Previous research evaluating burglars' offending location choices has produced mixed findings about the influence of physical barriers and connectors on offender movement patterns. Consequently, this article utilises the discrete spatial choice approach to formally evaluate the impact of barriers and connectors on residential burglars' macro-level offending location choices. Data from Perth, Western Australia, demonstrated that physical barriers and connectors exert significant influence on offender decision-making at this level, and that the influence of impermeable barriers increases with proximity of these obstacles to the offender's point of origin. These findings provide formalised evidence for the independent importance of physical barriers and connectors in offender movement and are discussed with respect to current environmental criminology theory.

This article investigated the role of the recognition criterion in the verbal overshadowing effect (VOE). In 3 experiments, people witnessed an event, verbally described a perpetrator, and then attempted identification. The authors found in Experiment 1, which included a "not present" response option and both perpetrator-present (PP) and perpetrator-absent (PA) lineups, an increased reluctance to identify a person from both lineup types after verbalization. Experiment 2 incorporated a forced-choice procedure, and the authors found no effect of verbalization on identification performance. Experiment 3 replicated the essential aspects of these results. Consequently, the VOE may reflect a change in recognition criterion rather than a changed processing style or alteration of the underlying memory trace. This conclusion was confirmed by computational modeling of the data.

No abstract

Past studies examining the international conflict behavior of parliamentary democracies have reported inconsistent findings and produced some empirical puzzles. One of the main puzzles is that, despite a strong theoretical basis for expecting coalitional majority cabinets to be less conflict prone than single-party majorities, most studies found no difference in their conflict behavior. Still others report coalitional governments to be more conflict prone than single-party ones. In this study, I show that these empirical inconsistencies can be resolved once we take into account the ideological composition of the cabinet. The main contention is that relatively marginal coalitional partners may have a disproportionate influence when the government faces risky decisions, such as the initiation of international disputes. The key lies in their greater bargaining leverage in intra-coalitional politics, which is subsequently reflected in their influence over foreign conflict decisions.More generally, this study shows how different degrees of ideological diversity or cohesion abate and ⁄ or accentuate a state's conflict behavior. The expectations are tested empirically, and the findings more robustly predict the conflict behavior of parliamentary regimes than do the results of previous research.

Contract cheating, or plagiarism via paid ghostwriting, is a significant academic ethical issue, especially as reliable methods for its prevention and detection in students' assignments remain elusive. Contract cheating in academic assessment has been the subject of much recent debate and concern. Although some scandals have attracted substantial media attention, little is known about the likely prevalence of contract cheating by students for their university assignments. Although rates of contract cheating tend to be low, criminological theories suggest that people who employ ghostwriters for their assignments are likely to reoffend, and little is known about re-offence rates in this form of academic misconduct. We combined previously-collected datasets (N = 1378) and conducted additional, and previouslyunreported, analyses on self-report measures of contract cheating prevalence. We found that few students (3.5%), on aggregate, ever engaged in contract cheating but this varied substantially among samples (from 0.3% to 7.9%). Of those who ever engaged in contract cheating, 62.5% did so more than once. The data also suggested that engagement in contract cheating is influenced by opportunity. These figures may help policy makers, and researchers who are creating contract cheating detection methods, to estimate base rates of contract cheating and the likelihood of re-offence.