Joseph A Hamm
Biographic Data
| ID | 1322271 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joseph A Hamm |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joseph A |
| FAMILY NAME | Hamm |
| SIGNATURE | HAMM J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9250-3681 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 126 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Perceived Control, Likelihood, and Severity as Explanations of Fear of the Police
Addressing the contemporary relationship between law enforcement and the communities they serve calls for nuanced attention to how individuals construct the emotions they experience toward police. One important such consideration is fear. Leveraging three established psychological conduits of fear of crime proposed by Jackson (perceptions of likelihood, severity, and control), we investigate the psychological construction of fear of unjustified p…
Trust in our divided world
‘Follow the science’
The coronavirus pandemic increased the role played by scientific advisers in counselling governments and citizens on issues around public health. This raises questions about how citizens evaluate scientists, and in particular the grounds on which they trust them. Previous studies have identified various factors associated with trust in scientists, although few have systematically explored a range of judgements and their relative effects. This stu…
Examining the Generational Intersection of Interpersonal, Cultural, and Institutional Betrayal in Flint, Michigan
Betrayal, particularly within marginalized communities, is a complex experience with deep psychological and societal implications. This study explores the generational impacts of betrayal through the experiences of nine participants from three families in Flint, Michigan. Using a generational case study design, this study examines how interpersonal, cultural, and institutional betrayals coexist, evolve, and influence inter‐ and intra‐personal com…
Where we’re going and where we’ve been
Trust the messenger
A key lesson of the coronavirus pandemic was the importance for pro-social behaviour of popular trust in key information sources. Yet existing studies rarely consider the role of people’s trust in a range of different information sources, and the relationship between such trust and particular attitudes and behaviours among individuals. This study goes beyond the general mantra that ‘trust matters’ and explores more specific effects, relating to t…
Towards a captivating conversation of trust research
Capturing the conversation of trust research
Integrating focal vulnerability into trust research
Trust – most often defined as the trustor’s willingness to accept vulnerability – matters across almost every facet of modern life. Significant bodies of research have been devoted to understanding the nature and dynamics of the construct, but much less work has directly considered the vulnerability at the core of its definition. The current article addresses this gap, elucidating the concept of focal vulnerability as the portion of the trustor’s…
The Dynamics of Trust and Trustworthiness Perceptions in a Government Agency
Although trust is widely recognized as key to effective public administration, little is known about trust dynamics, especially in typical governance relationships. We conducted an intensive longitudinal experience sampling study via a weekly survey of Florida residents’ ( N = 97) trust in and perceptions of the trustworthiness of the (US) National Hurricane Center over a 25-week hurricane season. We estimated two-level time series models to exam…
The emergence of convergence
Science is increasingly a collaborative pursuit. Although the modern scientific enterprise owes much to individuals working at the core of their field, humanity is increasingly confronted by highly complex problems that require the integration of a variety of disciplinary and methodological expertise. In 2016, the U.S. National Science Foundation launched an initiative prioritizing support for convergence research as a means of “solving vexing re…
Impact and (the Journal of) Trust Research
Self‐efficacy , prosocial impact, and self‐legitimacy as psychological predictors of judicial officer performance
The current work explores three potential facilitators of judicial performance. Participants in a state‐wide survey of judicial officers (response rate = 33.9 percent) completed self‐report measures of self‐efficacy, prosocial impact, and self‐legitimacy as well as subjectively perceived performance. Objective performance data collected by the state court administrative office were then merged with the survey data. Latent variable analysis confir…
Conceptualizing trust and distrust as alternative stable states
Despite the universally recognized importance of fostering trust and avoiding distrust in governance relationships, there remains considerable debate on core questions like the relation between (dis)trust and the evaluations of the characteristics that make a governance agent appear (un)worthy of trust. In particular, it remains unclear whether levels of (dis)trust simply follow levels of (dis)trustworthiness-such that building trust is primarily…
Comfort with and willingness to participate in Covid-19 contact tracing
Public Vulnerability to the Police
The recent protests regarding the state of policing in the United States clearly demonstrate that how the police do their job creates a salient potential for harm to the public. This study applies a multidimensional paradigm of risk perception to quantify evaluations of police-caused harm. Using data from a national (U.S.) convenience sample ( n = 1,890) that oversampled individuals who self-identified as black or Muslim, we tested whether these …
Using public priorities to disentangle the dimensions of procedural justice and trustworthiness in police–citizen interactions
Multidimensional constructs like procedural justice and trustworthiness are important drivers of public trust in the police. Less attention has been paid, however, to the differential import of the dimensions of procedural justice (voice, respect and impartiality) or trustworthiness (ability, benevolence and integrity). A national convenience sample of US residents was asked to prioritize among the dimensions of procedural justice (Study 1) or tr…
An application of the integrated framework of legitimacy to the state courts context
The current study uses data collected from defendants immediately after their hearings to test hypotheses regarding the relations among constructs relevant to perceptions of the state courts. Taking the Integrated Framework of Legitimacy as its guide, this research hypothesizes that trustworthiness assessments will mediate the effect of procedural fairness (as experienced from both the judge and court staff), distributive justice, and court perfo…
Risk, Stigma, Trustworthiness, and Citizen Participation—A Multifaceted Analysis of Media Coverage of Dioxin Contamination in Midland, Michigan
In the United States, more than 200 communities are designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as areas of concern for dioxins. Informing the public about potential risks associated with dioxins and delivering information about how to avoid such risks are essential activities. News coverage of environmental and health problems affects how members of the public assess those problems in terms of both severity and how they are understood…
Working with Institutional Stakeholders
Community engagement is a vital aspect of addressing environmental contamination and remediation. In the United States, the Superfund Research Program (SRP) forms groups of academic researchers from the social and physical sciences into Community Engagement Cores (CECs) and Research Translation Cores (RTCs), which focus on various aspects of informing and working with communities during and through the resolution of environmental crises. While th…
The Effect of Dioxin Contamination and Remediation on Property Values
Loss of property value is a major concern in communities faced with the toxic byproducts of industrial practices. Even after site remediation, stigma may persist and negatively affect market values of residential properties. To study the effects of contamination and of remediation on property values in Midland, Michigan, where dioxins have been released into the environment through the incineration of contaminated waste and the discharge of conta…
Community Science as a Pathway for Resilience in Response to a Public Health Crisis in Flint, Michigan
While the story of the Flint water crisis has frequently been told, even sympathetic analyses have largely worked to make invisible the significant actions of Flint residents to protect and advocate for their community. Leaving the voices of these stakeholders out of narratives about the crisis has served to deepen distrust in the community. Our project responds to these silences through a community-driven research study aimed explicitly at eleva…
Trust in whom? Dioxin, organizations, risk perception, and fish consumption in Michigan’s Saginaw Bay watershed
Trust is generally recognized as important for risk-relevant behavior but research suggests that trust in different organizations may have varying effects. This research advances the literature by testing two hypotheses which postulate that this variability can be explained by risk perception. We collected data from 351 anglers regarding their trust in nine organizations whose efforts are relevant to dioxin contamination in Michigan's Saginaw Bay…
Fair Process, Trust, and Cooperation
Positive public perceptions are a critical pillar of the criminal justice system, but the literature addressing them often fails to offer clear advice regarding the important constructs or the relationships among them. The research reported here sought to take an important step toward this clarity by recruiting a national convenience sample to complete an online survey about the police in the respondent’s community, which included measures of the…
Trust, Trustworthiness, and Motivation in the Natural Resource Management Context
Trust is critical for natural resource management (NRM). In recognition of this, a noteworthy body of literature has investigated the construct but is, as yet, still developing. The current research proposes and tests an increasingly complete model that integrates the major advances in not only the NRM literature but in the social psychological literature addressing trust more generally as well. To that end, the current analyses were conducted wi…
Public Participation, Procedural Fairness, and Evaluations of Local Governance
The purpose of this article is to test whether the use of public participation by a local government increases perceptions of procedural fairness among the public and to propose an explanation for why fairness is a strong predictor of satisfaction with governmental decisions. To do this, we draw on the uncertainty management model to hypothesize that indications of procedural fairness can increase public support for government and its decisions a…
Trust, Trustworthiness, and Motivation in the Natural Resource Management Context
Trust is critical for natural resource management (NRM). In recognition of this, a noteworthy body of literature has investigated the construct but is, as yet, still developing. The current research proposes and tests an increasingly complete model that integrates the major advances in not only the NRM literature but in the social psychological literature addressing trust more generally as well. To that end, the current analyses were conducted wi…
Community Science as a Pathway for Resilience in Response to a Public Health Crisis in Flint, Michigan
While the story of the Flint water crisis has frequently been told, even sympathetic analyses have largely worked to make invisible the significant actions of Flint residents to protect and advocate for their community. Leaving the voices of these stakeholders out of narratives about the crisis has served to deepen distrust in the community. Our project responds to these silences through a community-driven research study aimed explicitly at eleva…
The dimensionality of trust-relevant constructs in four institutional domains
Using confirmatory factor analyses and multiple indicators per construct, we examined a number of theoretically derived factor structures pertaining to numerous trust-relevant constructs (from 9 to 12) across four institutional contexts (police, local governance, natural resources, state governance) and multiple participant-types (college students via an online survey, community residents as part of a city's budget engagement activity, a random s…
Deconstructing public confidence in state courts
Although researchers have consistently demonstrated the importance of confidence in public institutions like the courts, relatively little attention has been paid to understanding what confidence itself really is. This article presents data from two samples of community members, thereby building on and extending a preliminary investigation that sought to understand constructs related to confidence in state courts with student samples. Structural …
Social capital, ideology, and health in the United States
Integrating focal vulnerability into trust research
Trust – most often defined as the trustor’s willingness to accept vulnerability – matters across almost every facet of modern life. Significant bodies of research have been devoted to understanding the nature and dynamics of the construct, but much less work has directly considered the vulnerability at the core of its definition. The current article addresses this gap, elucidating the concept of focal vulnerability as the portion of the trustor’s…
Comfort with and willingness to participate in Covid-19 contact tracing
Regime shifts and panarchies in regional scale social-ecological water systems
In this article we summarize histories of nonlinear, complex interactions among societal, legal, and ecosystem dynamics in six North American water basins, as they respond to changing climate. These case studies were chosen to explore the conditions for emergence of adaptive governance in heavily regulated and developed social-ecological systems nested within a hierarchical governmental system. We summarize resilience assessments conducted in eac…
On the influence of trust in predicting rural land owner cooperation with natural resource management institutions
Contemporary natural resource management (NRM) emphasises the role of the public in general and land owners in particular as voluntary participants in the process. Understanding the role of trust in voluntary cooperation is therefore critical, but the current state of the relevant literature is such that it fails to systematically address a few important issues. This inquiry sought to address these issues by presenting and testing a model of land…
Trust and Intention to Comply with a Water Allocation Decision
Hamm, J. A., L. M. PytlikZillig, M. N. Herian, A. J. Tomkins, H. Dietrich, and S. Michaels. 2013. Trust and intention to comply with a water allocation decision: the moderating roles of knowledge and consistency. Ecology and Society 18(4): 49. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05849-180449
Capturing the conversation of trust research
The Dynamics of Trust and Trustworthiness Perceptions in a Government Agency
Although trust is widely recognized as key to effective public administration, little is known about trust dynamics, especially in typical governance relationships. We conducted an intensive longitudinal experience sampling study via a weekly survey of Florida residents’ ( N = 97) trust in and perceptions of the trustworthiness of the (US) National Hurricane Center over a 25-week hurricane season. We estimated two-level time series models to exam…
Impact and (the Journal of) Trust Research
Self‐efficacy , prosocial impact, and self‐legitimacy as psychological predictors of judicial officer performance
The current work explores three potential facilitators of judicial performance. Participants in a state‐wide survey of judicial officers (response rate = 33.9 percent) completed self‐report measures of self‐efficacy, prosocial impact, and self‐legitimacy as well as subjectively perceived performance. Objective performance data collected by the state court administrative office were then merged with the survey data. Latent variable analysis confir…
Conceptualizing trust and distrust as alternative stable states
Despite the universally recognized importance of fostering trust and avoiding distrust in governance relationships, there remains considerable debate on core questions like the relation between (dis)trust and the evaluations of the characteristics that make a governance agent appear (un)worthy of trust. In particular, it remains unclear whether levels of (dis)trust simply follow levels of (dis)trustworthiness-such that building trust is primarily…
Using public priorities to disentangle the dimensions of procedural justice and trustworthiness in police–citizen interactions
Multidimensional constructs like procedural justice and trustworthiness are important drivers of public trust in the police. Less attention has been paid, however, to the differential import of the dimensions of procedural justice (voice, respect and impartiality) or trustworthiness (ability, benevolence and integrity). A national convenience sample of US residents was asked to prioritize among the dimensions of procedural justice (Study 1) or tr…
An application of the integrated framework of legitimacy to the state courts context
The current study uses data collected from defendants immediately after their hearings to test hypotheses regarding the relations among constructs relevant to perceptions of the state courts. Taking the Integrated Framework of Legitimacy as its guide, this research hypothesizes that trustworthiness assessments will mediate the effect of procedural fairness (as experienced from both the judge and court staff), distributive justice, and court perfo…
Environmental Stigma
This article examined the extent to which residents living in the Midland-Saginaw-Bay City area in Eastern Michigan felt stigmatized due to industrial contamination. Seventy in-depth interviews were conducted with local residents, focusing on the extent to which they experienced three aspects of stigma-affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Results indicated that although some participants were not concerned with living in a contaminated community…
Assessing Resilience in Stressed Watersheds
Nemec, K. T., J. Chan, C. Hoffman, T. L. Spanbauer, J. A. Hamm, C. R. Allen, T. Hefley, D. Pan, and P. Shrestha. 2013. Assessing resilience in stressed watersheds. Ecology and Society 19(1): 34. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-06156-190134
Reducing courts' failure-to-appear rate by written reminders
For the law to be effective, people must obey it (Caldeira, 1986; Tyler, 2006b). Although the law frequently involves el-ements of coercion, in practical terms the legal system has, at best, a limited ability to compel people to obey the law (e.g., Rottman, 2007; Tyler, 2006b). Voluntary acceptance minimizes the need for authorities to explain and justify each decision, re-duces the need to monitor implementation, and limits the ex-penditure of s…
Public Participation, Procedural Fairness, and Evaluations of Local Governance
The purpose of this article is to test whether the use of public participation by a local government increases perceptions of procedural fairness among the public and to propose an explanation for why fairness is a strong predictor of satisfaction with governmental decisions. To do this, we draw on the uncertainty management model to hypothesize that indications of procedural fairness can increase public support for government and its decisions a…
Deconstructing public confidence in state courts
Although researchers have consistently demonstrated the importance of confidence in public institutions like the courts, relatively little attention has been paid to understanding what confidence itself really is. This article presents data from two samples of community members, thereby building on and extending a preliminary investigation that sought to understand constructs related to confidence in state courts with student samples. Structural …
Reducing courts' failure-to-appear rate by written reminders
For the law to be effective, people must obey it (Caldeira, 1986; Tyler, 2006b). Although the law frequently involves el-ements of coercion, in practical terms the legal system has, at best, a limited ability to compel people to obey the law (e.g., Rottman, 2007; Tyler, 2006b). Voluntary acceptance minimizes the need for authorities to explain and justify each decision, re-duces the need to monitor implementation, and limits the ex-penditure of s…
Trust and Intention to Comply with a Water Allocation Decision
Hamm, J. A., L. M. PytlikZillig, M. N. Herian, A. J. Tomkins, H. Dietrich, and S. Michaels. 2013. Trust and intention to comply with a water allocation decision: the moderating roles of knowledge and consistency. Ecology and Society 18(4): 49. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-05849-180449
Social capital, ideology, and health in the United States
Assessing Resilience in Stressed Watersheds
Nemec, K. T., J. Chan, C. Hoffman, T. L. Spanbauer, J. A. Hamm, C. R. Allen, T. Hefley, D. Pan, and P. Shrestha. 2013. Assessing resilience in stressed watersheds. Ecology and Society 19(1): 34. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-06156-190134
The dimensionality of trust-relevant constructs in four institutional domains
Using confirmatory factor analyses and multiple indicators per construct, we examined a number of theoretically derived factor structures pertaining to numerous trust-relevant constructs (from 9 to 12) across four institutional contexts (police, local governance, natural resources, state governance) and multiple participant-types (college students via an online survey, community residents as part of a city's budget engagement activity, a random s…
On the influence of trust in predicting rural land owner cooperation with natural resource management institutions
Contemporary natural resource management (NRM) emphasises the role of the public in general and land owners in particular as voluntary participants in the process. Understanding the role of trust in voluntary cooperation is therefore critical, but the current state of the relevant literature is such that it fails to systematically address a few important issues. This inquiry sought to address these issues by presenting and testing a model of land…
Environmental Stigma
This article examined the extent to which residents living in the Midland-Saginaw-Bay City area in Eastern Michigan felt stigmatized due to industrial contamination. Seventy in-depth interviews were conducted with local residents, focusing on the extent to which they experienced three aspects of stigma-affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Results indicated that although some participants were not concerned with living in a contaminated community…
Fair Process, Trust, and Cooperation
Positive public perceptions are a critical pillar of the criminal justice system, but the literature addressing them often fails to offer clear advice regarding the important constructs or the relationships among them. The research reported here sought to take an important step toward this clarity by recruiting a national convenience sample to complete an online survey about the police in the respondent’s community, which included measures of the…
Trust, Trustworthiness, and Motivation in the Natural Resource Management Context
Trust is critical for natural resource management (NRM). In recognition of this, a noteworthy body of literature has investigated the construct but is, as yet, still developing. The current research proposes and tests an increasingly complete model that integrates the major advances in not only the NRM literature but in the social psychological literature addressing trust more generally as well. To that end, the current analyses were conducted wi…
Regime shifts and panarchies in regional scale social-ecological water systems
In this article we summarize histories of nonlinear, complex interactions among societal, legal, and ecosystem dynamics in six North American water basins, as they respond to changing climate. These case studies were chosen to explore the conditions for emergence of adaptive governance in heavily regulated and developed social-ecological systems nested within a hierarchical governmental system. We summarize resilience assessments conducted in eac…
Trust in whom? Dioxin, organizations, risk perception, and fish consumption in Michigan’s Saginaw Bay watershed
Trust is generally recognized as important for risk-relevant behavior but research suggests that trust in different organizations may have varying effects. This research advances the literature by testing two hypotheses which postulate that this variability can be explained by risk perception. We collected data from 351 anglers regarding their trust in nine organizations whose efforts are relevant to dioxin contamination in Michigan's Saginaw Bay…
Risk, Stigma, Trustworthiness, and Citizen Participation—A Multifaceted Analysis of Media Coverage of Dioxin Contamination in Midland, Michigan
In the United States, more than 200 communities are designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as areas of concern for dioxins. Informing the public about potential risks associated with dioxins and delivering information about how to avoid such risks are essential activities. News coverage of environmental and health problems affects how members of the public assess those problems in terms of both severity and how they are understood…
Working with Institutional Stakeholders
Community engagement is a vital aspect of addressing environmental contamination and remediation. In the United States, the Superfund Research Program (SRP) forms groups of academic researchers from the social and physical sciences into Community Engagement Cores (CECs) and Research Translation Cores (RTCs), which focus on various aspects of informing and working with communities during and through the resolution of environmental crises. While th…
The Effect of Dioxin Contamination and Remediation on Property Values
Loss of property value is a major concern in communities faced with the toxic byproducts of industrial practices. Even after site remediation, stigma may persist and negatively affect market values of residential properties. To study the effects of contamination and of remediation on property values in Midland, Michigan, where dioxins have been released into the environment through the incineration of contaminated waste and the discharge of conta…
Community Science as a Pathway for Resilience in Response to a Public Health Crisis in Flint, Michigan
While the story of the Flint water crisis has frequently been told, even sympathetic analyses have largely worked to make invisible the significant actions of Flint residents to protect and advocate for their community. Leaving the voices of these stakeholders out of narratives about the crisis has served to deepen distrust in the community. Our project responds to these silences through a community-driven research study aimed explicitly at eleva…
An application of the integrated framework of legitimacy to the state courts context
The current study uses data collected from defendants immediately after their hearings to test hypotheses regarding the relations among constructs relevant to perceptions of the state courts. Taking the Integrated Framework of Legitimacy as its guide, this research hypothesizes that trustworthiness assessments will mediate the effect of procedural fairness (as experienced from both the judge and court staff), distributive justice, and court perfo…
Public Vulnerability to the Police
The recent protests regarding the state of policing in the United States clearly demonstrate that how the police do their job creates a salient potential for harm to the public. This study applies a multidimensional paradigm of risk perception to quantify evaluations of police-caused harm. Using data from a national (U.S.) convenience sample ( n = 1,890) that oversampled individuals who self-identified as black or Muslim, we tested whether these …
Using public priorities to disentangle the dimensions of procedural justice and trustworthiness in police–citizen interactions
Multidimensional constructs like procedural justice and trustworthiness are important drivers of public trust in the police. Less attention has been paid, however, to the differential import of the dimensions of procedural justice (voice, respect and impartiality) or trustworthiness (ability, benevolence and integrity). A national convenience sample of US residents was asked to prioritize among the dimensions of procedural justice (Study 1) or tr…
Comfort with and willingness to participate in Covid-19 contact tracing
The emergence of convergence
Science is increasingly a collaborative pursuit. Although the modern scientific enterprise owes much to individuals working at the core of their field, humanity is increasingly confronted by highly complex problems that require the integration of a variety of disciplinary and methodological expertise. In 2016, the U.S. National Science Foundation launched an initiative prioritizing support for convergence research as a means of “solving vexing re…
Impact and (the Journal of) Trust Research
Self‐efficacy , prosocial impact, and self‐legitimacy as psychological predictors of judicial officer performance
The current work explores three potential facilitators of judicial performance. Participants in a state‐wide survey of judicial officers (response rate = 33.9 percent) completed self‐report measures of self‐efficacy, prosocial impact, and self‐legitimacy as well as subjectively perceived performance. Objective performance data collected by the state court administrative office were then merged with the survey data. Latent variable analysis confir…
Conceptualizing trust and distrust as alternative stable states
Despite the universally recognized importance of fostering trust and avoiding distrust in governance relationships, there remains considerable debate on core questions like the relation between (dis)trust and the evaluations of the characteristics that make a governance agent appear (un)worthy of trust. In particular, it remains unclear whether levels of (dis)trust simply follow levels of (dis)trustworthiness-such that building trust is primarily…
Psychology (27 works) · Political science (21 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Law (12 works) · Perception (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Business (9 works) · Medicine (9 works)