What Works at Scale? Distilling the Critical Success Factors for Scaling Up Rural Sanitation

This paper is based on the Knowledge Sharing Forum of the same name. It examines the conditions for success in sanitation programs and strategies that lead to robust implementation in various countries

“This is the way ‘I’ create my passwords ...":does the endowment effect deter people from changing the way they create their passwords?

The endowment effect is the term used to describe a phenomenon that manifests as a reluctance to relinquish owned artifacts, even when a viable or better substitute is offered. It has been confirmed by multiple studies when it comes to ownership of physical artifacts. If computer users also "own", and are attached to, their personal security routines, such feelings could conceivably activate the same endowment effect. This would, in turn, lead to their over-estimating the \value" of their existing routines, in terms of the protection they afford, and the risks they mitigate. They might well, as a consequence, not countenance any efforts to persuade them to adopt a more secure routine, because their comparison of pre-existing and proposed new routine is skewed by the activation of the endowment effect.In this paper, we report on an investigation into the possibility that the endowment effect activates when people adopt personal password creation routines. We did indeed find evidence that the endowment effect is likely to be triggered in this context. This constitutes one explanation for the failure of many security awareness drives to improve password strength. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research to confirm our findings, and to investigate the activation of the effect for other security routines

Capturing Individual Harms

The aggregated lifestyles and behaviors of individuals impose significant environmental harms yet remain largely unregulated. A growing literature recognizes the environmental significance of individual behaviors, critiques the failure of environmental law and policy to capture harms traceable to individual behaviors, and suggests and evaluates strategies for capturing individual harms going forward. This Article contributes to the existing literature by approaching the problem of environmentally significant individual harms through the lens of environmental federalism. Using climate change and individual greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions as an exemplar, the Article illustrates how local information, local governments, and local implementation can enhance policies designed to capture individual environmental harms. Local information and community-level implementation may enhance norm management efforts designed to influence GHG-emitting behaviors by (1) allowing for the identification of concrete behaviors that are feasible to target through norm management in a given community; (2) informing the design and content of norm campaigns, including the selection of the abstract norm that will form the basis of the appeal for specific behavioral change; and (3) facilitating effective implementation strategies. This framework supports a preference for local action expressed, but to date largely unexamined, in the broader norm management literature. Additionally, the Article argues that obstacles to using mandates to influence GHG-emitting behaviors may be less formidable when mandates are developed and enforced locally. Local development and enforcement of mandates can reduce intrusion objections because (1) individuals are accustomed to local control over day-to-day behaviors; (2) familiarity with local attitudes and practices enables the design of mandates that avoid intrusion objections; and (3) local governments are in a better position to structure time, place, and manner restrictions that channel behavior while preserving some individual choice. Local design and enforcement of mandates may also minimize the key enforcement challenges of expense, numerosity, and (in)visibility

Immune cognition, social justice and asthma: structured stress and the developing immune system

We explore the implications of IR Cohen's work on immune cognition for understanding rising rates of asthma morbidity and mortality in the US. Immune cognition is conjoined with central nervous system cognition, and with the cognitive function of the embedding sociocultural networks by which individuals are acculturated and through which they work with others to meet challenges of threat and opportunity. Using a mathematical model, we find that externally- imposed patterns of 'structured stress' can, through their effect on a child's socioculture, become synergistic with the development of immune cognition, triggering the persistence of an atopic Th2 phenotype, a necessary precursor to asthma and other immune disease. Reversal of the rising tide of asthma and related chronic diseases in the US thus seems unlikely without a 21st Century version of the earlier Great Urban Reforms which ended the scourge of infectious diseases

Integrating Employment Contracts and Comparisons: What One Can Teach Us about the Other

This study examines the events that trigger individuals to consider the social exchanges involved in their employment relationships. Integrating social comparison and psychological contract literature streams, a parallel is drawn between system-referent comparisons and psychological contract evaluations. We hypothesize that self- and other-referent comparisons may be human triggers for engaging in this type of comparison. A variety of structural triggers are also proposed to influence psychological contract evaluations. This field study examines these primary and secondary contract makers as social comparison triggers. Results support the hypotheses that the triggers identified predict psychological contract evaluation and that psychological contract breach is correlated with these evaluations. Implications for future research and managerial practice are discussed

Structured Psychosocial Stress and Therapeutic Intervention: Toward a Realistic Biological Medicine

Using generalized 'language of thought' arguments appropriate to interacting cognitive modules, we explore how disease states can interact with medical treatment, including, but not limited to, drug therapy. The feedback between treatment and response creates a kind of idiotypic 'hall of mirrors' generating a pattern of 'efficacy', 'treatment failure', and 'adverse reactions' which will, from a Rate Distortion perspective, embody a distorted image of externally-imposed structured psychosocial stress. This analysis, unlike current pharmacogenetics, does not either reify 'race' or blame the victim by using genetic structure to place the locus-of-control within a group or individual. Rather, it suggests that a comparatively simple series of questions to identify longitudinal and cross-sectional stressors may provide more effective guidance for specification of individual therapy than complicated genotyping strategies of dubious meaning. These latter are likely to be both very expensive and utterly blind to the impact of structured psychosocial stress -- a euphemism for various forms of racism and ethnic cleansing -- which, we contend, is often a principal determinant of treatment outcome at both individual and community levels of organization. We propose, to effectively address 'health disparities' between populations, and in contrast to current biomedical ideology based on a simplistic genetic determinism, a richer program of biological medicine reflecting Lewontin's 'triple helix' of genes, environment, and development, a program more in concert with the realities of a basic human biology marked by hypersociality unusual in vertibrates. Aggressive social, economic, and other policies of affirmative action to redress the persisting burdens of history would be an integral component of any such project