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Technology Arms Peeping Toms with a New and Dangerous Arsenal: A Compelling Need for States to Adopt New Legislation, 17 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 1167 (1999)

February 21, 2019November 15, 2017 by admin

I. INTRODUCTION

The act of voyeurism is becoming an increasingly prevalent and unsettling threat to human dignity and the right to privacy. The "peeping Tom" of yesterday is now armed with a new arsenal that threatens more than just the unsuspecting victim standing by an open window. With the development and advancement of surveillance technology, voyeurism has evolved into something an increasing number of people suspect and fear. The accessibility of small video cameras and other viewing or recording methods eases the barriers for perverts to observe others engaged in otherwise personal activities. The story of Susan and Gary Wilson, recent victims of video voyeurism, illustrates what these peeping perverts can do with the aid of a video camera. In 1996, the couple went looking for a home and at the suggestion of a friend and fellow church member, Steve Glover,...

The Misuse Of Input Information In Judgments Of Outcomes

February 21, 2019November 15, 2017 by admin

Abstract

In this paper we identify an input bias, the systematic misuse of input information in judgments of outcome quality. In many settings irrelevant input measures, such as the amount of time an employee spends in the office, influence outcome assessments, such as performance reviews. Across four studies we find that input values subtly, but significantly distort judgments of outcome quality.Irrelevant input information predictably influences outcome assessments even when people recognize that input measures should not matter and believe that input information did not matter. We examine the mechanics of the input bias, and suggest that because input measures are often easy to manipulate or misrepresent, the input bias is likely to have broad implications for managerial judgment and decision making.

2003 Published by Elsevier Science (USA)

1. Introduction

Judgments of quality are essential prerequisites for many decision making tasks. For example, prior to making a hiring decision a manager needs to assess thequality of...

The Psychology of Power and Evil: All Power to the Person? To the Situation? To the System?

February 21, 2019October 7, 2017 by admin

To understand anti-social behavior by individuals, which includes violence, torture and terrorism, I endorse a greater reliance on situational variables and processes than has been traditional in psychology. The dominant dispositional orientation, embedded in a psychology of individualism, focuses on internal factors that people bring into various situations, such as genetic, personality, character, and pathological risk factors. While this perspective is obviously important to appreciating the integrity of individual functioning, it is vital to add an appreciation of the extent to which human actions may come under situational influences that can be quite powerful. Those influences have not been fully recognized within psychology or society in trying to explain unusual or “evil” behaviors, such as that of the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by United States military police guards at Abu Ghraib Prison. How one understands the root causes of such behaviors then impacts treatment and prevention strategies. This view has...

A Brief Guide to Writing the Psychology Paper

February 21, 2019October 18, 2017 by admin

The Challenges of Writing in Psychology

Psychology writing, like writing in the other sciences, is meant to inform the reader about a new idea, theory or experiment. Toward this end, academic psychologists emphasize the importance of clarity and brevity in writing while minimizing descriptive language and complex sentence structure. The best writers of psychology have the ability to make complex ideas understandable to people outside of their area of expertise. When you write a psychology paper, you are, above all, writing to convey factual knowledge that is supported by research. You are striving to be precise, and thus you should expect every word you write to be read literally. Psychology writing can be very dense, with many references to previous research. Writers of psychology almost never directly quote a source. Instead, they distill the essence of the idea or finding, and cite the appropriate source. In the...

Sex, Lies, and Strategic Interference: The Psychology of Deception Between the Sexes

February 18, 2019August 4, 2017 by admin

The desires of one sex can lead to deceptive exploitation by the other sex. Strategic Interference Theory proposes that certain “negative” emotions evolved or have been co-opted by selection, in part, to defend against deception and reduce its negative consequences. In Study 1 (N = 217) Americans reported emotional distress in response to specific forms of deception. Study 2 (N = 200) replicated the results in a German sample. Study 3 (N = 479) assessed Americans’ past experiences with deception and conducted additional hypothesis tests using a procedure to control for overall sex differences in upset. Each study supported the hypothesis that emotions track sex-linked forms of strategic interference. Three clusters of sex differences proved robust across studies emotional upset about resource deception, commitment deception, and sexual deception. We discuss implications for theories of mating and emotion and directions for research based on models of antagonistic coevolution between the sexes

Cooperation between a man and a woman is virtually a...

When Did Prisons Become Acceptable Mental Healthcare Facilities?

February 17, 2019August 9, 2017 by admin

INTRODUCTION

We can no longer ignore the massive oppression we are inflicting upon the mentally ill throughout the United States. Over a century ago, Dorothea Dix began a movement to improve the deplorable conditions of mentally ill prisoners. Despite her success in changing the country’s perception and treatment of the mentally ill in prison, we are now right back where we started in the nineteenth century. Although deinstitutionalization was originally understood as a humane way to offer more suitable services to the mentally ill in community-based settings, some politicians seized upon it as a way to save money by shutting down institutions without providing any meaningful treatment alternatives. This callousness has created a one-way road to prison for massive numbers of impaired individuals and the inhumane warehousing of thousands of mentally ill people.We have created conditions that make criminal behavior all but inevitable for many of our brothers and sisters who are mentally ill. Instead of treating them, we are imprisoning them.

Psychology of Compulsory Detention

February 17, 2019August 7, 2017 by admin

The compulsory detention and treatment of patients against their will is unique to psychia try. It is arguably the most stressful event in psychiatric practice, both for the doctor and for the patient, and yet, although much has been written about the details of mental health legislation (Clare, 1980; Fennell, 1995), very little has been said about the psychological impact that this procedure has on either the doctor or the patient (exceptions are Mills, 1962; Rogers et al 1993). This paper will examine the emotional factors involved when a patient is deprived of his or her liberty, and will take as its point of reference the Scottish Mental Health Act. Among psychiatrists there is a spectrum of attitudes towards compulsory detention. At one end there is the position, exemplified by Thomas Szasz, which views psychiatric intervention as an infringement of personal liberty. If,for example, a person wishes to kill himself, that is his right and no one should interfere.

Introducing Investigative Psychology

February 14, 2019August 2, 2017 by admin

What is Investigative Psychology?

Investigative psychology (IP) is a framework for the integration of a diverse range of aspects of psychology into all areas of criminal and civil investigation. It is concerned with all the forms of criminality that may be examined by the police, from arson and burglary to murder, rape or even terrorism. The discipline also extends to cover those areas of activity that require investigation but may not always be conventionally within the domain of police services. These may include matters such as insurance fraud, corruption, malicious fire setting, tax evasion or smuggling. Increasingly, issues of crowd control and public order are also being studied by investigative psychologists. The main concern is the ways in which criminal activities may be examined and understood in order for the detection of crime to be effective and for legal proceedings to be appropriate. As such, investigative psychology is concerned with psychological input to the full range of issues that relate to the

A Rhetorical Journey into Darkness: Crime-Scene Profiling as Burkean Analysis

February 14, 2019August 10, 2017 by admin

Abstract:

This essay focuses upon dramatistic nature of crime scene profiling, the technique used to infer the motivations that underlie a baffling but increasingly familiar human act: the “stranger killing.” It argues that this technique of interpreting the symbolic “text” of the crime scene is essentially a rhetorical method that employs with different names the elements and ratios of Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad. My study, like other broad applications of Burkean principles, both validates Burke’s observation of the ubiquity of the two principal dramatistic ratios (act-scene and scene-agent) and affirms the symbolic infusion of all human action, including acts of identification through extreme mortification.

THE MAJOR FEATURE OF ANY STORY of unprovoked violent crime is the baffling question of why such acts occur. Because they are typically random, and because they appear to be without motive as it is commonly understood, these crimes compel our attention even as they terrify and confound us. “Who done...

Tell Me Who Your Friends Are And I Will Tell You, Who You Are

February 12, 2019July 29, 2017 by admin

Background and keywords:

In his book providing key strategies for teaching boys, Biddulph (2003) stated that girls in today’s Western world possess more self-confidence than boys. Self-confidence is frequently linked to the position a child occupies within the group, who supports him and his inner circle. Friends and groups/cliques are especially important to children during puberty years. It is common knowledge that at that age, children start gradually detaching themselves from their parents and home life, as they become more independent. Often parents dictate to their children, which friends are desirable and which are not. As Helga Gürtler so eloquently puts it, parents want their children to have friends that greet in a friendly manner, wipe their feet before coming inside and know how to speak “in a civilized manner”. Often parents are not very good judges of which children make good friends and which others are merely, only figuratively-speaking good at “buttering them up“. Children themselves have completely different criteria, when it comes to meeting...

Journal of Experimental Psychology Failure To Escape Traumatic Shock

February 12, 2019January 1, 2019 by admin

Dogs which had 1st learned to panel press in a harness in orderto escape shock subsequently showed normal acquisition of escape/avoidance behavior in a shuttle box. In contrast, yoked, inescapableshock in the harness produced profound interference with subsequentescape responding in the shuttle box. Initial experience with escapein the shuttle box led to enhanced panel pressing during inescapableshock in the harness and prevented interference with later respondingin the shuttle box. Inescapable shock in the harness and failure toescape in the shuttle box produced interference with escape respondingafter a 7-day rest. These results were interpreted as supporting alearned "helplessness" explanation of interference with escape re-sponding: Ss failed to escape shock in the shuttle box following in-escapable shock in the harness because they had learned that shock termination was independent of responding.

Overmier and Seligman (1967) haveshown that the prior exposure of dogsto inescapable shock in a Pavlovianharness reliably results in interfer-ence with subsequent escape/avoidancelearning in a shuttle box. Typically,these dogs do not even escape from

Offender Profiling and Investigative Psychology

February 9, 2019July 6, 2017 by admin

Abstract

The origins of ‘Offender Profiling’ in the advice given by police medical advisors and other experts to criminal investigations are briefly outlined. The spread of such advice to police inquiries across the United States in the early 1970s, culminating in its uptake by Special Agents of the FBI in the mid-1970s and the widespread promotion of their services through the fictional writings of Thomas Harris and others is noted. The development beyond the early application to serial killer investigations, and the focus on psychopathological explanations, to cover the full gamut of crime from, for instance, arson and burglary to terrorism, is briefly reviewed. The consideration of the social psychological processes inherent in criminality as well as the characteristics of individual offenders also broadens out the concerns of the field. The linking of crimes to a common offender as well as predicting their future actions further widens the range of issues to be dealt with. The many psychological and practical questions raised by these ‘profiling’activities are

Investigative Psychology

February 9, 2019July 6, 2017 by admin

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, structural properties of several naturally arising networks (the Internet, social networks, the web graph, etc.) have been studied intensively with a view to understanding their evolution. In recent empirical work, Leskovec, Kleinberg, and Faloutsos identify two new and surprising properties of the evolution of many real-world networks: densification (the ratio of edges to vertices grows over time), and shrinking diameter (the diameter reduces over time to a constant). These properties run counter to conventional wisdom, and are certainly inconsistent with graph models prior to their work. In this paper, we present the first model that provides a simple, realistic, and mathematically tractable generative model that intrinsically explains all the well-known properties of the social networks, as well as densification and shrinking diameter. Our model is based on ideas studied empirically in the social sciences, primarily on the groundbreaking work of Breiger (1973) on bipartite models of social networks that capture the affiliation of agents to societies....

Theories of Organized Criminal Behavior

January 26, 2019 by admin

In 1993, Medellin cartel founder Pablo Escobar was gunned down by police on the rooftop of his hideout in Medellin, Colombia. At the time of his death, Escobar was thought to be worth an estimated $2 billion, which he purportedly earned during more than a decade of illicit cocaine trafficking. His wealth afforded him a luxurious mansion, expensive cars, and worldwide recognition as a cunning, calculating, and ruthless criminal mastermind. The rise of Escobar to power is like that of many other violent criminals before him. Indeed, as history has shown, major organized crime figures such as Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, the El Rukinses, Jeff Fort, and Abimael Guzman, leader of Peru’s notorious Shining Path, were all aggressive criminals who built large criminal enterprises during their lives

The existence of these criminals and many others like them poses many unanswered questions about the cause and development of criminal behavior. Why are some criminals but not others involved with organized...

Psychology of Homicide Unit IV

December 29, 2018July 31, 2017 by admin

Computed across a lifespan of 75 years, there is a 1 in 200 chance that an individual in the United States will be murdered. The frequency of homicide and this startlingly high statistic warrant more concerted efforts to research the psychological underpinnings motivating homicide. The history of the study of the psychology of homicide is replete with theoretical shifts—some of which have led to empirical dead ends and others to tremendous advances. Explaining the motivations of a murderer historically has been a difficult task for psychologists because of the wide array of individual, situational, and cultural variables influencing the development of homicidal behavior. Recent psychological research includes both theoretical and methodological advances that have allowed for new, unprecedented insights into the psychology of homicide.

Theoretical Perspectives on Homicide

Several theories have been developed over the brief history of psychology seeking explanations of the patterns of homicide. These theories have followed larger movements within psychology. Movements have proceeded from individualistic explanations

Additional Resource: Homicide Psychology