Determinants of tax evasion and compliance

The problem of tax evasion and subsequent revenue loss is an important one for our nation. Noncompliance with tax laws causes multibillion dollar annual losses for the U.S. treasury. An investigation of psychological variables is suggested as the most promising route to increase tax compliance. Hence, a review of the legal, economic, sociological, and psychological literature concerning the motivation and causes of noncompliance with tax laws is presented. Theoretical models and empirical studies addressing the issue of tax evasion are reviewed. An individual's feelings of equity and sense of norm commitment may be the crucial factors in the decision to comply or evade legally mandated taxes, superseding the notion of sanctions as the most effective deterrent. A legal reasoning model is one suggested alternative in the search for a causal explanation of noncompliance.     

Comprehension of nonverbal communication: A reexamination of the social competencies of learning-disabled children

This study was designed to determine whether learning-disabled (LD) children differed from nondisabled (NLD) children in their ability to comprehend nonverbal communication when potential attentional differences between the groups were controlled. In addition, the relationship between nonverbal comprehension and social competence was assessed. Thirty LD and 30 NLD boys between 9 and 12 years of age were administered a short form of the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS) to assess nonverbal comprehension; social competence measures included teachers' ratings of aggressive and withdrawn behaviors using the Behavior Problem Checklist, and blind judges' ratings of performance on a role-play of friendshipmaking skills. Under attention-incentive conditions, no performance differences between LD and NLD children were found on the PONS; however, LD children were judged to be more withdrawn and less socially skilled. While PONS scores were not related to other social competence measures, hey were associated with academic achievement and IQ. Results emphasize the importance of considering the presence of attentional problems in LD children that may interfere with an accurate assessment of their skills.     

Linkages of School Structural and Socioenvironmental Characteristics to Parental Satisfaction With Public Education and Student Academic Achievement

This study examined school climate's relation to the sociodemographic composition of the school student population, school structural characteristics, parental involvement, classroom support in learning, parental satisfaction with public education, and student academic achievement all together at one time in a sample of 122 elementary schools. Parental satisfaction was best predicted by parental perceptions of a safe school and positive climate, followed by the school's informing parents of their child's educational progress and empowering parents. Student performance on a standardized achievement was best predicted by the percentage of students in the Free and Reduced Meals program, parental perceptions of a safe school, and parental involvement. Study results are discussed in terms of two general levels (school and classroom) and types (task support and interpersonal support) of the school's social environment.     

If you want to get ahead,get a theory

Although Genevan research has provided a detailed analysis of cognitive structures, our knowledge of cognitive processes remains fragmentary. The focus is now not only on macro-development but also on changes occurring in children's spontaneous action sequences in micro-formation. A series of experiments designed to study goal-oriented behavior is in progress. This paper describes the action sequences of 67 subjects between 4;6 and 9;5 years in a block balancing task. It is not a study of children's understanding of a specific notion in physics, but an attempt to pave the way towards understanding the more general processes of cognitive behavior. The analysis focuses on the interplay between the child's action sequences and his implicit theories which the observer infers from the sequences rather than from his verbal comments. Emphasis is placed on the role of counterexamples and on shifts in attention from goal to means. The construction and overgeneralization of ‘theories-in-action’ appear to be dynamic and general processes which are not stage-linked. The results also suggest certain functional rather than structural analogies between the acquisition of physical knowledge and the acquisition of language.     

Elective mutism in a first grader: The remediation of a complex behavioral problem

Teachers frequently deal with unusual and perplexing behavioral problems in their classes. This study demonstrates how spontaneous and prompted speech were produced in a six-year-old mute by a first-grade teacher and her aide. A reinforcement system for peer-prompted speech and spontaneous speech was employed in three separate school classes in a multiple-baseline fashion. The reinforcement system produced prompted and spontaneous speech in each situation. Postchecks in the second grade indicated the child was still speaking and conversing spontaneously with his peers. This study suggests a method that teachers can use in the classroom to deal with this severely handicapping condition.     

The attentional demands of mnemonic control processes

In order to assess the processing (i.e., attentional) demands of different control processes, subjects were required to perform a secondary choice reaction time task in addition to primary verbal tasks. The performance of the secondary task yielded a measure termedexpended processing capacity (EPC), which was used to infer the attentional demands of the primary tasks. Two factors, mediator type (experimenter-supplied vs. subject-generated) and intentionality (incidental vs. intentional), were varied in a paired-associate situation in an effort to affect the degree of elaboration processing. Only mediator type had an effect on recall accuracy and on EPC during both initial processing and recall. Subject-generated mediators resulted in higher recall and in higher EPC during initial processing, but in lower EPC during recall, than did experimenter-supplied mediators. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Human responses to various conditions of water temperature

Skin-surface temperatures on thehuman hand were obtained immediately following six exposure times ranging from 5 to 60 sec. for water temperatures varying in 5° increments from 10° to 40°C. The surface of the skin was found to respond rapidly and regularly to both the temperature and time of exposure. In a second study 30 Ss exposed a hand for 5 or 30 sec. to water temperatures ranging from 10° to 45°C. and made ratings on scales of pain and comfort as well as attaching a verbal label (cold, cool, tepid, etc.) to each experience. The experience of cold became more intense over these time intervals while the experience of warmth became less, and with the threshold constant taken into account the sensations of pain and discomfort were found to follow a psychophysical power law. The usefulness of these sorts of data for interpreting the effects of noxious stimuli in basic learning studies is discussed.