Gender stereotypes underlie child custody decisions

Using hypothetical divorce cases we examine the role of gender stereotypes in decisions about child custody. Good mothers received greater custody allocations than did good fathers across a tightly matched pair of vignettes in three culturally distinct samples: Argentina, Brazil, and the United States (Study 1). Two follow-up studies indicated that the warmth dimension of stereotype content partly accounted for the asymmetry in custody awards: The proportion of maternal-primary custody was predicted by the tendency to ascribe warmth-related traits—such as friendliness, generosity, or trustworthiness—to mothers (Study 2) and associate them with female over male nouns (Study 3). We also found that endorsing shared custody mitigated the asymmetry in custody awards documented in our studies. Together, these results highlight the interplay of stereotyped attitudes and egalitarian commitments in the context of judicial decisions about child custody.     

Aggregating preference rankings: An AHP-based approach

The problem considered here involves the selection of an alternative by a group of decision makers in a context that involves the aggregating of votes from a preferential ballot. A popular approach for solving such problems is the well-known weighting problem formulation. However, with such a formulation two issues become of critical importance: (a) the weights should reflect the decision-making group's belief on the importance of each rank position and (b) the weights should accord each alternative a fair (if not its best) assessment. Many researchers have studied this problem and proposed various solution strategies. None of these strategies, however, appears to have adequately addressed both issues. The objective of this research is to develop a group decision-making model that solves the problem in a manner that adequately addresses the two critical issues identified, as well as allows for sensitivity analysis and is fairly robust with respect to the various paradoxes identified in voting systems.