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The very contextual nature of most mitigating evidence runs counter to America’s individualistic culture. Prior research has found that capital jurors are unreceptive to most mitigating circumstances, but no research has examined the capital sentencing decisions of trial judges. This study fills that gap through a content analysis of eight judicial sentencing opinions from Delaware. The findings indicate that judges typically dismiss contextualizing evidence in their sentencing opinions and instead focus predominately on the defendant’s culpability. This finding calls into question the ability of guided discretion statutes to ensure the consideration of mitigation and limit arbitrariness in the death penalty.

How we become a part of group, identify with the group, and acquire a “we” feeling is both simple and complex. We may absorb groupness either because we were born into the group, or because we have made a decision to choose membership into the group. In this subsection the former will be our focus, and since we have already broached the African American theme we will explain collective identity matters from this perspective.

In this chapter, we argue that despite the fact that empirical research on trait neuroticism has shown fairly weak relations between the broad neuroticism trait and overall job performance, organizational research can benefit by increased attention to the neuroticism construct. This is because the influence of neuroticism on work behavior can be best understood by separating the more general neuroticism domain into its lower level facets. We discuss various conceptualizations of neuroticism and then review existing research on the relation between the facets of neuroticism and job performance. Next, we turn our attention to a theoretical framework that suggests that the relations between neuroticism facets and job performance outcomes are explained by the social, cognitive, and behavioral effects of having varying levels of neuroticism-based traits. In so doing, we not only focus on mediated relationships between facets of neuroticism and job performance dimensions but also recognize some important moderators, as well as some expected direct relations between the facets and job performance. Finally, we discuss implications for further conceptual development, offer some suggestions for testing the propositions, and discuss potential practical implications of finding support for this model.