Community Violence and Support for Violent Extremism: Evidence From the Sahel

This article examines the effects of exposure to communal violence on support for violent religious extremism. We argue that in communities with high levels of reported violence, individuals lose political and social trust, develop exclusionary attitudes towards outgroups, and find appeal in nonconventional, black-or-white religious teachings, all of which can promote support for extremist violence. Using survey data from over 17,000 respondents in 84 communes surveyed between 2013 and 2017 in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad, we find strong support for these predictions. More violent communities express substantially greater support for violent extremism, with an increase in exclusionary outgroup biases and a turn to fundamentalist religious views being the primary mechanisms explaining—and amplifying—the effect. The findings run counter to arguments suggesting that exposure to violence leads to “war weariness” or generates community resilience to extremism via prosocial behaviors.     

The sales manager as a unit of analysis: a review and directions for future research

This article analyzes empirical research in which the sales manager is the unit of analysis to determine what knowledge has been generated by sales scholars about sales managers and sales management practice. It examines what we have learned from sales managers about their jobs and themselves with particular emphasis on the managerial relevance of the work. While the sales literature is vast and despite the importance of sales managers being widely recognized and accepted, an extensive search of the sales literature identified only 163 articles in which the sales manager was the focus of empirical research about what they do. To help better understand what has been discovered, these articles are examined and categorized according to the main focus of each article's research. The results show that with respect to sales managers, our knowledge is limited and substantial opportunities exist for additional research to expand our understanding of the nature, roles, and impact of sales managers as well as providing usable advice for the practice of sales management.     

Dispositional optimism and luck attributions: Implications for philosophical theories of luck

We conducted two studies to determine whether there is a relationship between dispositional optimism and the attribution of good or bad luck to ambiguous luck scenarios. Study 1 presented five scenarios that contained both a lucky and an unlucky component, thereby making them ambiguous in regard to being an overall case of good or bad luck. Participants rated each scenario in toto on a four-point Likert scale and then completed an optimism questionnaire. The results showed a significant correlation between optimism and assignments of luck: more optimistic people rated the characters in the ambiguous scenarios as more lucky while more pessimistic people rated the same characters in the same scenarios as more unlucky. Study 2 separated the good and bad luck components of the study 1 scenarios and presented the components individually to a new group of participants. Participants rated the luckiness of each component on the same four-point scale and then completed the optimism questionnaire. We found that the luckiness of the bad luck component could be significantly predicted by their level of optimism. We discuss how these findings pose problems for philosophical accounts that treat luck as an objective property.     

Inference in the Wild: A Framework for Human Situation Assessment and a Case Study of Air Combat

Situation awareness is a key construct in human factors and arises from a process of situation assessment (SA). SA comprises the perception of information, its integration with existing knowledge, the search for new information, and the prediction of the future state of the world, including the consequences of planned actions. Causal models implemented as Bayesian networks (BNs) are attractive for modeling all of these processes within a single, unified framework. We elicited declarative knowledge from two Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) fighter pilots about the information sources used in the identification (ID) of airborne entities and the causal relationships between these sources. This knowledge was represented in a BN (the declarative model) that was evaluated against the performance of 19 RAAF fighter pilots in a low‐fidelity simulation. Pilot behavior was well predicted by a simple associative model (the behavioral model) with only three attributes of ID. Search for information by pilots was largely compensatory and was near‐optimal with respect to the behavioral model. The average revision of beliefs in response to evidence was close to Bayesian, but there was substantial variability. Together, these results demonstrate the value of BNs for modeling human SA.     

Personality and Everyday Functioning in Older Adults With and Without HIV

Journal of Clinical Psychology in Medical Settings - In a cross-sectional multi-method study of older adults living with and without HIV (n?=?202; 69.8% HIV seropositive), we tested...     

Using behavioral economics to optimize safer undergraduate late-night transportation

Many universities sponsor student-oriented transit services that could reduce alcohol-induced risks but only if services adequately anticipate and adapt to student needs. Human choice data offer an optimal foundation for planning and executing late-night transit services. In this simulated choice experiment, respondents opted to either (a) wait an escalating delay for a free university-sponsored “safe” option, (b) pay an escalating fee for an on-demand rideshare service, or (c) pick a free, immediately available “unsafe” option (e.g., ride with an alcohol-impaired driver). Behavioral-economic nonlinear models of averaged-choice data describe preference across arrangements. Best-fit metrics indicate adequate sensitivity to contextual factors (i.e., wait time, preceding late-night activity). At short delays, students preferred the free transit option. As delays extend beyond 30 min, most students preferred competing alternatives. These data depict a policy-relevant delay threshold to better safeguard undergraduate student safety.     

Exploring a patient's shift from relative silence to verbal expressiveness: Observations on an element of the analyst's participation

By tracing a portion of close process of a patient's shifts from a relatively silent and inhibited stance to one in which he is beginning to verbalize more about his experience and fantasy, I will illustrate some tensions between the analyst's role as facilitating expressiveness and as occupying a place in the patient's internalized world. Since the analyst's functions as facilitator and as internal object (often an obstacle to the patient's expressiveness) are sometimes in conflict with one another, it is important for the analyst to be able to work internally with this conflict as he works with his patient. Splitting processes between these two functions may provide the analyst with cues related to the patient's and the analyst's resistance to understanding the patient's communication of unconscious conflict and the patient's recruitment of the analyst into the patient's internalized world.     

Who expressed what emotion? Men grab anger,women grab happiness

When anger or happiness flashes on a face in the crowd, do we misperceive that emotion as belonging to someone else? Two studies found that misperception of apparent emotional expressions—“illusory conjunctions”—depended on the gender of the target: male faces tended to “grab” anger from neighboring faces, and female faces tended to grab happiness. Importantly, the evidence did not suggest that this effect was due to the general tendency to misperceive male or female faces as angry or happy, but instead indicated a more subtle interaction of expectations and early visual processes. This suggests a novel aspect of affordance-management in human perception, whereby cues to threat, when they appear, are attributed to those with the greatest capability of doing harm, whereas cues to friendship are attributed to those with the greatest likelihood of providing affiliation opportunities.