College Students' Revenge Goals Across Friend,Romantic Partner,and Roommate Contexts: The Role of Interpretations and Emotions

Residential college environments provide young people with distinctive relationship opportunities and challenges. A major purpose of the present study was to learn whether college students respond differently to conflict‐of‐interest vignettes in three different relationship contexts. Students were more likely to make negative interpretations about their romantic partner's behavior than they did about their friend's or roommate's behavior. They were also more likely to feel angry and hurt and to endorse hostile goals and strategies with romantic partners. A second major purpose was to learn about the types of interpretations and emotions associated with revenge goals in conflict‐of‐interest situations. Results indicated that interpreting the other person's actions as disrespectful and as rejecting was related to revenge goals and also predicted to revenge goals beyond the contributions of anger and hurt feelings.     

Optimal voting rules for two-member tenure committees

A tenure committee first votes on whether to hire a candidate; if it does, it receives an informative performance signal, and then votes on whether to tenure the candidate; rejection at either stage returns the committee to a candidate pool, endogenising the value of the outside option. A candidate’s fate depends only on the behaviour of two ‘weather-vane’ committee members. Committee members may vote against favoured candidates if the weather-vane is opposed; enthusiastic assessments by one of these weather-vanes may harm a candidate’s chances by increasing others’ thresholds for hiring him; sunk time costs may lead voters who voted against hiring to vote for tenuring him, even after a poor probationary performance. For two member committees that are patient and perceptive, the optimal voting rule is a (weak) majority at the hiring stage and unanimity at the tenure stage; when such committees are impatient or imperceptive, the double (weak) majority rule is optimal. Perversely, the performance of a patient, imperceptive committee improves as its perceptiveness further declines. Consistent with practice, falling threshold rules are not optimal. Results on optimal voting rules are also presented in limit cases as committee members’ beliefs become more correlated. Finally, we compare the model to a discrete-time European options model.     

Age at marriage and marital fertility

In recent years much criticism has been levelled against the use of gross and net reproduction rates as measures of replacement in any period of marked change. In this paper the author considers these criticisms and outlines a method which would yield more information on the problem of replacement and which would also eliminate the influence of varying ages at marriage on fertility when different groups or periods of time are compared. The use of this method is illustrated by an application to the fertility statistics of England and Wales and of different counties.     

“I Swear I Will Never Betray You”: Factors Reported by Spouses as Helping Them Resist Extramarital Sex in Relation to Gender,Marriage Length,and Religiosity

Studies suggest that married people frequently engage in intimate relationships with people other than their spouses, and the literature has extensively examined motives for doing so. However, less is known about what factors prevent spouses from engaging in extramarital sex. While investment theory, interdependence theory, and moral theories offer insights into this question, they have not been subject to much empirical research. We examine these theories in relation to several characteristics of individuals and couples: gender, length of the marriage, and religiosity. In two studies, 423 participants completed a questionnaire on the perceived importance of 29 reasons to resist the temptation for extramarital sex. Participants also reported the likelihood that they would engage in extramarital sex if the opportunity presented itself. Results show that being female, more religious, and married for less time were associated with greater expectations of refraining from extramarital sex when presented with a hypothetical scenario. Multiple hierarchical regression showed that among factors relevant to conscious decision making, moral standards and fundamental anxieties (fear of remaining alone) predict expectations of refraining from extramarital sex better than concerns about effects on the children or the other participant.     

State abstinence education programs and teen birth rates in the US

Title V, Section 510 of the Social Security Act, passed in 1996 and implemented in 1998, appropriates funding to states for the purpose of educating minors on the benefits of abstinence before marriage. Despite considerable research on the impact of abstinence education on teen fertility outcomes, high quality population-level studies on state abstinence education using panel data are absent. This paper uses state-level data to analyze the impact of abstinence education on the birth rates for teens 15–17 years by evaluating the Title V, Section 510 State Abstinence Education (SAE) program. For an average state, increasing spending by 50,000/year on SAE can help avoid approximately four births to teenagers, resulting in net savings of50,000/year on SAE can help avoid approximately four births to teenagers, resulting in net savings of 15,652 to the public for each birth avoided.