Introspective Projection: Prototypical Representations of Policing in the Service of Rule of Law.

Mass protests that have taken place over the past decade in various Western democracies have called into question the role of police in society, as officers have employed measures to contain rallies protesting for or against various issues. A number of these protests have resorted to violent means, resisting the police or protesting directly against their role and methods. The present study sought to investigate the prototypical representations of the police that lay citizens use to forge or desist identification with police officers. Social identification enables citizens to consider the police as ingroup members, facilitating respect for their authority. Conversely, identifying the police as outgroup precipitates resistance. The study involved 41 in-depth interviews carried out with citizens of Malta between May and June 2020. Thematic Networks Analysis revealed various points of consensus as well as a number of controversial themes. In particular, respondents demonstrated sceptical attitudes regarding policing on the beat for fear of overfamiliarity, rooted in introspective attributions projected at the police as merely human. Moreover, respondents expressed support for technological innovations that overcome natural psychological tendencies. The findings of this study suggest that seeking increasing trust in the police may be a red herring for policymakers. Rather, efforts should be directed at developing inter-objective systems, (e.g. body-cams), that overcome individual psychological propensities.

The Role of Worldviews in Predicting Support for Recreational Cannabis.

We studied the role of worldviews in the endorsement of proposals for the legalisation of recreational cannabis. Drawing on literature on generalised belief structures, we developed categorical measures for five worldviews drawing on commonalities in the typologies reviewed (Orthodox, Localised, Reward, Pragmatist, and Survivor). We proceeded to study the relative influence of worldviews in support of a range of items concerned with the legalisation of recreational cannabis amongst a randomly generated sample (N = 1000) in Malta. Our findings demonstrate that the Orthodox worldview stands in contrast to all others in opposing the proposals and constitutes the resistance group to legalisation. On the other hand, no other worldview unilaterally supports the proposals albeit these are, on an individual basis, favourably perceived. Our study further demonstrates that proportions of variance accounted for by the worldview measures we adopted are comparable to those exercised by demographic variables demonstrating significance. We propose that the study of worldviews is critical in understanding social and political alliances that come together to support or oppose particular politicised projects or collective courses of action.

Disaster preparedness and cultural factors: a comparative study in Romania and Malta.

This exploratory study investigates the relationships between the disaster preparedness of citizens and cultural factors in Romania and Malta. With regard to methodology, quantitative and qualitative data were collected during two Citizen Summits, which consisted of a real-time survey and focus group discussions. The results point to two specific cultural factors that may bridge this 'gap' and be operationalised to enhance people's readiness for a disaster event. In Malta, the findings reveal how community cohesion is altered from a personal to a cultural value, which has the potential to encourage the transformation of preparedness intentions into actual preparedness behaviour. In Romania, meanwhile, the findings highlight the ambivalent aspects of trusting behaviour as a cultural norm on the one hand, and distrust in authorities based on experience and unmet expectations on the other hand. Social media use may reduce this tension between trust and distrust, and thus foster successful disaster risk-related communication.

Developing a model of perceptions of security and insecurity in the context of crime.

The current study was carried out as part of the CITYCOP project exploring fear of crime, risk perception and feelings of security and insecurity. Participants (n = 272) from 11 European countries answered a questionnaire exploring measures of risk perception, fear of crime, anxiety, trust in police and related behaviours. A seven-factor structure is proposed incorporating 'Signs of Social and Physical Disorder', 'Trust in Police', 'Trait Anxiety', 'Collective Efficacy', 'Perceived Risk of Victimisation', 'Fear of Personal Harm' and 'Fear of Property Theft'. Overall findings suggest that the measures associated with feelings of insecurity are negatively related to the measures associated with feelings of security. Efforts should be made to reduce feelings of insecurity through encouraging trust in law enforcement and community interaction and reducing signs of social and physical disorder.

Perceptual similarity in autism.

People with autism have consistently been found to outperform controls on visuo-spatial tasks such as block design, embedded figures, and visual search tasks. Plaisted, O'Riordan, and others (Bonnel et al., 2003; O'Riordan & Plaisted, 2001; O'Riordan, Plaisted, Driver, & Baron-Cohen, 2001; Plaisted, O'Riordan, & Baron-Cohen, 1998a, 1998b) have suggested that these findings might be explained in terms of reduced perceptual similarity in autism, and that reduced perceptual similarity could also account for the difficulties that people with autism have in making generalizations to novel situations. In this study, high-functioning adults with autism and ability-matched controls performed a low-level categorization task designed to examine perceptual similarity. Results were analysed using standard statistical techniques and modelled using a quantitative model of categorization. This analysis revealed that participants with autism required reliably longer to learn the category structure than did the control group but, contrary to the predictions of the reduced perceptual similarity hypothesis, no evidence was found of more accurate performance by the participants with autism during the generalization stage. Our results suggest that when all participants are attending to the same attributes of an object in the visual domain, people with autism will not display signs of enhanced perceptual similarity.

Strategic processes in false recognition memory.

In two experiments, the response signal technique (Reed, 1973) was combined with the DRM paradigm (e.g., McDermott & Roediger, 1998) to investigate the time course of false recognition memory--in particular, how this effect varies along the time course of generating a recognition judgment. Across the experiments, in addition to standard instructions, there were forewarning instructions encouraging the participants to avoid this effect, as well as inclusion instructions intended to enhance this tendency. It was found that the false memory effect was at its strongest at earlier response signals, diminishing when more time was given to make a recognition judgment. The forewarning instructions led to a more conservative overall response bias, rather than to a reduction of the effect. However, the participants were able to exaggerate this effect in the inclusion condition. The results are discussed in terms of the role of strategic processing in recognition memory.

Adaptive changes of response criterion in recognition memory.

An experiment was conducted to investigate people's ability to vary a response criterion strategically, in a recognition memory task, as a function of the length of time given to process the test stimuli (from 100 to 1,500 msec). The experiment used the response signal procedure, in which the participants responded after a signal that came at a variable time delay from stimulus onset. The proportion of new versus old test items was varied systematically with the time of the response signal, with the proportion of new test items rising, falling, or staying constant at later signals. It was found that the participants' response biases changed adaptively, becoming more conservative at later signals in the rising condition, becoming less conservative in the falling condition, and not changing significantly in the constant condition. Theoretical and methodological implications for recognition memory research are discussed.

Feature-sampling and random-walk models of individual-stimulus recognition.

Traditional process models of old-new recognition have not addressed differences in accuracy and response time between individual stimuli. Two new process models of recognition are presented and applied to response time and accuracy data from 3 old-new recognition experiments. The 1st model is derived from a feature-sampling account of the time course of categorization, whereas the 2nd model is a generalization of a random-walk model of categorization. In the experiments, a new technique was used, which yielded reliable individual-stimulus data through repeated presentation of structurally equivalent items. The results from the experiments showed reliable differences in accuracy and response times between stimuli. The random-walk model provided the better account of the results from the 3 experiments. The implications of the results for process models of recognition are discussed.

Perceptual processes in matching and recognition of complex pictures.

The role of perceptual feature sampling in speeded matching and recognition was explored in 4 experiments. Experiments 1-3 involved a perceptual matching task with pictures of various objects and scenes. In Experiments 2 and 3, same-different judgments were given under time pressure. The main objective of the matching task was to obtain measures of the perceptual processing rates of different object features. Experiment 4 was an old-new recognition experiment, in which the same stimuli as those in the matching task were used. Response signals were used to limit processing time in the recognition task. The results demonstrated that it is possible to predict speeded recognition performance from performance in perceptual matching. A simple stochastic feature-sampling model provides a unified account of the data from the 4 experiments.