Cohort bias in predictive risk assessments of future criminal justice system involvement.

Risk assessment instruments (RAIs) are widely used to aid high-stakes decision-making in criminal justice settings and other areas such as health care and child welfare. These tools, whether using machine learning or simpler algorithms, typically assume a time-invariant relationship between predictors and outcome. Because societies are themselves changing and not just individuals, this assumption may be violated in many behavioral settings, generating what we call cohort bias. Analyzing criminal histories in a cohort-sequential longitudinal study of children, we demonstrate that regardless of model type or predictor sets, a tool trained to predict the likelihood of arrest between the ages of 17 and 24 y on older birth cohorts systematically overpredicts the likelihood of arrest for younger birth cohorts over the period 1995 to 2020. Cohort bias is found for both relative and absolute risks, and it persists for all racial groups and within groups at highest risk for arrest. The results imply that cohort bias is an underappreciated mechanism generating inequality in contacts with the criminal legal system that is distinct from racial bias. Cohort bias is a challenge not only for predictive instruments with respect to crime and justice, but also for RAIs more broadly.

Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change.

SignificancePeople change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others' changes. These misperceptions may bedevil people's efforts to understand and change their social worlds, distort the democratic process, and turn imaginary trends into real ones. For example, participants believed that Americans increasingly want to limit immigration, which they said justifies tighter borders. However, participants also said that limiting immigration would not be right if attitudes had shifted against it--which is what actually occurred. Our findings suggest that the national discourse around contentious social issues, policies resulting from that discourse, and perhaps the opinions that drive discourse in the first place would be very different if people better understood how attitudes have and have not changed.

Pragmatic bias impedes women's access to political leadership.

Progress toward gender equality is thwarted by the underrepresentation of women in political leadership, even as most Americans report they would vote for women candidates. Here, we hypothesize that women candidates are often disadvantaged by pragmatic bias, a tendency to withhold support for members of groups for whom success is perceived to be difficult or impossible to achieve. Across six studies (N = 7,895), we test whether pragmatic bias impedes women's access to a highly significant political leadership position-the US presidency. In two surveys, 2020 Democratic primary voters perceived women candidates to be less electable, and these beliefs were correlated with lower intentions to vote for women candidates (Studies 1 and 2). Voters identified many reasons women would be less electable than men, including others' unwillingness to vote for women, biased media coverage, and higher requirements to prove themselves. We next tested interventions to reduce pragmatic bias. Merely correcting misperceptions of Americans' reported readiness for a woman president did not increase intentions to vote for a woman (Study 3). However, across three experiments (including one preregistered on a nationally representative sample), presenting evidence that women earn as much support as men in US general elections increased Democratic primary voters' intentions to vote for women presidential candidates, an effect driven by heightened perceptions of these candidates' electability (Studies 4 to 6). These findings highlight that social change efforts can be thwarted by people's sense of what is possible, but this may be overcome by credibly signaling others' willingness to act collectively.

Stimulating the capacity to govern the commons.

The ability to strengthen governance institutions and fisheries restrictions and laws is needed to improve conservation and management of common-pool resources. We evaluated the potential for stimulating change with modest interventions by studying fishing village households before and after a 27-month intervention period in a high-priority coral reef conservation area. Interventions included training in catch monitoring, stock assessment, mapping fishing grounds, microcredit, gender inclusion, theatrical skills, fuel efficient stoves, and participation in the planning of a conservation proposal. There was a background increase in reported formal education, household size, group membership, and household wealth but a decrease in fish consumption and public services. Of conservation importance, the perceived strength of 13 governance institutions and benefits of 6 fisheries restrictions increased over the intervention period. Finally, correspondence between knowledge of and agreement with recent national fisheries laws was moderate to high and positively correlated. The intervention period was stronger than demographic factors that often influence perceptions, such as village, government services, gender, household size, membership in community groups, and age responses. In general, perceptions of strengths of governance and benefits of restrictions increased more among women and youth than adult men respondents. The largest changes in perceptions of increased benefits were among strict restrictions initially ranked low, specifically fisheries closures, parks, and species restrictions. Consequently, capacity building overrode demographic factors common to poor people with limited employment capacity that can have negative perceptions of strict conservation.

Variabilidad demográfica y escalas de aceptación y rechazo sobre las restricciones en el manejo de recursos Resumen Se necesita de la capacidad para fortalecer a las instituciones de gobierno y las leyes y restricciones a la pesca para mejorar la conservación y manejo de los recursos comunes. Evaluamos el potencial para estimular el cambio con intervenciones modestas con un estudio en los hogares de una aldea pesquera antes y después de un periodo de intervención de 27 meses en un área de conservación de gran prioridad para un arrecife de coral. Las intervenciones incluyeron formación en el monitoreo de las capturas, análisis de stock, mapeo de las zonas de pesca, microcréditos, inclusión de género, habilidades teatrales, estufas ecológicas y participación en la planeación de una propuesta de conservación. Hubo un incremento en el trasfondo de la educación formal reportada, el tamaño del hogar, los miembros del grupo y la riqueza del hogar, pero una disminución en el consumo de pescado y en el servicio público. Fue de importancia para la conservación que la fuerza percibida de 13 de las instituciones de gobierno y los beneficios de seis restricciones a la pesquería incrementaron durante el periodo de intervención. Por último, la correspondencia entre el conocimiento sobre y la aceptación de las leyes recientes de pesca fue de moderada a alta y con una correlación positiva. El periodo de intervención fue más fuerte que los factores demográficos que con frecuencia influyen sobre las percepciones, como las respuestas de los servicios de gobierno, aldea, género, tamaño del hogar, membresía en un grupo comunitario y edad. En general, la percepción de la fuerza de la gobernanza y los beneficios de las restricciones incrementó más entre las mujeres y la juventud que entre los hombres respondientes. Los cambios más grandes en la percepción del aumento en beneficios fueron entre las restricciones estrictas marcadas como bajas al inicio, específicamente el cierre de pesquerías, parques y restricción de especies. Como consecuencia, la formación de capacidad sobrepasó los factores demográficos, que con frecuencia son personas con una capacidad limitada de empleo que pueden tener una percepción negativa de la conservación estricta.

Mobilizing or Sedative Effects? A Narrative Review of the Association Between Intergroup Contact and Collective Action Among Advantaged and Disadvantaged Groups.

ACADEMIC ABSTRACT: In this narrative review, we examined 134 studies of the relationship between intergroup contact and collective action benefiting disadvantaged groups. We aimed to identify whether, when, and why contact has mobilizing effects (promoting collective action) or sedative effects (inhibiting collective action). For both moderators and mediators, factors associated with the intergroup situation (compared with those associated with the out-group or the in-group) emerged as the most important. Group status had important effects. For members of socially advantaged groups (examined in 98 studies, 100 samples), contact had a general mobilizing effect, which was stronger when contact increased awareness of experiences of injustice among members of disadvantaged groups. For members of disadvantaged groups (examined in 49 studies, 58 samples), contact had mixed effects. Contact that increased awareness of injustice mobilized collection action; contact that made the legitimacy of group hierarchy or threat of retaliation more salient produced sedative effects. PUBLIC ABSTRACT: We present a review of existing studies that have investigated the relationship between intergroup contact and collective action aimed at promoting equity for disadvantaged groups. We further consider the influence of contact that is positive or negative and face-to-face or indirect (e.g., through mass or social media), and we distinguish between collective action that involves socially acceptable behaviors or is destructive and violent. We identified 134 studies, considering both advantaged (100 samples) and disadvantaged groups (58 samples). We found that intergroup contact impacts collective action differently depending on group status. Contact generally leads advantaged groups to mobilize in favor of disadvantaged groups. However, contact has variable effects on members of disadvantaged groups: It sometimes promotes their collective action in support of their own group; in other cases, it leads them to be less likely to engage in such action. We examine when and why contact can have these different effects.

Segregation and clustering of preferences erode socially beneficial coordination.

Polarization on various issues has increased in many Western democracies over the last decades, leading to divergent beliefs, preferences, and behaviors within societies. We develop a model to investigate the effects of polarization on the likelihood that a society will coordinate on a welfare-improving action in a context in which collective benefits are acquired only if enough individuals take that action. We examine the impacts of different manifestations of polarization: heterogeneity of preferences, segregation of the social network, and the interaction between the two. In this context, heterogeneity captures differential perceived benefits from coordinating, which can lead to different intentions and sensitivity regarding the intentions of others. Segregation of the social network can create a bottleneck in information flows about others' preferences, as individuals may base their decisions only on their close neighbors. Additionally, heterogeneous preferences can be evenly distributed in the population or clustered in the local network, respectively reflecting or systematically departing from the views of the broader society. The model predicts that heterogeneity of preferences alone is innocuous and it can even be beneficial, while segregation can hamper coordination, mainly when local networks distort the distribution of valuations. We base these results on a multimethod approach including an online group experiment with 750 individuals. We randomize the range of valuations associated with different choice options and the information respondents have about others. The experimental results reinforce the idea that, even in a situation in which all could stand to gain from coordination, polarization can impede social progress.

Social change and cohort differences in group-based arrest trajectories over the last quarter-century.

This article draws on official criminal histories for multiple birth cohorts spanning a 17-y difference in birth year to study how social change can alter our understanding of influential theories and policies about criminal offender groups. Arrest histories are linked to comprehensive longitudinal measurement on over 1,000 individuals originally from Chicago. Using group-based trajectory modeling, we investigated the magnitude and type of cohort differences in trajectories of arrest over the period 1995 to 2020. Our results show that trajectory group membership varies strongly by birth cohort. Membership in the nonoffender group is nearly 15 percentage points higher for cohorts born in the mid-1990s as compared to those born in the 1980s; conversely, older cohorts are more likely to be members of adolescent-limited and chronic-offender groups. Large cohort differences in trajectory group membership persist after controlling for a wide-ranging set of demographic characteristics and early-life risk factors that vary by cohort and that prior research has identified as important influences on crime. Not only does the effect of social change on cohort differentiation persist, but its magnitude is comparable to-indeed larger than-differences in trajectory group membership associated with varying levels of self-control or by whether individuals grew up in high-poverty households. These results suggest that changes in the broader social environment shared by members of the same birth cohort are as powerful in shaping their trajectory group membership as classic predictors identified in prior research, a finding that carries implications for crime-control policies that rely on prediction.

Public discourse narratives: from 'Secret Aid Worker' discontent to shifting power in humanitarian systems.

Public discourse is rich in meaning, reflecting consensus, dissent, and change. Yet, very little public discourse on the humanitarian sector has been authored by aid workers themselves. We conducted a thematic analysis of the 'Secret Aid Worker' (SAW) series, published in The Guardian newspaper between 2015 and 2018, the only corpus of data on humanitarian life experiences publicly accessible through mainstream media. Our research questions were twofold: how did authors frame their work and appraise humanitarian structures?; and how did they reflect and amplify humanitarian issues of the time? The main themes included: personal challenges of humanitarian life; characterisation of stakeholders; and systemic issues within the humanitarian sector. The SAW narratives reveal a powerful discourse of discontent. They planted seeds of change regarding shifting power, coloniality and racism, sexual abuse, and duty of care. We argue that such public discourse has symbolic power, calling for greater accountability, equity, and justice in remaking the future of the humanitarian sector.

Social Change and Race-Specific Homicide Trajectories: An Age-Period-Cohort Analysis.

Objectives: Social change and the aging process are racially bifurcated in the United States, where Black and White populations have long lived in divergent social worlds. This study examines the cohort patterns and life-course trajectories of Black and White homicide involvement over the past four decades. Data and Methods: The study uses data from the Supplemental Homicide Reports and Age-Period-Cohort-Interaction (APC-I) models to analyze race-specific trends of (alleged) homicide offending and victimization between 1976 and 2018 in the U.S. Results: Results reveal similar patterns in the age, period, and cohort effects on Black and White homicide involvement. However, while the shapes of these trajectories are comparable, the volatility in cohort effects on homicide is much more accentuated for Black cohorts than White cohorts. We also find racial differences for cohorts born after 1990, with a downward cohort pattern among the White group but a flat cohort trend among the Black group. Conclusions: Findings suggest that Black cohorts' homicide involvement is more susceptible than White cohorts' to the influence of external social changes (e.g., economic downturn, the crack epidemic). In addition, an increasing racial gap between Black and White populations is found among the recent birth cohorts. Possible mechanisms are discussed.

Materialism in Chinese college students during 2007-2020: The influence of social change on the inclining trend.

Materialism is fundamental to the human value or goal system; therefore, an understanding of its level among Chinese college students and its changes over time is of great value. In the present study, a cross-temporal meta-analysis was performed by reviewing studies that conducted Material Values Scale-based assessment of the materialism level among Chinese university students from 2007 to 2020. Moreover, a time lag analysis was performed to clarify whether variations in materialism level are interpretable with macro-social indicators. Finally, 82 articles on studies enrolling a total of 45,966 Chinese university students were reviewed. The materialism score significantly increased on a yearly basis. Furthermore, macro-social changes in diverse areas, including economic condition (gross domestic product per capita, consumption level of all residents and national disposable income per capita), social connectedness (urbanisation degree and divorce ratio) and overall threat (rate of university enrollment), were the major factors influencing the degree of materialism among the students. By identifying the inclining trend of materialism among these college students across time and using relevant macro-social indicators, a theoretical three-dimensional framework was established to elucidate the degree of materialism among Chinese college students as a group.

Feeling social change in the gut: gyastrik and the problematisation of domestic roles among Newar women in contemporary Nepal.

Drawing upon 15 months of research conducted in 2018-2019 in Bhaktapur, Nepal, this paper examines how middle-class women experience and make sense of gyastrik (an umbrella term for multiple gut disorders) as an embodiment of social change. Enumerating dietary injustices and distress following unmet middle-class expectations of well-being and domestic intimacy as a primary cause of the condition, these women narratively problematised social norms and found ways out through the concomitant vocalisation of physical pain and social discontent. While illness epistemologies differ (with the persistence of mind-body dichotomies on the one hand and the centrality of notions of well-being and ideals of self-care on the other), these accounts demonstrate both a passive and active role of the gut in the social change experience, inviting to take the gut as the site where somatic modes of 'attention' and 'action' enable the navigation of personal life trajectories and the negotiation of social change itself.

Women Who Perform Social Egg Freezing as Moral Pioneers: The Case of Ultra-Orthodox Communities in Israel.

Social egg freezing (SEF) is a new reproductive technology that is increasingly used within ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, stirring tensions between tradition and modernity. Based on in-depth semi-structured interviews, this study examined how ultra-Orthodox singles who employ SEF engage in social negotiations over gender- and body-related norms. Findings show that participants successfully assimilated SEF by establishing facts on the ground and discreetly spreading information while actively avoiding tensions that may threaten religious tradition. SEF did not push participants into modern individualism or dissolve their strong connection to the community. However they did modify social boundaries and articulated social criticism.

Did Gender Egalitarianism Weaken Religiosity in Baby Boom Women? A Developmental-Historical Approach.

This investigation used long-term longitudinal survey data from baby boomer women to identify whether strengthening gender role egalitarianism in early adulthood predicted declines in religious service attendance and religious intensity in later life. The aging of this cohort coincided with dramatic societal shifts in gender values and religiosity. The data were derived from 350 women participating in the Longitudinal Study of Generations, a study originally fielded in 1971 of families living in Southern California. Respondents were initially assessed in their late teens and early 20s and followed up to their early-to-mid 60s. Using growth curve modeling, we linked the change in egalitarian gender attitudes from 1971 to 1988 to a change in religiosity from 1994 to 2016. Women who became more egalitarian in their gender attitudes experienced sharper declines in religious intensity, but not in religious attendance in the period studied. Controlling for life-course transitions did not alter these results. The findings are discussed in terms of the connection between two asynchronous social changes occurring over the lives of women in a uniquely positioned birth cohort.

The Ecological Resilience Framework: The Justice Ambassadors Youth Council as a model for community-based resilience.

We present an 'Ecological Resilience Framework' (ERF) to demonstrate how resilience is created through the Justice Ambassadors Youth Council (JAYC) program. JAYC is a platform in which New York government representatives collaboratively learn and develop policy solutions alongside emerging adults who are criminal legal system impacted and reside in predominantly Black and Hispanic communities characterized by chronically high levels of poverty, violence, and incarceration. We focus our work on the process of developing resilience in the context of structural social inequity and injustice. We argue that resilience can best be understood in the context of the adversity to which it is a response, not as an isolated individual quality. Therefore, resilience science is at its best when it incorporates a multi-disciplinary scientific perspective, one that addresses a continuum from individual- to community- to society-level physical, cognitive, relationship, and mental health variables. To demonstrate how our ERF incorporates this approach, we outline how JAYC not only supports young adult participants in understanding their individual life trajectories and narrative identity, but also actively connects them within a diverse social network of mentors and to various opportunities that support a healthy transition to adult resilience.

Social change at the local level: A psychobiography of Khali Sweeney from Detroit's downtown boxing gym.

OBJECTIVE: This psychobiography analyzes the life of Khali Sweeney from Detroit's Downtown Boxing Gym to understand his motivation for and methods as a social change agent. In doing so, the project also considers how to prepare the next generation of youth development leaders as social change agents. METHOD: We conducted a nine-step psychobiography based on recommendations from established psychobiographical methods. Using a team-based, thematic analysis approach we analyzed contextual, first-, second-, and third- person data from the perspective of Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST). RESULTS: Results suggest Khali is an effective social change agent due to five interrelated factors. Analyzing Khali's life through the lens of PVEST also revealed his experiences resulted in two realizations central to him becoming a social change agent: the people and services that are supposed to serve youth at times do not, and; individuals like him can step up to meet youth needs. CONCLUSIONS: Results point to several important lessons related to transformational leadership theory that can enable YDP leaders to serve as social change agents.

Psychobiographies of social change agents: Introduction to the Special Issue.

This Special Issue of Journal of Personality, focused on psychobiographies of social change agents, aims to make contributions to the field in terms of content, method, and process. The content of the issue is focused on understanding people who powerfully impact their world, from eminent global leaders to everyday change agents. The contributions to the Special Issue are unified by their adoption of psychobiographical methods, though as a set they offer both excellent representations of common psychobiographical approaches as well as vital innovations in this tradition. The process of curating this Special Issue sought to make several interventions in typical practices, including the cultivation of an intentional community of scholars representing both experienced and fledgling psychobiographers, the pursuit of a relational approach to publishing, and the adoption of open science practices. Psychobiography has an important role to play in contemporary personality psychology and we hope this Special Issue will itself serve as a foundation for continued innovation in the field.

"It's something to own": A psychobiographical exploration of the life story of Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama.

OBJECTIVE: On January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama placed his hand on the Bible and completed his oath of office as the 44th President of the United States, Michelle Obama instantly was First Lady. The purpose of this psychobiography was to interpret the meaning of Michelle Obama's life during a significant life transition. METHOD: The research design included a social constructivist epistemological stance, a case study design, and an iterative process of narrative interpretation of Michelle Obama's Becoming memoir and documentary. My narrative inquiry led me to crystalize the research question, How does Michelle Obama narratively process her lived experiences and draw upon a pattern of autobiographical reasoning to curate her life story? RESULTS: My interpretive analysis illuminated how she curated her life story with autobiographical reasoning that employs a "phenomenal woman" script and narrative metaphors based in the sound of striving and the concept of location. CONCLUSION: This psychobiography supports the life story theory of identity and self-defining memory research about enduring goals of the self. It also elevates the role of positionality as a form of sociocultural methodological integrity within psychobiography. Autobiographical authenticity of her agentic self is a profound force in Michelle Obama becoming a person who can garner worldwide status as a social change agent.

"You gotta give them hope": A structural psychobiography of Harvey Milk (1930-1978).

OBJECTIVE: In this psychobiographical study, we examined the life and times of social change agent Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay public officials in the United States. Milk is remembered as a gay hero who fought for the rights of marginalized people, often by invoking the importance of hope. Milk was assassinated less than 1 year after his election. METHOD: We adopt a structural psychobiographical approach, foregrounding social, cultural, political, and historical forces that intersect with personal factors to explain Milk's ascension to the status of social change agent. RESULTS: This psychobiography tells the story of a man not destined to become a social change agent but who became one anyway because of shifting tides in the political climate of San Francisco in the 1970s, because of a series of catalytic events that started him down this path, because of a history of persecution as a gay Jew, and because of his enduring need for a stage upon which he could express his generative concern. CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis raises questions about the story that "belongs" to the agent of social change, and the story that "belongs" to the rest of us, as we remember him.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on enrollment in undergraduate health-related studies in Spain.

The aim of this study was to determine whether the pandemic has reinforced the choice of pursuing health-related bachelor's degrees, and to identify underlying factors that could contribute to that impact. This is a cross-sectional study using an online survey of 2,344 students of nursing, physiotherapy, medicine, psychology and podiatry who started health-related bachelor's degrees after the COVID-19 outbreak in Spanish higher education institutions. The pandemic influenced the choice of these studies by increasing the desire to help others (33.2%), by increasing citizenship values (28.4%), and by increasing the desire to contribute to improving the situation of the country (27.5%). Women had a significantly greater influence on the increase in social values related to the practice of the profession produced by the pandemic, whereas men and the bachelor's degree in podiatry were more influenced by salary prospects. An increased desire to help others was significantly higher among women and nursing and medical students. Podiatry and psychology were the degrees were most influenced by the pandemic, as more students decided to pursue them, something they had previously doubted, while in nursing, psychology, and medicine the pandemic reinforced their interest in pursuing the degree the most. Students personally affected by COVID-19 reported being more influenced in reconsidering their professional path and in reinforcing their desire to pursue the health-related studies.

Braiding the Healing Gifts of Photovoice for Social Change: The Means Are Ends in the Making.

Photovoice is an important participatory action method for motivating social change. The potential for this change within the processes of the method remains under-explored. We present the voice and perspectives of three health promotion practitioners who have important connections to photovoice: a grandmother and co-founder of the method, a nurse from Wales, and an early adopter seeking change. Through braided storytelling, the voices describe their history with photovoice and how their relationship to the method has changed over time, arguing ultimately that in photovoice the means are as important as the ends for advancing relations with others, understanding and working with power, and realizing the gifts the processes bring.