First‐Person Shooters and the Third‐Person Effect

A sample of 118 U.S. 6th and 7th graders was used to examine early adolescents’ views of whether video games negatively influence themselves, others of the same age, and younger others. Six specific games ranging in rating from E for Everyone to M for Mature were listed for the early adolescents to respond to, with questions asked about both potential influence and whether young people should be allowed to play the games. Results support a third‐person perception that grew as the rating of the game became more restrictive and as the “other” group in question became younger. The presence of rules set by parents about video game use was a positive predictor of perceptions of influence on self and others.     

Localizing Detroit’s Food System: Boundary-Work and the Politics of Experiential Expertise

ABSTRACT

Recently, different expert actors have attempted to localize Detroit’s food system to bring about greater justice citywide. At first, ‘professional experts’ dominated these efforts, claiming authority in the food system due to their knowledge based in qualified training and applied work experience. Yet a rival group of ‘experiential experts’ soon rose up to assert their power, arguing they and their unique race and place-based know-how merited greater influence. Within just a few years, experiential experts successfully replaced professional ones in commanding much area food localization. I show that experiential experts achieved this power largely through strategic boundary-work, including expulsion, expansion, and protection of autonomy. Nonetheless, some Detroiters and professional experts themselves questioned experiential experts’ legitimacy in removing professional experts from the food system altogether. I thus introduce a fourth form of boundary-work that experiential experts deployed to maintain their clout, what I term ‘accommodation’. Accommodation connotes instances of strategic inclusion where an expert authority facilitates rivals in sharing some influence based on distinct conditions that leave dominant epistemic arrangements generally intact. This occurred in Detroit as experiential experts accommodated professional ones in exercising some food systems power provided they better deploy their own race and place-based knowledge. Such actions helped quell public concern while also protecting experiential experts’ rising authority. Accommodation is useful for understanding cases in which diverse types of experts work together despite that single knowledge-forms guide their activities overall. Further research into accommodation could aid in identifying whether or not diverse forms of knowledge are together influencing decision-making around a range of cases, or if single forms of expertise remain dominant despite the appearance that democratization is taking place.     

A COMPARISON OF MALE AND FEMALE DIRECTORS IN POPULAR PORNOGRAPHY: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WOMEN ARE AT THE HELM?

Pornography is a lucrative business. Increasingly, women have participated in both its production, direction, and consumption. This study investigated how the content in popular pornographic videos created by female directors differs from that of their male counterparts. We conducted a quantitative analysis of 122 randomly selected scenes from 44 top-renting adult videos in 2005 (half male- and half female-directed). Findings revealed that all films shared similar depictions: Verbal and physical aggression was common, women were the primary targets of aggression, and negative responses to aggression were extremely rare. Compared to male-directed films, female-directed films were significantly more likely to portray women-only scenes and sexual acts. Even when controlling for main characters' gender, female-directed films showed significantly more female perpetrators aggressing against female targets and significantly more depictions of women as perpetrators of aggression. We highlight the importance of economic forces, rather than director gender, in dictating the content of popular pornography.     

Inspection times and the selection task: What do eye-movements reveal about relevance effects?

Three experiments are reported that used eye-movement tracking to investigate the inspection-time effect predicted by Evans' (1996) heuristic-analytic account of the Wason selection task. Evans' account proposes that card selections are based on the operation of relevance-determining heuristics, whilst analytic processing only rationalizes selections. As such, longer inspection times should be associated with selected cards (which are subjected to rationalization) than with rejected cards. Evidence for this effect has been provided by Evans (1996) using computer- presented selection tasks and instructions for participants to indicate (with a mouse pointer) cards under consideration. Roberts (1998b) has argued that mouse pointing gives rise to artefactual support for Evans' predictions because of biases associated with the task format and the use of mouse pointing. We eradicated all sources of artefact by combining careful task constructions with eye-movement tracking to measure directly on-line attentional processing. All three experiments produced good evidence for the robustness of the inspection-time effect, supporting the predictions of the heuristic-analytic account.