Explore the vast range of titles available.

The Neotropics have many plant species that seem to be adapted for seed dispersal by megafauna that went extinct in the late Pleistocene. Given the crucial importance of seed dispersal for plant persistence, it remains a mystery how these plants have survived more than 10,000 y without their mutualist dispersers. Here we present support for the hypothesis that secondary seed dispersal by scatter-hoarding rodents has facilitated the persistence of these large-seeded species. We used miniature radio transmitters to track the dispersal of reputedly megafaunal seeds by Central American agoutis, which scatter-hoard seeds in shallow caches in the soil throughout the forest. We found that seeds were initially cached at mostly short distances and then quickly dug up again. However, rather than eating the recovered seeds, agoutis continued to move and recache the seeds, up to 36 times. Agoutis dispersed an estimated 35% of seeds for >100 m. An estimated 14% of the cached seeds survived to the next year, when a new fruit crop became available to the rodents. Serial video-monitoring of cached seeds revealed that the stepwise dispersal was caused by agoutis repeatedly stealing and recaching each other’s buried seeds. Although previous studies suggest that rodents are poor dispersers, we demonstrate that communities of rodents can in fact provide highly effective long-distance seed dispersal. Our findings suggest that thieving scatter-hoarding rodents could substitute for extinct megafaunal seed dispersers of tropical large-seeded trees.

Deception is common in nature, but victims of deception discriminate against and ultimately ignore deceptive signals when they are produced too frequently. Flexible variation of signals could allow evasion of such constraints. Fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus adsimilis) use false alarm calls to scare other species away from food that they then steal. We show that drongos mimic the alarms of targeted species. Further, target species reduce their response to false alarm calls when they are repeated. However, the fear response is maintained when the call is varied. Drongos exploit this propensity by changing their alarm-call type when making repeated theft attempts on a particular species. Our results show that drongos can evade the frequency-dependent constraints that typically limit deception payoffs through flexible variation of their alarm calls.

He was the Norwegian footballer who became the art thief renowned for stealing Edvard Munch's 'The Scream'. The Economists' obituary editor, Ann Wroe, explores the unusual life and criminal history of Pål Enger.

Since the mid-1990s, the U.S. civilian gun stock has grown from approximately 192 million (65 million handguns) to approximately 265 million (113 million handguns). In 2015, gun owners owned more weapons and were more likely to own both handguns and long guns than in 1994. As in 1994, ownership in 2015 was highly concentrated: the median owner owned two, but the 8 percent of all owners who owned ten or more accounted for 39 percent of the stock. Approximately seventy million firearms changed hands within the past five years (from 2011 to 2015); most were purchased. Two and a half percent of Americans had guns stolen within the past five years, accounting for an estimated five hundred thousand guns per year.

It is widely recognized that communications that activate social norms can be effective in producing societally beneficial conduct. Not so well recognized are the circumstances under which normative information can backfire to produce the opposite of what a communicator intends. There is an understandable, but misguided, tendency to try to mobilize action against a problem by depicting it as regrettably frequent. Information campaigns emphasize that alcohol and drug use is intolerably high, that adolescent suicide rates are alarming, and--most relevant to this article--that rampant polluters are spoiling the environment. Although these claims may be both true and well intentioned, the campaigns' creators have missed something critically important: Within the statement \"Many people are doing this undesirable thing\" lurks the powerful and undercutting normative message \"Many people are doing this.\" Only by aligning descriptive norms (what people typically do) with injunctive norms (what people typically approve or disapprove) can one optimize the power of normative appeals. Communicators who fail to recognize the distinction between these two types of norms imperil their persuasive efforts.

This research is the first to examine service sweethearting, an illicit behavior that costs firms billions of dollars annually in lost revenues. Sweethearting occurs when frontline workers give unauthorized free or discounted goods and services to customer conspirators. The authors gather dyadic data from 171 service employees and 610 of their customers. The results from the employee data reveal that a variety of job, social, and remuneration factors motivate sweethearting behavior and several measurable employee traits suppress its frequency. The results from the customer data indicate that although sweethearting inflates a firm's satisfaction, loyalty, and positive word-ofmouth scores by as much as 9%, satisfaction with the confederate employee fully mediates these effects. Thus, any benefits for customer satisfaction or loyalty initiatives are tied to a frontline worker that the firm would rather not employ. Marketing managers can use this study to recognize job applicants or company settings that are particularly prone to sweethearting and as the basis for mitigating a positive bias in key customer metrics.

The “crime drop” is the most important criminological phenomenon of modern times. In North America, Europe, and Australasia, many common crimes have fallen by half or more since the early 1990s, albeit with variation in the specifics. Seventeen explanations are examined here including demographics, policing, imprisonment, drug markets, and lead poisoning. Pioneering research relevant only to the United States now appears, with the benefit of hindsight, somewhat parochial. Sixteen of the 17 hypotheses fail one or more of four evidence-based standardized tests on which they are assessed. The one that passes is the security hypothesis, underpinned by crime opportunity theories. Here there is strong evidence that vehicle theft fell because of more and better security, and mounting evidence that improved security was critical in reducing burglary and other acquisitive crime. Many crime types are interrelated, while most criminal careers are dominated by property crime, so removing these volume crimes might be expected to reduce violence.

There has been growing scholarly interest in understanding individual-level antecedents of counterproductive workplace behavior (CWB). While researchers have found a positive relationship between individuals' negative affect and engagement in CWB, to date, our understanding of the factors which may affect this relationship is limited. In this study, we investigate the moderating roles of moral disengagement and gender in this relationship. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found that individuals with a greater tendency to experience negative emotions were more likely to engage in CWB when they had a higher propensity to morally disengage. Moreover, we found that this interacting relationship varied across men and women. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings and offer avenues for future research.

Punishment can help maintain cooperation by deterring free-riding and cheating. Of particular importance in large-scale human societies is third-party punishment in which individuals punish a transgressor or norm violator even when they themselves are not affected. Nonhuman primates and other animals aggress against conspecifics with some regularity, but it is unclear whether this is ever aimed at punishing others for noncooperation, and whether third-party punishment occurs at all. Here we report an experimental study in which one of humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), could punish an individual who stole food. Dominants retaliated when their own food was stolen, but they did not punish when the food of third-parties was stolen, even when the victim was related to them. Third-party punishment as a means of enforcing cooperation, as humans do, might therefore be a derived trait in the human lineage.