Robert MacCoun

Robert MacCoun
Stanford University | SU

Ph.D., Psychology

About

118
Publications
41,679
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
7,191
Citations
Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
July 1993 - July 2014
University of California, Berkeley
Position
  • University of California, Berkeley
January 1993 - present
University of California, Berkeley

Publications

Publications (118)
Article
Psychologists have long studied the ways in which individuals draw inferences from evidence in their environment, and the conditions under which individuals forgo or ignore those inferences and instead conform to the choices of their peers. Recently, anthropologists and biologists have given considerable attention to the ways in which these two pro...
Article
In states where marijuana has been legalized, new edible marijuana products raise public health concerns, including a risk of consumption by children. States have only partially addressed these risks, which are likely to be amplified as other states follow their lead.
Article
Full-text available
Nearly all American states use one of two systems for setting the amount of child support that noncustodial parents (NCPs) are required to pay to custodial parents (CPs). In previous work, we found that lay judgments of the child support amount the law should require differ in meaningful ways from these two systems: Our respondents favored child su...
Article
I compare the collective behavior map proposed by Bentley et al. ("BOB" for short) with a similar "balance of pressures" (BOP) map proposed by MacCoun (2012). The BOB and BOP maps have important points of convergence, but also some differences. The comparison suggests that they are analogous to different map "projections" for maps of Earth - differ...
Article
Full-text available
There is a perennial expert debate about the criteria to be included or excluded for the DSM diagnoses of substance use dependence. Yet analysts routinely report evidence for the unidimensionality of the resulting checklist. If in fact the checklist is unidimensional, the experts are wrong that the criteria are distinct, so either the experts are m...
Article
Full-text available
Is it possible to increase one's influence simply by behaving more confidently? Prior research presents two competing hypotheses: (1) the confidence heuristic holds that more confidence increases credibility, and (2) the calibration hypothesis asserts that overconfidence will backfire when others find out. Study 1 reveals that, consistent with the...
Article
There is a perennial expert debate about the criteria to be included or excluded for the DSM diagnoses of substance use dependence. Yet analysts routinely report evidence for the unidimensionality of the resulting checklist. If in fact the checklist is unidimensional, the experts are wrong that the criteria are distinct, so either the experts are m...
Article
Early jury simulation research, reviewed and meta-anyalysed by MacCoun and Kerr (1988), suggested a leniency asymmetry in criminal jury deliberations such that a given faction favoring acquittal will tend to have a greater chance of prevailing than would an equivalent sized faction favoring conviction. More recently, a handful of field studies of a...
Article
In previous work, we have demonstrated that lay intuitions about how much child support should be paid in various situations differ in meaningful ways from extant systems. We find that the wealthier the NCP, the more dollars respondents think he should be paying. But the wealthier the CP, the smaller the percent the NCP should be paying, because sh...
Article
Three public opinion studies examined public attitudes toward prevalence reduction (PR; reducing the number of people engaging in an activity) and harm reduction (HR; reducing the harm associated with an activity) across a wide variety of domains. Studies 1 and 2 were telephone surveys of California adults’ views on PR and HR strategies for a wide...
Article
Full-text available
Citizens awaiting jury service were asked a series of items, in Likert format, to determine their endorsement of various statements about principles to use in setting child support amounts. These twenty items were derived from extant child support systems, from past literature and from Ellman and Ellman's (2008) Theory of Child Support. The twenty...
Article
Reports an error in "The Burden of Social Proof: Shared Thresholds and Social Influence" by Robert J. MacCoun (Psychological Review, Advanced Online Publication, Feb 20, 2012, np). In the article, incorrect versions of figures 3 and 6 were included. Also, Table 8 should have included the following information in the table footnote “P(A V) = probabi...
Article
Full-text available
Social influence rises with the number of influence sources, but the proposed relationship varies across theories, situations, and research paradigms. To clarify this relationship, I argue that people share some sense of where the "burden of social proof" lies in situations where opinions or choices are in conflict. This suggests a family of models...
Article
Full-text available
For decades, the debate over the merits of ending drug prohibition has carried on with little consequence. The recent near success of a cannabis legalization initiative in California suggests that citizens and politicians alike are more receptive to calls for change. We review basic research on deterrence and prices as well as emerging evidence on...
Article
No modern jurisdiction has ever legalized commercial production, distribution and possession of cannabis for recreational purposes. This paper presents insights about the effect of legalization on production costs and consumption and highlights important design choices. Insights were uncovered through our analysis of recent legalization proposals i...
Article
To examine the empirical consequences of officially tolerated retail sales of cannabis in the Netherlands, and possible implications for the legalization debate. Available Dutch data on the prevalence and patterns of use, treatment, sanctioning, prices and purity for cannabis dating back to the 1970s are compared to similar indicators in Europe and...
Article
For almost all crimes, the appearance and behaviour of the victim are legally irrelevant to a defendant's guilt or innocence. However, there is evidence that such extralegal victim characteristics can influence juror behaviour. This paper reports an experimental juror simulation which examined the effects on mock jurors' verdicts of three victim ch...
Article
This study examined the effects of group members' relative task ability on the relationship between group sex composition and member task motivation. Male and female subjects performed a simple motor task with an opposite-sex partner, a same-sex partner, or no partner. Partners had higher, equal, or lower task ability than subjects. When the partne...
Book
Full-text available
At the request of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Secretary of Defense, the RAND Corporation conducted a study on sexual orientation and U.S. military policy in order to provide information and analysis that might be considered in discussing the possible repeal of the law known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT). The study examined DADT...
Article
Harm reduction principles have not been applied to social policy programs that affect drug users. This paper considers whether income supports for the drug-dependent poor might be harm reducing, given that a principal harm related to drug dependence is crime committed to finance drug use. We examine the political fate of the principal income suppor...
Article
Harm reduction principles have not been applied to social policy programs that affect drug users. This paper considers whether income supports for the drug-dependent poor might be harm reducing, given that a principal harm related to drug dependence is crime committed to finance drug use. We examine the political fate of the principal income suppor...
Article
Citizens awaiting jury service were asked a series of items, in Likert format, to determine their endorsement of various principles that might be called upon to explain legal judgments about the appropriate amount of child support to require in individual cases. These items were derived from extant systems, from past literature and from Ellman and...
Article
Setting the amount of a child support award involves tradeoffs in the allocation of finite resources among at least three private parties: the two parents, and their child or children. Federal law today requires states to have child support guidelines or formulas that determine child support amounts on a uniform statewide basis. These state guideli...
Article
How do ordinary citizens react to new policy-relevant findings that they learn about from media mentions or word of mouth? We conducted an experiment embedded in a random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone survey of 1,050 California adults. Respondents heard a description of a hypothetical study on one of four politicized topics or a politically neutral to...
Article
Full-text available
Deterrence theory proposes that legal compliance is influenced by the anticipated risk of legal sanctions. This implies that changes in law will produce corresponding changes in behavior, but the marijuana decriminalization literature finds only fragmentary support for this prediction. But few studies have directly assessed the accuracy of citizens...
Article
Using administrative data on public school students in North Carolina, we find that sixth grade students attending middle schools are much more likely to be cited for discipline problems than those attending elementary school. That difference remains after adjusting for the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the students and their sch...
Article
Full-text available
People tend to believe, and take advice from, informants who are highly confident. However, people use more than a mere “confidence heuristic.” We believe that confidence is influential because—in the absence of other information—people assume it is a valid cue to an informant’s likelihood of being correct. However, when people get evidence about a...
Article
For all its problems, the microeconomic "rational addiction" theory had the appeal of making clear predictions about the effects of various drug policies. The emerging picture of the "what" and "how" of addiction is far more complex. Addiction scientists might help bridge the science-policy gap by devoting more attention to the "whom" and "when" of...
Article
Deterrence theory proposes that legal compliance is influenced by the anticipated risk of legal sanctions. This implies that changes in law will produce corresponding changes in behavior, but the marijuana decriminalization literature finds only fragmentary support for this prediction. But few studies have directly assessed the accuracy of citizens...
Article
Different models of judicial decision making highlight particular goals. Traditional legal theory posits that in making decisions judges strive to reach the correct legal decision as dictated by precedent. Attitudinal and strategic models focuses on the ways in which judges further their preferred policies. The managerial model emphasizes the incre...
Article
We examine how ordinary citizens translate intuitions about child welfare and distributive justice into dollar amounts for post-divorce child support payments. Our analyses indicate that child support judgments are quite sensitive to anchoring and question-wording effects. Nevertheless, we find much that is both interpretable and principled in thes...
Article
Prohibition makes some drug use and drug selling a crime by statute, but licit drugs like alcohol are also associated with criminality in myriad ways. Within a prohibition regime, it is difficult but important to distinguish a drug's "intrinsic" psychopharmacological harms from the harms created or exacerbated by prohibition and its enforcement. Ra...
Article
Full-text available
In a variety of important domains, there is considerable correlational evidence suggestive of what are variously referred to as social norm effects, contagion effects, information cascades, or peer effects. It is difficult to statistically identify whether such effects are causal, and there are various non-causal mechanisms that can produce such ap...
Article
Jurors rely heavily on witnesses' confidence and veracity when evaluating credibility. Three studies demonstrate that jurors will regard a witness's calibration - the relation between that witness's own confidence and accuracy - as more important than either confidence or veracity when calibration information is available. We have already shown (Te...
Article
Confident witnesses are deemed more credible than unconfident ones, and accurate witnesses are deemed more credible than inaccurate ones. But are those effects independent? Two experiments show that errors in testimony damage the overall credibility of witnesses who were confident about the erroneous testimony more than that of witnesses who were n...
Article
Legal rules are often understood as setting the appropriate balance between competing claims. One might expect policymakers to identify these competing claims and employ a systematic and comprehensive analysis to assign them relative values, and to generate legal rules that follow from those values. But probably, they will not. If policy is instead...
Article
Full-text available
Using administrative data on public school students in North Carolina, we find that sixth grade students attending middle schools are much more likely to be cited for discipline problems than those attending elementary school. That difference remains after adjusting for the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the students and their sch...
Article
Full-text available
Based on a new Army War College study of unit cohesion in the Iraq War, Wong et al. argue that successful unit performance is determined by social cohesion (the strength of interpersonal bonds among members) rather than task cohesion (a sense of shared commitment to the unit’s mission). If correct, these conclusions have important implications for...
Article
Full-text available
cle, I examine a more indirect manifestation of the rule of law: the indirect effect that criminal law can have on private risk management efforts by individuals and corporations. Formal law can encourage private risk regulation, but it can also distort it. This Article examines the chemical testing of psychoactive drugs. Trained technicians in com...
Article
Full-text available
The procedural justice literature has grown enormously since the early work of Thibaut and Walker in the 1970s. Since then, the finding that citizens care enormously about the process by which outcomes are reached—even unfavorable outcomes—has been replicated a wide range of methodologies (including panel surveys, psychometric work, and experimenta...
Article
Full-text available
In this essay, I discuss the difficulty of sustaining an inquisitorial system of policy research and analysis when it is embedded in a broader adversarial political setting. Conflicts of interest in public policy research exist on a continuum from blatant pecuniary bias to more subtle ideological bias. Because these biases are only partially suscep...
Article
Although frequently discussed as a singular policy, there is tremendous variation in the laws and regulations surrounding so-called decriminalization policies adopted by Western countries, with many jurisdictions adopting depenalization policies rather than policies that actually change the criminal status of cannabis possession offences. This pape...
Article
Factfinders in civil cases must often make a constellation of decisions, such as assigning responsibility and blame, making compensation and (sometimes) giving out punishment. These decisions are likely to evoke numerous social and moral concerns and, therefore, inevitably implicate a variety of instrumental and symbolic goals. We argue that descri...
Article
Full-text available
Drug markets have been targeted for increasingly tough enforcement, yet retail prices for cocaine and heroin have fallen by 70–80%. No research has explained adequately why prices have fallen. This paper explores the possibility that part of the explanation may lie in the failure of drug dealers to respond to risks the way the simplest rational act...
Article
Full-text available
de Zwart & van Laar ([2001][1]) provide a thoughtful discussion of our recent article comparing alternative legal regimes for cannabis ([MacCoun & Reuter, 2001 a ][2]). We quite agree that any correlation between a rise in cannabis-selling coffee shops and a rise in cannabis prevalence might be
Book
This book provides the first multidisciplinary and nonpartisan analysis of how the United States should decide on the legal status of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. It draws on data about the experiences of Western European nations with less punitive drug policies as well as new analyses of America's experience with legal cocaine and heroin a centu...
Article
Full-text available
Cannabis policy continues to be controversial in North America, Europe and Australia. To inform this debate, we examine alternative legal regimes for controlling cannabis availability and use. We review evidence on the effects of cannabis depenalisation in the USA, Australia and The Netherlands. We update and extend our previous (MacCoun & Reuter,...
Book
This book provides the first multidisciplinary and nonpartisan analysis of how the United States should decide on the legal status of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. It draws on data about the experiences of Western European nations with less punitive drug policies as well as new analyses of America’s experience with legal cocaine and heroin a centu...
Article
Full-text available
This brief addresses the issue of jury performance and jury responses to expert testimony. It reviews and summaries a substantial body of research evidence about jury behavior that has been produced over the past quarter century. The great weight of that evidence challenges the view that jurors abdicate their responsibilities as fact finders when f...
Article
This brief addresses the issue of jury responses to expert testimony.
Article
Full-text available
Comments on the article by R. Hastie et al (see record 1998-04034-003 ) and N. Vidmar's (see record 1999-15875-006 ) critique of the Hastie et al study that examined civil juries' decisions concerning defendants' liability for punitive damages in court cases and whether jurors' demographic characteristics predict their verdicts. The current author...
Article
Full-text available
Replies to the comments by D. Cadogan (see record 1999-11644-010) and K. Resnicow and E. Drucker (see record 1999-11644-011) on the present author's article (see record 1998-11971-003) which examined 3 strategies for dealing with the harmful consequences of drug use and risky behaviors. The author clarifies some misunderstandings and highlights...
Article
Full-text available
Recent tort reform debates have been hindered by a lack of knowledge of how jurors assess damages. Two studies investigated whether jurors are able to appropriately compartmentalize compensatory and punitive damages. In Study 1, mock jurors read a trial summary and were asked to assess compensatory and punitive damages in one of three conditions: (...
Article
Full-text available
This article discusses 3 different strategies for dealing with the harmful consequences of drug use and other risky behaviors: We can discourage people from engaging in the behavior (prevalence reduction), we can encourage people to reduce the frequency or extent of the behavior (quantity reduction), or we can try to reduce the harmful consequences...
Article
The latter half of this century has seen an erosion in the perceived legitimacy of science as an impartial means of finding truth. Many research topics are the subject of highly politicized dispute; indeed, the objectivity of the entire discipline of psychology has been called into question. This essay examines attempts to use science to study scie...
Article
Full-text available
The Dutch depenalization and subsequent de facto legalization of cannabis since 1976 is used here to highlight the strengths and limitations of reasoning by analogy as a guide for projecting the effects of relaxing drug prohibitions. While the Dutch case and other analogies have flaws, they appear to converge in suggesting that reductions in crimin...
Article
Full-text available
Gender differences in treatment and in judgments of distributive and procedural justice were examined. Three hundred nine litigants who had been involved in arbitrated auto negligence lawsuits responded to exit surveys. Two mechanisms by which gender might influence justice perceptions were explored. First, we examined whether a “chivalry bias” mig...
Article
Heyman makes a convincing case that a melioration choice strategy is sufficient to produce addictive behavior. But given a plethora of addiction theories, the question is whether melioration theory is superior to rivals more sophisticated than a simple disease model or operant conditioning account. Heyman offers little direct evidence that meliorat...
Article
Full-text available
The relative susceptibility of individuals and groups to systematic judgmental biases is considered. An overview of the relevant empirical literature reveals no clear or general pattern. However, a theoretical analysis employing J. H. Davis's (1973) social decision scheme (SDS) model reveals that the relative magnitude of individual and group bias...
Article
Full-text available
The relative susceptibility of individuals and groups to systematic judgmental biases is considered. An overview of the relevant empirical literature reveals no clear or general pattern. However, a theoretical analysis employing J. H. Davis’s (1973) social decision scheme (SDS) model reveals that the relative magnitude of individual and group bias...
Article
Full-text available
A content analysis of 249 articles fromTime, Newsweek, Fortune, Forbes, andBusiness Week during 1980–1990 examined the representativeness of popular media coverage of tort litigation. Compared to objective data on tort cases, the magazine articles considerably overrepresented the relative frequency of controversial forms of litigation (product liab...
Article
The debate over alternative regimes for currently illicit psychoactive substances focuses on polar alternatives: harsh prohibition and sweeping legalization. This study presents an array of alternatives that lies between these extremes. The current debate lacks an explicit and inclusive framework for making comparative judgments. In this study, we...
Article
explore the following question: are decision-making groups any less (or more) subject to judgmental biases than individual decision makers / shed light on when groups are more biased than individuals, when individuals are more biased than groups, and most important, whether and why there are patterns in such comparisons SDS [social decision schem...
Article
Evidence that juries treat corporate defendants less favorably than individual defendants is often cited in support of the widely held view that juries are biased against wealthy ''deep-pocket'' defendants. Such evidence confounds defendant wealth and defendant identity. In two juror simulation experiments involving citizens on jury duty, these fac...
Article
We present a multiple-cohort analysis of rates of participation in drug offenses versus other crime in an urban sample, based on official charge data on young adults from the Pretrial Services Agency in the District of Columbia for the years 1985 to 1991. We make lower-bound estimates of how many individuals from particular population groups residi...
Article
Analyzed 2 convenience samples of opinion essays from US newspapers to examine differences in the content and complexity of argumentation in the drug legalization debate. Content analyses of 51 New York Times essays over a 20-yr span of the 1970s and 1980s and 133 essays from 27 newspapers across the country in 1989 and 1990 suggest that the debat...
Article
Full-text available
There is an ongoing American policy debate about the appropriate legal status for psychoactive drugs. Prohibition, decriminalization, and legalization positions are all premised on assumptions about the behavioral effects of drug laws. What is actually known and not known about these effects is reviewed. Rational-choice models of legal compliance s...
Article
Full-text available
There is an ongoing American policy debate about the appropriate legal status for psychoactive drugs. Prohibition, decriminalization, and legalization positions are all premised on assumptions about the behavioral effects of drug laws. What is actually known and not known about these effects is reviewed. Rational-choice models of legal compliance s...
Article
One hundred and eighty-six probationers in Washington, D.C., who acknowledged a recent history of drug dealing were interviewed regarding their legitimate and illegitimate activities. They reported median net earnings of $721 per month from drug sales - $2,000 per month among the 37% who reported selling drugs selling drugs on a daily basis. These...
Article
Full-text available
Arbitration programs are expected to reduce delay and costs by providing a more efficient substitute for trial. But since most disputes are already resolved without adjudication, an arbitration program is likely to divert more cases from settlement than from trial. The net effect can be an increase in delay and congestion in the courts. This patter...
Article
Does deliberation attenuate extralegal biases in jury verdicts, or does it exaggerate them? Consistent with an information-integration theory analysis, Kaplan and Miller in 1978 found that deliberation can eliminate such biases. However, in the present study, the physical attractiveness of a criminal defendant only influenced postdeliberation mock...
Article
Full-text available
Little is known about the reactions of tort litigants to traditional and alternative litigation procedures. To explore this issue, we interviewed litigants in personal injury cases in three state courts whose cases had been resolved by trial, court-annexed arbitration, judicial settlement conferences, or bilateral settlement. The litigants viewed t...
Article
Full-text available
Because trial juries deliberate in secrecy, legal debates about jury functioning have relied heavily on anecdote and speculation. In recent years, investigators have begun to challenge many common assumptions about jury behavior. An important tool in this effort has been the mock jury experiment, in which research participants are randomly assigned...

Network

Cited By