Does It Pay to Be Moral? How Indicators of Morality and Competence Enhance Organizational and Work Team Attractiveness

Based on a social identity analysis, the authors argue that people are attracted to teams and organizations with positive features. Such features can refer to the competence and achievements of the organization, or to its moral values and ethical conduct. However, in work contexts, ethics and achievements do not necessarily go together. The paper reports three studies that examine the relative and combined impact of perceived competence vs morality of a team or organization on its attractiveness to individuals. Study 1 (n = 44) reveals that students prefer to seek employment in a moral rather than a competent organization, when forced to choose between these organizational features on a bipolar scale. Study 2 (n = 100) replicates these findings in a design where the competence and morality of a fictitious organization were manipulated orthogonally. Study 3 (n = 89) examines responses to experimental task teams that systematically differed from each other in their competence and morality. Results of all three studies converge to demonstrate that the perceived morality of the team or organization has a greater impact on its attractiveness to individuals than its perceived competence. The authors discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.     

Toddler Emotion Regulation With Mothers and Fathers: Temporal Associations Between Negative Affect and Behavioral Strategies

The present study investigated temporal associations between putative emotion regulation strategies and negative affect in 20‐month‐old toddlers. Toddlers’ parent‐focused, self‐distraction, and toy‐focused strategies, as well as negative affect, were rated on a second‐by‐second basis during laboratory parent–toddler interactions. Longitudinal mixed‐effects models were conducted to determine the degree to which behavioral strategy use predicts subsequent negative affect and negative affect predicts subsequent strategy use. Results with mother–toddler and father–toddler dyads indicated that parent‐focused strategies with an unresponsive parent were followed by increases in negative affect, whereas toy‐focused strategies were followed by decreases in negative affect. Results also indicated that toddler negative affect serves to regulate behavioral strategy use within both parent contexts.     

The role of contraceptive supply and demand in Mexican fertility decline: evidence from a microdemographic study

This paper uses retrospective life history data to assess the impact of family planning services on contraceptive use in a rural Mexican township. Between 1960 and 1990 contraceptive use rose and fertility declined dramatically. Both contraceptive supply and demand factors were influential in these trends. The start of the government-sponsored family planning programme in the late 1970s was associated with a sharp rise in female sterilization and use of the IUD. However, once we controlled for the changing socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the sample, the presence of family planning services had no significant effect on the likelihood that women used modern reversible methods compared to traditional methods. Men and women expressed concerns about the safety of modern methods such as the pill and the IUD. Efforts to increase modern contraceptive use should place greater emphasis on communicating the safety of these methods and improving the quality of services.     

Economic opportunity in mexico and return migration from the United States

I analyze the influence of the economic characteristics of origin area on trip duration for Mexican migrants in the United States. I argue that migrants from economically dynamic areas in Mexico with favorable opportunities for employment and small capital investment have a larger incentive to stay in the United States longer and to withstand the psychic costs of separation from family and friends than do migrants from economically stagnant areas in Mexico, where the productive uses of savings are severely limited. In line with this argument we should expect investment opportunities in migrants’ origin areas to be associated positively with migrants’ trip duration in the United States. To test this hypothesis I use individual- and household-level data on U.S migration experience collected in 13 Mexican communities. Evidence from parametric hazards models supports the idea that economic characteristics of origin areas influence the motivations and strategies of Mexican migrants in the United States.     

Seasonality of coitus and seasonality of birth

Seasonal variation of birth rates has been observed in every population in which it has been studied. Many hypotheses have been advanced to account for the variation, including seasonal variation in frequency of coitus. This relationship is known to be true for other primates, but seasonal variation in coital rate has not been previously documented in man.This paper presents over one hundred woman-years of data on coital rates from about .fifty white, mostly well-educated, premenopausal, married, husband-present volunteers. Seasonal fluctuations were seen in coital rates, of about the same magnitude as seasonal variations in the white birth rates reported for New York City, 1962-64; for the United States, 1963; and for the highest socioeconomic quintile census tracts, Baltimore, 1952-56. However, shifting the birth rates back forty weeks to approximate conception dates revealed no association with the observed coital rates.If the pattern presented has great generality, seasonal variations in births cannot be explained by seasonality of coitus.     

Rural-Urban Migration and Reproductive Behavior in Guatemala

Guatemala has the highest fertility of any country in Latin America, and it is also the least urbanized. Projected rural-urban migration will shift more of Guatemala's population from rural areas into towns and cities. This article uses retrospective life-history data collected in migrant origin and destination areas in Guatemala to compare the fertility of rural-urban migrant women to that of rural and urban nonmigrants. Results from discrete-time hazard regression models of union formation, first birth, and third and higher parity births indicate that delayed marriage while still in rural areas, and the rapid adoption of urban fertility practices after migration, result in intermediate migrant fertility that is closer to that of urban natives than rural nonmigrants. If current patterns are any guide to the future, the redistribution of population from high fertility rural areas to towns and cities in Guatemala will accelerate the decline in aggregate fertility beyond what would have resulted from declines in rural and urban fertility alone.     

Selective Emigration, Cohort Quality, and Models of Immigrant Assimilation

In this article we identify sample underenumeration, changing cohort quality, and selective emigration as problems that threaten the validity of findings on immigrant socioeconomic assimilation derived from cross-sectional data. Using information on Mexican immigrants from the 1990 U.S. census and a unique binational source of data, we address the effects of these problems on cross-sectional regressions of English proficiency and wage attainment. Our results suggest that the underenumeration of temporary and undocumented migrants biases the estimated effects of human capital variables downward, but that selective emigration does not significantly affect cross-sectional models. We do find, however, that period of entry is a poor proxy for total migrant experience, and when we disentangle duration and cohort effects, we find some evidence for shifts in cohort quality over time, but not the systematic decline seen by others.     

Knowledge of American sign language and the ability of hearing individuals to decode facial expressions of emotion

The relation between knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) and the ability to decode facial expressions of emotion was explored in this study. Subjects were 60 college students, half of whom were intermediate level students of ASL and half of whom had no exposure to a signed language. Subjects viewed and judged silent video segments of stimulus persons experiencing spontaneous emotional reactions representing either happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, or fear/surprise. Results indicated that hearing subjects knowledgeable in ASL were generally better than hearing non-signers at identifying facial expressions of emotion, although there were variations in decoding accuracy regarding the specific emotion being judged. In addition, females were more successful decoders than males. Results have implications for better understanding the nature of nonverbal communication in deaf and hearing individuals.We are grateful to Karl Scheibe for comments on an earlier version of this paper and to Erik Coats for statistical analysis. This study was conducted as part of a Senior Honors thesis at Wesleyan University.     

Social Consequences of Employee/Management Buyouts: Two Canadian Examples From the Forest Sector*

Abstract Local control of natural resource processing facilities in small rural communities is often viewed as beneficial to community development. This paper employs social impact assessment tools to examine the social and economic effects of change in the ownership of forest products mills in two communities. Our analysis documents (1) the degree to which local ownership of the new, locally owned corporations led to local reinvestment of profits, and (2) whether the goals of the architects of these buyouts were realized: the maintenance of jobs, income, population, and a way of life. Overall, both communities were able to maintain jobs, population, and real estate values, and profits were reinvested in mill upgrades. After the buyouts, however, both communities experienced a rise and then a decline in community cohesion, and changes in local social and power relations, in which local ownership was short‐lived; benefits to relationships within the community were mixed.