Psychology Commons^™

Self-Handicapping And Managers' Duty Of Care, David A. Hoffman

David A Hoffman

This symposium essay focuses on the relationship between managers’ duty of care and self-handicapping, or constructing obstacles to performance with the goal of influencing subsequent explanations about outcomes. Conventional explanations for failures of caretaking by managers have focused on motives (greed) and incentives (agency costs). This account of manager behavior has led some modern jurists, concerned about recent corporate scandals, to advocate for stronger deterrent measures to realign manager and shareholder incentives. Self-handicapping theory, by contrast, teaches that bad manager behavior may occur even when incentives are well-aligned. Highly successful individuals in particular come to fear the pressure of replicating …

Efigie De Luigi Corsaro, Leysser L. Leon

Leysser L. León

Ha fallecido en Perugia, a los 72 años, el Prof. Luigi Corsaro (1940-2012), que auspició y dirigió mis investigaciones jurídicas e interdisciplinarias por seis años (2000-2005). En el 2007, a pedido de una revista dirigida y editada por varios de mis alumnos más destacados, escribí estas páginas evocativas de sus enseñanzas y de su papel en mi formación académica. Las vuelvo a publicar, por este medio, confiando en que pueda difundirse entre el mayor público posible (especialmente entre los jóvenes estudiantes) la imagen de un jurista, de un Maestro cuyas lecciones universitarias y de vida me acompañarán por siempre.

Disentangling The Psychology And Law Of Instrumental And Reactive Subtypes Of Aggression, Reid Griffith Fontaine

Reid G. Fontaine

Behavioral scientists have distinguished an instrumental (or proactive) style of aggression from a style that is reactive (or hostile). Whereas instrumental aggression is cold-blooded, deliberate, and goal driven, reactive aggression is characterized by hot blood, impulsivity, and uncontrollable rage. Scholars have pointed to the distinction between murder (committed with malice aforethought) and manslaughter (enacted in the heat of passion in response to provocation) in criminal law as a reflection of the instrumental–reactive aggression dichotomy. Recently, B. J. Bushman and C. A. Anderson (2001) argued that the instrumental–reactive aggression distinction has outlived its usefulness in psychology and pointed to inconsistencies and …

Calling For Stories, Nancy Levit, Allen Rostron

Nancy Levit

Storytelling is a fundamental part of legal practice, teaching, and thought. Telling stories as a method of practicing law reaches back to the days of the classical Greek orators. Before legal education became an academic matter, the apprenticeship system for training lawyers consisted of mentoring and telling war stories. As the law and literature movement evolved, it sorted itself into three strands: law in literature, law as literature, and storytelling. The storytelling branch blossomed.

Over the last few decades, storytelling became a subject of enormous interest and controversy within the world of legal scholarship. Law review articles appeared in the …