HOME / SEARCH /

Search

Search results

    Maplight.Org

    Elected officials collect large sums of money to run their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws. Fellow Daniel Newman is co-founder and executive director of MapLight, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization revealing money's influence on politics. MapLight serves journalists, issue-oriented nonprofit groups, and interested citizens, providing in-depth information about lawmakers, votes, and special-interest influence.... Read more about Maplight.Org

    Creative or Corrupt? How Wikipedians Decide If a New Contribution Is "good" or "bad"

    Creativity is the introduction of a novel and appropriate idea or product into a community that transforms the community in some way. Corruption is the decay or redirection of community resources away from a community's purpose toward a self-interested end. Both creativity and corruption alter the possibilities available to later community contributors. In an empirical study of seven contentious Wikipedia pages, Fellow Seana Moran explores: How does the editing community decide, at the time a novel contribution is made, whether it is creative and should be kept, or corrupt and should be removed or blocked? How long does this evaluation take? What evaluative criteria are used?... Read more about Creative or Corrupt? How Wikipedians Decide If a New Contribution Is "good" or "bad"

    Varieties of Corruption and the Architecture of Public Trust

    Corruption poses two distinct dangers. First, it may prevent institutions from serving their proper ends, as happens when a bribe leads an inspector to overlook a dangerous violation. Second, perceptions of corruption can lead to a lack of trust in institutions themselves, further undermining their public value. Combating corruption, however, is easier said than done. Corruption can take many different forms, depending on the industry or context, and strategies of oversight can sometime be more costly than corruption itself.... Read more about Varieties of Corruption and the Architecture of Public Trust

    The Economy of Influence Shaping American Public Health and the Environment

    The principal investigator of this project is Sheila Kaplan. The EPA has a vast mandate - protecting air, water, land and people from pollutants. But year after year, through both Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses, strong economies and weak ones, the institution fails the American public in many ways. The evidence abounds. Reports by the Government Accountability Office (formerly the General Accounting Office), EPA's own Inspectors General and the media have long documented EPA's inability to guard Americans from toxic chemicals, mining waste, leaking Superfund sites, greenhouse gas emissions, contaminated water, air pollution and other hazards.... Read more about The Economy of Influence Shaping American Public Health and the Environment

    The Perils of Imagining the Unethical Road Not Taken

    In this project, Daniel Effron and his colleagues examine a psychological process that allows people to act unethically without feeling unethical. When people reflect on the unethical road not taken - that is, the misdeeds that they refrained from committing in the past - they feel more justified in acting unethically in the future. Thus, situations that draw people's attention to these unethical roads not taken can inadvertently increase the incidence of unethical behavior.... Read more about The Perils of Imagining the Unethical Road Not Taken

    Ethical Nudges

    The principal investigator of this project is Sreedhari D. Desai. In this project, Sreedhari and her colleagues use laboratory and field experiments to investigate the role of ethical nudges, or non-coercive ways of leading people down moral pathways. In one segment of this project, they investigated how displaying cues such as moral quotations at the bottom of emails and pictures of moral leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi can trigger implicit psychological processes such that people feel discouraged from behaving unethically.... Read more about Ethical Nudges

    Legal Ambiguity and Organizational Noncompliance

    The principal investigator of this project is Yuval Feldman. The focus of this research is to understand the psychological processes that mediate and moderate the effect of ambiguity in law on rule-following behaviors of individuals in organizations. Although recent research suggests that when people face ambiguity, they may be more likely to rely on their own self-interest to guide their behavior, either deliberately or unknowingly, this project will demonstrate that in an organizational context, the picture is more complex.... Read more about Legal Ambiguity and Organizational Noncompliance

    Anatomy of an Organization: an Ethnographic Approach to Understanding the History and Ethics of the American Psychiatric Association

    Although all medical specialties have come under scrutiny for financial conflicts of interest, the field of psychiatry has been at the epicenter of this "crisis of credibility" (Fava, 2006). Researchers, investigative journalists, and policy makers have raised questions about the extent of industry influence on the diagnostic and practice guidelines developed by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).... Read more about Anatomy of an Organization: an Ethnographic Approach to Understanding the History and Ethics of the American Psychiatric Association

    Political Money and the Crisis in Political Representation

    In this project, Paul Jorgensen will conduct an empirical and normative project investigating how the industrial structure of the American economy influences the partisan control of Congress and the public policy emanating from this legislative body, from 1990 through 2010. The specific questions guiding this research include: (1) what are and what explains electoral and lobbying coalitions between organized interests and political parties across time, which are defined broadly to include all types of campaign contributions, lobbying contracts, and contents of congressional member stock portfolios, and (2) what are the legislative and economic effects of these coalitions across time?... Read more about Political Money and the Crisis in Political Representation

Pages