Design Clarity in Public Outreach Documents: A Guidebook for a First Detector Volunteer Network

We established a first detectors network by inviting woodland owners to monitor for invasive pests on their property as volunteers. Accessible outreach materials are necessary to communicate volunteer responsibilities. A professional graphic design firm provided a series of design and layout techniques, including font size, font style, spacing, color palette, backgrounds, and figures, that improved our instructional guidebook. The guidebook was received positively in anonymous volunteer evaluations and in face-to-face discussion. The techniques may be useful in the development of materials for other outreach programs

Character Testimony in the Law: What Kind of Evidence is Informative?

PHDPsychologyUniversity of Michiganhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/150884/1/psychdiss024.pd

New Media and Politics: Some Insights from Social and Political Psychology

Many fascinating questions have been raised about the “transformative” influence of the Internet on everyday social life. Some research suggests that the Internet has a positive and transformative influence on many lives, but other studies suggest that this influence is overstated and not always associated with such positive consequences. This article briefly discusses some of these claims, especially those grounded in research from social and political psychology. It focuses on the extent to which the Internet is providing (a) an important and increasingly influential forum for acquiring politically relevant information and (b) a new context for researchers to study traditional social-psychological processes that may be associated with the way citizens enhance their political knowledge online and bolster their political attitudes and partisan affiliations. More generally, the article suggests that there are potential theoretical and empirical payoffs associated with studying online information-seeking behavior in the political realm

The Separate Spheres Model of Gendered Inequality.

Research on role congruity theory and descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes has established that when men and women violate gender stereotypes by crossing spheres, with women pursuing career success and men contributing to domestic labor, they face backlash and economic penalties. Less is known, however, about the types of individuals who are most likely to engage in these forms of discrimination and the types of situations in which this is most likely to occur. We propose that psychological research will benefit from supplementing existing research approaches with an individual differences model of support for separate spheres for men and women. This model allows psychologists to examine individual differences in support for separate spheres as they interact with situational and contextual forces. The separate spheres ideology (SSI) has existed as a cultural idea for many years but has not been operationalized or modeled in social psychology. The Separate Spheres Model presents the SSI as a new psychological construct characterized by individual differences and a motivated system-justifying function, operationalizes the ideology with a new scale measure, and models the ideology as a predictor of some important gendered outcomes in society. As a first step toward developing the Separate Spheres Model, we develop a new measure of individuals' endorsement of the SSI and demonstrate its reliability, convergent validity, and incremental predictive validity. We provide support for the novel hypotheses that the SSI predicts attitudes regarding workplace flexibility accommodations, income distribution within families between male and female partners, distribution of labor between work and family spheres, and discriminatory workplace behaviors. Finally, we provide experimental support for the hypothesis that the SSI is a motivated, system-justifying ideology

Best Practices: How to Evaluate Psychological Science for Use by Organizations

We discuss how organizations can evaluate psychological science for its potential usefulness to their own purposes. Common sense is often the default but inadequate alternative, and benchmarking supplies only collective hunches instead of validated principles. External validity is an empirical process of identifying moderator variables, not a simple yes-no judgment about whether lab results replicate in the field. Hence, convincing criteria must specify what constitutes highquality empirical evidence for organizational use. First, we illustrate some theories and science that have potential use. Then we describe generally accepted criteria for scientific quality and consensus, starting with peer review for quality, and scientific agreement in forms ranging from surveys of experts to meta-analyses to National Research Council consensus reports. Linkages of basic science to organizations entail communicating expert scientific consensus, motivating managerial interest, and translating broad principles to specific contexts. We close with parting advice to both sides of the researcher-practitioner divide

The Differential Impact of Abstract vs. Concrete Information on Decisions

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91929/1/differential_impact_abstract.pd

Symbolic Politics and the Prediction of Attitudes Toward Federal Regulation of Reduced-Exposure Tobacco Products

The present study relies on symbolic politics theory to predict public attitudes toward the federal regulation of conventional tobacco products (a familiar attitude object) and reduced-exposure tobacco products (a relatively novel attitude object). We predicted that attitudes toward most forms of regulation would be more strongly influenced by symbolic beliefs about the role of government in society than by self-interested concerns, with the exception of taxation. We predicted that the financial consequences of taxation policies would be less ambiguous for those who are affected, resulting in a stronger relationship between self-interest and policy attitudes. The results strongly supported our hypotheses, suggesting a process by which symbolic beliefs and self-interested concerns influence attitude formation. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed