Public opinion polls suggest that American's trust in the police and courts is declining. The same polls also reveal a disturbing racial divide, with minorities expressing greater levels of distrust than whites. Practices such as racial profiling, zero-tolerance and three-strikes laws, the use of excessive force, and harsh punishments for minor drug crimes all contribute to perceptions of injustice. In Trust in the Law, psychologists Tom R. Tyler and Yuen J. Huo present a compelling argument that effective law enforcement requires the active engagement and participation of the communities it serves, and argue for a cooperative approach to law enforcement that appeals to people's sense of fair play, even if the outcomes are not always those with which they agree.

Based on a wide-ranging survey of citizens who had recent contact with the police or courts in Oakland and Los Angeles, Trust in the Law examines the sources of people's favorable and unfavorable reactions to their encounters with legal authorities. Tyler and Huo address the issue from a variety of angles: the psychology of decision acceptance, the importance of individual personal experiences, and the role of ethnic group identification. They find that people react primarily to whether or not they are treated with dignity and respect, and the degree to which they feel they have been treated fairly helps to shape their acceptance of the legal process. Their findings show significantly less willingness on the part of minority group members who feel they have been treated unfairly to trust the motives to subsequent legal decisions of law enforcement authorities.

Since most people in the study generalize from their personal experiences with individual police officers and judges, Tyler and Huo suggest that gaining maximum cooperation and consent of the public depends upon fair and transparent decision-making and treatment on the part of law enforcement officers. Tyler and Huo conclude that the best way to encourage compliance with the law is for legal authorities to implement programs that foster a sense of personal involvement and responsibility. For example, community policing programs, in which the local population is actively engaged in monitoring its own neighborhood, have been shown to be an effective tool in improving police-community relationships.

Cooperation between legal authorities and community members is a much discussed but often elusive goal. Trust in the Law shows that legal authorities can behave in ways that encourage the voluntary acceptance of their directives, while also building trust and confidence in the overall legitimacy of the police and courts.

TOM R. TYLER is professor of psychology at New York University.

YUEN J. HUO is professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles

A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

In January 1980 a panel of distinguished social scientists and statisticians assembled at the National Academy of Sciences to begin a thorough review of the uses, reliability, and validity of surveys purporting to measure such subjective phenomena as attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and preferences. This review was prompted not only by the widespread use of survey results in both academic and non-academic settings, but also by a proliferation of apparent discrepancies in allegedly equivalent measurements and by growing public concern over the value of such measurements.

This two-volume report of the panel’s findings is certain to become one of the standard works in the field of survey measurement. Volume I summarizes the state of the art of surveying subjective phenomena, evaluates contemporary measurement programs, examines the uses and abuses of such surveys, and candidly assesses the problems affecting them. The panel also offers strategies for improving the quality and usefulness of subjective survey data. In volume II, individual panel members and other experts explore in greater depth particular theoretical and empirical topics relevant to the panel’s conclusions.

For social scientists and policymakers who conduct, analyze, and rely on surveys of the national state of mind, this comprehensive and current review will be an invaluable resource.

CHARLES F. TURNER is professor of Applied Social Research at the City University of New York.

ELIZABETH MARTIN is research associate at the National Research Council.

CONTRIBUTORS: Robert P. Abelson, Barbara A. Bailar, Marian Ballard, Theresa J. Demaio, Otis Dudley Duncan, Baruch Fischhoff, Lester R. Frankel, William H. Kruskal, Michael B. Mackuen, Catherine Marsch, Elizabeth Martin, Sara B. Nerlove, Howard Schuman, Tom W. Smith, Charles F. Turner

In a time when the American family has undergone dramatic evolution, change among African Americans has been particularly rapid and acute. African Americans now marry later than any other major ethnic group, and while in earlier decades nearly 95 percent of black women eventually married, today 30 percent are expected to remain single. The black divorcee rate has increased nearly five-fold over the last thirty years, and is double the rate of the general population. The result, according to The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans, is a greater share of family responsibilities being borne by women, an increased vulnerability to poverty and violence, and an erosion of community ties.

The original, often controversial, research presented in this book links marital decline to a pivotal drop in the pool of marriageable black males. Increased joblessness has robbed many black men of their economic viability, rendering them not only less desirable as mates, but also less inclined to take on the responsibility of marriage. Higher death rates resulting from disease, poor health care, and violent crime, as well as evergrowing incarceration rates, have further depleted the male population. Editors M. Belinda Tucker and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and the contributors take a hard look at the effects of chronic economic instability and cultural attitudes toward the male role as family provider. Their cogent historical analyses suggest that the influence of external circumstances over marriage preferences stems in large part from the profoundly damaging experience of slavery.

This book firmly positions declining marriage within an ominous cycle of economic and social erosion. The authors propose policies for relieving the problems associated the changing marital behavior, focusing on support for single parent families, public education, and increased employment for African American men.

M. BELINDA TUCKER is associate professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles and faculty associate of the Center for Afro-American Studies.

CLAUDIA MITCHELL-KERNAN is vice chancellor for academic affairs, dean of the graduate division, and professor of anthropology and of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.

CONTRIBUTORS: Phillip J. Bowman, Lynn C. Burbridge, Sheldon Danziger, William A. Darity Jr., Elizabeth Douvan, Mark A. Fossett, Shirley J. Hatchett, David M. Heer, James S. Jackson, K. Jill Kiecolt, Marilyn Krogh, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Hector F. Myers, Samuel L. Myers Jr., Melvin L. Oliver, Robert J. Sampson, Robert Schoen, A. Wade Smith, Brenda Stevenson, Mark Testa, M. Belinda Tucker, and Joseph Veroff

Women, Politics, and Change, a compendium of twenty-three original essays by social historians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, examines the political history of American women over the past one hundred years. Taking a broad view of politics, the contributors address voluntarism and collective action, women's entry into party politics through suffrage and temperance groups, the role of nonpartisan organizations and pressure politics, and the politicization of gender. Each chapter provides a telling example of how American women have behaved politically throughout the twentieth century, both in the two great waves of feminist activism and in less highly mobilized periods.

"The essays are unusually well integrated, not only through the introductory material but through a similarity of form and extensive cross-references among them....in raising central questions about the forms, bases, and issues of women's politics, as well as change and continuity over time, Tilly, Gurin, and the individual scholars included in this collection have provided us with a survey of the latest research and an agenda for the future." —Contemporary Sociology

"This book is a necessary addition to the scholar's bookshelf, and the student's curriculum." —Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, professor of sociology, City University of New York Graduate Center

LOUISE A. TILLY is professor of history and sociology at the New School for Social Research and chair of its Committee on Historical Studies. She is president of the American Historical Association.

PATRICIA GURIN is professor of psychology and women's studies and a faculty associate of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

CONTRIBUTORS:  Kristi Anderson, Alida Brill,  Nancy F. Cott,  Elizabeth Faue,  M. Patricia Fernandez-Kelly,  Jo Freeman, Anna M. Garcia, Patricia Gurin, Nancy A. Hewitt, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Leonie Huddy, Herbert Jacob,  Jacqueline Jones,  M. Kent Jennings, Rebecca Klatch,  David Knoke,  Suzanne Lebsock, William Lehrman,  Jane Mansbridge, Ruth Milkman,  Barbara J. Nelson,  David O. Sears,  Kay Lehman Schlozmon,  Louise A. Tilly,  Sidney Verba, Susan Ware, Robert Wuthnow.

Standard economic theory is built on the assumption that human beings act rationally in their own self interest. But if rationality is such a reliable factor, why do economic models so often fail to predict market behavior accurately? According to Richard Thaler, the shortcomings of the standard approach arise from its failure to take into account systematic mental biases that color all human judgements and decisions. Economics assumes behavior is consistently rational, when it is, in fact, only partially, or quasi-rational.

The papers collected in Quasi-Rational Economics represent a significant sampling of this innovative approach, written by a leader in the field along with co-authors Thomas Russell, H. M. Shefrin, Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, Werner De Bondt, Eric Johnson, Charles Lee, and Andrei Shleifer. Thaler and his colleagues challenge established economic theories in such areas as consumer choice and financial markets, offering empirical evidence and alternate models based on behavioral research about how economic decisions are actually made.

Quasi-Rational Economics deals with a number of intriguing questions. Why do people have trouble ignoring sunk costs and recognizing opportunity costs? How do people’s preferences for already endowed possessions suppress trading volume and keep markets from clearing? What are the effects on market behavior of consumer attitudes about fairness? How do people’s mental accounting procedures lead them to behave in economically inconsistent ways? Why do investors’ tendencies to overreact to past trends cause losing firms to outperform winners in the stock market?

In offering answers to these questions, Quasi-Rational Economics provides an essential introduction to a new field. It mounts a trenchant critique of current practice in economics and calls for richer, more realistic approaches to formulating and testing economic theory. More than just a call for reform, this book provides numerous illustrations of how the call can be answered.

"Richard Thaler's book offers great evidence for the importance of quasi rational behavior in economic settings, thus stimulating the reader. Its broad coverage makes an interesting introduction to a new field, as well as informing about further applications and methods." —Kyklos

RICHARD H. THALER is Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Economics and director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University. He is research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Modern financial markets offer the real world's best approximation to the idealized price auction market envisioned in economic theory. Nevertheless, as the increasingly exquisite and detailed financial data demonstrate, financial markets often fail to behave as they should if trading were truly dominated by the fully rational investors that populate financial theories.

These markets anomalies have spawned a new approach to finance, one which as editor Richard Thaler puts it, "entertains the possibility that some agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time." Advances in Behavioral Finance collects together twenty-one recent articles that illustrate the power of this approach. These papers demonstrate how specific departures from fully rational decision making by individual market agents can provide explanations of otherwise puzzling market phenomena.

To take several examples, Werner De Bondt and Thaler find an explanation for superior price performance of firms with poor recent earnings histories in the tendencies of investors to overreact to recent information. Richard Roll traces the negative effects of corporate takeovers on the stock prices of the acquiring firms to the overconfidence of managers, who fail to recognize the contributions of chance to their past successes. Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny show how the difficulty of establishing a reliable reputation for correctly assessing the value of long term capital projects can lead investment analysis, and hence corporate managers, to focus myopically on short term returns.

As a testing ground for assessing the empirical accuracy of behavioral theories, the successful studies in this landmark collection reach beyond the world of finance to suggest, very powerfully, the importance of pursuing behavioral approaches to other areas of economic life. Advances in Behavioral Finance is a solid beachhead for behavioral work in the financial arena and a clear promise of wider application for behavioral economics in the future.

RICHARD H. THALER is Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Economics, and director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Lawrence M. Ausubel, Victor L. Bernard, Fischer Black, Navin Chopra, David M. Cutler, Werner F. M. De Bondt, J. Bradford De Long, Jeffrey A. Frankel, Kenneth R. French, Kenneth A. Froot, Josef Lakonishok, Charles M. C. Lee, James M. Poterba, Jay R. Ritter, Richard Roll, Hersh M. Shefrin, Robert J. Shiller, Andrei Shleifer, Meir Statman, Jeremy Stein, Lawrence H. Summers, Richard H. Thaler, Robert W. Vishny, and Robert J. Waldmann

The social survey has become an essential tool in modern society, providing crucial measurements of social change, describing social life, and guiding government policy. But the validity of surveys is fragile and depends ultimately upon the accuracy of answers to survey questions. As our dependence on surveys grows, so too have questions about the accuracy of survey responses.

Authored by a group of experts in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and survey research, Questions About Questions provides a broad review of the survey response problem. Examining the cognitive and social processes that influence the answers to questions, the book first takes up the problem of meaning and demonstrates that a respondent must share the survey researcher’s intended meaning of a question if the response is to be revealing and informative. The book then turns to an examination of memory. It provides a framework for understanding the processes that can introduce errors into retrospective reports, useful guidance on when those reports are more or less trustworthy, and investigates techniques for the improvement of such reports. Questions about the rigid standardization imposed on the survey interview receive a thorough airing as the authors show how traditional survey formats violate the usual norms of conversational behavior and potentially endanger the validity of the data collected.

Synthesizing the work of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Cognition and Survey Research, Questions About Questions emphasizes the reciprocal gains to be achieved when insights and techniques from the cognitive sciences and survey research are exchanged.

"these chapters provide a good sense of the range of survey problems investigated by the cognitive movement, the methods and ideas it draws upon, and the results it has yielded." —American Journal of Sociology

JUDITH M. TANUR is professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is co-chairperson of the Social Science Research Council Committee on Cognition and Survey Research.

CONTRIBUTORS: Robert P. Abelson,  Herbert H. Clark,  Robert T. Croyle, Robyn M. Dawes,  Cathryn S. Dippo, Jack F. Dovidio,  Russell H. Fazio,  Judith Fiedler,  Ronald P. Fisher,  Nancy H. Fultz,  Anthony G. Greenwald,  Robert Groves,  Brigitte Jordan,  Mark Klinger,  Jon A. Krosnik,  Elizabeth F. Loftus,  Elizabeth Martin,  Janet L. Norwood,  Robert W. Pearson,  Kathryn L. Quigley,  Michael Ross,  Michael F. Schober,  Kyle D. Smith,  Lucy Suchman, Judith M. Tanur.  

Two sociologists and a lawyer examine here the attitudes of both survivors and attorney on various problems surrounding inheritance—from will-making through estate settlement. Within a legal frame of reference, this book is a study of what happens within a family at death—and why. The authors use the "inheritance unit" as the basis for looking at the functions of inheritance in intergenerational family continuity and the general patterns of family relationship.

MARVIN B. SUSSMAN is professor and chairman of the Department of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University.

JUDITH N. CATES is research associate of the American Psychological Association.

DAVID T. SMITH is professor of law at the University of Florida.

One of the most detailed reports ever made on an effort to establish a therapeutic community within a California prison. This work describes how the program was launched, gives a number of examples of its operation, and outlines the new problems and prospects created for inmates, staff, and the broader prison administration by this attempt to redefine the roles within the prison.

ELLIOT STUDT, a social worker, is a member of the senior research staff of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

SHELDON L. MESSINGER is Vice Chairman of the Center and is a sociologist.

THOMAS P. WILSON is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Examines the conditions under which motives to achieve are fostered in children. The papers included in this volume reflect the major traditions of research in the field and bring together a set of studies for achieving a better understanding of the ways in which achievement-related personality characteristics develop and function in evaluative or competitive situations.

CHARLES P. SMITH is associate professor of psychology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

CONTRIBUTORS: John W. Atkinson, Virginia C. Crandall, Sheila C. Feld, Judith Lewis, Howard A. Moss, Seymour B. Sarason, Charles P. Smith, and Joseph Veroff