Social science researchers increasingly recruit participants through Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform. Yet, the physical isolation of MTurk participants, and perceived lack of experimental ...control have led to persistent concerns about the quality of the data that can be obtained from MTurk samples. In this paper we focus on two of the most salient concerns—that MTurk participants may not buy into interactive experiments and that they may produce unreliable or invalid data. We review existing research on these topics and present new data to address these concerns. We find that insufficient attention is no more a problem among MTurk samples than among other commonly used convenience or high-quality commercial samples, and that MTurk participants buy into interactive experiments and trust researchers as much as participants in laboratory studies. Furthermore, we find that employing rigorous exclusion methods consistently boosts statistical power without introducing problematic side effects (e.g., substantially biasing the post-exclusion sample), and can thus provide a general solution for dealing with problematic respondents across samples. We conclude with a discussion of best practices and recommendations.
•Online participant recruitment has led to persistent concerns about data quality.•Online participants are just as attentive as participants recruited offline.•Online participants buy into experimental social interactions as much as in the lab.•Rigorous exclusion methods can be used to improve data quality online and offline.
Research has demonstrated that the presence of others shifts decision‐making about risky/deviant behavior. One reason for this shift could be changes in the anticipated experience of formal ...sanctions, informal costs, and rewards. To investigate this possibility, this study conducted two randomized controlled trials with hypothetical vignettes, in which a range of how many other people were also involved in the criminal act defined the treatment conditions. Across two samples of university students (Ns = 396 and 263), the results revealed that as the size of the involved group increased, the anticipated experience of sanction risk and several informal social costs associated with engaging in the act decreased, and the anticipated experience of two rewards increased. Additional analyses suggest that, with one exception in each data set, these changes are not only tied to the solo/group distinction.
Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We ...examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum. We test whether people are sensitive to common knowledge when deciding whether to engage in risky coordination. Participants decided between working alone for a certain profit and working together for a potentially higher profit that they would receive only if their partner made the same choice. Results showed that more participants attempted risky coordination when they and their prospective partner had common knowledge of the payoffs (broadcast over a loudspeaker) than when they had only shared knowledge (conveyed to both by a messenger) or private knowledge (revealed to each partner separately). These results support the hypothesis that people represent common knowledge as a distinct cognitive category that licenses them to coordinate with others for mutual gain. We discuss how this hypothesis can provide a unified explanation for diverse phenomena in human social life, including recursive mentalizing, performative speech acts, public protests, hypocrisy, and self-conscious emotional expressions.
Peer Influence and Delinquency McGloin, Jean Marie; Thomas, Kyle J
Annual review of criminology,
01/2019, Letnik:
2, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Peer influence occupies an intriguing place in criminology. On the one hand, there is a long line of theorizing and empirical work highlighting it as a key causal process for delinquency. On the ...other, there is a group of theoretical skeptics who view it as one of the most notorious examples of a spurious link. After discussing these perspectives, this review takes stock of our intellectual advancements in understanding peer influence over decades' worth of research toward this endeavor. We conclude that although there have been important gains, essential questions and gaps remain. Toward this aim, we offer some lines of future work that we believe offer pathways to yielding the greatest added value to the discipline.
Current interest in functional assemblies of inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) stems from their collective properties and diverse applications ranging from nanomedicines to optically active ...metamaterials. Coating the surface of NPs with polymers allows for tailoring of the interactions between NPs to assemble them into hybrid nanocomposites with targeted architectures. This class of building blocks is termed “hairy” inorganic NPs (HINPs). Regiospecific attachment of polymers has been used to achieve directional interactions for HINP assembly. However, to date anisotropic surface functionalization of NPs still remains a challenge. This Account provides a review of the recent progress in the self-assembly of isotropically functionalized HINPs in both the condensed state and aqueous solution as well as the applications of assembled structures in such areas as biomedical imaging and therapy. It aims to provide fundamental mechanistic insights into the correlation between structural characteristics and self-assembly behaviors of HINPs, with an emphasis on HINPs made from NPs grafted with linear block copolymer (BCP) brushes. The key to the anisotropic self-assembly of these HINPs is the generation of directional interactions between HINPs by designing the surrounding medium (e.g., polymer matrix) or engineering the surface chemistry of the HINPs. First, HINPs can self-assemble into a variety of 1D, 2D, or 3D nanostructures with a nonisotropic local arrangement of NPs in films. Although a template is not always required, a polymer matrix (BCPs or supramolecules) can be used to assist the assembly of HINPs to form hybrid architectures. The interactions between brushes of neighboring HINPs or between HINPs and the polymer matrix can be modulated by varying the grafting density and length of one or multiple types of polymers on the surface of the NPs. Second, the rational design of deformable brushes of BCP or mixed homopolymer tethers on HINPs enables the anisotropic assembly of HINPs (in analogy to molecular self-assembly) into complex functional structures in selective solvents. It is evidenced that the directional interactions between BCP-grafted NPs arise from the redistribution and conformation change of the long, flexible polymer tethers, while the lateral phase separation of brushes on NP surfaces is responsible for the assembly of HINPs carrying binary immiscible homopolymers. For HINPs decorated with amphiphilic BCP brushes, their self-assembly can produce a variety of hybrid structures, such as vesicles with a monolayer of densely packed NPs in the membranes and with controlled sizes, shapes (e.g., spherical, hemispherical, disklike), and morphologies (e.g., patchy, Janus-like). This strategy allows fine-tuning of the NP organization and collective properties of HINP assemblies, thus facilitating their application in effective cancer imaging, therapy, and drug delivery. We expect that the design and assembly of such HINPs with isotropic functionalization is likely to open up new avenues for the fabrication of new functional nanocomposites and devices because of its simplicity, low cost, and ease of scale-up.
We argue that a rational choice framework can be used to explain declines in offending from adolescence to young adulthood in two ways. First, subjective expectations of offending can be age graded ...such that perceptions of rewards decrease and perceptions of risks and costs increase. Second, the marginal (dis)utility of crime may be age graded (e.g., preferences for risks, costs, and rewards). We examine changes in offending from adolescence to young adulthood among a subset of individuals from the Pathways to Desistance Study (N = 585) and employ a nonlinear decomposition model to partition differences in offending attributable to changing subjective expectations (X) and changing marginal utilities (β). The results indicate that both have direct and independent effects on changes in offending over time. The results of a detailed decomposition on the subjective expectations also indicate that differences exist across the type of incentives. That is, the effect of changing expectations is attributed mainly to changes in perceived rewards (both social and intrinsic). Changing expectations of social costs and risk of arrest from offending have weak effects on changes in criminal behavior, which suggests that they must be accompanied by increases in the weight placed on these expectations to promote appreciable declines in offending.
Objectives:
I argue that a person-situation complex of delinquent rationalizations can be conceptualized by relating rationalizations to item response theory (IRT), where approval of delinquency is ...predominately a function of the individual willingness to rationalize (θ
j) and situational difficulty of applying a rationalization (bi
). This framework offers testable predictions and addresses extant criticisms.
Method:
Adolescents from a public high school (N = 223) and subjects from the National Youth Survey (N = 1,436) were asked their degree of approval for delinquency under various circumstances. Graded response models assessed the joint effects of individual and situational characteristics on approval of delinquency. I test whether differences in self-reported offending (SRO) and willingness to offend (WTO) are consistent with predictions derived from IRT models.
Results:
Approval of delinquency is a joint function of individual and situational characteristics. Some situations are so “easy” to rationalize that most everyone is predicted to approve of delinquency, and others are so “difficult” that only those very high in θ are predicted to express approval. SRO and WTO differences between individuals and situations are consistent with the IRT predictions.
Conclusion:
The findings demonstrate the utility of IRT for understanding delinquent rationalizations. The implications of the findings for theory and person-situation explanations are discussed.
In Toward a Cognitive Criminological Future, the authors describe the criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) divide, discuss efforts to bridge this gap, and offer "cognitive criminology" as a ...solution. I highlight additional reservations about "evidence-based" and other back-end approaches to link criminology and criminal justice. I argue instead that gains can only be made by bucking current educational approaches in graduate programs that emphasize specialized "publication training" and discourage holistic reading of classic and contemporary scholarship and comprehensive knowledge attainment. I further suggest a re-evaluation of disciplinary priorities that reward quantity over quality and call instead for an emphasis on the breadth and significance of knowledge contributions. Finally, I suggest that "cognitive criminology"-rooted in business-as-usual positivism-is unlikely to promote the change necessary to address the CCJ divide but is simply going to result in half-baked attempts to measure agency and other cognitive variables to add to regression models.
The relationship between associating with (non)deviant peers and one's own delinquent tendencies is often attributed to the motivation for positive reinforcement and status attainment. Guided by ...prospect theory and loss aversion, we assert that there is an alternative mechanism through which individuals conform to peer influence - to prevent loss of status for not conforming to the peer group. We surveyed over 1,200 college students at multiple universities across the United States and randomly provided them with hypothetical scenarios related to fighting, driving drunk, and using marijuana where the social consequences were framed as either gains or losses in status. Respondents reported a greater willingness to engage in both deviance and non-deviance when the social consequences were framed as status losses compared to status gains. Our findings are supportive of loss aversion and we advocate for further research that merges individual decision making and peer influence.
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