UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item CHILDREN’S CONCEPTIONS OF FAIRNESS: THE ROLE OF MENTAL STATE UNDERSTANDING AND GROUP IDENTITY(2021) D'Esterre, Alexander; Killen, Melanie; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Children’s everyday experiences occur against a backdrop that is rich in social information andwhich requires decisions involving considerations about fairness, intentionality, and social groups. With age, children improve in their ability to utilize intentional information in their judgments and have been shown to demonstrate preferences for fairness over group benefit. What has not been fully investigated is how children coordinate and weight these considerations at different ages. Moreover, mistaken intentions and a tendency to benefit the in-group over others can be seen even in adulthood – suggesting that these issues are not so easily overcome and have the potential to affect the evaluations and behaviors of individuals more than have been previously considered. Research designed to carefully investigate the impact of these social and cognitive factors on children’s fairness concepts can provide insight into the ways in which biases may begin to form and potentially inform our understanding of the underlying mechanisms present in prejudicial attitudes. The present dissertation contains a series of three empirical papers that are designed to investigate children’s responses to unintentional and intentional transgressions based on their cognitive ability to infer beliefs of others and their relationship to the group identity of the target. Empirical Study 1 demonstrated the value of using a morally-relevant theory of mind measure embedded directly into the context when predicting children’s responses to unintentional and intentional transgressions. Empirical Study 2 investigated the ways in which children’s assessment of fair and unfair advantages were influenced by the group identity of the character who created the advantage. Empirical Study 3 explored the types of retributive justice that children would endorse in light of various types of intentional and unintentional transgressions, revealing differences based on group identity and the impact that the retributive justice would present to the functioning of the group. The results of these studies together suggest that children’s fairness concepts are heavily influenced by the context in which children find themselves and are far from static. Better understanding the relationship between these factors will provide increased insight into the ways in which prejudice and bias may develop in childhood and suggest potential areas for intervention.Item POWER AND STATUS IN JUDGING AND PUNISHING IMMORALITY(2018) Ho, Hsiang-Yuan; Lucas, Jeffrey W.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research offers a framework that explains how observers respond to moral violations when considering the amount of power and status held by violators. It follows the group processes literature on the characteristics of power and status. A proposed theory describes that prior to witnessing moral violations, observers develop moral expectations about potential violators on the basis of the levels of power and status attributed to the violators. When the moral violations occur, the moral expectations about the violators, as well as the resources available to the violators, in turn, affect the judgment and punishment decisions of the observers toward the violators. An online vignette study and a laboratory experiment test my predictions based on the proposed theory by varying the relative levels of perceived power and status between evaluation targets (i.e., violators) and evaluators (i.e., observers). Vignettes used in Study 1 described that observers had lower, equal, or higher power/status compared to violators in hypothetical scenarios. In Study 2, observers were assigned with either lower or higher power/status relative to violators in a group interaction setting in which the observers experienced differential risks of retaliation from the violators. Both studies assessed expectations of observers about the moral character of potential violators before exposing the observers to details of a moral violation committed by the designated violators. Punishment decisions of observers examined in Study 1 were attitudinal measures while those in Study 2 were based on behavioral reactions. Results indicate that prior to the immoral incident, observers developed lower moral expectations about violators with greater power and higher moral expectations about violators holding greater status. However, these expectations did not always translate into moral judgment and punishment. While viewing the violation as immoral regardless of power/status held by the violators, depending on the context, observers might or might not penalize the violators differentially across the power/status spectra. Fears of retaliation from violators who utilized resources attached to varied power and status positions did not affect how observers punished the violators. Therefore, results of the studies suggest a resilient power and status hierarchy despite the disruption of moral norms.Item On the Relationship Between Peers and Propensity: Examining Vulnerability to Peer Reinforcement(2011) Thomas, Kyle J.; McGloin, Jean; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Though scholars recognize that peer-based risks for offending are especially robust, a handful of researchers have started to question whether the vulnerability to these risks varies across people in theoretically meaningful ways. For instance, drawing on theory and empirical research, there is reason to suspect that individuals of high and low morality are not vulnerable to deviant peer reinforcement, whereas those who exist in the "middle ground" of morality are. In this way, there may be an inverted "U" of susceptibility to deviant peer socialization according to the level of subjects' propensity for offending. The current study investigates this hypothesis using longitudinal data from the National Youth Survey. Peer reinforcement does not significantly influence the offending behavior of the high morality individuals, and is a consistent and significant predictor for medium morality offenders. For low morality offenders, however, the results are inconsistent across the models. The theoretical and methodological implications for future research on the peer-propensity interaction are discussed.Item EVALUATING SOCIAL EXCLUSION: THE INTERACTION BETWEEN GROUP GOALS AND TARGET CHARACTERISTICS(2011) Richardson, Cameron; Killen, Melanie; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Past work has revealed that adolescents utilize a variety of justifications to support exclusion and inclusion judgments. Group functioning justifications (e.g., "She will ruin the group/make the group work well") are one frequently cited class of considerations. This type of justification is suggestive of an attempt by the adolescent to coordinate group concerns with what the target will likely bring to the group. The above account of group functioning considerations, however, has yet to be formally tested. In this report, both target characteristics (e.g., aggression, shyness, gender) as well as group goals (competitive, noncompetitive) are manipulated in a soccer context to assess the extent to which exclusion judgments rely on the perception of target-group fit. We demonstrate evidence consistent with a target-group fit account of exclusion judgments. Implications and future directions are considered.