Dogmatism and the Death Penalty: A Reinterpretation of the Duquesne Poll Data

In Witherspoon v. Illinois the defendant asked the court to reverse his conviction by a non-scrupled jury arguing that (1) the jury determining the guilt issue favored the death penalty; (2) those who favored the death penalty were highly authoritarian, dogmatic personalties; and (3) highly dogmatic jurors were prosecution prone. From these premises, the defendant concluded that his Sixth Amendment guarantee to an impartial jury was denied by the non-scrupled jury determining his guilt because it was prosecution prone. The Court acknowledged the defendant\u27s first premise when it reversed his death sentence, but rejected the full argument because premises (2) and (3) had not been proven to its satisfaction

Societal-level versus individual-level predictions of ethical behavior: a 48-society study of collectivism and individualism

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed

The Open and Closed Mind : Investigations into the nature of belief systems and personality ...

New Yorkxv, 447 p.; 20 c

La Nature et la signification du dogmatisme

Rokeach Milton. La Nature et la signification du dogmatisme. In: Archives de sociologie des religions, n°32, 1971. pp. 9-28

Long-range experimental modification of values, attitudes, and behavior

S INCE the summer of 1966, a major portion of the research effort at Michigan State University has been devoted to a systematic investigation of the effects of experimentally induced feelings of self-dissatisfaction on long-range changes in values, attitudes, and behavior. The theoretical approach used differs from other approaches in experimental social psychology in three major respects: 1. Contemporary social psychologists generally agree that a necessary prerequisite to cognitive or attitude change is the presence of a state of imbalance or inconsistency. Two major experimental methods generally employed to create such a psychological state are (a) to induce a person to engage in behavior that is incompatible with his attitudes and values and (b) to expose him to information about the attitudes or values of significant others that are incompatible with his own attitudes and values. In contrast to these two well-known methods, we have employed a third method, namely, to expose a person to information designed to make him consciously aware of states of inconsistency that exist chronically within his own value-attitude system below the level of his conscious awareness. 2. While the main theoretical focus of contemporary social psychology is on the concept of attitude and on theories of attitude change, the present focus is on the concept of value and on a theory of value change. This shift from attitudes to values is made on the assumption that values are more fundamental components within a person's makeup than attitudes and, moreover, that values are de-1 The research reported herein was supported by a grant from (he National Science Foundation. Support of this research is gratefully acknowledged. This paper was presented as part of a symposium, Human Behavior and Its Control, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chicago, Illinois, December . '(0, 1070. 3 Requests for reprints should be sent to Milton Rokcach, Visiting Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London 72, Ontario. terminants of attitudes as well as of behavior. Such a shift in focus becomes scientifically possible only if clear conceptual and operational distinctions can be made between the attitude and value concepts. Relevant discussions concerning this distinction are presented elsewhere (Rokeach, 1968a(Rokeach, , 1968b(Rokeach, , 1968c(Rokeach, , 1968(Rokeach, -69, 1971) and need not be repeated here except to say that an attitude represents an organization of interrelated beliefs that are all focused on a specific object or situation, while a value refers to a desirable end state of existence (terminal value) or a desirable mode of behavior (instrumental value). Terminal and instrumental values arc generalized standards of the means and ends of human existence that transcend attitudes toward specific objects and situations. Thus denned, a person is conceived to have many thousands of attitudes but only several dozens of values. These relatively few values are conceived to determine many or all of man's attitudes as well as his behavior. 3. A third way in which our theoretical approach differs from those of other workers in the field of attitude change is in the conception and measurement of psychological states of dissonance (imbalance, inconsistency, incongruity). To speak of dissonance meaningfully is to identify at least two elements X and Y that are in some "dissonant relation" to one another. In Festinger's theory (and in other balance formulations), X and Y are typically identified as two cognitions (beliefs, attitudes, values, or cognitions about behavior), and X and Y will necessarily vary from one situation to another. In the present formulation, X and Y are not two cognitions that vary from one situation to another, but are invariant across all situations: X ~ self; Y -one's perceived performance or behavior in whatever the situation. X and Y are dissonant with one another if the person's behavior in any given situation leads him to become dissatisfied with himself; X and Y are consonant if his behavior in a given situation leads him to remain satisfied with himself. Such states of dis-45