Lay Persons' and Police Officers' Beliefs Regarding Deceptive Behaviour

Research on the detection of deception, via non-verbal cues, has shown that people's ability to successfully discriminate between truth and deception is only slightly better than chance level. One of the reasons for these disappointing findings possibly lies in people's inappropriate beliefs regarding ‘lying behaviour’. A 64-item questionnaire originally used in Germany, which targets participants' beliefs regarding truthful and deceptive behaviour, was used. The present study differed from previous research in three ways: (i) instead of a student population, police officers and lay people were sampled, (ii) both people's beliefs regarding others' deceptive behaviour and their beliefs regarding their own deceptive behaviour were examined, and (iii) both non-verbal cues to, and content characteristics of, deceptive statements were examined. Results were consistent with previous studies, which found significant differences between people's beliefs regarding deceptive behaviour and experimental observations of actual deceptive behaviour. Further, police officers held as many false beliefs as did lay people and finally, participants were more accurate in their beliefs regarding their own deceptive behaviour than they were in their beliefs regarding others' behaviour.     

Resisting change: information-seeking and stereotype change

Despite recent laboratory successes in demonstrating stereotype change in response to disconfirming information, stereotypes remain resistant to change or modification. The reported research employed an information gathering methodology in which perceivers could control the amount and nature of the information they received about members of a stereotyped group prior to evaluating the group on a number of stereotype-relevant characteristics. Perceivers showed a stereotype-preservation bias in their information gathering (Experiments 1 and 2) and, consequently, showed no modification of existing stereotypic beliefs. Experiment 3 manipulated the salient processing goals under which perceivers gathered information and found that, under certain conditions, the stereotype preservation bias could be overcome and stereotypes moderated.     

Adolescents’Motivations for Viewing Graphic Horror

This study identifies four motivations adolescents report for viewing graphic horror films: gore watching, thrill watching, independent watching, and problem watching. On the basis of a uses and gratifications model of media effects, it is argued that viewing motivations are predictors of responses to graphic horror. This study also seeks to extend Zillmann's excitation-transfer model of media effects to predict under what conditions viewing-generated arousal is transferred to positive or negative affect. The dispositional characteristics of fearfulness, empathy, and sensation seeking are found to be related to different viewing motivations, providing a viewing-related personality profile for the four different types of adolescent viewers. The four viewing motivations are found to be related to viewers’cognitive and affective responses to horror films, as well as viewers’tendency to identify with either the killers or victims in these films. Directions for future research addressing the role of viewing motivations in the relationship between violent media, cognitive and affective responses, and subsequent behavioral aggression are discussed.     

Nozick's Identity Crisis

ABSTRACT Both the general structure of Nozick's entitlement theory of justice and the particular arguments he directs against Rawls presuppose a conception of the person. The essay argues that this initial conception of the person is flawed and that Nozick must amend it. However, those amendments lead either to an equally flawed conception or to a conception which is substantially similar to that which Rawls invokes. On either possibility the entitlement theory is weakened. The argument has two steps. First, the initial conception of the person which emerges from Anarchy, State and Utopia is stated. Second, the problems with that initial conception lead to the elucidation of subsequent conceptions, only the last of which is capable of avoiding those problems. The cost of avoidance is, however, a high one for Nozick's arguments against Rawls, in particular, and the entitlement theory in general.