Robert Apel

This reminds me of my favorite oxymoron, heard at every academic research conference: anecdotal evidence 😆

News coverage of the Trump administration's proposed "compact" with universities has been, so far, shockingly bad.

I hate to pick on NPR reporter Elissa Nadworny, who's usually a solid reporter, but almost every important thing I heard her say this morning about the proposed "compact" was false.

GitHub - bobapel-git/demir-apel-2025-jq: Reproducibility package for Demir and Apel (2025), published in Justice Quarterly Reproducibility package for Demir and Apel (2025), published in Justice Quarterly - bobapel-git/demir-apel-2025-jq

9/ Reproducibility package is on my Github page and includes a pre-publication manuscript, since the published article is not open access: github.com/bobapel-git/...

Recorded Justice or Procedural Justice? A Randomized Controlled Experiment of the Influence of Body Worn Cameras and Officer Behavior on Citizen Attitudes We implement cluster randomization to test the impact of procedurally just and unjust police behavior during a hypothetical traffic stop (versus procedurally neutral behavior), in addition to the i...

8/ Full study is here, with lots of analysis and other interesting findings, along with a case for integrating prospect theory with procedural justice: www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/...

7/ 📢 Bottom line: Procedural justice—the quality of how officers treat people—is more powerful in shaping public attitudes than mere presence of a camera. Cameras might record justice—but only officers can actually deliver it.

6/ Even generalized views—like willingness to cooperate with or follow the law—were affected by a single (imagined) traffic stop. But the most powerful effects were on how people judged the officer’s behavior in the moment.

5/ 😬 Interestingly, negative encounters had a bigger impact than positive ones. Unfair treatment led to more negative attitudes than fair treatment led to positive ones—evidence of “loss aversion” in how people judge interactions with police.

4/ 🎥 What about body-worn cameras? Whether or not the officer said they were wearing a BWC made no difference to people’s attitudes. That’s right: being filmed didn’t help if the officer acted poorly, and didn’t enhance impressions if they acted well.

3/ 🚨 Key finding: How the officer behaved mattered—a lot. Respectful, fair treatment improved people’s views of the officer and the police generally. Hostile, unfair behavior worsened views even more strongly.

2/ We administered mock traffic stop scenarios portraying different officer behaviors: Procedurally JUST (respectful, fair); procedurally UNJUST (hostile, disrespectful), and procedurally NEUTRAL (standard, no-frills). We also varied whether the officer announced a body camera.

1/ Do body-worn cameras (BWCs) improve public attitudes toward the police? Or is how officers treat people what really matters? My new Justice Quarterly article with Mustafa Demir from John Jay tackles these questions with a vignette experiment. 🧵

Oh, I wouldn’t suggest eliminating any of them. What I find interesting is that there was a time when divisions basically catered to interests outside of “mainstream criminology” (whatever that means). That hasn’t been true for some time now.

I’ve watched with interest as the number of ASC divisions has grown over the course of my career, from 4 to 21. I’m now tempted to start a petition to create an all-new division: Division of Criminology. Curious if there would be any takers.

GitHub - bobapel-git/lageson-apel-2025-crim: Reproducibility package for Lageson and Apel (2025), published in Criminology Reproducibility package for Lageson and Apel (2025), published in Criminology - bobapel-git/lageson-apel-2025-crim

10/ Reproducibility package is on Harvard Dataverse as well as my Github page: github.com/bobapel-git/...

The mark or trace of a criminal record: A survey experiment of race and criminal record signaling Employment discrimination from a criminal record is a salient social fact, evidenced by a robust body of experimental research. In Part 1 of this study, we analyze prior criminal record hiring experi...

9/ Full study by @sarahlageson.bsky.social and @bobapel.bsky.social is here and is open access: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

8/ TLDR: In today’s hiring landscape, the “mark of a criminal record” is alive and well. An unofficial and online “trace of a criminal record” can also hurt job chances. Race interacts with these effects in evolving, complex ways.

7/ Why the shift? We discuss several possibilities: “Ban the Box” hiring policies, social movements (e.g., post-George Floyd reckoning), experimental study design (e.g., in-person audit vs. online audit vs. opt-in survey), and greater skepticism toward informal online data.

6/ That’s a reversal from older studies, which have shown Black applicants are penalized more for a criminal record. But in a separate part of our paper, we document a closing of this racial gap over the last 20 years.

5/ The twist? White applicants with an official criminal record were penalized more than Black applicants with the same record (no racial difference in the impact of a Google hit).

4/ We estimate that an official record cut hiring chances by ~42%, and a Google hit for a record (even if not official) cut chances by ~8%. Both had independent effects—meaning, a Google hit adds to the penalty even if the record is already known.

3/ We tested how employers responded to fictional applicants by varying: applicant race (Black or White), presence of a criminal record (official background check report), and a Google search "hit" showing a criminal history.

2/ Hiring managers still penalize applicants with criminal records—no surprise there. But our study finds even a Google search insinuating a criminal record can reduce a job applicant’s chance of being hired.

1/ Can a Google search hurt your chances of getting a job more than a background check? A new study with Sarah Lageson on criminal records, race, and willingness to hire has surprising answers. 🧵

The political theory behind IRA was roughly as follows: We have lost control of the information landscape and can no longer win rhetorical or purely political battles; however, if we make substantive policy progress that directly touches voters' lives, they will notice and reward us.

The menswear guy: social theorist. Some interesting history and sociological insight here.

Americans Are Stuck. Who’s to Blame? Yoni Appelbaum on his new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity

Enjoyable for those interested in history of urban issues. With some justified finger-wagging at Jane Jacobs for hypocrisy: “It was the kind of thing that Jacobs praised, but when she buys the building, she gut renovates it. She tears out the storefront. She turns it into a single-family home.”

Ok sociology, what do you think are genuine breakthroughs that our field has made. Contributions that might convince skeptical but sympathetic *academics* (not the public) of the value of our field? I'll brainstorm some of mine in the thread - I treat sociology very broadly

Engels estate now taking RFPs

If it helps, there was just a paper published in Sociological Science on changes in the OMB’s standard for measurement of race/ethnicity sociologicalscience.com/download/vol...