Richard John

University of Southern California | USC · Department of Psychology

Student commuting, specifically single-occupant vehicles, is a significant contributing factor to the carbon footprint of universities. Many universities have action plans and programs to reduce emissions from student commuting; however, the issues of safety, time, and convenience typically outweigh students' motivation to use alternative modes of...

Due to the strategic and adaptive nature of adversaries, the deployment of new technologies is common practice in the arenas of security and defense (e.g., new baggage scanners at airports). History has shown that the deployment of these technologies has often been disclosed to the public, allowing malicious actors to potentially understand which v...

This study evaluates the perceptions of school security countermeasures among parents, recent students, and staff (n = 1105) recruited via Prolific.com. The survey collected participants' perceptions of safety and countermeasure effectiveness and invasiveness. Results show broad acceptance of measures like emergency drills, door locks, and security...

Multiattribute decision analysis allows decision makers to identify their objectives as a critical part of constructing a prescriptive model for decision making. Failure to consider all relevant objectives is one of the leading causes of poor decision outcomes (Keeney & Raiffa, Decisions with multiple objectives: Preferences and value trade-offs. C...

Signal detection theory posits that a rational decision made under uncertainty is a function of three properties: discriminability, base rates, and the relative cost of false positive and false negative errors, referred to in legal contexts as a Blackstone ratio. Building on the analysis by Smith and Wells (2024), which focuses on discriminability,...

Empirical evidence suggests that decision‐makers are ill‐equipped to identify all relevant objectives in a decision problem. We examine the effect of an incomplete set of objectives using a Monte Carlo simulation to compare a baseline model to a reduced model incorporating only a subset of objectives. We assess the performance of reduced models var...

Benefit–cost analyses are critical to support U.S. agencies’ programmatic decision making. These analyses are particularly challenging when one of the benefits is adversary deterrence. This paper presents a framework for calculating the value of deterrence related to countermeasures implemented to mitigate an attack by an adaptive adversary. We off...

We estimate the economic impacts of COVID-19 in the U.S. using a disaster economic consequence analysis framework implemented by a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. This facilitates identification of relative influences of several causal factors as "shocks" to the model, including mandatory business closures, disease spread trajec...

Artificial intelligence (AI) research provides a rich source of modeling languages capable of generating socially plausible simulations of human behavior, while also providing a transparent ground truth that can support validation of social-science methods applied to that simulation. In this work, we leverage two established AI representations: dec...

In recent years, there have been many high-profile attacks on large, relatively unprotected venues, including entertainment and shopping complexes in the U.S. and around the world. Public and private decision-makers can choose from a wide array of terrorism countermeasures. A question arises as to whether patrons’ complaints about delays, inconveni...

To extend decision theory models to account for observed choice behavior in sequential risky choices with multiple outcomes, the present study examined and compared 30 heuristic choice models and 6 baseline choice models in a naturalistic, sequential high-stakes game show context. One-thousand and ninety-five games from one British and two American...

There is great value in understanding the public’s reactions to terror attacks, though such reactions pose stark challenges for sound psychological investigation. Reactions to terrorism (as with any other threat) involve emotional and cognitive components, and the degree to which they reciprocally interact is not well understood. Furthermore, much...

With the increased use of social media in crisis communication following extreme events, it is important to understand how the public distinguishes between true and false information. A U.S. adult sample (N = 588) was presented 20 actual social media posts following a natural disaster or soft‐target terrorist attack in the United States. In this st...

This chapter focuses on responses to near‐miss experiences in a cyber environment involving negative consequences (e.g. loss of data, credit card fraud) that could have occurred but did not. A Cyber Near‐miss Appraisal Scale (CNMAS) is described to assess an individual's tendency to ignore a near‐miss message and take risky actions. The scale has a...

Research suggests that public fear and anger in wake of a terror attack can each uniquely contribute to policy attitudes and risk-avoidance behaviors. Given the importance of these negative-valanced emotions, there is value in studying how terror events can incite fear and anger at various times and locations relative to an attack. We analyze 36,49...

This article describes a methodology for risk‐informed benefit–cost analyses of homeland security research products. The methodology is field‐tested with 10 research products developed for the U.S. Coast Guard. Risk‐informed benefit–cost analysis is a tool for risk management that integrates elements of risk analysis, decision analysis, and benefit...

This study examines how exploiting biases in probability judgment can enhance deterrence using a fixed allocation of defensive resources. We investigate attacker anchoring heuristics for conjunctive events with missing information to distort attacker estimates of success for targets with equal defensive resources. We designed and conducted a behavi...

In communicating the risk that terror attacks pose to the public, government agencies and other organizations must understand which characteristics of an attack contribute to the public's perception of its severity. An attack's casualty count is one of the most commonly used metrics of a terror attack's severity, yet it is unclear whether the publi...

Authentication is a major component in protecting the security of online user services. An effective implementation of security policies requires compliance from users, who are one class of key stakeholders in the cybersecurity policy decision problem. We examine this multiple stakeholder decision problem by conducting a virtual public values forum...

The current study developed a mixed-methods coding scheme to explore the degree of correspondence between Latino patients’ and their psychotherapists’ descriptions of the presenting problems. We interviewed 34 patients and clinicians (17 dyads) following an initial therapy session. Using a theoretical thematic approach, we generated a list of probl...

Empirical studies of sexual offender recidivism have proliferated in recent decades. Virtually all of the studies define recidivism as a new legal charge or conviction for a sexual crime, and these studies tend to find recidivism rates of the order of 5–15% after 5 years and 10–25% after 10+ years. It is uncontroversial that such a definition of re...

Previous research has evaluated public risk perception and response to a natural hazards in various settings; however, most of these studies were conducted either with a single scenario or after a natural disaster struck. To better understand the dynamic relationships among affect, risk perception, and behavioral intentions related to natural disas...

We explore three research questions related to risky sequential choice: (1) Does adherence to expectedutility theory increase or decrease over sequential choices? (2) Does risk attitude vary systematically oversequential choices? and (3) To what extent are sequential choices influenced by future possible choices?We selected the game show, Deal or N...

Much legal discourse has focused on the probable cause standard and the constitutionality of law enforcement searches. Existing case law stipulates that probable cause requires less than 50% certainty in a suspect's involvement in a crime, and that it should be applied consistently regardless of the crime at hand or type of search in question. Beca...

The current research examines how American air travelers perceive various risk-based airport security screening policies that vary in terms of selection procedure and agency. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions that differ in terms of procedures for selecting passengers for enhanced screening. Respondents were p...

In most cyber security contexts, users need to make trade-offs for information security. This research examined this issue by quantifying the relative value of information security within a value system that comprises of multiple conflicting objectives. Using this quantification as a platform, this research also examined the effect of different usa...

Transportation systems are one of the most frequent and high-profile targets for terrorist attacks, and such attacks can cause reduced or altered public travel behavior that can have severe economic consequences. Thus, understanding the relationship between transportation terror and public response is critical. We recruited n = 430 participants to...

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently commissioned a risk analysis of the passenger threat vector in which an adversary gains access through the screening checkpoint. The goal of the project was to provide insights to the TSA to improve both safety and resource allocation as they continue to develop new security procedures in a...

Today's information-rich society demands constant evaluation of cause-effect relationships; behaviors and attitudes ranging from medical choices to voting decisions to policy preferences typically entail some form of causal inference ("Will this policy reduce crime?", "Will this activity improve my health?"). Cause-effect relationships such as thes...

Many studies have investigated public reactions to nuclear accidents. However, few studies focused on more common events when a serious accident could have happened but did not. This study evaluated public response (emotional, cognitive, and behavioral) over three phases of a near-miss nuclear accident. Simulating a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA)...

Understanding motivations that drive terrorist group behavior is critical. Current methods for terrorism risk assessment focus on target vulnerability, terrorist capability and resources, and attack consequence. However, threat assessment requires consideration of the influence of terrorist group values and beliefs in shaping militant behavior. The...

Introduction Previously, we've examined how to set up and solve a Stackelberg security game (SSG) (Tambe, 2011). In doing so, we've demonstrated how game theory can be useful for reasoning about real-world security settings where security forces must protect critical assets from potential adversaries. However, an important factor in these real-worl...

This study describes a three-player cyber security game involving an attacker, a defender, and a user. An attacker must choose to attack the defender or the user or to forego an attack altogether. Conversely, defender (e.g., system administrator) and user (e.g., individual system user) must choose between either a “standard” or “enhanced” security...

The extent to which users take precautionary actions against cyber risks is conditional upon how they perceive the value of information security relative to other important personal goals. In most cyber security contexts, users are faced with trade-offs between information security and other important attributes that they desire to maximize. We exa...

Near-miss experiences have been identified as a contributing factor in responses to risk of disaster events. Researchers have found that specific characteristics of a near-miss event could lead individuals to interpret the risk as either “vulnerable” or “resilient.” Moreover, these interpretations can lead to quite different decisions regarding fut...

The growing number of anti-terrorism policies has elevated public concerns about discrimination. Within the context of airport security screening, the current study examines how American travelers value the principle of equal protection by quantifying the "equity premium" that they are willing to sacrifice to avoid screening procedures that result...

The presumption of innocence explicitly forbids jurors from using official suspicion or indictment as evidence of guilt in a criminal trial. A behavioral experiment tested whether jurors follow this prescription. It revealed that, compared to when a suspect had been merely named, jurors thought that the individual was significantly more likely to b...

This study addressed three questions: 1. What are the objectives of the leaders of ISIL? 2. What are the objectives of the followers of ISIL? 3. How are the two sets of objectives related? To answer these questions we analyzed the transcripts of interviews and presentations of 59 subject matter experts (SMEs) and conducted a separate analysis of sp...

In Stackelberg security games, a defender must allocate scarce resources to defend against a potential attacker. The optimal defense involves the randomization of scarce security resources, yet how attackers perceive the risk given randomized defense is not well understood. We conducted an experiment where attackers chose whether to attack or not a...

There is a paucity of research examining public response to the cumulative effects of multiple related extreme events over time. We investigated the separate and combined effects of frequency and trajectory of terrorist attacks. A scenario simulation of a series of gas station bombings in Southern California was developed to evaluate respondents' a...

Past research indicates that people have strong concerns about their information privacy. This study applies multi-attribute utility theory to conceptualize the concern for smartphone privacy and examine how people value smartphone privacy protection. We also investigated how the value of privacy varied by the identity of a privacy attacker and ind...

The presumption of innocence is sacrosanct in Anglo-legal doctrine, yet how jurors interpret it remains unknown. This experiment manipulated the alleged crime (violent, child, or sexual assault) and the defendant’s physical appearance (good, mediocre, or bad). Following Savage (1954), uncertainty about the guilt of the defendant was conceptualized...

"The contents of this paper reflect some of the work that Dr. Cabayan and his colleagues are doing to help us understand and comprehend this “intangible power” across a unique enterprise of academicians, scientists, policy intellectuals, current and former Foreign Service, military, and intelligence professionals. Most importantly, their efforts to...

Stackelberg Security Games (SSG) have been used to model defender- attacker relationships for analyzing real-world security resource allocation problems. Research has focused on generating algorithms that are optimal and efficient for defenders, based on a presumed model of adversary choices. However, relatively less has been done descriptively to...

Cyber security often depends on decisions made by human operators, who are commonly considered a major cause of security failures. We conducted 2 behavioral experiments to explore whether and how cyber security decision-making responses depend on gain–loss framing and salience of a primed recall prior experience. In Experiment I, we employed a 2 ×...

Security of infrastructure is a major concern. Traditional security schedules are unable to provide omnipresent coverage; consequently, adversaries can exploit predictable vulnerabilities to their advantage. Randomized security schedules, which randomly deploy security measures, overcome these limitations, but public perceptions of such schedules h...

Forensic science is not infallible, as data collected by the Innocence Project have revealed. The rate at which errors occur in forensic DNA testing-the so-called "gold standard" of forensic science-is not currently known. This article presents a Bayesian analysis to demonstrate the profound impact that error rates have on the probative value of a...

Extensive research has explored policy challenges associated with preparing and responding to a large-scale biological release. A key component in recovery strategy development that has received less attention is the understanding of government policy influence on the impacted populations’ migratory decisions. This study experimentally manipulates...

While game-theoretic approaches have been proposed for addressing complex security resource allocation problems, many of the standard game-theoretic assumptions fail to address human adversaries who security forces will likely face. To that end, approaches have been proposed that attempt to incorporate better models of human decision-making in thes...

A large-scale biological terrorist attack would result in mass casualties and have major economic consequences for the affected area, and potentially for the nation as a whole. The extent to which an impacted area recovers from such losses depends in large part on the decision making of local residents. In this study we utilize scenario simulation,...

Structured methods to assess violence risk have proliferated in recent years, but such methods are not uncontroversial. A "core controversy" concerns the extent to which an actuarial risk estimate derived at the group level should-morally, logically, or mathematically-apply to any particular individual within the group. This study examines the rela...

September 11 created a natural experiment that enables us to track the psychological effects of a large-scale terror event over time. The archival data came from 8,070 participants of 10 ABC and CBS News polls collected from September 2001 until September 2006. Six questions investigated emotional, behavioral, and cognitive responses to the events...

While extensive risk perception research has focused on emotions, cognitions, and behavior at static points in time, less attention has been paid to how these variables might change over time. This study assesses how negative affect, threat beliefs, perceived risk, and intended avoidance behavior change over the course of an escalating biological d...

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, there has been an increase in public discussion regarding U.S. domestic intelligence activities. Domestic intelligence activities focus on gathering information about potential threats from individuals within the United States, and completely rational members of the public can have different opinions about the acce...

Genetic databases are highly controversial. Significant controversy followed a report by the National Research Council (1996) concluding that a DNA match resulting from a database trawl is less probative than when only a single test is conducted. Legal scholars and statisticians have demonstrated why this conclusion is specious, but there is no emp...

The logical import of base rates is known among violence risk assessment researchers, but there has been little epistemological discussion of base rates, including identification of the relevant base rate and determining from whence the relevant base rate ought to come. This article describes the substantive considerations before examining whether...

Mechanical restraints are highly controversial because of the seriousness of their consequences. Death and severe physical and psychological injury are not uncommon consequences, yet, at the same time, restraints can be used to effectively avert violence and prevent injury. Hence, advocates call for their abolition and professionals regard them as...

Recent attempts to indict the use of actuarial risk assessment instruments have relied on confidence intervals to demonstrate that risk estimates derived at the group level do not necessarily apply to any specific individual within that group. This article contends that frequentist confidence intervals are inapposite to the current debate. Instead,...

This paper demonstrates an innovative approach for learning about earthquake victims' behavioral responses to an emergency situation in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake. Researchers developed a scenario following a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that leads to escalating complications described over eight episodes. Subjects were assigned to scenar...

Despite a proliferation of actuarial risk assessment instruments, empirical research on the communication of violence risk is scant and there is virtually no research on the consumption of actuarial risk assessment. Using a 2 × 3 Latin Square factorial design, this experiment tested whether decision-makers are sensitive to varying levels of risk ex...

Stackelberg games have garnered significant attention in recent years given their deployment for real world security. Most of these systems, such as ARMOR, IRIS and GUARDS have adopted the standard game-theoretical assumption that adversaries are perfectly rational, which is standard in the game theory literature. This assumption may not hold in re...

It becomes critical to address human adversaries' bounded rationality in security games as the real-world deployment of such games spreads. To that end, the key contributions of this paper include: (i) new efficient algorithms for computing optimal strategic solutions using Prospect Theory and Quantal Response Equilibrium; (ii) the most comprehensi...

Stackelberg games have recently gaired significant attention for resource allocation decisions in security settings. One critical assumption of traditional Stackelberg models is that all players are perfectly rational and that the followers perfectly observe the leader's strategy. However, in real-world security settings, security agencies must dea...

There is an ethical debate about whether mental health professionals should predict dangerousness. One powerful objection involves considering the nature and scope of what is being predicted. Dangerousness is a bifurcated concept with a descriptive component, corresponding to risk factors and their relation to violence, and a normative component, c...

Generating fear within the civilian population is an expressed motive underlying most terrorist acts. Fear has both psychological and economic consequences. To better understand these consequences, our studies ask people to imagine how they would feel if an attack or series of attacks occurred, as well as how their plans would be affected. We elici...

The objective of this research is to further develop our pioneering approach to adversary threat assessment through the construction of random utility models of terrorist preferences. This work builds on previous research efforts (Rosoff, 2009; Rosoff & John, 2009) that have used decision analysis models and elicitation methods to: (1) construct of...

The current study examines whether an educational intervention in combination with photo aging reduces young adults’ intention to socially smoke, decreases willingness to smoke under certain conditions (e.g., stress), and decreases smoking behavior. Data provide support for a relationship between gender, future time perspective and photo aging, fin...

During the second year of this project, we have continued to collect data in which we examine responses to terrorism threat. Our basic technique is to present hypothetical scenarios in which terrorists do their evil deeds. Because the main objective of terrorists is to instill fear, we ask people to imagine how they would feel if these attacks occu...

The relationship between suicide and social class has been equivocal. While some authors have reported that higher social class is related to higher rates of suicide, most other studies report that lower social class is associated with higher rates of suicide. Our study attempted to resolve these inconsistencies by using a High Risk for schizophren...

The relationship between work and marriage is well documented in dual-earner couples. Work-marital spillover patterns, however, have been understudied in single-earner couples. The current study extends the work-marital spillover literature by examining spillover patterns from individual experiences and self-care behaviors to the marital relationsh...

This research project has two ongoing primary objectives: (1) Develop methods to estimate the likelihood of terrorism events (attack modes), and (2) Develop methods to predict both immediate and long-term public response to various terrorism events. During Year 4 we made progress on both of these objectives by focusing on the decisions faced by ter...

This study examines the criminal arrest records of a Danish birth cohort of 28,884 men to test the hypothesis that specialization exists for violent offending. Property offending is included for comparison. Specialization in violence is found to exist for offenders with more than three arrests, and specialization in property offending, for offender...

We examined how the frequency of 23 activities varied as a function of the level of cockpit automation. The pilots' activities were recorded in actual revenue-generating line operations at 7.5-sec intervals during climbs and descents during 193 flights in 2 models of the B737-200 and in 2 models of the B737-300. Eight of the 23 activities were assu...

In today's global market environment, enterprises are increasingly turning to use of distributed teams to leverage their resources and address diverse markets. Individual members of structurally diverse distributed teams need to develop their collaboration know-how to work effectively with others on their team. The lack of face-to-face cues creates...

This study empirically tests A. Holtzworth-Munroe and G. L. Stuart's (1994) typology of male batterers in a community sample. Latent class analyses based on severity of physical aggression, generality of violence, and psychopathology partially replicated the Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart typology by identifying 3 types of violent men: family-only, m...

This article examines the spillover and crossover patterns between an individual's daily work experiences and health-promoting behaviors and daily marital interaction in 49 dual-earner couples. Husbands and wives separately completed daily diaries that included questions about work experiences, health-promoting behaviors, and marital interactions o...

This study examined the utility of the TELE, a telephone assessment for dementia, in a sample of 269 individuals that was not selected on the basis of previous dementia diagnosis. Thus, the conditions of the study reflect the actual situation in which a screening instrument might be employed. Scores on TELE were compared to dementia diagnoses. Usin...

Large projects, especially those planned and managed by government agencies, often incur substantial cost overruns. The tolerance, particularly on the part of members of Congress, for these cost overruns has decreased, thus increasing the need for accurate, defensible cost estimates. Important aspects of creating responsible cost estimates are acco...

The authors examined the relation between parents' hostility during conflict-focused discussions and child behavior problems. Parents engaged in 3 discussions: a dyadic marital discussion of marital disagreements, a dyadic marital discussion of child-related disagreements, and a triadic family discussion with the child about the child-related disag...

Coparenting is examined as an explanatory link between marital conflict and parent-child relations in 2-parent families. Data were collected from 3 samples (pilot sample, n = 220 mothers; preadolescent sample, n = 75 couples; preschool sample, n = 172 couples) by using the Coparenting Questionnaire (G. Margolin, 1992b) to assess parents' perception...