This paper explores antipathy to the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) by Serbians, who feel that not just Slobodan Milosevic but the whole country of Serbia is on trial. The author proposes that social identity and self-categorization, as elaborated primarily by Henri Tajfel and John Turner, are intervening mechanisms that help explain this negative social reaction to international criminal law. This pair of social psychological theories are used to argue that it is the belief in a group threat which produces a strong self-categorization as a group member and predicts the function of social identity mechanisms. In the Serbian case, this paper argues that there was far less social identification at the national level, and greater diversity of national political opinion, before the NATO bombing in 1999. However, the NATO bombing constituted an inescapable threat at the national level, creating an atmosphere in which Serbians felt they were all treated alike regardless of their political opinion; this group-level, inescapable threat produced a greater sense of in-group homogeneity and identification. Rather than differentiating themselves primarily against the Milosevic regime, Serbs who were previously dissidents changed their salient out-group and began differentiating themselves primarily against the Western countries participating in the bombing. The significance of notions of rebelliousness and victimhood in the Serbian self-stereotype helped further define an international stance that rejected the kind of post-war solution offered by the ICTY.

The Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) that intellectually disabled defendants cannot be sentenced to death. However, little is known about how intellectual disability judgments are made by jurors in capital cases. Our experiment addresses this gap by examining the impact of both clinical expert opinions and crime information on jurors’ disability judgments and death sentencing behavior. In a study of 286 venire jurors, we found that expert opinions significantly influenced juror disability decisions and death sentencing – with juror judgments tending to align with expert opinions – and exposure to crime details made jurors significantly more likely to sentence the defendant to death. Our results suggest that to protect the rights of disabled defendants, it may be necessary for courts to have a separate hearing on the issue of intellectual disability specifically – without crime details – to ensure jurors are not unduly influenced.

This dissertation concerns the US presidential use of heroic framing in connection with foreign policy. I identify "heroic framing" as speech which describes policies in terms evoking the heroic narrative, either explicitly or implicitly through references to heroic characters. The technique of heroic framing both encourages audiences to view a situation in terms of stark moral absolutes and normalizes casualties and violence as an aspect of these heroic conflicts. This rhetorical technique thereby combines fear appeals with important dimensions of inspiration and reassurance. To develop this concept, I draw primarily on Jungian archetype, social psychology, organizational leadership and feminist international relations theory. My ultimate aim is to see whether the president's heroic framing of foreign policy heightens domestic support of and foreign attention to those policies. Extending Samuel Kernell's theory of "going public" and James Fearon's theory of audience costs, I hypothesize that presidents use heroic framing as a multivocal signal. First, by using heroic framing, presidents seek to increase domestic support for politically contentious policies. Meanwhile, by speaking forcefully about a subject in heroic terms, presidents also cue foreign leaders to the seriousness of their intentions.

To test the hypothesis that presidents use heroic framing strategically and do gain greater domestic and foreign attention as a result, I employ a multi-modal research design. I first use a content-analytic and statistical approach to measure the impact of the president's rhetorical choices on the media, on congressional action, and on public opinion polls for every month from 1981 through 2005. I then perform two historical case studies to examine the impact of the president's use of heroic imagery on domestic and foreign response to US foreign policies during 1983 and during the 2001-2004 period. Along the way to testing my main hypotheses, I use the extensive database I created of the presidential use of heroic rhetoric to explore differences in the use of heroic imagery across individual presidents, across policy domains, in response to presidential popularity crises, and in the context of war. Through statistical analysis, I determine that the president's use of heroic imagery does increase domestic attention to foreign policy subjects. Similarly, presidential speech patterns suggest that foreign policy targets would do well to respond to the US president's increased use of heroic framing, since it does generally signal commitment to conflict. These statistical findings of the significance of heroic framing are supported by an examination of the cases of 1983 and 2001-2004. In 1983, Ronald Reagan's use of heroic framing for policy advocacy and for public reassurance was misinterpreted by the USSR as a signal of conflict commitment - a misperception which very nearly led to nuclear war. Meanwhile, in the period 2001-2004 George W. Bush made extensive use of heroic framing to promote the War on Terror and the Iraq War. Through an analysis of opinion polls, I determined that even after the US failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush's intensive use of this technique led to an increase in domestic support for his Iraq War policy, which provided a critical boost to his 2004 re-election effort.

Informants are an integral part of the American criminal justice system. However, relatively little research has been done on nearly all aspects of informant use, from how they are recruited and how they reach agreements to cooperate with law enforcement to how jurors evaluate their testimony in court. The present study focuses on this last area – juror perceptions of informants who testify. The limited research that exists on this topic has presented troubling conclusions: jurors may not be appropriately responsive to cues that could signal informant unreliability. In particular, jurors may fail to account for and properly weigh evidence that an informant is testifying for an incentive (such as a reduced prison sentence) when reaching a verdict. However, thus far, studies in this area have some limitations in case type, materials used, and statistical power. The objective of the current study is to advance in each of these areas and provide new evidence about the impact of juror perceptions of informant incentives. This study used a novel fact pattern, video stimuli manipulations, and a sample of 886 online participants to test the impact of informant incentives on juror judgments. It featured four conditions that vary the nature and size of the incentive reported by a jailhouse informant (i.e., no incentive, a vague leniency incentive, and small and large sentence reduction incentives), plus a control condition with no informant testimony. The results speak to the conflicted literature on this topic – finding a significant impact of incentive presence on verdicts. Participants who observed an incentivized informant rated him as less credible and were less likely to convict the defendant based on his testimony – compared to participants who viewed an otherwise identical non-incentivized informant. However, participants’ verdicts in this study were not sensitive to changes in the size of an informant’s incentive, showing no significant difference in conviction rates when the incentive was large (10 years off of a 20-year sentence) compared to small (1 year off of a 20-year sentence). This study also included a test of a novel hope-for-leniency condition, which prompted verdict responses most similar to that of the small incentive condition. These results suggest that jurors may be more capable than previously thought at accounting for informant incentives in reaching a verdict. It also suggests that reforms that aim to preserve evidence of jailhouse informant incentives and ensure that such information is able to reach a jury at trial have potential to meaningfully influence verdict outcomes.