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The use of surveillance technologies by legal authorities has intensified in recent years. As new data collection technologies expand into law enforcement spaces previously dominated by interpersonal interactions, questions emerge about whether the public will evaluate interpersonal and technologically mediated interactions with legal authorities in the same ways. In an analysis guided by procedural justice theory, we examine whether and how legal authorities’ use of decision-making technology affects public evaluations of an authority-subordinate interaction and its outcome in the context of airport border crossings. Using an experimental vignette design (N = 278), we varied whether an encounter between a traveller and border security “agent” that produced a secondary search was described as interpersonal (conducted by a human agent) or technologically mediated (conducted by a machine agent). We also varied the traveller’s group membership relative to the nation-state, describing the traveller as either born in the country in question and a member of the nation’s most common racial group (in-group) or not born in the country and a racial minority (out-group). Both encounter type and group membership independently affected perceptions of the interaction (procedural justice judgements) and its outcome (distributive justice judgments). Technologically mediated encounters improved perceptions of procedural and distributive justice. Further, procedural justice judgments mediated the relationship between encounter type and distributive justice, demonstrating how perceptions of interactions influence perceptions of the outcomes of those interactions. Out-group members were evaluated as having worse experiences across all measures. The findings underscore the importance of extending tests of procedural justice theory beyond interpersonal interactions to technologically mediated interactions.

Rural/remote health services are vulnerable to occupational violence and aggression due to factors such as weapon accessibility, poor network coverage and distance to backup. This systematic review investigated (1) the nature of occupational violence and aggression perpetrated in rural/remote health service urgent care settings and (2) the availability and effectiveness of policies/interventions/recommendations that address occupational violence and aggression in this context. We searched Business Source Complete, CINAHL Complete, HealthSociety, APAIS Health, Health Collection, PsycINFO, PubMed, Scopus, SocIndex and Web of Science. Included articles (peer-reviewed, no grey literature and English language) addressed occupational violence and aggression in rural health service urgent care settings. Fifteen articles matched these criteria (total [rural/remote only, where specified] N ~ 2555) and were included in the final analysis. The Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool was applied to assess the risk of bias. A data extraction table and narrative synthesis are presented. The most common occupational violence and aggression type was verbal aggression. The primary perpetrator was patients. Risk factors reflected practitioner age, remoteness, sector, staffing, shift type and area of practice. Precipitating factors were alcohol/drugs, dissatisfaction and mental health conditions. Policy content and limitations and education/training programme effectiveness were not addressed. Community collaboration supported occupational violence and aggression prevention/management. Organisational culture should promote reporting, debriefing and post-incident care for staff well-being. Work environment and job/task design are priorities for safety, but with possible limitations for traumatised clients. Occupational violence and aggression policies/interventions in rural health settings must be systematically evaluated to inform best practices. Co-funded by Swinburne Social Innovation Research Institute Interdisciplinary Seed Funding Scheme and SMART Rural Health Network.

The present study examined the role of political orientation and task engagement in juror decision-making. The study was conducted as a 2 (mode: laboratory versus online) × 2 (role: juror, observer) × 3 (evidence: admissible, inadmissible, control) between-subjects experiment, with participants (N = 157) recruited from a mid-sized Australian university. Findings supported our predictions that political conservatism is associated with convictions, and that university students endorse a wide range of political orientations. Participants who were more engaged in the study perceived more threat in the defendant, and threat, in turn, led to higher conviction rates; furthermore, the effect of participation mode on verdict decisions was completely mediated by perceptions of the threat posed by the defendant. Findings are discussed in terms of their implications for jury decision-making research and its relevance to actual juror decisions.

The bioengineering of individual microbial organisms or microbial communities has great potential in agriculture, bioremediation and industry. Understanding community level drivers can improve community level functions to enhance desired outcomes in complex environments, whereas individual microbes can be reduced to a programmable biological unit for specific output goals. While understanding the bioengineering potential of both approaches leads to a wide range of potential uses, public acceptance of such technology may be the greatest hindrance to its application. Public perceptions and expectations of “naturalness,” as well as notions of disgust and dread, may delay the development of such technologies to their full benefit. We discuss these bioengineering approaches and draw on the psychological literature to suggest strategies that scientists can use to allay public concerns over the implementation of this technology.

In restorative justice, crime is recognised fundamentally as a violation of people and relationships, rather than as a violation of law (Zehr 1990). When criminal justice systems shift to framing crime in this way, there is a consequent recognition that an appropriate response to crime is to allow those affected by crime to discuss the event and arrive at a consensus about reparation (Latimer et al. 2005). With the increasing incorporation of restorative justice approaches and processes into mainstream criminal justice systems, researchers have recognised the need for thorough evaluations of the impact of restorative justice on various important outcomes, such as recidivism rates and participants’ perceptions that restorative justice procedures and their outcomes are fair and satisfactory. A wide and varied body of restorative justice research has been developing to meet this challenge over the past two decades, including program evaluations (Trimboli 2000), literature reviews (Braithwaite 1999), and meta-analyses (Latimer et al. 2005). In this special issue, we call for researchers to meet the next important challenge in restorative justice scholarship, framed eloquently by Kenneth Polk in 1994: Why does restorative justice work in the desired ways, for whom is it working or not working, and does it work differently for different people? Note that Polk presented us with these challenging questions in 1994— nearly two decades ago. Since that time, relative inattention to these questions in restorative justice research has left us with a strong understanding of the powerful effects of the restorative justice process as a whole, but without an equivalent understanding of why the process is so powerful, or the elements of the process that are more or less powerful. This relegates the transformative power of restorative justice to the realm of mystery. In order to develop restorative justice procedures and policy most effectively in the future, we seek a greater understanding of the basic mechanisms that drive the success or failure of restorative justice processes, and a more nuanced insight into the specific factors of