The Impact of Comprehensive Community Initiatives on Population-Level Child,Youth, and Family Outcomes: A Systematic Review

Comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) represent a popular method for creating systemic change, yet there is a dearth of evidence on their effectiveness (Zaff, Pufall Jones, Donlan, Lin, & Anderson, 2016). This article presents a systematic review of the evidence on the population-level impact of CCIs, focusing specifically on documented effects from studies using an experimental or quasi-experimental design. Of 1,947 articles identified through a database and hand search, 25 articles examining six different CCIs—most of which employed prevention science frameworks—met the review inclusion criteria. The results of this review show that CCIs can strengthen protective factors and reduce risk factors, delay initiation of and reduce substance use, and reduce the likelihood of, and delay engagement in, violent and/or delinquent behaviors. Impacts have been documented as soon as one year after initial intervention, and as early as 7^th grade, with effects sustained as long as seven years post-intervention, and as late as a year post-high school. However, relative to the prevalence of CCIs as a practical intervention, the evidence base is small, potentially dated, and focused on a narrow set of outcomes and populations. Recommendations for interpreting the evidence base are discussed, including methodological limitations and implications for future work.     

False fame,perceptual clarity,or persuasion? Flexible fluency attribution in spokesperson familiarity effects

Familiar people are especially persuasive spokespersons. Here, a fluency attribution model of spokesperson familiarity was tested. Specifically, it was hypothesized that repeated exposure to a spokesperson would create fluency that, in a persuasive context, could be attributed to the persuasive message or to another fluency-relevant cue (e.g., the fame of the spokesperson). In three experiments a woman's photo was repeatedly presented, and subsequently accompanied a persuasive message. Consistent with hypotheses, inflated ratings of the message followed repeated spokesperson exposure (compared to a no exposure control) but only when inflated ratings of the spokesperson (fame) or her photo (perceptual clarity) were not observed. Discussion focuses on implications for familiarity theories and on guidelines for maximizing the influence of familiar spokespersons.     

Anthropological Approaches to ‘Primitive’ Religions

The study of religion by social anthropologists, as distinct from the classical philosophical approach of the Greeks and their medieval heirs, began in the late 19th century with Edward Tyler’s Primitive Culture (1871). Tyler’s approach was completely a priori in style in that it did not rest on systematic field work or empirical observation. The same approach characterized James Frazer’s famous book, The Golden Bough (1891). Baldwin Spencer, the founding father of Australian anthropology, was persuaded by Frazer to see the sophisticated religious beliefs and rites of the Aboriginal groups he studied in central Australia as mere ‘magic’. By the 1960s, a new generation of anthropologists, influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss and English thinkers like E. Evans Pritchard, had arrived on the scene. This new ‘turn’ in anthropology led a number of contemporary scholars to the radical position that Western anthropology itself is a socio-cultural phenomenon that can be investigated in a broadly anthropological way. To see what this involves, it is worthwhile examining a number of crucial misunderstandings of Australian Aboriginal beliefs and practices that have been the artefactual result of various anthropological approaches.

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An assessment of the fakeability of self-report and implicit personality measures

Researchers are focusing on developing implicit measures of personality to address concerns related to the faking of self-report measures. The present study examined the validity and fakeability of Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures of personality self-concept in a repeated-measures design (N = 33). People’s predictions about how they represented themselves on the measures were also assessed. Results indicated that participants were able fake self-report measures when instructed to do so and that they could accurately predict how they represented themselves on these measures. Participants were also able to fake an IAT measure of Extraversion, but were unable to fake an IAT measure of Conscientiousness or predict how they represented themselves on either IAT measure.     

Social cues in animated conversational agents

In human‐computer interaction people often interpret the interaction with the computer as interactions with humans. The social agency theory suggests that social cues like the face and voice of the agent motivate this interpretation. In two off‐line experiments in which comprehension scores and liking ratings were collected, we found that participants preferred natural agents with natural voices, as predicted by the social‐cue hypothesis. Although female agents with male voices formed an exception, this was explained by a stereotype effect. These findings support the social‐cue hypothesis and the social agency theory that human characteristics are applied in the perception of computational animated conversational agents. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Overcoming focusing failures in competitive environments

This paper attacks one of the chief limitations of the field of behavioral decision research—the past inability to use this literature to improve decision making. Building on the work of Thompson, Gentner, Loewenstein and colleagues (Loewenstein, Thompson, & Gentner, 1999; Thompson, Gentner, & Loewenstein, 2000; Gentner & Markman, 1997), the current paper finds that it is possible to reduce bias in one of the most robust problems in the decision literature, the Acquiring a Company Problem (Samuelson & Bazerman, 1985). Past research has shown that individuals make suboptimal offers as a result of the failure to think about the decisions of others and to incorporate a clear understanding of the rules of the game. In the current study, we find that by allowing study participants to see and understand differences in seemingly unrelated decision problems—versions of the Monty Hall Game (Nalebuff, 1987; Friedman, 1998) and Multiparty Ultimatum Game (Messick, Moore, & Bazerman, 1997; Tor & Bazerman, 2003)—study participants can learn to focus more accurately on the decisions of other parties and the rules of the game, the keys to solving the Acquiring a Company Problem. This research offers a new piece of evidence that comparative and analogical processes may be a successful direction for improving decision making. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.