Robert J Maccoun
Biographic Data
| ID | 215106 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert J Maccoun |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert J |
| FAMILY NAME | Maccoun |
| SIGNATURE | MACCOUN R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0929-4423 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 266 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Computational Models of Social Influence And Collective Behavior
This chapter encourages to social psychologists to solidify and advance their understanding of social influence and collective behaviour by creating and testing computational models—models that can be formally stated with enough specificity to allow them to be run as computer simulations. Almost a century ago, Floyd Allport suggested that there are two kinds of data in social psychology: the behaviour of an individual in direct response to social…
The deterrent effects of Australian street-level drug law enforcement on illicit drug offending at outdoor music festivals
How Medical Marijuana Smoothed the Transition to Marijuana Legalization in the United States
Public support for legalizing marijuana use increased from 25% in 1995 to 60% in 2016, rising in lockstep with support for same-sex marriage. Between November 2012 and November 2016, voters in eight states passed ballot initiatives to legalize marijuana sales for nonmedical purposes-covering one-fifth of the US population. These changes are unprecedented but are not independent of the changes in medical marijuana laws that have occurred over the …
Legal Issues: Public Opinion
The Impact of Psychological Science on Policing in the United States: Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and Effective Law Enforcement
The May 2015 release of the report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing highlighted a fundamental change in the issues dominating discussions about policing in America. That change has moved discussions away from a focus on what is legal or effective in crime control and toward a concern for how the actions of the police influence public trust and confidence in the police. This shift in discourse has been motivated by two factor…
Public intuitions about fair child support allocations: Converging evidence for a “Fair Shares” rule
Nearly all American states use one of two systems for setting the amount of child support that noncustodial parents (NCPs) are required to pay to custodial parents (CPs). In previous work, we found that lay judgments of the child support amount the law should require differ in meaningful ways from these two systems: Our respondents favored child support amounts that are more responsive to the NCP’s income and much more responsive to the CP’s inco…
Is the leniency asymmetry really dead? Misinterpreting asymmetry effects in criminal jury deliberation
Early jury simulation research, reviewed and meta-anyalysed by MacCoun and Kerr (1988), suggested a leniency asymmetry in criminal jury deliberations such that a given faction favoring acquittal will tend to have a greater chance of prevailing than would an equivalent sized faction favoring conviction. More recently, a handful of field studies of actual juries have reported either no such leniency asymmetry or one in the opposite direction (a sev…
The burden of social proof: Shared thresholds and social influence
Social influence rises with the number of influence sources, but the proposed relationship varies across theories, situations, and research paradigms. To clarify this relationship, I argue that people share some sense of where the "burden of social proof" lies in situations where opinions or choices are in conflict. This suggests a family of models sharing 2 key parameters, one corresponding to the location of the influence threshold, and the oth…
Abstract principles and concrete cases in intuitive lawmaking
Citizens awaiting jury service were asked a series of items, in Likert format, to determine their endorsement of various statements about principles to use in setting child support amounts. These twenty items were derived from extant child support systems, from past literature and from Ellman and Ellman's (2008) Theory of Child Support. The twenty items were found to coalesce into four factors (principles). There were pervasive gender differences…
Abstract principles and concrete cases in intuitive lawmaking
Citizens awaiting jury service were asked a series of items, in Likert format, to determine their endorsement of various statements about principles to use in setting child support amounts. These twenty items were derived from extant child support systems, from past literature and from Ellman and Ellman’s (2008) Theory of Child Support. The twenty items were found to coalesce into four factors (principles). There were pervasive gender differences…
Assessing Drug Prohibition and Its Alternatives: A Guide for Agnostics
For decades, the debate over the merits of ending drug prohibition has carried on with little consequence. The recent near success of a cannabis legalization initiative in California suggests that citizens and politicians alike are more receptive to calls for change. We review basic research on deterrence and prices as well as emerging evidence on the potential empirical consequences of various alternatives to full prohibition, including depenali…
Citizens' Perceptions of Ideological Bias in Research on Public Policy Controversies
How do ordinary citizens react to new policy‐relevant findings that they learn about from media mentions or word of mouth? We conducted an experiment embedded in a random‐digit‐dial (RDD) telephone survey of 1,050 California adults. Respondents heard a description of a hypothetical study on one of four politicized topics or a politically neutral topic (nutrition) and were asked to describe their reactions to the study's main finding. As in prior …
The implicit rules of evidence-based drug policy: A U.S. perspective
The benefits of knowing what you know (and what you don’t): How calibration affects credibility
The negative impacts of starting middle school in sixth grade
Using administrative data on public school students in North Carolina, we find that sixth grade students attending middle schools are much more likely to be cited for discipline problems than those attending elementary school. That difference remains after adjusting for the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the students and their schools. Furthermore, the higher infraction rates recorded by sixth graders who are placed in middle sc…
Does Social Cohesion Determine Motivation in Combat: An Old Question with an Old Answer
Based on a new Army War College study of unit cohesion in the Iraq War, Wong et al. argue that successful unit performance is determined by social cohesion (the strength of interpersonal bonds among members) rather than task cohesion (a sense of shared commitment to the unit's mission). If correct, these conclusions have important implications for scholarship as well as for numerous U.S. military policies such as the Unit Manning System. However,…
Voice, Control, and Belonging: The Double-Edged Sword of Procedural Fairness
The procedural justice literature has grown enormously since the early work of Thibaut and Walker in the 1970s. Since then, the finding that citizens care enormously about the process by which outcomes are reached—even unfavorable outcomes—has been replicated a wide range of methodologies (including panel surveys, psychometric work, and experimentation), cultures (throughout North America, Europe, and Asia), and settings (including tort litigatio…
Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places
PREFACE The Varieties of Drug Control at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century
Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places
This book provides the first multidisciplinary and nonpartisan analysis of how the United States should decide on the legal status of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. It draws on data about the experiences of Western European nations with less punitive drug policies as well as new analyses of America's experience with legal cocaine and heroin a century ago, and of America's efforts to regulate gambling, prostitution, alcohol and cigarettes. It offe…
American distortion of Dutch drug statistics
The Costs and Benefits of Letting Juries Punish Corporations: Comment on Viscusi
On the basis of a new survey-administered mock juror experiment, Kip Viscusi suggests that a corporate defendant "[u]ndertaking even a sound risk analysis in line with that used by government regulators" actually increases the magnitude of punitive damage verdicts, even when the corporation's analysis "may have struck an appropriate risk-cost balance.",This finding should not surprise us in light of the tremendous controversy that followed the re…
What harm reduction is and isn't
What harm reduction is and isn't
Biases in the Interpretation and Use of Research Results
The latter half of this century has seen an erosion in the perceived legitimacy of science as an impartial means of finding truth. Many research topics are the subject of highly politicized dispute; indeed, the objectivity of the entire discipline of psychology has been called into question. This essay examines attempts to use science to study science: specifically, bias in the interpretation and use of empirical research findings. I examine theo…
Voice, Control, and Belonging: The Double-Edged Sword of Procedural Fairness
The procedural justice literature has grown enormously since the early work of Thibaut and Walker in the 1970s. Since then, the finding that citizens care enormously about the process by which outcomes are reached—even unfavorable outcomes—has been replicated a wide range of methodologies (including panel surveys, psychometric work, and experimentation), cultures (throughout North America, Europe, and Asia), and settings (including tort litigatio…
Does Social Cohesion Determine Motivation in Combat: An Old Question with an Old Answer
Based on a new Army War College study of unit cohesion in the Iraq War, Wong et al. argue that successful unit performance is determined by social cohesion (the strength of interpersonal bonds among members) rather than task cohesion (a sense of shared commitment to the unit's mission). If correct, these conclusions have important implications for scholarship as well as for numerous U.S. military policies such as the Unit Manning System. However,…
In the Eye of the Beholder: Tort Litigants' Evaluations of their Experiences in the Civil Justice System
Little is known about the reactions of tort litigants to traditional and alternative litigation procedures. To explore this issue, we interviewed litigants in personal injury cases in three state courts whose cases had been resolved by trial, court-annexed arbitration, judicial settlement conferences, or bilateral settlement. The litigants viewed the trial and arbitration procedures as fairer than bilateral settlement, apparently because they bel…
The benefits of knowing what you know (and what you don’t): How calibration affects credibility
The burden of social proof: Shared thresholds and social influence
Social influence rises with the number of influence sources, but the proposed relationship varies across theories, situations, and research paradigms. To clarify this relationship, I argue that people share some sense of where the "burden of social proof" lies in situations where opinions or choices are in conflict. This suggests a family of models sharing 2 key parameters, one corresponding to the location of the influence threshold, and the oth…
The negative impacts of starting middle school in sixth grade
Using administrative data on public school students in North Carolina, we find that sixth grade students attending middle schools are much more likely to be cited for discipline problems than those attending elementary school. That difference remains after adjusting for the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the students and their schools. Furthermore, the higher infraction rates recorded by sixth graders who are placed in middle sc…
Drugs and the law: A psychological analysis of drug prohibition
There is an ongoing American policy debate about the appropriate legal status for psychoactive drugs. Prohibition, decriminalization, and legalization positions are all premised on assumptions about the behavioral effects of drug laws. What is actually known and not known about these effects is reviewed. Rational-choice models of legal compliance suggest that criminalization reduces use through restricted drug availability, increased drug prices,…
Citizens' Perceptions of Ideological Bias in Research on Public Policy Controversies
How do ordinary citizens react to new policy‐relevant findings that they learn about from media mentions or word of mouth? We conducted an experiment embedded in a random‐digit‐dial (RDD) telephone survey of 1,050 California adults. Respondents heard a description of a hypothetical study on one of four politicized topics or a politically neutral topic (nutrition) and were asked to describe their reactions to the study's main finding. As in prior …
Differential Treatment of Corporate Defendants by Juries: An Examination of the "Deep-Pockets" Hypothesis
Evidence that juries treat corporate defendants less favorably than individual defendants is often cited in support of the widely held view that juries are biased against wealthy "deep-pocket" defendants. Such evidence confounds defendant wealth and defendant identity. In two juror simulation experiments involving citizens on jury duty, these factors were separated by manipulating whether the defendant was described as a poor individual, a wealth…
Asymmetric influence in mock jury deliberation: Jurors' bias for leniency
Investigators have frequently noted a leniency bias in mock jury research, in which deliberation appears to induce greater leniency in criminal mock jurors. One manifestation of this bias, the asymmetry effect, suggests that proacquittal factions are more influential than proconviction factions of comparable size. A meta-analysis indicated that these asymmetry effects are reliable across a variety of experimental contexts. Experiment 1 examined t…
The effects of jury size and polling method on the process and product of jury deliberation
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly assumed the functional equivalence of different sized juries (at least in the range of 6- to 12-person groups). Several formal models of jury decision making predict that larger juries should hang more often, particularly for very close cases. Failures to confirm this prediction in several previous studies were attributed to inadequate sample sizes or to insufficiently close cases. An experimental simulation …
How Medical Marijuana Smoothed the Transition to Marijuana Legalization in the United States
Public support for legalizing marijuana use increased from 25% in 1995 to 60% in 2016, rising in lockstep with support for same-sex marriage. Between November 2012 and November 2016, voters in eight states passed ballot initiatives to legalize marijuana sales for nonmedical purposes-covering one-fifth of the US population. These changes are unprecedented but are not independent of the changes in medical marijuana laws that have occurred over the …
Assessing Drug Prohibition and Its Alternatives: A Guide for Agnostics
For decades, the debate over the merits of ending drug prohibition has carried on with little consequence. The recent near success of a cannabis legalization initiative in California suggests that citizens and politicians alike are more receptive to calls for change. We review basic research on deterrence and prices as well as emerging evidence on the potential empirical consequences of various alternatives to full prohibition, including depenali…
Understanding gender differences in distributive and procedural justice
Gaining and losing social support: Momentum in decision-making groups
Role expectations in social dilemmas: Sex roles and task motivation in groups
Tested the impact of asymmetric role relationships (in which some group members contribute more to the group's welfare than others) on behavior in a social dilemma setting by manipulating the sex composition of cooperative performance dyads, using 47 male and 48 female undergraduates. The prescriptions of traditional sex roles suggested that Ss of both sexes would defect more (i.e., work less hard) with a male partner than with a female partner, …
Public intuitions about fair child support allocations: Converging evidence for a “Fair Shares” rule
Nearly all American states use one of two systems for setting the amount of child support that noncustodial parents (NCPs) are required to pay to custodial parents (CPs). In previous work, we found that lay judgments of the child support amount the law should require differ in meaningful ways from these two systems: Our respondents favored child support amounts that are more responsive to the NCP’s income and much more responsive to the CP’s inco…
The Costs and Benefits of Letting Juries Punish Corporations: Comment on Viscusi
On the basis of a new survey-administered mock juror experiment, Kip Viscusi suggests that a corporate defendant "[u]ndertaking even a sound risk analysis in line with that used by government regulators" actually increases the magnitude of punitive damage verdicts, even when the corporation's analysis "may have struck an appropriate risk-cost balance.",This finding should not surprise us in light of the tremendous controversy that followed the re…
Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law
Role expectations in social dilemmas: Sex roles and task motivation in groups
Tested the impact of asymmetric role relationships (in which some group members contribute more to the group's welfare than others) on behavior in a social dilemma setting by manipulating the sex composition of cooperative performance dyads, using 47 male and 48 female undergraduates. The prescriptions of traditional sex roles suggested that Ss of both sexes would defect more (i.e., work less hard) with a male partner than with a female partner, …
The effects of jury size and polling method on the process and product of jury deliberation
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly assumed the functional equivalence of different sized juries (at least in the range of 6- to 12-person groups). Several formal models of jury decision making predict that larger juries should hang more often, particularly for very close cases. Failures to confirm this prediction in several previous studies were attributed to inadequate sample sizes or to insufficiently close cases. An experimental simulation …
Suspicion in the psychological laboratory: Kelman's prophecy revisited
Describes the spontaneous occurrence, during an experimental session, of an epileptic seizure experienced by 1 S. Three of the remaining 5 Ss suspected the seizure was part of the experiment; implications are discussed in terms of H. C. Kelman's suggestion that the frequent use of deception in social psychological experimentation creates Ss who enter the laboratory expecting to be deceived and are unlikely to react to the experimental context in …
Suspicion in the psychological laboratory: Kelman's prophecy revisited
Gaining and losing social support: Momentum in decision-making groups
Asymmetric influence in mock jury deliberation: Jurors' bias for leniency
Investigators have frequently noted a leniency bias in mock jury research, in which deliberation appears to induce greater leniency in criminal mock jurors. One manifestation of this bias, the asymmetry effect, suggests that proacquittal factions are more influential than proconviction factions of comparable size. A meta-analysis indicated that these asymmetry effects are reliable across a variety of experimental contexts. Experiment 1 examined t…
In the Eye of the Beholder: Tort Litigants' Evaluations of their Experiences in the Civil Justice System
Little is known about the reactions of tort litigants to traditional and alternative litigation procedures. To explore this issue, we interviewed litigants in personal injury cases in three state courts whose cases had been resolved by trial, court-annexed arbitration, judicial settlement conferences, or bilateral settlement. The litigants viewed the trial and arbitration procedures as fairer than bilateral settlement, apparently because they bel…
Drugs and the law: A psychological analysis of drug prohibition
There is an ongoing American policy debate about the appropriate legal status for psychoactive drugs. Prohibition, decriminalization, and legalization positions are all premised on assumptions about the behavioral effects of drug laws. What is actually known and not known about these effects is reviewed. Rational-choice models of legal compliance suggest that criminalization reduces use through restricted drug availability, increased drug prices,…
Lessons from the absence of harm reduction in American drug policy
Even among its supporters, the American drug control strategy provides few grounds for enthusiasm. Despite many indications that the prevalence of drug use has declined over the past decade, in many ways the severity of the drug problem has remained fairly constant.1 Moreover, our current mix of policies is expensive, intrusive, and may actually contribute to drug related harm.2 Thus there is considerable interest - as documented by a steady stre…
Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law
Bias in judgment: Comparing individuals and groups.
The relative susceptibility of individuals and groups to systematic judgmental biases is considered. An overview of the relevant empirical literature reveals no clear or general pattern. However, a theoretical analysis employing J. H. Davis's (1973) social decision scheme (SDS) model reveals that the relative magnitude of individual and group bias depends upon several factors, including group size, initial individual judgment, the magnitude of bi…
Assessing alternative drug control regimes
The debate over alternative regimes for currently illicit psychoactive substances focuses on polar alternatives: harsh prohibition and sweeping legalization. This study presents an array of alternatives that lies between these extremes. The current debate lacks an explicit and inclusive framework for making comparative judgments. In this study, we sketch out such a framework, as a reminder of possible policy levers and their costs and benefits th…
Differential Treatment of Corporate Defendants by Juries: An Examination of the "Deep-Pockets" Hypothesis
Evidence that juries treat corporate defendants less favorably than individual defendants is often cited in support of the widely held view that juries are biased against wealthy "deep-pocket" defendants. Such evidence confounds defendant wealth and defendant identity. In two juror simulation experiments involving citizens on jury duty, these factors were separated by manipulating whether the defendant was described as a poor individual, a wealth…
Understanding gender differences in distributive and procedural justice
Understanding gender differences in distributive and procedural justice
Biases in the Interpretation and Use of Research Results
The latter half of this century has seen an erosion in the perceived legitimacy of science as an impartial means of finding truth. Many research topics are the subject of highly politicized dispute; indeed, the objectivity of the entire discipline of psychology has been called into question. This essay examines attempts to use science to study science: specifically, bias in the interpretation and use of empirical research findings. I examine theo…
Toward a psychology of harm reduction
Toward a psychology of harm reduction
This article discusses 3 different strategies for dealing with the harmful consequences of drug use and other risky behaviors: We can discourage people from engaging in the behavior (prevalence reduction), we can encourage people to reduce the frequency or extent of the behavior (quantity reduction), or we can try to reduce the harmful consequences of the behavior when it occurs (harm reduction). These strategies are not mutually exclusive; this …
What harm reduction is and isn't
What harm reduction is and isn't
The Costs and Benefits of Letting Juries Punish Corporations: Comment on Viscusi
On the basis of a new survey-administered mock juror experiment, Kip Viscusi suggests that a corporate defendant "[u]ndertaking even a sound risk analysis in line with that used by government regulators" actually increases the magnitude of punitive damage verdicts, even when the corporation's analysis "may have struck an appropriate risk-cost balance.",This finding should not surprise us in light of the tremendous controversy that followed the re…
Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places
This book provides the first multidisciplinary and nonpartisan analysis of how the United States should decide on the legal status of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. It draws on data about the experiences of Western European nations with less punitive drug policies as well as new analyses of America's experience with legal cocaine and heroin a century ago, and of America's efforts to regulate gambling, prostitution, alcohol and cigarettes. It offe…
American distortion of Dutch drug statistics
PREFACE The Varieties of Drug Control at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century
Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Vices, Times, and Places
Psychology (34 works) · Political science (28 works) · Social Psychology (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Criminology (13 works) · Economics (13 works) · Medicine (12 works) · Social Psychology (12 works)