Rechtfertigun...

Mikro- versus Makroperspektive der retributiven Gerechtigkeit, Strafziele und die Forderung nach Strafe

Zusammenfassung: Wie Personen auf Straftaten reagieren und welche Strafziele sie dabei verfolgen, war bisher kaum Gegenstand psychologischer Forschung. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird die dimensionale Struktur der Praferenz von Strafzielen untersucht. In zwei Befragungen wurden juristischen Laien Fallgeschichten zur Beurteilung vorgelegt (Raububerfall, Korperverletzung, Betrug, Vergewaltigung). Die multivariaten Auswertungen weisen eine hohe Ubereinstimmung auf: Strafziele lassen sich durch die zwei voneinander unabhangigen Dimensionen Strafharte und Mikro- versus Makroperspektive klassifizieren. Wird eine Makroperspektive eingenommen, so ist dies mit einer starkeren Gewichtung von Gesellschaftsinteressen verbunden sowie mit der Praferenz fur das Strafziel der positiven Generalpravention. Die Mikroperspektive ist hingegen mit der Uberzeugung verbunden, dass Gerechtigkeit insbesondere aus der Perspektive der konkret Beteiligten herzustellen ist. Je nach geforderter Strafharte geht die Mikroperspektive mit ...