Policy and paradox: grounded theory at the moment of DADT repeal.

Through a mixed-methods approach of oral history and grounded theory, we report on a study investigating the effects of the U.S. military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy on active-duty service members at the moment of transition to open service. A stratified, snowball sample of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) service members (n = 17) from across all branches of the armed services were interviewed within two weeks of repeal (September 20, 2011). We find evidence that DADT was implicated in the structuring of military culture in terms of five irreconcilable contradictions: values, heroism, wartime, control, and silence. Military culture had moved in the direction of acceptance of LGBQ service members long before repeal, without the recognition of many leaders who had entered military service decades earlier.

Effects of financial incentives on the breakdown of mutual trust.

Disagreements between psychologists and economists about the need for and size of financial incentives continue to be hotly discussed. We examine the effects of financial incentives in a class of interactive decision-making situations, called centipede games, in which mutual trust is essential for cooperation. Invoking backward induction, the Nash equilibrium solution for these games is counterintuitive. Our previous research showed that when the number of players in the centipede game is increased from two to three, the game is iterated in time, the players are rematched, and the stakes are unusually high, behavior approaches equilibrium play. Results from the present study show that reducing the size of the stakes elicits dramatically different patterns of behavior. We argue that when mutual trust is involved, the magnitude of financial incentives can induce a considerable difference.