A quasi-experimental investigation of message appeal variations on organ donor registration rates.

OBJECTIVE: Approximately 6,000 Americans die every year awaiting an organ transplant. Health promotion interventions may alleviate the shortage of viable organs by increasing the number of registered organ donors. This study is the first to evaluate the differential effectiveness of various organ donor messages in naturalistic settings. DESIGN: A 4 (Appeal)x4 (Exemplar)x4 (Location) counterbalanced quasi-experimental design was implemented. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: The behavioral outcome measure was the number of individuals who registered to be organ donors at computer kiosks. RESULTS: A number of significant main effects and interactions emerged. Most notably, of the 4 different appeals (counterargument, emotional, motivating action, dissonance), counterargument was by far the most efficacious, especially in academic-type settings (library, university, community college); the emotional appeal was most successful in hospitals. CONCLUSIONS: The findings from this study have implications for both organ donor investigations and health campaign research in general. Statistical interactions highlight the importance of evaluating multiple exemplars in multiple locations for each type of appeal when conducting health campaign research.     

Repetition Priming Follows Spontaneous but not Prompted Recognition of Familiar Faces

Reaction times to make a familiarity decision to the faces of famous people were measured after recognition of the faces in a pre-training phase had occurred spontaneously or following prompting with a name or other cue. At test, reaction times to familiar faces that had been recognized spontaneously in the pre-training phase were significantly facilitated relative to an unprimed comparison condition. Reaction times to familiar faces recognized only after prompting in the pre-training phase were not significantly facilitated. This was demonstrated both when a name prompt was used (Experiments 1 and 3) and when subjects were cued with brief semantic information (Experiment 2).

Repetition priming was not found to depend on prior spontaneous recognition per se. In Experiment 3, spontaneously recognizing a familiar face did not prime subsequent familiarity judgements when the same face had only been identified following prompting on a prior encounter. In Experiment 4, recognition memory for faces recognized after cueing was found to be over 90% accurate. This indicates that prompted recognition does not yield repetition priming, even though subjects can remember the faces. A fusion of “face recognition unit” and “episodic record” accounts of the repetition priming effect may be more useful than either theory alone in explaining these results.     

Racialized Religion and Judicial Injustice: How Whiteness and Biblicist Christianity Intersect to Promote a Preference for (Unjust) Punishment

America's judicial system is both exceptionally punitive and demonstrably unjust toward racial minorities. While these dual realities are structured into America's institutions, we propose they are also partially sustained by the intersection of ideologies that are both racialized and sacralized. Using multiple waves of the General Social Surveys and a unique measure that asks Americans to choose between two forms of judicial injustice (wrongful conviction or erroneous acquittal), we examine how white racial identity intersects with biblical literalism to bolster America's bent toward unjust punitiveness. In the main effects, Americans who affirm biblical literalism are more likely to show a preference for convicting the innocent, as are whites compared to Black Americans. Examining interaction effects, however, we find whiteness moderates the influence of biblical literalism such that only white biblical literalists (as opposed to non‐white biblical literalists or white non‐biblical literalists) are more likely to prefer wrongful conviction. Indeed, in our full model, being a white biblical literalist is the strongest predictor of preferring wrongful conviction. We theorize that preference for wrongful conviction over erroneous acquittal stems, at least in part, from the combination of sacralized authoritarianism and perceived racial threat.