Pooling data from four samples in which 1,882 men were assessed for acts of interpersonal violence, we report on 120 men whose self-reported acts met legal definitions of rape or attempted rape, but who were never prosecuted by criminal justice authorities. A majority of these undetected rapists were repeat rapists, and a majority also committed other acts of interpersonal violence. The repeat rapists averaged 5.8 rapes each. The 120 rapists were responsible for 1,225 separate acts of interpersonal violence, including rape, battery, and child physical and sexual abuse. These findings mirror those from studies of incarcerated sex offenders (Abel, Becker, Mittelman, Cunningham-Rathner, Rouleau, & Murphy, 1987; Weinrott and Saylor, 1991), indicating high rates of both repeat rape and multiple types of offending. Implications for the investigation and prosecution of this so-called "hidden" rape are discussed.

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Tversky and Kahneman reported a large effect of the framing of decision options on choice. When options were phrased positively in terms of gains, people chose the sure thing. But when options were phrased negatively in terms of losses, people chose the risky option. However, not all researchers have replicated this finding, especially when using different decision problems and task requirements. Consequently, problem and/or task variables may be important. The current study investigated two problem variables: degree of apparent gain/loss in the risky option (e.g., partial vs. total) and probability of success in the risky option. The effect of requesting a rationale on the framing effect was also studied. Although framing significantly affected choice, its effects were mediated or moderated by rationale request, degree of apparent gain/loss, and probability, sometimes in complex ways. The findings suggest that framing is less pervasive than previously believed.

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Three experimental studies were conducted employing hypothetical news stories to compare the effects on reader risk perceptions of two situations: when agency communication behavior was reported to be responsive to citizens' risk concerns, vs. when the agency was reported to be unresponsive. In the first two experiments, news stories of public meetings filled with distrust and controversy led to ratings indicating greater perceived risk than news stories reporting no distrust or controversy, even though the risk information was held constant. This effect appeared clearly when the differences in meeting tone were extreme and subjects made their ratings from their recall of the stories, but it was much weaker when the differences were moderate and subjects were allowed to go back over the news stories to help separate risk information from conflict information. In the third experiment, news stories about a spill cleanup systematically varied the seriousness of the spill, the amount of technical information provided in the story, and the agency behavior and resulting community outrage. The outrage manipulation significantly affected affective and cognitive components of perceived risk, but not hypothetical behavioral intentions. Seriousness and technical detail had very little effect on perceived risk. ~