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This paper asks why the extreme real-world weather events of the summer of 1988 created a social scare in the USA while the comparable weather impacts of 2012 did not. It uses these two summers to exemplify the importance of the broader context surrounding the media. The key background factors are: the dominant issue culture in which the media function; grassroots environmental social movements; and both political and scientific claims-making on climate change. The paper seeks to show that these factors affected reporting opportunities related to the formation of reproducing stories and the (investigative) stance assumed by the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends recent work on the public arenas approach to social problems (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988) by examining changes in audience receptiveness to claims- making activities. Scientists' claims about global warming lulled to attract much public attention until the extraordinary heat and drought of the "summer of '88" created a social ware. That is, environmental claims arc most likely to be honored-and accelerate demands in the political arena-when they piggyback on dramatic real-world events. The dynamics of this social problem over time reveal that both demand attenuation and issue redirection processes have diminished global warming's standing as a "celebrity" social problem. Social scares hold potential importance for prospective social problems that revolve around new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an argument on the generalized fear of the Soviet threat punctuated by moral panics provided a signal impetus to the arms race. Growth of the American nuclear arsenal; Role of panics unleashed by Soviet challenges to American nuclear hegemony; Provision of political leverage for large-scale nuclear buildups.

Evaluates the factors determining the level of tolerance of first year university students and faculty in the United States for gender-based humor and their implication to the acceptability of such humor in the family, academe and society. Implication to shifting gender relations; Discussion on theories about the role of humor; Lesser acceptability gender-based jokes by faculty.

Three field experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that the expectations which generalized or proximate others hold for knowledge about a subject will affect the rate at which people fabricate opinions. In what was ostensibly a man-in-the-street interview for a radio program, respondents were asked to comment on both actual public events and on “counterfeit” but plausible public events. In Experiments 1 and 2, Cs were used to manipulate the expectation that one should or should not be knowledgeable about public events. Experiment 3 used a subject for which one would expect knowledge to be differentially distributed by sex. Consistent with the self-presentational hypothesis that individuals use the cues provided by others to determine how to optimize the public image they convey, it was found that the rate of fabrication increased as various sources of information (other's expectations, other's knowledge, the specialization of the topic) suggested that one should be knowledgeable about the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A “bystander invervention” paradigm was employed to test the effects of type of person (stigmatized vs nonstigmatized) and the costs of helping (high vs low effort) on the helping behavior of 200 Canadian men and women standing on subway platforms. As predicted, there were no differences in the help given to the stigmatized and the nonstigmatized in the low effort condition, but the stigmatized were less likely to be helped than the nonstigmatized in the high effort condition (p < .05). The results were explained by an assumption that the desire to avoid the stigmatized heightens a person's sensitivity to alterations in the cost of helping. It is proposed that an increase in the cost of helping is “amplified” by the presence of a stigmatized other, but in the presence of a nonstigmatized other a person is less attentive to a modest increase in costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article applies the gender-based attribution theory to the Canadian track athlete Ben Johnson's loss his gold medal for using a banned performance-enhancing steroid. Attribution theories have largely ignored the effects of gender or sought cross-situational predictions for the foci of men's and women's attributions. A theoretical position that sheds light on gender and attributions is that of differential moral development of men and women. Sociologist C. Gilligan claimed that in Western societies mother-centered early socialization leads to a rule-and-rationality based morality in men that maximizes self-interest. In contrast, women learn to emphasize relationships, and their ensuing morality is empathic, responsive to others' needs, and sensitive to context-specific circumstances. Thus, attributions of' the two sexes may be due to the fact that men resolve moral dilemmas through an instrumental and women through a socio-emotionai logic that Gililgan called the ethic of care.