Social Bonds and White-Collar Crime: A Two-Study Assessment of Informal Social Controls in White-Collar Offenders

ABSTRACT

In two studies, this paper examines age-graded informal social controls (bonds) in white-collar offenders. Using register data, Study 1 compares bonds in a sample of white-collar offenders to a matched control sample, while Study 2 uses probation data to examine bonds within a subsample of white-collar offenders of Study 1. The results show that white-collar offenders, including those who occupy executive positions and those with an adult-crime onset, were characterized by weakened bonds and that early-onset offenders had weaker bonds than adult-onset offenders. Along with the implications of these findings for theory, limitations and directions for future research are presented.     

Social Competence at the Playground: Preschoolers During Recess

Social interactions at the playground have been represented as a rich learning opportunity to hone and master social skills at preschool years. Specifically, all forms of social play (fantasy, role, exercise or rough‐and‐tumble) have been related to children's social competence. The main goal of this study was to examine whether it is a certain kind of social play which facilitates the development of social competence, or if it is just the opportunity for interacting during recess that provides children with an optimal environment for social learning. A total of 73 preschoolers (4–6 years old) were videotaped at the school's playground. Teachers provided assessments of children's social competence. Children's interactions at the playground were assessed through an innovative measuring method, based on radio‐frequency identification devices. The results showed a positive association between exercise play and children's social competence. In contrast with the literature, both forms of pretend play, fantasy and role play were unrelated to children's social competence. Smaller peer groups and longer interactions also demonstrated a positive association with these preschoolers' social competence. The study shows the importance of outdoor physical play for preschoolers' social success. Moreover, the study suggests that the environment in which children play has an important effect on the adaptive nature of their play. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exploring how people respond to conflicts between self‐interest and fairness: Influence of threats to the self on affective reactions to advantageous inequity

Two studies examined how people deal with conflicts between their self‐interest concerns and their striving for fairness. Specifically, the affective reactions to outcome arrangements in which people receive better outcomes than comparable other persons, were studied. These arrangements of advantageous inequity constitute situations in which fairness and self‐interest concerns are in conflict. Building on the social psychology of the self, it was predicted, and found, in both field and lab experiments that when people experience a self‐threat, they react more positively to arrangements of advantageous inequity than when not experiencing this threat. This supports the view that people's need for positive information about their selves is an important factor in the underlying psychological processes of the way that people deal with conflicts between their fairness and self‐interest concerns.     

The Factor Structure of Cognitive Functioning in Cognitively Healthy Participants: a Meta-Analysis and Meta-Analysis of Individual Participant Data

Neuropsychology Review - Many neuropsychologists are of the opinion that the multitude of cognitive tests may be grouped into a much smaller number of cognitive domains. However, there is little...     

Generosity and livelihoods: Dictator game evidence on the multidimensional nature of sharing among the Kenyan Maasai

This paper investigates whether sharing behavior is multidimensional and embedded in social organization and modes of economic production. It uses a modified dictator game varying social distance to the recipient and varying the resource (money vs. six in-kind resources) being shared among the pastoral Maasai of Kenya. Results show that both social distance and the nature of the resource matter for sharing as well as their combination. The discussion argues that these findings are consistent with the nature and role of these resources in the pastoral livelihood among the Maasai.     

Attribute-value functions as global interpretations of attribute importance

In order to better understand decision maker’s perceptions of the importance of attributes, Goldstein (1990) differentiates between global and local interpretations of attribute importance. While the appreciation for the distinction is growing, research on the relationship between measures of global and local importance is inconclusive. We believe that these inconclusive findings are caused by operationalizing global attribute importance with single-point measures that implicitly assume that the global interpretation of attribute importance linearly depends on the relevant range of context-specific attribute levels. To address this, we propose to operationalize the global interpretation of attribute importance by estimating decision makers’ attribute-value functions. Two empirical studies demonstrate that the shape of attribute-value functions changes from concave to convex with global attribute importance. Furthermore, the steepness of these functions increases with global attribute importance while the diminishing sensitivity decreases. Finally, it is demonstrated that the inconclusive findings about the relationship between common, single-point measures of global and local attribute importance is driven by non-linearities in decision makers’ attribute-value functions. The results suggest great promise for future research on using decision makers’ attribute-value functions for measuring the importance of attributes.     

On Provability Logics with Linearly Ordered Modalities

We introduce the logics GLP _Λ, a generalization of Japaridze’s polymodal provability logic GLP _ω where Λ is any linearly ordered set representing a hierarchy of provability operators of increasing strength. We shall provide a reduction of these logics to GLP _ω yielding among other things a finitary proof of the normal form theorem for the variable-free fragment of GLP _Λ and the decidability of GLP _Λ for recursive orderings Λ. Further, we give a restricted axiomatization of the variable-free fragment of GLP _Λ.     

Evidence for the Role of Shape in Mental Representations of Similes

People mentally represent the shapes of objects. For instance, the mental representation of an eagle is different when one thinks about a flying or resting eagle. This study examined the role of shape in mental representations of similes (i.e., metaphoric comparisons). We tested the prediction that when people process a simile they will mentally represent the entities of the comparison as having a similar shape. We conducted two experiments in which participants read sentences that either did (experimental sentences) or did not (control sentences) invite comparing two entities. For the experimental sentences, the ground of the comparison was explicit in Experiment 1 (“X has the ability to Z, just like Y”) and implicit in Experiment 2 (“X is like Y”). After having read the sentence, participants were presented with line drawings of the two objects, which were either similarly or dissimilarly shaped. They judged whether both objects were mentioned in the preceding sentence. For the experimental sentences, recognition latencies were shorter for similarly shaped objects than for dissimilarly shaped objects. For the control sentences, we did not find such an effect of similarity in shape. These findings suggest that a perceptual symbol of shape is activated when processing similes.     

Task complexity,student perceptions of vocabulary learning in EFL,and task performance

Background. The study deepened our understanding of how students’ self‐efficacy beliefs contribute to the context of teaching English as a foreign language in the framework of cognitive mediational paradigm at a fine‐tuned task‐specific level. Aim. The aim was to examine the relationship among task complexity, self‐efficacy beliefs, domain‐related prior knowledge, learning strategy use, and task performance as they were applied to English vocabulary learning from reading tasks. Sample. Participants were 120 second‐year university students (mean age 21) from a Chinese university. Method. This experiment had two conditions (simple/complex). A vocabulary level test was first conducted to measure participants’ prior knowledge of English vocabulary. Participants were then randomly assigned to one of the learning tasks. Participants were administered task booklets together with the self‐efficacy scales, measures of learning strategy use, and post‐tests. Data obtained were submitted to multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and path analysis. Results. Results from the MANOVA model showed a significant effect of vocabulary level on self‐efficacy beliefs, learning strategy use, and task performance. Task complexity showed no significant effect; however, an interaction effect between vocabulary level and task complexity emerged. Results from the path analysis showed self‐efficacy beliefs had an indirect effect on performance. Our results highlighted the mediating role of self‐efficacy beliefs and learning strategy use. Conclusions. Our findings indicate that students’ prior knowledge plays a crucial role on both self‐efficacy beliefs and task performance, and the predictive power of self‐efficacy on task performance may lie in its association with learning strategy use.