Reply to Ferlazzo and Foray: About the Space Pup project

The Challenges of Military Veterans in Their Transition to the Workplace: A Call for Integrating Basic and Applied Psychological Science

Long-standing structural features of the military have created a culture and society that is dramatically different and disconnected from civilian society. Thus, veterans transitioning to civilian society face a number of challenges related to fulfilling basic psychological needs (e.g., need for structure and order, belonging) and civilians' reliance on stereotypes to understand military veterans. In an attempt to enrich the understanding of these challenges, we integrate social psychological theories and insights with research from sociology, clinical psychology, military psychology, and organizational behavior. Theories of compensatory control, stereotype threat, and stereotyping are drawn on to help explain the psychological challenges that veterans may encounter during their transition to civilian society. We present recent research that leverages these theories to understand issues veterans face. This theoretical integration illustrates the opportunity and potential for psychological researchers to conduct basic and applied research in the context of veterans and for clinicians and managers to draw on basic theory to inform programs and interventions.

Bound to the group and blinded by the leader: ideological leader-follower dynamics in a trust economic game

Understanding the dynamics of trustworthiness in ideological contexts could influence human societies, affect electoral campaigns and ultimately impact democracy. We tested trust behaviour towards political leaders in a sample of 121 opposing/supporting voters assigned as trustors in an iterative trust game (TG). In two experiments, a famous Italian conservative leader (i.e. Silvio Berlusconi) or a famous non-politician were used as trustees in a predefined un/trustworthy TG, while trustors believed that mathematical algorithms reproduced trustee's real behaviour. Results revealed that depending on the group, voters either relied on the situation and adjusted to the behaviour of the out-group leader (in our case left-wing voters), or on their disposition for group-loyalty with respect for authority, thus failing to adjust to the behaviour of the in-group leader (in our case right-wing voters). Our findings suggest that: (i) complex voter-leader relations in politics are reflected in the simple trustor-trustee financial interactions from behavioural economics, and (ii) being bound to one's group and one's leader may affect the trust economic decisions of the followers.