Search

This document summarizes an article titled "Decolonizing power inequalities from a human rights and psychological perspective" published in the International Journal of Psychology. The article explores the lasting effects of colonization and enslavement on societies today, including their impact on social relationships, attitudes, and transgenerational trauma. It raises the question of whether contemporary psychology is equipped to address and rectify the consequences of past power imbalances or if it perpetuates the status quo. The article also examines various initiatives in Europe, Brazil, Canada, and Puerto Rico that aim to deconstruct and repair the effects of colonialism in psychology and society. Additionally, the document discusses a study that investigates the experiences of discrimination and microaggressions among college students with disabilities. The research involved in-depth interviews with 80 students with different disabilities, revealing instances of overt discrimination and microaggressions. The study provides recommendations for higher education teachers and administrative units to better support students with disabilities. [Extracted from the article]

Individuals enter police encounters with expectations about how these interactions will unfold. These expectations are often rooted in racialized personal, vicarious, and collective experiences with the police. Bayesian updating posits that the way youth perceive treatment by the police during stops and arrests combines with prior expectations and perceptions to shape current views of the law, whereas subtyping suggests this process differs by race. This study examines intra‐ and interracial variability in these processes using longitudinal survey data from 3,085 Black and White youth. Regardless of race, youth who indicate they were treated with disrespect during police encounters had lower perceptions of procedural justice than did those with no contact, whereas contact perceived as respectful had no significant effects. For White but not Black youth, police encounters rated as "neutral" are associated with more negative views of the police. Other forms of legal socialization are also racialized, including messages conveyed in the media and by parents. Limited evidence exists that prior views of the police moderate the effect of police encounters on procedural justice or that these conditioning effects vary by race. Findings support updating, but race differences do not neatly align with findings expected with updating or subtyping theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to give full play to the role of field research of legal psychology institutional investors in promoting enterprise environmental governance, this article puts forward the research on how legal Psychology institutional investors affect the corporate governance environment. Taking the listed companies in the A-share heavy pollution industry of Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2018 to 2021 as a sample, this article tests the impact and action mechanism of legal Psychology institutional investors' field research on corporate environmental governance. Hypothesis 1: the field research of legal Psychology institutional investors can promote the environmental governance of enterprises. Hypothesis 2: for enterprises with poor environmental information disclosure, the impact of field research of legal Psychology institutional investors on enterprise environmental governance is more obvious. Hypothesis 3: for enterprises with more concentrated distribution, the impact of field research of legal Psychology institutional investors on enterprise environmental governance is more obvious. Leadership power has the three attributes of management, social psychology, and law, and its essence is the socialization of legal psychology. Under the perspective of legal psychology, the psychological mechanism of leadership power is mainly manifested in three aspects: increasing the social distance, activating the approach system, and inducing the control illusion. The cumulative number of field investigations conducted by the enterprise in the current year +1 is adopted, and the logarithm is taken as the measurement index of the field investigation of legal Psychology institutional investors, which is expressed by Investigate. In the robustness test part, the virtual variables are set by whether the enterprise is investigated in the field in that year. The results show that in uncontrolled years and industries, the regression coefficients of legal Psychology institutional investor investigation and enterprise environmental protection capital investment are 0.0703 and 0.2416, respectively, which are significant at the level of 5%. After controlling the year and industry, the regression results show that the field investigation of legal Psychology institutional investors and enterprise environmental capital investment are still positive, significantly at the level of 5% and 1%, respectively. The environmental capital investment of enterprises with poor environmental information disclosure (0.479 and 1.161) is higher than that of enterprises with good environmental information disclosure (0.252 and 0.618), and the mean t-test maintains the significance level of 1%, indicating that the impact of field research on enterprise environmental governance is more obvious in enterprises with poor environmental information disclosure, which preliminarily verifies Hypothesis 2 of this article. Similarly, when the distribution of enterprises is more concentrated, the environmental capital investment of enterprises is 0.536 and 1.286, which is higher than that of enterprises with a more dispersed distribution (0.315 and 0.778) and maintains a significant level of 1%. The results show that obtaining environmental information is helpful for stakeholders to supervise enterprise environmental governance. Therefore, we should formulate and issue policies and regulations that require enterprises to disclose environmental information as soon as possible, improve the standards of environmental information disclosure, establish an enterprise environmental information disclosure platform, and improve the level and quality of environmental information disclosure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mission of policing is "to protect and serve," but recent events suggest that many Americans, and especially Black Americans, do not feel protected from the police. Understanding police‐related fear is important because it may impact civilians' health, daily lives, and policy attitudes. To examine the prevalence, sources, and consequences of both personal and altruistic fear of the police, we surveyed a nationwide sample (N = 1,150), which included comparable numbers of Black (N = 517) and White (N = 492) respondents. Most White respondents felt safe, but most Black respondents lived in fear of the police killing them and hurting their family members. Approximately half of Black respondents preferred to be robbed or burglarized than to have unprovoked contact with officers. The racial divide in fear was mediated by past experiences with police mistreatment. In turn, fear mediated the effects of race and past mistreatment on support for defunding the police and intentions to have "the talk" with family youths about the need to distrust and avoid officers. The deep American racial divide in police‐related fear represents a racially disparate health crisis and a primary obstacle to law enforcement's capacity to serve all communities equitably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of contact with the child welfare system (CWS) in legal socialization is not well understood. This is particularly true of youth who have contact with both the juvenile justice system and the CWS, known as dual system (DS) youth. Furthermore, much of the legal socialization research excludes Latinx youth, for whom legal socialization may function differently. Is CWS contact, compared to—and in addition to—juvenile justice system contact, associated with Latinx youths' attitudes toward police and judges? The present study addresses this research question among a sample of 417 Latinx youth who had been arrested for the first time, 74 of whom were DS youth. Results indicated that DS youth perceive police as less biased, and both police and judges as more legitimate, than their juvenile justice system‐only counterparts. CWS contact was not associated with perceptions of situational procedural justice for police or judges, suggesting that CWS contact colors general attitudes toward legal actors' bias and legitimacy, but not specific interactions with legal actors. The results suggest that CWS contact, above and beyond juvenile justice system contact, has a nuanced impact on children's legal socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its emergence as a coherent field of study a half century ago, legal socialization has moved to the forefront of conversations about legal reform across multiple fields. Amidst all this work, however, there is surprisingly little scholarship on an obvious, but understudied question: Does the law itself recognize legal socialization? Knowing whether, and how, American law recognizes its need to legally socialize the citizenry toward democratic norms is a critical step for bridging the divide between legal socialization scholarship and social policy reform. For this essay, we consider all 50 state constitutions, including all previous versions. Our analysis focuses on several specific areas where the text explicitly or implicitly addresses the law as a socializing agent. What we find is a diverse landscape of state law that ranges from silence to indirect and direct endorsement of legal socialization as a purpose of law, an obligation of the state, and a right of the individual citizen. Yet we also find that these acknowledgments are complex and at times contradictory, reflecting deep fissures between the law's commitments to democratic republicanism and its anti‐democratic commitments to the maintenance of privilege and overt oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the 2021 JSI special issue on legal socialization, which we planned to celebrate the legal socialization scholarship that was largely initiated by a special issue of JSI (1971, Vol. 27, Issue 2) published 50 years ago. In its broadest sense, legal socialization refers to the process by which people develop their relationship with the law. Undergirding this process is the acquisition, formation, and development of legal values, attitudes, and reasoning capacities. This intellectual tradition rests on four pillars—foundationality, reciprocity, ubiquity, and continuity—that provide order to a field of study where scholars are trained in different disciplines, employ different methodologies, and pursue different questions involving people's relationship with the law. Much like in 1971, today many people are questioning the role of law in society, its purpose, its function, its history, and its efficacy. It is more important than ever to understand how people develop their orientation toward this social institution and the influence of that orientation on legal behavior. This issue features an eclectic group of scholars and a broad array of legal socialization research. This body of scholarship is intended to push the boundaries of the field both theoretically and in scope. This introduction situates each article within the rich historical tradition of legal socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articles in this volume highlight resurgence of interest in the topic of legal socialization. Legal and moral socialization was central to the writing of classic social theorists around the beginning of the 20th century, and was an important research topic in the 1970s. It has been less widely studied in recent decades. Renewed attention to legal socialization today is a result of both developments in psychology and of emerging societal issues. In particular, a renewed societal focus on how to create a viable and sustainable social order has again drawn attention to legal socialization. In response, as this volume illustrates, psychologists have increased and broadened their efforts to understand legal socialization. They have addressed the issue using new theoretical models, have considered a broader set of sources of socialization, and have paid heightened attention to the experience of traditionally marginalized members of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a pilot project implemented in Milwaukee's Juvenile Court, which was designed as a preliminary feasibility study to assess whether a change in court procedures could alter young offenders' engagement in the court process and enhance their relationship with the juvenile court judge. Participants in the pilot engaged in regular monthly conversations with the juvenile judge and other legal actors in an informal context focused on collaborative planning and problem solving. The procedural justice and legal socialization literature suggests that these changes in interactions and relationships might facilitate the development of a "consensus" orientation to legal authority associated with a shared trust in the law and a voluntary acceptance of its legitimacy. This paper offers an evaluation of the pilot project using a quasi‐ethnographic approach based on observational data and interviews with participants. Although the original focus of the pilot was on the relationship between the young offenders and the judge and on the impact of that relationship on the youths' attitudes, it became evident, over the course of the study, that the impact of the engagement was felt on both sides of the relationship, and that it was not limited to the judge and the youth. The paper explores the potential value of "reciprocal socialization"—socialization of legal authorities by the subjects with whom they interact—to the successful achievement of the juvenile justice system's aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescence and later childhood are critical periods for developing attitudes toward legal authorities, a process known as legal socialization. Traditionally, scholars have understood contact with local police officers and experiences with the juvenile justice system to drive legal socialization. These interactions, and in particular how fair they are perceived to be, influence long‐term views about the legitimacy of the legal system and future criminal behavior. In recent years, however, the potential for adolescent contact with police has increased exponentially through their presence in a new context: schools. In a survey of high schoolers, we explored how school‐based police, school resource officers (SROs), function as an emerging nexus of legal socialization. We found that SROs' influence extends beyond school grounds: the more procedurally just students perceived SROs to be, the more they were willing to follow their directives and to obey police outside of school. Further, procedural justice perceptions of SROs were correlated with school climate outcomes, including self‐reported academic success, anxiety, and identification with the school community. Our results speak to the connection between legal socialization and other developmental processes like community engagement and support expanding robust theories of legal socialization to consider arenas that intermingle legal and non‐legal authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research is increasingly focusing on how young people interpret their experiences with the legal system and whether and how this shapes attitudes and beliefs about the system. This study adds to the extant literature by examining the relationship between perceptions of procedural justice and attitudes toward the law and legal system for a sample of youth (N = 227) in residential placements. Specifically, it focuses on how youths' perceptions of their defense attorneys shape their attitudes toward the legal system. Results demonstrate that youth who feel they were treated more fairly by their defense attorneys viewed the police and courts as more legitimate. White youth viewed the police as more legitimate than did youth of color and girls viewed courts as less legitimate than did boys. Attitudes toward the legal system were also related to other contextual characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal socialization researchers have largely ignored the importance of emotion in the legal socialization process and engagement in crime. The purpose of the current study was to argue the potential importance of moral emotions (e.g., guilt) in legal socialization and take a preliminary step to integrate an emotion component into an existing model. The current study investigated whether the moral emotion of guilt, using both proneness and anticipatory measures, would predict rule‐violating behavior (RVB) as part of the integrated cognitive legal socialization model. The study used survey data from 474 participants who were part of a longitudinal study of adolescent rule‐violating behavior. Results showed that guilt proneness functioned as a predictor of RVB in parallel with legal reasoning, while anticipatory guilt served as a mediator in parallel with normative attitude mediators. Enforcement status (i.e., feeling people should be punished for committing RVB) mediated the relation between guilt proneness and RVB, while normative status (i.e., approval for engaging in RVB) and anticipatory guilt mediated the relation between legal reasoning and RVB. These findings help to advance legal socialization by demonstrating the unique contribution of emotion in legal socialization theory and provide a foundation for future research in this area. The implications for the role of emotion in both the integrated cognitive legal socialization model and the procedural justice legal socialization model and future directions for further inquiry are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID‐19 has challenged people worldwide to comply with strict lock‐downs and meticulous healthcare instructions. Can states harness enclave communities to comply with the law in such crucial times, even when compliance conflicts with communal sources of authority? We investigated this question through the case of Israeli ultra‐Orthodox schools compliance with COVID‐19 regulations. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with school principals, documents and media sources, and a field survey, we found that the state has the capacity to quickly internalize new norms and harness the cooperation of previously suspicious communities. At the same time, we found that communal authorities were able to shield widespread communal defiance from legal enforcement. These findings expose the bidirectionality of legal socialization: As the community uses its defiance power to attenuate the law, it socializes public authorities to accede to their bounded authority. As public authorities come to realize that the community cannot be brought to full compliance, they curtail enforcement efforts and socialize the community to operate outside the law. Our findings animate the reciprocity assumption in legal socialization theory and highlight one of the crucial tasks for the next 50 years of research: to examine the bidirectionality of legal socialization and discover its socio‐legal effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the pillars of legal socialization theory is how non‐legal contexts shape the legitimacy of and compliance with laws. Yet there is little longitudinal evidence establishing the interface mechanism between these spheres. The purpose of this research was to demonstrate how youths' beliefs in a just world (BJW) can help explain the transmission between the justice of non‐legal authorities (parents and schools) and law legitimacy and rule violating behavior (RVB). We utilized two waves of longitudinal data from adolescents at ages 13 and 14 (N = 680) in the São Paulo Legal Socialization Study. Structural equation modeling revealed a good fit to the tested model that parental procedural justice and school justice predict both personal and general BJW, and these predict law legitimacy evaluations 1 year later. General and personal BJW also had an indirect effect on RVB over the following year via law legitimacy. The results suggest that non‐legal authorities may influence law legitimacy not through a direct projection (which was not significant), but through an indirect process of worldview construction. Legal socialization and just world belief research can converge to help explain the interface between non‐legal and legal spheres of authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the emergence of the legal socialization field, the obligation to obey the law was central in theoretical and empirical approaches. Scholars in the last 50 years often noted that the obligation to obey the law (OOL) is vital for compliance, yet studies rarely empirically examined factors that promote the OOL. This study used data from 1000 adults stratified sampled to be nationally representative of the United States to examine how personal characteristics (i.e., impulsivity and morality), perceptions of the nonlegal social context (i.e., social bonds, teacher legitimacy, and parent legitimacy), and perceptions of the legal system context (i.e., deterrence and police procedural justice, distributive justice, bias, and legitimacy) are associated with the OOL. The results indicated that impulsivity, teacher legitimacy, deterrence, and perceptions of police legitimacy and bias were associated with the OOL. Implications for the next 50 years of legal socialization research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal attitudes, such as legal cynicism and perceived legitimacy, develop through an ongoing process of legal socialization involving both legal authorities and non‐legal agents of socialization. Most research on the non‐legal sources of legal socialization has focused on authorities most relevant to the early stages of the life‐course. Few studies have examined the influence of non‐legal sources of socialization relevant to adulthood, even though early pioneers of the field anticipated that legal socialization involves a life‐long process. In this article, I investigate the influence of changes in intimate relationships and their characteristics on legal cynicism and legitimacy. Using data from a longitudinal study of serious, young offenders, I investigate the extent to which changes in relationship characteristics contribute to within‐individual changes in legitimacy and legal cynicism during the transition from adolescence to early adulthood. The results indicate that changes in the characteristics of intimate relationships are associated with changes in legal attitudes, and that these involve both direct and indirect effects. These findings highlight the importance of non‐legal sources of legal socialization over the life‐course and show that they are not confined to the authority figures traditionally acknowledged in the legal socialization literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police rely on citizens to report crime and victimization. Yet for many people low levels of trust in police and concerns about unjust police treatment impact their willingness to engage proactively with police. For some, defying police authority is common. This can be particularly so for ethnic, racial, and religious minority groups. The personal and vicarious experiences these groups have with police play an important role in the legal socialization process, shaping how they perceive and behave toward police. As a religious minority group Muslims have experienced intense scrutiny from police. As such, the current study examines how and why Muslims defy police authority. Using survey data from 398 Australian Muslims, this study tests whether Muslims' concerns about procedural justice and bounded‐authority violations (i.e., the belief that police overstep the boundaries of acceptable authority) have differential effects on two types of defiance: resistance and disengagement. Findings show that Muslims' concerns about procedural justice are most important for understanding resistance, while disengagement is dominated by concerns about perceived boundary violations. Further, procedural justice moderates the association between bounded‐authority concerns and resistance, but not disengagement. The implications of these findings for the legal socialization process, theory, and police practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of police legitimacy evaluations is a core component of the legal socialization process. Research has identified many factors that impact peoples' perceptions of legitimacy such as social and ethnic identity, but the role of American identity has yet to be examined. This study attempted to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that impact legal socialization by examining the relationship between American identity and police legitimacy evaluations. Using a sample of 2086 adults from the United States, we found that people with a stronger American identity were more likely to believe the police are a legitimate authority after accounting for other known predictors of legitimacy. The results demonstrate that national identity may be play a key role in the legal socialization process and partially shape peoples' evaluations of police legitimacy regardless of the content and quality of interactions they have with the police. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legal socialization framework emphasizes the importance of adolescents' encounters with police. We examine how different types of police contact and neighborhood experiences are linked to the legal socialization process among adolescents living in São Paulo, Brazil. Drawing on 669 participants across three waves of panel data from the São Paulo Legal Socialization Study, results from the multilevel longitudinal model revealed that within‐person increases in vicarious police contact were linked to a decrease in police legitimacy over time. Exploratory analyses using a multilevel mediation model indicated that the observed negative effect of vicarious police contact was mediated by evaluations of police procedural justice. As for the between‐person effects, voluntary police contact positively predicted police legitimacy over time. However, the effects of vicarious police contact and violent police contact were mediated by police procedural justice. Additionally, police legitimacy decreased for people who had more exposure to violence and lower levels of fear of crime. The study revealed that the nature of police contact and levels of exposure to violence can have important effects on adolescents' perceptions of police legitimacy, even after accounting for procedural justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The procedural justice model is a common framework for understanding how and why fair procedures conveyed by legal authorities (such as police officers) shape the legal socialization process. The present contribution draws upon self‐determination theory (SDT) to advance the procedural justice model through its focus on internalization, in terms of identification and external regulation. Study 1 is a questionnaire‐based study conducted among 268 Belgian adolescents that provides initial evidence for the incremental value of the SDT‐based operationalization of internalization, above and beyond the classic operationalization (i.e., obligation to obey), for explaining why perceived procedural justice is linked to more compliance and less defiance. These results are corroborated in Study 2, which involves an experimental, vignette‐based study (N = 210) contrasting a procedurally just versus unjust situation. The discussion focuses on how SDT may inform the legal socialization literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This paper accomplishes two goals. First, we assesses the measurement invariance of legal cynicism among adolescents in São Paulo, Brazil, Montevideo, Uruguay, and Zurich, Switzerland. Second, we evaluate a series of social and individual antecedents that are expected to influence legal cynicism across contexts.Methods: This paper first evaluates the measurement invariance of legal cynicism using Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis with three randomized clustered samples of adolescents in Zurich (n = 1447), São Paulo (n = 2680) and Montevideo (n = 2204). Second, we assessed the correlates for legal cynicism in each city using structural equation modelling techniques.Results: The results demonstrated metric invariance, but not scalar invariance among adolescents in São Paulo, Zurich, and Montevideo. We were able to establish partial measurement invariance for legal cynicism in São Paulo and Zurich, and therefore proceeded with the comparison of latent means and antecedents. The results show that on average legal cynicism is higher in Zurich, but that the size and strength of antecedents were similar across cities. Low self-control was by far the strongest correlate of legal cynicism.Conclusions: Overall, our results suggest that current operationalizations of legal cynicism may not be rooted in social structural context and experiences with legal authorities, but rather reflect how individuals interpret legal boundaries and dispositions towards rule-breaking. Researchers must reconsider how legal cynicism fits into models of legal socialization, and whether developmental models of self-control may help us understand the origins and nature of legal cynicism, as it is currently measured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In different theoretical traditions, negative social conditions, attachments, and interactions shape the way individuals view the law and its agents. Although most researchers acknowledge the conceptual distinction between different legal attitudes such as legal cynicism and police legitimacy, it remains unclear to what extent these attitudes stem from the same social sources. In the current study, therefore, we evaluate the social and individual factors that influence trajectories of legal cynicism and police legitimacy using a diverse community sample of youths in Zurich, Switzerland. Latent growth curve models were employed to examine patterns of change in legal cynicism and police legitimacy between 13 and 20 years of age. The findings show that legal cynicism and police legitimacy both decline into early adulthood and exhibit high rank‐stability over time. Furthermore, we find that legal cynicism is closely related to individual characteristics that reflect one's inability to recognize or abide by their internal rules. By contrast, police legitimacy is shaped by socialization influences, particularly teacher bonds and police contacts. These results indicate a need to assess the measurement and interpretation of legal cynicism critically in relation to broader legitimacy beliefs and to investigate the shared and distinct sources of these different constructs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: More than 20 years after an expansion of juvenile transfer policies, questions remain regarding the specific deterrent effect of juvenile waiver given the singular focus on the court of jurisdiction and neglect of other critical aspects of the provision, such as the incapacitation experience. Prior research has also not been focused on identifying the mediating mechanisms that produce criminogenic, null, or deterrent effects. We use data from the Pathways to Desistance Study, propensity score methodology, and mediational analyses to examine how and why the waiver‐incapacitation experience is related to recidivism rates during emerging adulthood. We find that the prior focus on a binary “waiver effect” is potentially misleading as it masks meaningful variation. Furthermore, we find that the path to increased recidivism in emerging adulthood is indirect and we identify stymied educational attainment as a mediator. Our discussion is focused on the criminogenic effects of incapacitation for juveniles and its implications for juvenile transfer research. The discussion also calls for future research to explore treatment heterogeneity further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on adolescent social cognition has had an enormous impact on how the justice system conceptualizes adolescent legal responsibility and deals with adolescents who commit crimes. Such research also has broader implications for adolescent legal socialization, which have been largely underdeveloped. A renewed effort to connect psychological research with legal policy must expand beyond these beginnings to focus on all adolescents and their engagement in broader social institutions. Specifically, a consideration of the unique capacities for growth and development during the adolescent years should be leveraged toward fostering positive outcomes like community identity, academic and social achievement, and the development of an orientation toward law based upon legitimacy and trust. Studies suggest that a key component of positive socialization is dealing with authorities one experiences as procedurally just. Researchers focused on issues of juvenile justice should also expand their focus to consider how the social climate in institutions such as schools can be designed to take advantage of the unique capacities adolescents have for exploring identity and connecting with peers in developing their orientation to the law and legal authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]