Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with...

The debate on abortion gets heated because some people feel that abortion should be abolished while others argue that is should be legalized. Those who against abortion reason that life begins at conception, and hence the unborn child has equal human rights with any other living person. This makes them state that abortion is murder and that those involved should be charged with murder in a cour...

This article argues that an iconic event in the history of helping research -- the story of the 38 witnesses who remained inactive during the murder of Kitty Genovese -- is not supported by the available evidence. Using archive material, the authors show that there is no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive. Drawin...

Injunctions are a contentious issue between the judiciary and press. What press wishes to publish has sometimes been restricted by through issuing of injunctions. Nonethel...

0

Although mass murder is a rare event in the United States—perhaps a dozen to a dozen and a half incidents a year in the recent decades—occurrences tend to overshadow the much greater number of other murders, because of the electrifying effect upon the public of so many lives being lost all at once. Much of the heightened frequency and greater death toll stems from the easier availability of sem...

The motivation for this multi-part series is solely my observation that much of the writing on complexity theory seems to have arbitrarily ignored the vast systems theory literature. I don’t know whether this omission is deliberate (i.e., motivated by the political need to differentiate and promote one set of topical boundaries from another; a situation unfortunately driven by a reductionist fu...