Des R Gibson
Biographic Data
| ID | 414391 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Des R Gibson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Des R |
| FAMILY NAME | Gibson |
| SIGNATURE | GIBSON R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8554-4060 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 366 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Hyping the Hypothetical: Talk and Temporality in US Supreme Court Oral Arguments
The US Supreme Court conducts much of its business through talk, including during oral arguments, where a central activity is the consideration of hypotheticals posed by justices. Using conversation analysis, I examine a key segment of the oral arguments for Citizens United v. FEC, one that arguably changed the course of campaign finance history. I identify the conversational devices employed to advance and contest one particular hypothetical, in…
Autistic Intelligence: Interaction, Individuality, and the Challenges of Diagnosis
Minutes of History: Talk and Its Written Incarnations
Meeting minutes (and similar records) provide a cherished window into the internal workings of important bodies, but scholars usually have little option but to trust their veridicality. However, the production of a record of talk as it happens is a difficult task, especially when talk is animated and turn-taking unregimented. I compare recordings of four National Security Council meetings secretly made by Presidents Kennedy and Nixon with minutes…
Facts into faults: The grammar of guilt in jury deliberations
Jurors customarily do their work with very little by way of instruction from the court, other than about the law. This suggests that they enter the jury room with the relevant cognitive and interactional tools at the ready, drawn from everyday life. This paper focuses on a specific conversational device jurors use to do their work: conditional-contrastive inculpations (CCIs), whereby the defendant’s actions are compared unfavorably to what a norm…
What We Do When Alone, and Why It Matters
The Habits of Normal, Innocent People, as Construed by the North American Juror
Deliberating juries draw on commonsense notions of what counts as “normal” behavior in distinguishing facts which are inculpatory from those that lend themselves to more innocent interpretation. Though this is a commonplace observation, prior research has shed little light on the underlying model(s) of normalcy. Taking a generative approach to inculpatory statements made by two real‐life juries deliberating the same case, I first enumerate the di…
Ignorance at Risk: Interaction at the Epistemic Boundary of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi Scheme
Enduring Illusions: The Social Organization of Secrecy and Deception
Sociologists theorize that people comply with the dictates of states and other organizations out of self-interest or because of the perceived legitimacy of those in authority. Some organizations, however, are based on lies, or secrets, and it would seem that these should be very short-lived, given how easy it is for the truth to escape. This article lays the foundations of a sociology of deception, focusing on lies and secrets successfully mainta…
All the News That Fits to Print: Desk Competition for Front‐Page Space at The New York Times 1
Where sociologists find resources, they infer power or status. However, sometimes resources are fleetingly held rather than enduringly controlled, and then status only translates into resources given impetus, or the motivation and momentary capacity to make resource claims. Status then rests on relations of impingement, whereby one actor gains resources and another loses them when the former’s impetus surges. These ideas are developed through an …
Speaking of the Future: Contentious Narration During the Cuban Missile Crisis
Avoiding Catastrophe: The Interactional Production of Possibility during the Cuban Missile Crisis
In October 1962, the fate of the world hung on the U.S. response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy’s decision to impose a blockade was based on hours of discussions with top advisers (the so-called ExComm), yet decades of scholarship on the crisis have missed the central puzzle: How did the group select one response, the blockade, when all options seemed bad? Recently released audio recordings are used to argu…
Marking the Turn: Obligation, Engagement, and Alienation in Group Discussions
In group conversations, not speaking is the state of affairs experienced by most people most of the time; I refer to this as ‘‘conversational latency.’’ Hypothesizing that conversational latency affects one’s discursive options, I analyze the association between latency (operationalized as the number of turns that elapsed since the current speaker last spoke) and turn-initial words (e.g., but, oh) in twenty-nine experimental task groups, taking t…
More than a Game: Sociological Theory from the Theories of Games
Sociologists are fond of game metaphors. However, such metaphors rarely go beyond casual references to generic games. Yet games are little social systems, and each game offers a distinctive perspective on the relationship between rules and constraints, on the one side, and emergent order, on the other. In this article, we examine three games-chess, go, and (Texas hold 'em) poker-for sociological insights into contested social arenas such as marke…
Doing Time in Space: Line‐Joining Rules and Resultant Morphologies 1
Waiting lines are spatial configurations of people that store information about time of arrival until it is recapitulated as order of service. Someone joining a line has an interest in assuming a position that will be seen as recognizably “in line,” particularly by those arriving later. When physical constraints are few—such as in 30th Street Station, Philadelphia, the site for this research—this is normally accomplished through conformity with t…
How the Outside Gets In: Modeling Conversational Permeation
Conversation is incrementally, progressively produced, subject to constraints that ensure linearity (one person speaks at a time) irrespective of the identities, motives, and conversational resources of those present. And yet conversation is also receptive to influence from-or permeation by-external factors, such as attributes, formal status, and relationships. This review summarizes conversation-analytic work on how talk-in-interaction is produc…
Opportunistic Interruptions: Interactional Vulnerabilities Deriving From Linearization
Speaking involves “linearizing” a message into a string of words. This process leaves us vulnerable to being interrupted in such a way that the aborted turn is a misrepresentation of the intended message. Further, because we linearize our messages in standard ways, we are recurrently vulnerable to interruptions at particular turn-construction junctures, and consequently to recurrent types of self-misrepresentation. These vulnerabilities can be ex…
Concurrency and Commitment: Network Scheduling and Its Consequences for Diffusion 1
Network ties are thought to be concurrent—one can “have” many friends at once, for instance—but their concrete enactment is largely serial and episodic, guided by priorities that steer a person from one encounter to the next. Further, dyadic encounters require that two people be simultaneously available to interact, creating the need for coordinated scheduling. Here I study the consequences of scheduling for network diffusion, using a computer si…
Taking Turns and Talking Ties: Networks and Conversational Interaction
Conversational encounters are permeable to network effects but not entirely so, for conversation is internally structured by sequential constraints and dependencies that limit the latitude people have to act on their relational commitments. The author analyzes the effects of hierarchical (superior‐subordinate) and horizontal (friendship and co‐working) networks on “participation shifts”—transitions in the identities of speakers and targets (addre…
Participation Shifts: Order and Differentiation in Group Conversation
Conversation is both rule-governed and a venue in which people are differentiated, in how they act and are acted toward. I propose a new framework for the analysis of conversational sequences that captures both aspects simultaneously, based on the concept of participation shift. This refers to the moment-by-moment shuffling of individuals between the “participation statuses” of speaker, target, and unaddressed recipient. An analysis of participat…
Epidemiology and Public Health Consequences of Methamphetamine Use in California's Central Valley
Methamphetamine use is an increasingly serious public health problem in California and other parts of the country. Despite sensationalistic media attention, however, very little is known about users of this clandestinely consumed drug. Employing methods known as Rapid Assessment and Response, the authors describe the epidemiology and public health implications of methamphetamine use in California's Central Valley, with a focus on Sacramento, whic…
Effectiveness of syringe exchange programs in reducing HIV risk behavior and HIV seroconversion among injecting drug users
Drug addiction is a major risk factor for HIV infection for an estimated 3.4–5.5 million injecting drug users (IDU) in more than 125 countries [1–3]. In the USA, injecting drug use now accounts for nearly one-third of new AIDS cases [4] and for as many as three-quarters of annual incident HIV infections [5]. Behaviors associated with drug use that are responsible for HIV transmission include shared use of injection equipment and other drug paraph…
Seizing the Moment: The Problem of Conversational Agency
In conversation, actors face constraints on when they can speak, whom they can address, what they can say, and what they can safely expect from others by way of cooperation. This is the backdrop against which people pursue their idiosyncratic interests and objectives, success at which constitutes conversational agency. In principle, agency is made possible by the 'looseness' of conversational constraints. This does not create a clear path for the…
Effectiveness of Brief Counseling in Reducing HIV Risk Behavior in Injecting Drug Users: Final Results of Randomized Trials of Counseling with and Without HIV Testing
Personality correlates of logical and sociomoral judgment
This study examined the relation of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) to stages of logical and sociomoral judgment. Logical judgment was measured using adaptations of the pendulum and correlations tasks of Inhelder and Piaget; moral judgment was scored using the standard Kohlberg interview. In a sample of 143 adults, logical and sociomoral judgment were correlated .30 to .50 with most of the Class I (Factor 2) CPI scales, those capturi…
Response bias in assessing sexual behaviors relevant to HIV transmission
Methodological problems in Aids behavioral research: Influences on measurement error and participation bias in studies of sexual behavior
An unprecedented number of human sexuality studies have been initiated in response to the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic. Unfortunately, methodological developments in the field of sex research have been slow in meeting the demands of AIDS investigations focusing on the diverse populations at risk for infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (e.g., adolescents, gay men, intravenous-drug users, ethnic minorities, elderl…
Taking Turns and Talking Ties: Networks and Conversational Interaction
Conversational encounters are permeable to network effects but not entirely so, for conversation is internally structured by sequential constraints and dependencies that limit the latitude people have to act on their relational commitments. The author analyzes the effects of hierarchical (superior‐subordinate) and horizontal (friendship and co‐working) networks on “participation shifts”—transitions in the identities of speakers and targets (addre…
Response bias in assessing sexual behaviors relevant to HIV transmission
Participation Shifts: Order and Differentiation in Group Conversation
Conversation is both rule-governed and a venue in which people are differentiated, in how they act and are acted toward. I propose a new framework for the analysis of conversational sequences that captures both aspects simultaneously, based on the concept of participation shift. This refers to the moment-by-moment shuffling of individuals between the “participation statuses” of speaker, target, and unaddressed recipient. An analysis of participat…
Avoiding Catastrophe: The Interactional Production of Possibility during the Cuban Missile Crisis
In October 1962, the fate of the world hung on the U.S. response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy’s decision to impose a blockade was based on hours of discussions with top advisers (the so-called ExComm), yet decades of scholarship on the crisis have missed the central puzzle: How did the group select one response, the blockade, when all options seemed bad? Recently released audio recordings are used to argu…
Speaking of the Future: Contentious Narration During the Cuban Missile Crisis
How the Outside Gets In: Modeling Conversational Permeation
Conversation is incrementally, progressively produced, subject to constraints that ensure linearity (one person speaks at a time) irrespective of the identities, motives, and conversational resources of those present. And yet conversation is also receptive to influence from-or permeation by-external factors, such as attributes, formal status, and relationships. This review summarizes conversation-analytic work on how talk-in-interaction is produc…
Enduring Illusions: The Social Organization of Secrecy and Deception
Sociologists theorize that people comply with the dictates of states and other organizations out of self-interest or because of the perceived legitimacy of those in authority. Some organizations, however, are based on lies, or secrets, and it would seem that these should be very short-lived, given how easy it is for the truth to escape. This article lays the foundations of a sociology of deception, focusing on lies and secrets successfully mainta…
Seizing the Moment: The Problem of Conversational Agency
In conversation, actors face constraints on when they can speak, whom they can address, what they can say, and what they can safely expect from others by way of cooperation. This is the backdrop against which people pursue their idiosyncratic interests and objectives, success at which constitutes conversational agency. In principle, agency is made possible by the 'looseness' of conversational constraints. This does not create a clear path for the…
Opportunistic Interruptions: Interactional Vulnerabilities Deriving From Linearization
Speaking involves “linearizing” a message into a string of words. This process leaves us vulnerable to being interrupted in such a way that the aborted turn is a misrepresentation of the intended message. Further, because we linearize our messages in standard ways, we are recurrently vulnerable to interruptions at particular turn-construction junctures, and consequently to recurrent types of self-misrepresentation. These vulnerabilities can be ex…
More than a Game: Sociological Theory from the Theories of Games
Sociologists are fond of game metaphors. However, such metaphors rarely go beyond casual references to generic games. Yet games are little social systems, and each game offers a distinctive perspective on the relationship between rules and constraints, on the one side, and emergent order, on the other. In this article, we examine three games-chess, go, and (Texas hold 'em) poker-for sociological insights into contested social arenas such as marke…
Marking the Turn: Obligation, Engagement, and Alienation in Group Discussions
In group conversations, not speaking is the state of affairs experienced by most people most of the time; I refer to this as ‘‘conversational latency.’’ Hypothesizing that conversational latency affects one’s discursive options, I analyze the association between latency (operationalized as the number of turns that elapsed since the current speaker last spoke) and turn-initial words (e.g., but, oh) in twenty-nine experimental task groups, taking t…
Concurrency and Commitment: Network Scheduling and Its Consequences for Diffusion 1
Network ties are thought to be concurrent—one can “have” many friends at once, for instance—but their concrete enactment is largely serial and episodic, guided by priorities that steer a person from one encounter to the next. Further, dyadic encounters require that two people be simultaneously available to interact, creating the need for coordinated scheduling. Here I study the consequences of scheduling for network diffusion, using a computer si…
Ignorance at Risk: Interaction at the Epistemic Boundary of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi Scheme
Doing Time in Space: Line‐Joining Rules and Resultant Morphologies 1
Waiting lines are spatial configurations of people that store information about time of arrival until it is recapitulated as order of service. Someone joining a line has an interest in assuming a position that will be seen as recognizably “in line,” particularly by those arriving later. When physical constraints are few—such as in 30th Street Station, Philadelphia, the site for this research—this is normally accomplished through conformity with t…
All the News That Fits to Print: Desk Competition for Front‐Page Space at The New York Times 1
Where sociologists find resources, they infer power or status. However, sometimes resources are fleetingly held rather than enduringly controlled, and then status only translates into resources given impetus, or the motivation and momentary capacity to make resource claims. Status then rests on relations of impingement, whereby one actor gains resources and another loses them when the former’s impetus surges. These ideas are developed through an …
Minutes of History: Talk and Its Written Incarnations
Meeting minutes (and similar records) provide a cherished window into the internal workings of important bodies, but scholars usually have little option but to trust their veridicality. However, the production of a record of talk as it happens is a difficult task, especially when talk is animated and turn-taking unregimented. I compare recordings of four National Security Council meetings secretly made by Presidents Kennedy and Nixon with minutes…
Personality correlates of logical and sociomoral judgment
This study examined the relation of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) to stages of logical and sociomoral judgment. Logical judgment was measured using adaptations of the pendulum and correlations tasks of Inhelder and Piaget; moral judgment was scored using the standard Kohlberg interview. In a sample of 143 adults, logical and sociomoral judgment were correlated .30 to .50 with most of the Class I (Factor 2) CPI scales, those capturi…
Response bias in assessing sexual behaviors relevant to HIV transmission
Methodological problems in Aids behavioral research: Influences on measurement error and participation bias in studies of sexual behavior
An unprecedented number of human sexuality studies have been initiated in response to the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic. Unfortunately, methodological developments in the field of sex research have been slow in meeting the demands of AIDS investigations focusing on the diverse populations at risk for infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (e.g., adolescents, gay men, intravenous-drug users, ethnic minorities, elderl…
Effectiveness of Brief Counseling in Reducing HIV Risk Behavior in Injecting Drug Users: Final Results of Randomized Trials of Counseling with and Without HIV Testing
Seizing the Moment: The Problem of Conversational Agency
In conversation, actors face constraints on when they can speak, whom they can address, what they can say, and what they can safely expect from others by way of cooperation. This is the backdrop against which people pursue their idiosyncratic interests and objectives, success at which constitutes conversational agency. In principle, agency is made possible by the 'looseness' of conversational constraints. This does not create a clear path for the…
Effectiveness of syringe exchange programs in reducing HIV risk behavior and HIV seroconversion among injecting drug users
Drug addiction is a major risk factor for HIV infection for an estimated 3.4–5.5 million injecting drug users (IDU) in more than 125 countries [1–3]. In the USA, injecting drug use now accounts for nearly one-third of new AIDS cases [4] and for as many as three-quarters of annual incident HIV infections [5]. Behaviors associated with drug use that are responsible for HIV transmission include shared use of injection equipment and other drug paraph…
Epidemiology and Public Health Consequences of Methamphetamine Use in California's Central Valley
Methamphetamine use is an increasingly serious public health problem in California and other parts of the country. Despite sensationalistic media attention, however, very little is known about users of this clandestinely consumed drug. Employing methods known as Rapid Assessment and Response, the authors describe the epidemiology and public health implications of methamphetamine use in California's Central Valley, with a focus on Sacramento, whic…
Participation Shifts: Order and Differentiation in Group Conversation
Conversation is both rule-governed and a venue in which people are differentiated, in how they act and are acted toward. I propose a new framework for the analysis of conversational sequences that captures both aspects simultaneously, based on the concept of participation shift. This refers to the moment-by-moment shuffling of individuals between the “participation statuses” of speaker, target, and unaddressed recipient. An analysis of participat…
Opportunistic Interruptions: Interactional Vulnerabilities Deriving From Linearization
Speaking involves “linearizing” a message into a string of words. This process leaves us vulnerable to being interrupted in such a way that the aborted turn is a misrepresentation of the intended message. Further, because we linearize our messages in standard ways, we are recurrently vulnerable to interruptions at particular turn-construction junctures, and consequently to recurrent types of self-misrepresentation. These vulnerabilities can be ex…
Concurrency and Commitment: Network Scheduling and Its Consequences for Diffusion 1
Network ties are thought to be concurrent—one can “have” many friends at once, for instance—but their concrete enactment is largely serial and episodic, guided by priorities that steer a person from one encounter to the next. Further, dyadic encounters require that two people be simultaneously available to interact, creating the need for coordinated scheduling. Here I study the consequences of scheduling for network diffusion, using a computer si…
Taking Turns and Talking Ties: Networks and Conversational Interaction
Conversational encounters are permeable to network effects but not entirely so, for conversation is internally structured by sequential constraints and dependencies that limit the latitude people have to act on their relational commitments. The author analyzes the effects of hierarchical (superior‐subordinate) and horizontal (friendship and co‐working) networks on “participation shifts”—transitions in the identities of speakers and targets (addre…
Doing Time in Space: Line‐Joining Rules and Resultant Morphologies 1
Waiting lines are spatial configurations of people that store information about time of arrival until it is recapitulated as order of service. Someone joining a line has an interest in assuming a position that will be seen as recognizably “in line,” particularly by those arriving later. When physical constraints are few—such as in 30th Street Station, Philadelphia, the site for this research—this is normally accomplished through conformity with t…
How the Outside Gets In: Modeling Conversational Permeation
Conversation is incrementally, progressively produced, subject to constraints that ensure linearity (one person speaks at a time) irrespective of the identities, motives, and conversational resources of those present. And yet conversation is also receptive to influence from-or permeation by-external factors, such as attributes, formal status, and relationships. This review summarizes conversation-analytic work on how talk-in-interaction is produc…
Marking the Turn: Obligation, Engagement, and Alienation in Group Discussions
In group conversations, not speaking is the state of affairs experienced by most people most of the time; I refer to this as ‘‘conversational latency.’’ Hypothesizing that conversational latency affects one’s discursive options, I analyze the association between latency (operationalized as the number of turns that elapsed since the current speaker last spoke) and turn-initial words (e.g., but, oh) in twenty-nine experimental task groups, taking t…
More than a Game: Sociological Theory from the Theories of Games
Sociologists are fond of game metaphors. However, such metaphors rarely go beyond casual references to generic games. Yet games are little social systems, and each game offers a distinctive perspective on the relationship between rules and constraints, on the one side, and emergent order, on the other. In this article, we examine three games-chess, go, and (Texas hold 'em) poker-for sociological insights into contested social arenas such as marke…
All the News That Fits to Print: Desk Competition for Front‐Page Space at The New York Times 1
Where sociologists find resources, they infer power or status. However, sometimes resources are fleetingly held rather than enduringly controlled, and then status only translates into resources given impetus, or the motivation and momentary capacity to make resource claims. Status then rests on relations of impingement, whereby one actor gains resources and another loses them when the former’s impetus surges. These ideas are developed through an …
Speaking of the Future: Contentious Narration During the Cuban Missile Crisis
Avoiding Catastrophe: The Interactional Production of Possibility during the Cuban Missile Crisis
In October 1962, the fate of the world hung on the U.S. response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy’s decision to impose a blockade was based on hours of discussions with top advisers (the so-called ExComm), yet decades of scholarship on the crisis have missed the central puzzle: How did the group select one response, the blockade, when all options seemed bad? Recently released audio recordings are used to argu…
Enduring Illusions: The Social Organization of Secrecy and Deception
Sociologists theorize that people comply with the dictates of states and other organizations out of self-interest or because of the perceived legitimacy of those in authority. Some organizations, however, are based on lies, or secrets, and it would seem that these should be very short-lived, given how easy it is for the truth to escape. This article lays the foundations of a sociology of deception, focusing on lies and secrets successfully mainta…
The Habits of Normal, Innocent People, as Construed by the North American Juror
Deliberating juries draw on commonsense notions of what counts as “normal” behavior in distinguishing facts which are inculpatory from those that lend themselves to more innocent interpretation. Though this is a commonplace observation, prior research has shed little light on the underlying model(s) of normalcy. Taking a generative approach to inculpatory statements made by two real‐life juries deliberating the same case, I first enumerate the di…
Ignorance at Risk: Interaction at the Epistemic Boundary of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi Scheme
What We Do When Alone, and Why It Matters
Facts into faults: The grammar of guilt in jury deliberations
Jurors customarily do their work with very little by way of instruction from the court, other than about the law. This suggests that they enter the jury room with the relevant cognitive and interactional tools at the ready, drawn from everyday life. This paper focuses on a specific conversational device jurors use to do their work: conditional-contrastive inculpations (CCIs), whereby the defendant’s actions are compared unfavorably to what a norm…
Minutes of History: Talk and Its Written Incarnations
Meeting minutes (and similar records) provide a cherished window into the internal workings of important bodies, but scholars usually have little option but to trust their veridicality. However, the production of a record of talk as it happens is a difficult task, especially when talk is animated and turn-taking unregimented. I compare recordings of four National Security Council meetings secretly made by Presidents Kennedy and Nixon with minutes…
Hyping the Hypothetical: Talk and Temporality in US Supreme Court Oral Arguments
The US Supreme Court conducts much of its business through talk, including during oral arguments, where a central activity is the consideration of hypotheticals posed by justices. Using conversation analysis, I examine a key segment of the oral arguments for Citizens United v. FEC, one that arguably changed the course of campaign finance history. I identify the conversational devices employed to advance and contest one particular hypothetical, in…
Psychology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Conversation (10 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (9 works) · Social Psychology (7 works)