The value of formative investment in organizational federations

Public goods theories highlight an incentive system that rewards ‘free riding’ on the contributions of early contributors toward collective actions. However, because such theories focus on creation of the good, they may underestimate returns that accrue to early contributors subsequent to the good's realization. The concept of formative investment is introduced here to describe the extent to which organizations help to create public goods such as interorganizational linkages like participatory federations. Data from the CEOs of 48 organizations involved in a participatory federation were used to assess how an organization's level of formative investment is related to later patterns of dependency and interaction among federation members. Findings suggest that from a long‐term perspective, and for goods that involve communication and interaction, the incentive structure may not be so favorable for free riders. To the extent that organizations with high formative investment have the capability to envision the future and communicate that vision to potential federation partners, they may be able to both reduce free riding and secure for themselves advantageous positions in the subsequent network of relations.     

Therapeutic Contract Program: preliminary report on a behavioral alternative to the token economy

The token economy has been the primary model for the behavioral management of inpatient populations. However, this basically operant approach seldom emphasizes the development of cognitive-coping skills to help patients more effectively manage stressors that result in hospitalization. The Therapeutic Contract Program (TCP) is described as an inpatient-treatment strategy that is designed to help foster such cognitive-coping and self-control skills. While external structure is provided by components of this program, subprograms of the TCP have as their goal the development of internally-attributed coping skills and self-perceptions of competence. This preliminary report describes the structure of the TCP, as well as planned and in-progress measures of program participation and treatment outcome.     

Attitudes and Attraction: Optimism and Weight as Explanations for the Similarity–Dissimilarity Asymmetry

The positive link between attitude similarity and attraction is one of the fundamental outcomes in social psychology. However, attitude dissimilarity seems to be a stronger driver of this relationship than attitude similarity. The authors review the evidence on this similarity–dissimilarity asymmetry, and discuss two explanations. One is that people generally enter into interactions with optimism, and so supposedly neutral partners are often seen as mildly positive. Another is that dissimilar attitudes carry greater weight than similar attitudes in cognitive processes. Implications of these mechanisms for wider issues in person perception and attitude structure are discussed, connecting them with more recent theories of attitudinal ambivalence and evaluative space.