Joseph A Hamm

Michigan State University | MSU · School of Criminal Justice

Purpose Despite a common conceptual root, research applying legitimacy theory addresses any number of more or less distinct behaviours, attitudes, and processes. Although this variety in approaches has complicated theoretical development, we argue that it is critical to addressing the breadth of the construct. To address this state of affairs, we o...

Science is increasingly a collaborative pursuit. Although the modern scientific enterprise owes much to individuals working at the core of their field, humanity is increasingly confronted by highly complex problems that require the integration of a variety of disciplinary and methodological expertise. In 2016, the U.S. National Science Foundation l...

The current work explores three potential facilitators of judicial performance. Participants in a state‐wide survey of judicial officers (response rate = 33.9%) completed self‐report measures of self‐efficacy, prosocial impact, and self‐legitimacy as well as subjectively perceived performance. Objective performance data collected by the state court...

Purpose The majority of legitimacy research has been conducted in low-power distance societies such as America, England, Australia, etc. We test the relative impact of normative and instrumental judgments on police legitimacy in a high-power distance society. It is hypothesized that in this context, individuals in high-power distance societies, suc...

Objective Contact tracing (CT) can limit the spread of infectious diseases, however its effectiveness hinges on public participation. We evaluated perceptions of the financial and health risk posed by COVID-19 and trust in information about COVID-19 provided by the state health department that manages CT as predictors of comfort and willingness to...

In our target article (Hamm et al., Legal and Criminological Psychology, 2022), we propose a Concentric Diagram of Legitimacy as an organizing tool for legitimacy theory. In so doing, we hoped to stimulate a scholarly discussion about the state of the literature and the best avenues for pushing past the field’s current intellectual plateau. Six exp...

Global human health threats, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, necessitate coordinated responses at multiple levels. Public health professionals and other experts broadly agree about actions needed to address such threats, but implementation of this advice is stymied by systemic factors such as prejudice, resource deficits, and high inequality...

The recent protests regarding the state of policing in the United States clearly demonstrate that how the police do their job creates a salient potential for harm to the public. This study applies a multidimensional paradigm of risk perception to quantify evaluations of police-caused harm. Using data from a national (U.S.) convenience sample ( n =...

Food labeling is one approach to encourage safe, healthy, and sustainable dietary practices. Consumer buy and pay preferences for specially labeled food products (e.g., U.S. Department of Agriculture organic, raised without antibiotics, and locally raised) may promote the adoption of associated production practices by food producers. Thus, it is im...

Multidimensional constructs like procedural justice and trustworthiness are important drivers of public trust in the police. Less attention has been paid, however, to the differential import of the dimensions of procedural justice (voice, respect and impartiality) or trustworthiness (ability, benevolence and integrity). A national convenience sampl...

Discipline and context specific inquiries into the nature and dynamics of trust are beginning to give way to cross-boundary understandings which seek to outline its more consistent elements. Of particular note within these is an argument that trust is premised on vulnerability; that it has an important nexus with assessments of the ability, benevol...

Three studies developed and tested a new measure of the perceived trustworthiness of the jury system, the 23-item Jury System Trustworthiness (JUST) scale, and assessed the scale’s convergent and discriminant validity. Study 1 assessed the scale’s factor structure and relation to other relevant constructs. In Studies 2 and 3, the JUST scale was adm...

Objectives The current research adds to the literature addressing police body-worn cameras (BWCs) by experimentally evaluating their effect on an interaction that has, to date, received relatively little systematic, empirical attention: police–eyewitness interactions. Although research suggests that BWCs generally have positive effects, legal schol...

Based on the survey of 495 police officers from the Croatian capital of Zagreb, this chapter explores the relation between organizational justice and police integrity. Grounded in the theory of police integrity and the related methodology developed by Klockars and colleagues, our study incorporates a number of hypothetical scenarios, ranging from p...

In the United States, more than 200 communities are designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as areas of concern for dioxins. Informing the public about potential risks associated with dioxins and delivering information about how to avoid such risks are essential activities. News coverage of environmental and health problems affects h...

Community engagement is a vital aspect of addressing environmental contamination and remediation. In the United States, the Superfund Research Program (SRP) forms groups of academic researchers from the social and physical sciences into Community Engagement Cores (CECs) and Research Translation Cores (RTCs), which focus on various aspects of inform...

Loss of property value is a major concern in communities faced with the toxic byproducts of industrial practices. Even after site remediation, stigma may persist and negatively affect market values of residential properties. To study the effects of contamination and of remediation on property values in Midland, Michigan, where dioxins have been rel...

The current study uses data collected from defendants immediately after their hearings to test hypotheses regarding the relations among constructs relevant to perceptions of the state courts. Taking the Integrated Framework of Legitimacy as its guide, this research hypothesizes that trustworthiness assessments will mediate the effect of procedural...

Political trust is a perennially important concern and the events of the last few years have, in many ways, heightened this importance. The relevant scholarship has done much to meet this challenge but continues to struggle with definitional unclarities and an inability to provide accounts that consistently operate as expected. The current research...

While the story of the Flint water crisis has frequently been told, even sympathetic analyses have largely worked to make invisible the significant actions of Flint residents to protect and advocate for their community. Leaving the voices of these stakeholders out of narratives about the crisis has served to deepen distrust in the community. Our pr...

While the story of the Flint water crisis has frequently been told, even sympathetic analyses have largely worked to make invisible the significant actions of Flint residents to protect and advocate for their community. Leaving the voices of these stakeholders out of narratives about the crisis has served to deepen distrust in the community. Our pr...

Trust is generally recognized as important for risk-relevant behavior but research suggests that trust in different organizations may have varying effects. This research advances the literature by testing two hypotheses which postulate that this variability can be explained by risk perception. We collected data from 351 anglers regarding their trus...

In this study we assess the extent to which the regulations governing the use of drones in the United States address the concerns held by the public they are meant to protect. In general, respondents were most supportive of those regulations that could be categorized as limiting one's exposure to an unwanted drone. The most popular policies were th...

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Explore perceptions of Flint stakeholders on the water crisis regarding trust and the capacity of faith and community-based organizations providing public health services to address community needs. Analyze the community’s voice shared at (1) 17 key community communications (community/congressional meetings and events), an...

The focus of this study is to examine citizen satisfaction with the police. Specifically, the authors aim to understand the factors that determine citizen satisfaction with police services in India, a former English colony and a relatively new republic that has achieved a significant economic development in recent decades. Findings from analysis of...

Positive public perceptions are a critical pillar of the criminal justice system but the literature addressing them often fails to offer clear advice regarding the important constructs or the relationships among them. The research reported here sought to take an important step toward this clarity by recruiting a national convenience sample to compl...

This study examined a knowledge-centered theory of institutional trust development. In the context of trust in water regulatory institutions, the moderating impact of knowledge was tested to determine if there were longitudinal changes in the bases of institutional trust as a function of increases in knowledge about a target institution. We hypothe...

Longitudinal data. (CSV)

Slopes-as-outcomes model 1: Dispositional and governmental trust predicting institutional trust. (DOCX)

Appendix of measures. (DOCX)

Formatting. (SAS)

Longitudinal syntax. (SAS)

Notes. (DOCX)

Slopes-as-outcomes model 4: Trustworthiness predicting institutional trust. (DOCX)

Slopes-as-outcomes model 2: Dispositional and governmental trust predicting trustworthiness. (DOCX)

Slopes-as-outcomes model 3: Dispositional and governmental trust predicting distrustworthiness. (DOCX)

Slopes-as-outcomes model 4: Distrustworthiness predicting institutional trust. (DOCX)

In this article we summarize histories of nonlinear, complex interactions among societal, legal, and ecosystem dynamics in six North American water basins, as they respond to changing climate. These case studies were chosen to explore the conditions for emergence of adaptive governance in heavily regulated and developed social-ecological systems ne...

Trust is critical for natural resource management (NRM). In recognition of this, a noteworthy body of literature has investigated the construct but is, as yet, still developing. The current research proposes and tests an increasingly complete model that integrates the major advances in not only the NRM literature but in the social psychological lit...

Clarifying the “conceptual morass” of the social science of trust is a critical endeavor, and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is an important tool for researchers seeking to investigate the relationships among and relative influence of the many trust constructs in this expanding literature. Problematically, however, the often conceptually overla...

As argued throughout this volume, trust matters. This importance has spawned a number of major contemporary efforts to increase trust in numerous domains. These efforts typically seek to leverage the best available science for understanding and motivating trust but it is, as yet, not well understood to what degree trust is essentially the same or i...

One invasive species of increasing concern nationally is feral swine. These animals can host parasites and diseases that threaten livestock and human health, and regularly cause extensive damage to agricultural land, forests, and water resources. Increased understanding about how risk communication plays a role in effective invasive species policy...

This article examined the extent to which residents living in the Midland–Saginaw–Bay City area in Eastern Michigan felt stigmatized due to industrial contamination. Seventy in-depth interviews were conducted with local residents, focusing on the extent to which they experienced three aspects of stigma—affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Results...

Using confirmatory factor analyses and multiple indicators per construct, we examined a number of theoretically derived factor structures pertaining to numerous trust-relevant constructs (from 9 to12) across four institutional contexts (police, local governance, natural resources, state governance) and multiple participant-types (college students v...

Contemporary natural resource management (NRM) emphasises the role of the public in general and land owners in particular as voluntary participants in the process. Understanding the role of trust in voluntary cooperation is therefore critical, but the current state of the relevant literature is such that it fails to systematically address a few imp...

Older adults are an increasingly relevant subpopulation for criminal justice policy but, as yet, are largely neglected in the relevant research. The current research addresses this by reporting on a psychometric evaluation of a measure of older adults’ Confidence in Legal Institutions (CLI). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) provided support for t...

This dissertation investigates the role of trust in predicting cooperation with a natural resources management institution. It begins with an exploration of the legal landscape against which the relationship between land owners and natural resources management institutions is contextualized, presents a review of the often ostensibly disparate trust...

Although several frameworks for assessing the resilience of social-ecological systems (SESs) have been developed, some practitioners may not have sufficient time and information to conduct extensive resilience assessments. We have presented a simplified approach to resilience assessment that reviews the scientific, historical, and social literature...

Efficiency and resistance to rapid change are hallmarks of both the judicial and legislative branches of the United States government. These defining characteristics, while bringing stability and predictability, pose challenges when it comes to managing dynamic natural systems. As our understanding of ecosystems improves, we must devise ways to acc...

Regulating water resources is a critically important yet increasingly complex component of the interaction between ecology and society. Many argue that effective water regulation relies heavily upon the compliance of water users. The relevant literature suggests that, rather than relying on external motivators for individual compliance, e. g., puni...

Although researchers have consistently demonstrated the importance of confidence in public institutions like the courts, relatively little attention has been paid to understanding what confidence itself really is. This article presents data from two samples of community members, thereby building on and extending a preliminary investigation that sou...

Although several frameworks for assessing the resilience of social-ecological systems (SESs) have been developed, some practitioners may not have sufficient time and information to conduct extensive resilience assessments. We have presented a simplified approach to resilience assessment that reviews the scientific, historical, and social literature...

Jury nullification, which refers to the jury's intentional disregard of the law as presented in arriving at its verdict, is an important policy concern for the legal system. Despite the well-settled law regarding the issue, the legal field is entrenched in a decades old debate regarding its merits and problems, with proponents arguing that courts s...

The purpose of this article is to test whether the use of public participation by a local government increases perceptions of procedural fairness among the public and to propose an explanation for why fairness is a strong predictor of satisfaction with governmental decisions. To do this, we draw on the uncertainty management model to hypothesize th...

Purpose — Municipalities commonly ask the public to give input by answering questions about their preferences. There is some belief that input enhances the public’s confidence in government. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether different types of input activities (obtained by phone or online surveys, or via face-to-face engagements) diff...

This Article examines state statutes providing for the mandatory reporting of older adult maltreatment. These statutes are important in protecting older adults from potential victimization at the hands of both formal and informal caregivers. Nevertheless, Professor Brank, Ms. Wylie, and Mr. Hamm argue that these statutes undermine older adults’ aut...

This article examines the effectiveness of using different kinds of written reminders to reduce misdemeanor defendants' failure-to-appear (FTA) rates. A subset of defendants was surveyed after their scheduled court date to assess their perceptions of procedural justice and trust and confidence in the courts. Reminders reduced FTA overall, and more...

One of the most important things a judge does when presiding over a jury trial is instruct jurors on the law. No doubt judges themselves are well-versed in the law, and the language of jury instructions is the source of much pre-deliberation wrangling on the part of the attorneys. Yet once judges settle on proper instructions, how effectively do th...

Despite its contemporary and theoretical importance in numerous social scientific disciplines, institutional confidence research is limited by a lack of consensus regarding the distinctions and relationships among related constructs (e.g., trust, confidence, legitimacy, distrust, etc.). This study examined four confidence-related constructs that ha...

Municipalities across the country use various methods of public input to inform managers and elected policymakers about citizen’s preferences and perspectives regarding budget matters or performance measures. One benefit of actively involving the public on key governmental decisions is the belief that it enhances the public’s trust and/or confidenc...

Abstract: Trust and confidence are important in any human interaction but this importance is heightened for public institutions like the various regulatory institutions responsible for the Platte and other rivers because of their connection with increasing public willingness to accept the institution’s authority. Public trust and confidence in inst...

Municipalities across the country use various methods of public input to inform managers and elected policymakers about citizen's preferences and perspectives regarding budget matters or performance measures. One benefit of actively involving the public on key governmental decisions is the belief that it enhances the public's trust and/or confidenc...

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According to legal theory, jurors should equally evaluate every defendant found to be legally competent regardless of the defendant’s mental characteristics. Thus, once deemed competent and charged as an adult, a marginally competent juvenile and a clearly competent adult defendant should be evaluated similarly by jurors. As little research address...